THAT UNDER WATER SMILE

don't run home to mama
don't run home to pa
the flood has reached the kitchen
the flood has become law

Dylan hung out at the corner
with puppets from his past
an allegory was lynched in the morning
a silhouette ate up adversity real fast

don't run home to mama
don't run home to pa
the flood has reached the unconscious
the flood covered everything I saw

PHILOSOPHICAL WORK AHEAD

The Bacon boys scatter in all directions.
Grief overloads every boat heading for the sea.
It takes the square root of five paving stones
to reveal that a big step can turn into a tumble.
With a thigh graft taking hold on the top
of my Danish head, I take a long left
at the corner of confusion and critical mass.

TRAVELING UNDER DOUBLE VISION

The sulfur flamingo took the day off,
leaving her best powder pink caked
down the spine of a grizzled God of
the Fender bending booze drizzle suitcase
who was left with struggling to mop up
all of the fleshy Moorish blend of
Stones and Zeppelin that could tongue
the African road in a genuine
attempt to steady an impatient
cascade of melting linoleum lips.

BUILDING A BETTER HIDING PLACE

It was being said before I even got there.
It was nothing new or memorable or
anything close to sincere from my vantage point.
It was like a thousand tantrums later and
no one was budging from their place in the sandbox.
I remained on the outskirts of the argument.
One more impossible punch to what the moon
had to offer kept me at a safe distance.
It was ribbons to rivers of disrespect in the palms
of unscripted hand signals that had scattered
us all so many elbows ago.
I followed the cat out of particle range and
settled in behind the assets of real poetry.

FLUENT WITHOUT WARNING

The eyes squeeze through
a vision at every turn
of a dozen unpacked appliances
looking for ears to
hear their opposable notions
unearthed by millions
of worker stars banging
from one end to the other
without a stringy sky to
settle all the issues
of an unmade garden of glass.

AS FUNNY AS A FLOOR BURN OF LOVE

I wear blue earmuffs from Sears on
bingo night in her kitchen.
She keeps goat cheese from Trader Joe's
on a short leash near the hall closet.
I mean to hold her with the vibrato of a king snake.
She means to flog me with the ponytail of a go-go dancer.
City ants take cover in cheap chardonnay.
Funny feels as sharp as soccer cleats.
We will finally pop all the buttons off every
clean garment that we own.

PERHAPS INTERROGATIVE

content under the chair of
a sweeping bigness that bulges as
much as a notion of rolling in
cowhide coital positions with
nothing benign or standing on
a keyhole protocol down burrowing
fleshy doom that cuts unequally
among moral write-offs and as
polite as piss with a Sunday whistle
tickling the inner thigh of poetry

TRAVELING UP THE STRIP ON A DOWN DAY

The fingers are done with counting for the duration.
They have grown to mistrust all numbers like the plague.
Life is a paper cut away from crying uncle.
I'm keeping a Gaza Strip on the top of my jealous head.
An abstract wound has gone jigsaw on my future plans.
I can't read the small print fast enough for the surgeon.
No one is left in the waiting room from Hangover Heaven.
No cross is large enough to correct my unraveling in snow.
I'm out of the woodpile and into an itchy abyss.
All the Calvinists have frozen in the dead of the desert.
All Egyptians have lost themselves in a pyramid scheme.

THE TAKING OF GLOW OUT OF GULLIBLE

It is the technology of the cricket that
takes me on a donkey run across a folio
coughed up in Shakespeare's time with
rubbed edges and shavings from dead
furniture near the door of an opium
confession cradled in the hands of
a Chinese empire driven to a teaching
moment when bears sleep top to bottom in
a rudderless bed with assassins cutting
into the waterline measured in red
petals from ancient roots bobbing beyond
warm hills where herdsmen are enamored by
long evasive pursuits down a thousand
miles of gullible getting low on glow and
glitter in the bloodshot eyes of salvation.

WORKING ON A BED OF BETTER EXCUSES

I've been working on a bag of raw pecans since Christmas.
There is a chance that rain clouds will take all happy zealots hostage.
The Big Dipper was trashed by a flock of Galileo's dyslexic friends.
Caravaggio gave flagellation a good name.
Picasso poked a hole in the piracy of purpose.
I got a Christmas card from a cousin doing 3 to 6 in a California prison.
The revised atlas of alcoholism has gone to the birds.
The Supreme Court replaced ephemera with regret.
The defendant took door number 3 instead of justice.
Titian threw cold water on a modest nymph.
I let my cat shape my lap into a bed.