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.

Coming on in Grim Fashion

An eager rooster takes a wrong
turn at the corner of river and trees,
misses the mountains entirely,
races beyond the limestone pillars
that archaeologists had drooled over.
The morning mysteries give me
enough nausea to last until lunch.
Hens spend the afternoon laying
eggs in hammocks before they
succumb to a barking Walt Whitman
on his way to the refrigerator.
Construction on the apocalypse gets
hung up at the city council meeting.
A shaky rooster is ferried across a parched
reservoir disguised as a grim Allen Ginsberg.

Remembering to Forget

A black cat warms to the cushion on
the kitchen floor as obedient eggs
scramble up in a skillet from the import store.
My concentration is broken by a front
door bell that has put its teeth into the bright
temperature of my early morning examination.
The day seems to be divided between piles of
impertinent socks and insistent shoes that
attempt to measure imperfect space.
The potted plants go bone dry before I can
flood them with a watering can full of mathematics.
A black cat stalks field mice in the tall grass of
the bedroom where babies used to gurgle up amnesia.

On Top

I want the June version of success,
the egg up a tree with feathers in the mail.

The barking cat remembers when its world
was nothing more than a clump of hair.

I condemn the morning for keeping me in the dark,
the sparrows nest in the small of tomorrow's back.

An empty continent is shipped to my
door with a manual in five languages.

I grind giddiness into a bad excuse for going out,
acceleration goes barren in the cut of the bloom.

The sea sits on my kitchen counter in an eight-ounce
glass with a potato taking root.

I muscle summer into sweet submission,
the sun shoulders the curve of the source.

The crow follows the morning, the grasshopper
follows the crow, the ants are left to clean up the mess.