Year of Nights

Maybe you should get some sleep         for sleep is a Saracen graveyard

In the Sicilian Sea                           and sleep is listening

To the wind-scored screams           of birds you’ll never see

Behind the paywall of your eyes               you will find what you are owed

An 1804 draped bust dollar coin     thrown down a kitty litter mine

Outside Skull Valley Arizona       what you owe is what viral winter

Gives you the nuance of looking     and never being seen

What you owe is an old father         listening for his son’s cry behind the door

When there’s no one behind the door           how to love and work again

Is a blown fuse          a rectangle of halogen on dirty kitchen tiles

Now that comeuppance has become a province        with tooth and fire

Where posterity’s dented horn keeps blowing      into static settling on foothills

Xed out by empty roads        consider tonight’s rain-damaged parchment

Vellum scraped or washed clean of ancient recipes     of the names of the condemned

Protocols for flaying the progeny of enemy kings     faint letters tell time’s

Shortest history      of a god’s brief adolescence

What he ate how his bones ached         as they grew in the night how he talked

With his hands as he stole bread      and couldn’t explain himself

Before the void of all his life-making        this was before he stole the identity

Of a stillborn twin       so he could hide from his worshippers

As a schizophrenic      keeping a motorhome of bees

The artifact you find is shaking in your hands          but if you hold a light behind it

As if candling an egg           you’ll read a fragment of his only

Extant poem

…dollop of oblivion

        the buffoon doffs

                                      the lion’s skin

        doubloons are lost again

 as ships slip under the sea…

The River Among Exiles

And wherever the broad yellow petals drifted

Hard star-shaped fruit

Cracked open

To peel your hands

From your face to see by the river

Among the exiles to listen finally

To the two-spiny

Segments becoming

The cadence of your stride

Toward any telling yourself as if

To un-do what has been done were to

Put an ear to the clean white shirt

And hear the president’s heartbeat his

Dense spiked terminal cluster

Of the preterit’s

Chambered capsule

Its habitat of roadsides

Bottomlands where once you held

The white placard

Of tiny white exclamation

Marks now endless holiday traffic spilling

From a poison vial broken

For you for a space

Has opened

Onto an oval approval’s

Scalloped or toothed margin

To stand still among the vehicles

Breathing through hot metal

In its wake as you are here

To be tested like this every day

With a question like a visitor

To break you

In your sleep dreaming of angel rope

Burning up into the night sky

Still waiting to know who is telling you the story

Now that

The now-what having just taken hold

Has let you go

Cagescape

My runaway bullet that once slept obesely & hard

My red piano now driven wet & raw into low orbit

The city of gates twisted & watched for

Outside their rusted lilies of the valley

I must search as if the bird gone dark had taken

My picture a storm behind my I love you virus

Found on a corrupted file Mother’s voice singing daisy daisy

The god’s transparent body is brimming with

Flaming scarecrows of the brave because if I don’t

Keep trying the mind says to itself

Lathered & holding with unsteady hand the bent yellow safety razor

In a bathroom mirror the wounds will stop

Spitting teeth & data about me down the off-ramp

Into neighborhoods where there is no space

For anyone we’re talking the patterns I am told

Are mazelike arteries surging aneurysmal zeros &

Ones home & work on & off on & on