The port rests on my high right chest, a pink crater, a cleanly folded linen shroud kissed with tears wheeled from operating room to recovery by melting folds of scrub blues with iodoform scents. The fragrance of me is creased into a tucked blanket, monitors on my legs and arm caressing rhythmic, sounds dissolving…
Everything Is You
Kiss me. Devour me. Press yourself to me until inside and forever let me know you are there. Every breath is you. Every smell is you. Everything I taste has the savor of you. I look around and everything is you. Noise settles into the house with the timber of you. The gentle cloth of…
A Dying Poet’s Final Sonnet
Bury me not in a high tomb of gloom on days sacred to all your lonely heart nor scatter my ashes in the pale moon on June’s or September’s early-late start. Mix me in with all my good beastlies‘ dust, one third reserved for Elsi’s sweet embrace, two parts crushed into diamonds that not…
Neil Armstrong Takes Back the Moon
Days before liftoff Neil Armstrong saw Easy Rider in the cool solitude of a dark space 25 miles from the launchpad and Born to Be Wild blasted in his ears as the Saturn V lifted him with the drive of over 400 sky blue corvettes towards a lunar orbit almost four days later. Space was…
The Nacre of Cancer
I have no taste for whiskey, although it seems over the years I have developed a proclivity for cancer, for building the nacre into pearl. It’s funny how one can live with death scooted to the borders, listening to it rap the door with sub-audible gusts that only your dog hears and barks at.…
Icarus’ Sister
Icarus’ sister exists only in living stone, the watchful daughter of the craftsman in the middle of his own labyrinth, once his prized creation, placed in the prime line of his drafts, design, eye of his genius, now a relic existing in a dusty nowhere cobweb corner stained with Minotaur blood, watching her fleshy father…
He Writes, She Dreams Their Sentimental Song
These are the things he scribbles in the little white paper of his brain: catch the movement of passing shadows in a window; search the clouds for the feathers of a robin’s wing; listen in the spaces of music for the laughter of angels in hiding. These are the things she knows today, yesterday…
Catacombs Know No Smiles
Catacombs are full of bones snuggling in the disgrace of others. Hipbones piled on top of skulls, the absence of lower jaws denying the departed a smile, the eternal existential joke of insulting the living with the knowledge of their ultimate end. Femur, skull, femur skull is the monotonous pattern of the Paris catacombs.…
Snapshots of New York City in Stride
At lunchtime pigeons and pinstripes dance with Rockette syncopation in front of Radio City following the lead of thirty balloons encased in vinyl tugged down the 50th Street station. A chauffeured limousine pops out a freshly groomed and leashed Pomeranian seeking reunion with her dowager owner getting purple locks and cuticles nearby. At…