Lock Jaw

Put a bone cold pink
apple to my lips
behind my back
slip knot my wrists
and while you drag
a stone along a spike
kiss my jaw
say i should bite

nov 20

Your Own Belt

and travel like story
will take you, tie you
with your own belt,
where you do not want,
but where it will.
spit out the word
or be led away.

oct

Rome

She said Rome is
a pilgrim's city
from the light
to the water
you will never rest
along the nights
you will wander
throwing tokens overhead
going circles
through the empire
like the very palace bats
like the lapping surf of stones
like the domes ballooned with mass

oct

Tuscany

ready to receive in wonder
tilled hills
their blood in bark smell
towns crumbled
to a perfect standstill
light slowing
from wave to particle
ready to alight
to take and eat what is given

oct

Venice

We come to feel the moment we are lost
the texture walls take - sponge
and ways - splinters from the water.

We come to remember earth is animal
hungry and dissipated
enough to masticate her own.

We come to survive above the bricks and pilings
strapped to limestone rafts and hearses.

Pushing against the river Styx
we come to sing, to create ceremony for corpses
to gloss eulogy on matricide
not to mention how we die.

oct

Graphite and Gravity

graphite sea
some great liquid gravity
some siren
some magnet
the feathered sky
resigns
filament by filament

oct

Wolves of Siena

Cinder wolves of Siena
and the burned wall
against a sky
like a fist wrapped in sorrow
arms wound in flaw
a sky misktaken for land
clouds mistaken for shelter
you don't know where to look
you don't know where to fall

oct