Campfire

 Erotic letters found in the pocket

of a brown leather jacket

The crackling of autumn leaves

not yet dampened by the winter rains

I check the weather on my phone

just as drops begin to speckle the screen

I duck into a shop for a last-minute gift

I paw at the tchotchkes, listening to the rush

of ocean waves emanating from a plastic rock.

The box says it plays five other “soothing sounds.”

It's not a very convincing looking rock

and the sounds do not sound much like

the ocean, the river, the campfire.

Pixelated sparks as you poke the logs

Ocean spray from crashing waves

A bouquet of roses that explodes into blossom

every time I press the button

Pages blank as snow

That  night the rain whispers against the window

As I nuzzle your ear and slip my hand

between your legs

Gray curtains of cloud, soft down comforter

Jacket thrown over the back of a chair,

phone buzzing over and over

Across the street, the 7-11’s cold white glow

Car tires on the wet road

Your digital moan

Spider up a Pipe

 I'm talking to the one-eyed woman
who stands on the corner of Second and Mission
smoking and snarling through her curls. Hard to say
who are insults are aimed at. They land at her feet
like cigarette butts. I heard that years ago
someone strangled her, left her for dead
in a parking garage, and when she came to
she wandered into the natural history museum
and found herself chased down the wood and marble corridors
by flying horns and antlers that shot through the air
like schools of barracuda. Before they could impale her
she stepped through the glass and disappeared into a diorama
of a group of soft, harmless lemmings
who do not, by the way, actually commit mass suicide
by leaping into the sea, it's a myth we've perpetuated
over the years to convince ourselves that animals are
even more fucked up than we are.
She's the mirror image of my wife, whose face sprung
from a drawer crammed with invisible objects.
My wife also only has one eye, the opposite one
from the woman at Second and Mission, whom
I used to money to which I should have been giving
to my wife for groceries.
My wife insists on grocery shopping in the forest
even though the selection is not as good as at the markets
and everything she buys is covered in sap and stickers.
The woman at 2nd and Mission would tell me stories about her life
after being strangled. I went through a warp, she said.
I passed through a wormhole. I was on TV and the TV
was a tunnel. I was hugging the walls. Scrambling up
the drainpipes like a spider. My head was spinning on my neck
like goddamn Linda Blair, I was spitting streams
of strawberry milk, I was frothing at the mouth. I have powers
no one understands.
With that she winks and blows me a kiss.
I show her the book I wrote about her
but she slaps it out of my hands and stomps on it.
Her satin and furs start to shiver on her bony shoulders,
and suddenly a ragged bird bursts from her bosom,
leaving a trail of dust and mites and glitter behind.
Her eye rolls wildly in its socket the way
my wife's does. The corner has frozen solid
and she asks if I have any money and I say
I already gave you all I have and she starts to scream
and I reach into my pocket, looking for more,
and somehow there always is.

Wolf and Fox Hunt [after Rubens]

The foxes and wolves twist around the legs of the horses,
unafraid of the hooves which could easily pound them into jelly.
All the horses are standing completely still,
frozen mid-cantor, mid-whinny.
I press my ear to one of their bellies and can hear a ticking
and whirring inside, a metallic scratching.

The foxes and wolves are twisting around my ankles
and the ankles of all the frozen horses;
I can see their ribs poking through their pelts.
The ground is one vast carpet stretching to the horizon
in every direction, covered with flower prints and geometric patters
colored all the different shades of dust.
Night falls and the horses glow in the moonlight.

 the sky is filling up with black balloons
and the forests are charred toothpicks
and the fields have turned to dust.
The river is just a trickle
and the skin between your legs
is hard and dry as a scab,
you pick at it but once it starts peeling
it won't stop and before you know it
you've peeled all your flesh off
as the black egg of the sun cracks open
to let its golden goo drip and pool
just beyond the horizon

Next morning the huntsmen lie scattered about the fields,
their bodies hidden by industrious flies
as the sun sops up their blood like a sponge.
The foxes and wolves are nowhere to be found
though I keep thinking I catch glimpses of
the tip of a tail here, a quivering snout there.
A flash of red, a dash of gray.
I reach into the cloud of flies
and gingerly extricate a curved hunting horn
I lift the horn to my lips
and the world bursts into flames.

