How easy could my rhythmic crusade shift its wooden blade and slide the steel and double-hone through fleshy her as grimace lost bewilderment in those dazed eyes and fingers tremble with the why “Oh!” now and all of it quite over though she still stands steel rod straight with blood across the floor, a tidal [...]

Have I sunk so deep into this drowsy pillow’s Aztec strategies delivering the most beautiful blue virgins and their dancing never to be lovers into the cornfield of my wrinkling elbows so some dragon’s teeth won’t decimate my rows of yellowing, sublime in this cowardice that dogs my growing deaf ears and shades the darkening [...]

Every letter I’ve written’s a lie, love. Every love letter, ranting letter, letter of apology, letter to explain my actions or inactions, they’re all lies. Every “I love you—“ whispered, written, licked— every one’s a lie. Even this, my love’s a lie.

I’m putting on the red dress, Ma, and heading back onto the trucker’s lane to spread my legs (all hose pulled tight and bra that pushes me toward heaven) to do my due and give a few (the tired and poor) a swim along this once pure shore (my closest pal the crack boy down [...]

I wish you a happy birthday. Birth you on this day here. For you dear. Just you. You! I wish you so happy on this day. On each day. On everyday. Wishes for birth of an everyday kind, every minute birth, second birth, deep as contractions. An infant and cake kind. And icing. And candles. [...]

Go back to the Sphinx, please, or to Babylon where it was sorted out quite plainly with the perfect of the mummy, wrapped museum linen still, still preserved on Eighty-Fifth and Fifth, a glorious Rembrandt still, still life still gleaming, beautiful in leathery limbs of Midas gold and granite pure redeeming us from all this [...]

This sweet dimness that invades me— saddles me, rolls me in cotton and files me away with ancient morgue signatures affixed to my clever white socks— hopes that no one will notice how slipped away I’ve become, comfortable (spending the rest of my days as a detainee, squirreling tunnels of escape under my arms), but [...]

As Elvis Costello baptizes the radiant morning, blaring with the South Road sun (my SUV windows up against the Yukon wind, the oil of an Arabian child’s blood whistling this empire’s chromed wheel’s glory forward) I see her dancing. Dancing! A pining child with her pockets full of daddy’s jelly beans. Dancing a ragamuffin’s dreams [...]

like a whale giant and useful beyond machines, rising and I almost see him in the waves out there parallel to where I usually beach myself (a small blanket of primary colors sunglasses, a book I’m determined to finish) and then he’s gone back into the fish highway I might have seen a flicker of [...]

The heart is a muscle, its message methodical, pushing and pulling, a Viking at the oar in full battle regalia. It’s no mistake it’s attached to love.