To the Tones of Moss

Grains green up
and the ewe doddles
probably. Upon inspection,
summer’s posture is as culpable

as the gun-runner,
who slinks between massifs and crags.
There are times fit for leisure
homespun dull and neighborly

times. Then there is the present,
where careful heroes sit waiting
for photographs to tint.
Each summer may know the other

in the way ghosts do:
few details, aside from
the bobbing knee.
Either play the old horn or sing.

That’s the shanty, and
that’s the turncoat
who made the check out
to scandal and personality,

revealing as he did,
as he funded the error,
the bloodied cuticles.
Time versus time.

Things would happen to me

and the trail would go cold
where footprints
became handprints became nothing

Wind blow thee west
the stir will slake
the hot body

Weird: the ensemble
prose, which brought
bright colors

a day
wouldn’t cut it
not ten

the windows go from
the floor to the ceiling
straight to the bookcase

to the bats of the eye
and the glint if
the rhombus was indeed your eye.

Half mettle and half
swoon, equal parts
honest and bleach

how funny
would it be
if you hustled

down deep to the center
of the condition
with the speed

of a once-sleeping valet
or a businessman
returning for

the wallet. Set
the montage
to water.

Hello, Caesura

We need not be perfect.
I, for one, gave up good
in August, when life’s rolling boil
gave way, when something scuttled
beneath the moist sand. The
leftover milt finding the lakebed,
something behind my mind pulling
grey milt to the bottom. Reproductive
movements, ancestral movements.
It was August when light occasionally designed
to frustrate the brack, when
I resigned to a desire that
wasn’t mine. That desire being
something with its own physiology
the way a welt wells up,
the way a glance whips back,
becomes a thought.
When I love someone I want to give them everything.
I give them everything in the wrong order,
or allow it all at once. That
is how I beach the thing, with provocative
passes at the truth. With
interpretation, impatient warmth.
We should talk about tomorrow.
Before bed I’ll reserve a few
moments to polish the
barrel of my fear.