The Bullet Weighs More Than the Gun

You wanted it to shatter you,
as it had already once before
back before you cobbled yourself
back together, before you pasted
and spackled and glued and wound
yourself with tape like bandages,
back when you were a solid mass,
uncracked, unblemished,
counting down the days before
you would explode.
And now you want it to happen again,
you want to trace the steps
of the annihilation dance.
You want to feed your shards
to the ravenous wind.
Here, put out your hand. Feel that weight.
Feel how little it would take

And it would take everything 

Space Room lavatory

New Year's Eve

I sat down on a bench to wait for

the last train of the evening

Heard a soft, wet ticking sound

Like fat raindrops hitting the bricks

I looked up and saw

black against the brown night sky

the limbs of the spindly city trees

laden with

hundreds of crows

Clothespin Cufflinks

Stillbirth boiling in his throat, clog of bubbles plugging
the desiccated tunnel. Words that attempted
to claw their way out, lying in a soggy heap.
Wet, vulgar, hysterical, shriveled like sodden fungus.
Scrape the raw corridors, run fingertips along the traces
of words etched along the walls. A name scratched into the glass
and slathered in grease. A heavy pair of shears
zipping through the upholstery fabric
Thick stain-resistant floral prints. Lilac, buttercup, lily of the valley.
The umbrella that popped open when you swallowed it
The flutter of shredded pork plastered to your eyelid with barbecue sauce
The blotch of grease is a drop in the bucket and you just keep on repeating it
Gleefully, with no remorse, your head blown off before you realize the danger
Hollow teeth, baling wire stitches, crossed shovels, crocheted death shrouds,
I'm mining the breadlines, reminded of deadlines, never mind the land mines
Finding what's mine, rewinding the land slide, demanding slime,
pin hole camera inside your chest, periscope sticking out the top of your head,
manhole monocle, roast beef coin purse, skinned sand worm writhing in agony,
riding mahogany, giggling maniacally. Long underwear stuffed with
shoplifted candy bars, melting against your skin, pulling your legs off
one by one, apologizing for the butterscotch, Great Dane's body
hurled from the back of a pickup truck, lies flat and heavy
in the middle of the interstate, flies rise, cranes flop
over, sheets of lead folded and hung from the line,
rusty teeth in a rusty mouth, wheels spinning beneath your tongue.
Brown gusts. Wet grit in your palm. Runny streaks. Slag and bones.
Knife fight in the park. Leaves covering statues, withered hand,
Here we are, heavily resistant yet also eager to blindly follow
I want it to be long and layered and constantly shifting
Yet each piece able to be taken and examined on its own
Isolation and the certainty that what one is doing is important,
is worth doing. It's as important to doubt your own doubt
as it is to doubt your own certainty. Weather permitting,
restoration of those light gray pieces will resume tomorrow.
Small bug spitting pixels. Shifting spray of a stuttering sprinkler
passing back and forth over the lawn. Bury the evidence, blow
your cover, you're so pretty when you smile. Guts all over the lawn.
Folding the city in half and half again. Cut on the dotted line.
The crack in the fountain, the stone that saved the city,
the bone that remained on the plate when you'd finished your steak,
the crutch you threw in their face, the cane you tripped them with.
All the dangling tags from your jacket, suitcases, unspooled ribbon
and tape, wrapping presents on the carpet, grates of various sizes
and metals, damp cardboard, Stalin's granddaughter in mini shorts
and little t-shirt clutching a toy machine gun.
Cloak fluttering on a clothesline strung from a limb above Potter's Field,
never did get the hang of that blood and silver lining,
wind a low sexual moan, should have cut those pants off
before they shrunk so tight, should have disposed of the bright gleam
of skylights and rooftops and frogs hatching from their mother's backs.
Knotted our guts and hung them from a hook in the kitchen.
Blew kisses through the wavy glass. Upended bowls
of instant oatmeal across our bare chests.
Paced the perimeters of the shells of old buildings.
Attended the private screenings doused in grease and glue,
pureeing beets and radishes, shooing away the morons in stocking caps,
trying to haul chain links the size of your head,
rubber mask turned inside out, baling wire brassieres,
test tube rhinos, Cockring Cola, exhausted we flattened ourselves out
and rolled ourselves up and smoked ourselves to ash.