Doe Bones

Doe bones,
how you budge in your sleep,

your anxious ghosts
stirring in your mind,

your tendons constrict and release,
sudden, small flinching.

And you sigh, a pinkish moan,
as if a horsehair drawn

across your throat.
In tender dark, streaks

of halogen laying
across the blankets,

I will pull you tighter,
twin stars orbiting,

and creak a tale in your ear.
Let the words cascade and blur

into whatever machine
makes sleep—may your quick breath

soften and as I whisper
through these clouds

of your jasmine hair,
may the casual

movements of our bodies become
the melody of your dreams.

Sonnet 2

Sonnet 2


I wish to fill this white earth day with song,--
rising from bed with a mouth full of alphabet soup,
placing letters in the air with my tongue;
I will watch every plan turn to soot
when my toes press the winter-bitten carpet
& my throat will crack on regardless
of how the tracks on the ground below fade like jet
contrails; & I slip back into dreaminess----
But around around around goes the prickly sugar
outside my blindless window; spit & wound
in its dance, so unaware of time & nerves
only existing as a descending heavenly neighbor
caught up in its own weight & sound--
I pray I learn to curl my voice to its curves.

Sonnet 1

Sonnet 1


Origami cranes fed to the sunset
folded with arthritic knuckles tired
with gunpowder eyes staring out
over to the window prying the blinds out
past the rotting fence the red barn
all the fool's meadows lined with sunset
It would be useless to run now
setting down your paper wings
bushmills and k-hole in-tow
a blown out throat singing
of a sky as grey as God's own dream
that echoes in your lowdown rumble
you dance with all your loose seams
dance waiting for the room to shrivel

New Poem

Something new I've been working on:

Human of Senseless Fire


Is this the naked best of you?
The craned arch in the foot, continually
denying gravity--the ghostly webs that stretch
from body to body, only seen in a fountaining
silhouette, rippling from your arms
like the rings of a tree. The only prejudice
is the truth you have written in your senses--
the tugging gut, last night's melody whimpered low--
the way back to clattering your teeth
in dandelion greens, to your hand-claps for the naked
best moon, the way of the unkempt, frilled intimacy--
these veins stretch out like the countless roots
of wild fig trees, clutching firmly in the rutty ground.

But here in the raisin-sun mornings like this one
where you sling your song to the streetlamp and leave it,
and swagger your derelict tongue to the road--
you are merely cloth and smoke.