A thousand poems,
a million kisses,
laughter lands in
open eyes,
sighs I hear
in lovers' rooms.
sooner will
the sun be fading,
a lifetime
of hidden hopes
buried in
hillside grasses.

TOD HOWARD HAWKS

You correspond to the night.
Like an angel with gray wings, effacing
The stage of my prayers in tongue- a perjury of
Mine lesser than yours.
Which is a forgiveness, swaddled in linen sheets
Offering no warmth.

Mascara delineates 100 filaments
To exalt your image in my eye.
The copy left a shallow impression
And an afterthought of indelible darkness.
These tears that stain are a borrowed black;
100 claws that catch my skin in your shadow. Faith ends with me

On my knees, conjuring you
Through dreams which evaporate when
Distilled by light. Is it weightless?
The sun injures me with attention.
Day breaks like glass;
Coming over me at great altitude,
You correspond to the morning.

Your mealy curls are a nest of black ants squashed to death
In bed and drowning
By the hill of sweat between us

How do moist lips running across my own feel
Hegemonic and corroded as machinery

Switzerland in February is a lamb being sheared
So the path to K Kiosk may wear a fleece coat.

Breakfast comes in a box of Lucky Charms
Small as my palm, and
A sleeve of Fox’s party rings to share in silence;
Not out of a desire to eat, but in an analogue of
Unspoken recluse within our rental car.

You look nearly half-born in your ashen flesh,
As if unprepared for the journey,
Having left something behind.

Sitting adjacent to me, your legs are folded bilaterally.
A lawn chair for my handbag.
They jolt as the car growls to life.

Between us, even a stale coffee
Begins to froth with angst, spitting
Faint flecks of cocoa all over the seats.
Reaching over to sedate it, I gently imprint with coral lipstick
A heart upon its gill.
The driver mutters like an exasperated babysitter.

Picture specks of menthol green, clouded by frost, like a mood ring.
If you’d looked out the window just then, you’d have caught
A lone bird pawing offhandedly at the
Blistered surface of Lake Zurich.  

At 10,000 kilometres away from home, I am unmoored,
Yet not away long enough to send
Rambling, sentimental postcards back.

There is romance found in ingratiation – chaste doilies suffering implicitly beneath the burden of unclean bowls. Here’s one, illuminated as a pinball machine when you rattle that dung-brown stain about its shrivelled axis. Above its shaky pupil, a cataract of steam squirms about in unalarming routine.

So many nights I adulterated merely for lack of better days were given credence by the gimpy sun, turned away with its blouse undone, and ****** back to the chalkboard. Somewhere along the past few days I must have become bedridden, indentured to prickly sponge baths by that ****** tongue.

How I’d like to stay sedated now – another day of inoculation becoming an alibi for the adhesion of this numbness inducted to the soft-boiled meat of my temples, combing out my shoulder blades, running down my legs.

Stupidly I almost feel a sense of superiority in not learning any faces among the indiscrete convoys of whitish heads popping in now and then, with the subordinate arousal of stiff knuckles, or other things compressed inward by their own come-hither fervor.

“You talk too much, you worry me to death…”

Precocious baby, tempered to a china-blue hue, you
Had not been ripe as a morning glory
Before riots mongered in the plasma of your shapeless head.

Haunting as an omen, you
Had drank from the cord of my cold-blooded artery.
Turned my insides out like a shimmering dime bag
As we fell to the earth.

I take the long way home after Lydia’s wedding
down 67 into the cemetery off the highway
I stop at your grave where I’m surprised to find
you finally have a headstone—
They’ve moved all of the porcelain angel figurines into a heap, I gingerly peel them out of
the weeds and find the grass yellowing beneath their tiny wings

Lydia got married today, she looked beautiful. Your mom—you know her, she said you were here. a beat, thunder, like carillon bells, rumbles in the south. The bottom of an incus cloud, thick and flinty, rolls over the Wet Mountains
I looked beautiful too
The sprinklers turn on across the service walk,
long jets of white water


I’m not angry, Thomas. It’s okay.


I love you.


.

3 a.m.

the dying town, dark moon,
the wolf lurks in a concrete tomb.

fallen friends and picnics at the graveyard,
empty stores and sidewalk ******.

streets of sorrow--
one-way roads to no tomorrow.

shadowed eyes, whispers in bars,
fallen angels, shooting stars.

sirens wail the ****** night,
and in every traffic light burned red
time never stops for the dead.

the ****** on the corner.
none to morn her fate,
a wink and a whisper,
"do you want to go on a date?"

the black butterfly,
soul of sorrow,
no echo, no refrain,
lost in silence, bound by pain.