Falling and Freezing Pieces

hope of sleep abandoned
leaves flee from their branches

*

life's gridlines overwritten

*

a face become
a projection on vortices

the days doubling
a bust from life

who figures
square measures

is pierced by all parallels
unless a greater gravity deflects

your scything eyes
to the corner pockets

to the mauve umbrages
of the pink room

*

Every year's best title, progress
has pushed past the barricades
swept up your letters & down deposited
neatly in their wooden cages
No index to their apathy
is possible or necessary
who turned red at the handcrank
now burns in the mere season


Air beyond compare devouring
our bodies as we sit or sleep
idleness of ice cubes cracking as
the purple toe is stitched
A season without what now withers
The romp wrapped & quivering at the flame
& whites & reds float browning
at the over-brimming of this barrel


A yellow tree has captured the sun
In the ground of the white-sided house
reliquary pierced by the wires
fringed by the green remaining
Willow and vine shiver at changing
verily bow to the jaunty isolate
A yellow tree has captured the sun
& rendered it gently mortal


*

spilling sound
of milk and marble
till the garden
greens again
seen through the ice-dry window
in the moldy cardboard box
inside it the eyes
of a mirage
savage at least until
the fiction washes in
back to self
sometime
front to
everything else

*

Weirdness follows
the next next
A chain of fishes, tooth to tail
elaborate the seqence
Some checkered tongue
laps our conversation
as fears might our ambitions
unstated and abutting the inner causeways
But out here, the sweet tooth's
on youth, & right tight
behind claptraps smokebreath d___
packed too tightly to evacuate
each drinks a socrates milkshake
& swallow tongueless & alone

*

he was an angel of the snow
in polyester pants he lay
he swished his legs
together apart together
they stuck & stayed
in cold and icy weather

his breath could melt the snow
but could not sever
his legs that had so grown together

*

and the flakes piled in
the cracks of colour flocking
this way and away

like one who dangles without dropping
he hung on red and blue

i saw that movie too
my hand on yours like some moss around a tree

the architects lines, drafty
unity of a spider
strangles without shopping
best thing to do in winter

*

bugged out by feelng
garbage black

auto-eject into
wind whine wind

diagram into
tran quill idiom

our boy idiot
no

nightly
he-man


*

three aspen writ into
open arrow

snake rundownto
the bubbling gonetime

*

scarred endings & terrible, bearable beginnings
An engine ignites & a tiny little light goes on
Ricochets from heaven, return your mittentouch
The green glass we stand on
Hails your frosted roughish tongue
A wall painted over
is covered in surprise
(BLAMF!) Eat icepop custard
shiver
sunrise

*

An ion almost out of phase
An object of a deep surmise
A sequence of disordered days
A parenthetical reprise:

(A lion tallmost as she lays
The subject of a creep's demise
The week when she disordered plays
Her bare heretical replies.)

*

A soul flies from
its egg
to tar oil and snow
how long's gone
the dancer number
time to reproduce
a feeling

*

liquefying pink
mix crust and bread
in slender buckles
short sleeves prolong
the manner of facts
a flame
in a burning chalice
meanwhile means well
keeping our pants on

*

Beauty without sugar
Who pays for this register?

Sirens demand what they may in the dark

the sea of she-horses
false step through the eye — centre —
careless of latitudes 4x4

come out — the wheels are burning