Nature, Poetry and Aesthestics

Long sighs sometimes warp into goodbyes.

Steel beams of memories shared melt like heated butter, paired with the next over-caffeinated meal.

Hung-over mornings now pattern themselves to your habits.

Trampling through the brambles of this wilderness, looking for home without compass—just the faint trace of the north star, and her face.

Self-preservation in these wetlands requires instincts a little coarser; being carnivorous doesn't come naturally,

don the armor of half-worn cardigans and slacks— itchy and oversized, pale shoulders expose now and again.

Swap kisses now like cash swaps hands.

Nights now have all the love of unspayed strays in alleyways.

Heat yourself as moths circle cheap Christmas lights, your dandelion seeds lost again to the breeze— always seeking to root and roost.

Echo: she is still replete in the valleys. Homeward bound to the ballads of the past:

Walk with me tonight; we're perfectly paired to face whatever lurks, hisses, whispers from woods draped in charcoal black. This is truly Land's End.

Not so long ago, these rugged hills were green, teeming with life. Now, the last days of August, the fields acquire a sallow pallor.

As the sun is pulled by horse and cart beneath the world's westerly rim,

We arise after a day's labor in the underworld; soot, soil, and silica are our beauty mask.

Didn't you hear Tommy knocking? Every extra echo is them— footsteps that shadow from Redruth to the driftless west.

I climbed to climes disparate in temper, as continents sit still, then quake— where sun shed timber rattler skin, and lunar shadow let loose timberwolves once more.

Always to lap up their waters, inhale their scents, backstretch in their grassy heather; to stave off too many thoughts in penned pastures, fastened from youth's terrible cloistering.

Hamstrings remain high, coiled to spring; thighs remain taut, steadying strides. Cupid’s bow lips, they still pout— their arrowheads plant in flesh, devastating in their cruel symmetry.

All these weapons, well and honed, still subject to arthritic ravages: the graying of temples, and arteries calcifying.

The thermal shock of bills arriving, backdrop to the mourning dove's call; the quiet sharing of resources— ensuring the litter receives its full share.

Preserve and prolong with sun and steel: country lanes strolled, the boxer's bag struck, and a gardener's toil unearthed. Swordsmith the synaptic plastics with lectures and meditations in verse;

Strike a forlorn pose beside seashores distant. Is it vengeance or saving face— this self-imposed exile of yours? Stoking the firewood with an iron poker, ghostly lovers always make time for trysts, delight in reminiscing, then dissipate.

Saturn says swallow their hearts whole before they would consume yours, and toast Madeira to mortal wounds inflicted, your veins now distended. Her siren's call severs indifference; nothing in this wilderness compares.

Go unmasked, out of character to the ball: down drops her satin frock, frayed, off comes your Cossack coat, decayed. Wisdom be the intoxicant and lip balm as you slow dance round the hourglass, the first inhale felt suspended in your lungs— free falling into mercurial pools in which only you two are reflected.

Morning sees you off to most august ruin, pulled by the quadriga off track. Keep her cameo; her silhouette clings to your neck like Ariel's ride unbridled.

Neither Tuscan hills green sprawling, Campanian fields oscillating in heat, nor Ligurian vineyards lemon soaked satisfy your thirst for very long.

Fever dreams make you a leader among men in the cradle of Alexander and Plato, and here you dine with Persephone— struck silent not by rivalry, nor by klepht's dagger, just too many lancets, just too many leeches, a system in shock.

Too pagan, too carnal, too voluptuous in verse and in life's palette and hearth to make the poet's corner.

You might just make a second-hand tear in her eye.

Shivering strays walking circles in the commuter town's loop. Cicadas warm up in streetlight candle glow.

Under the bridge, the creek’s muffled rush soundtracks this nightly figure-eight.

Companionship is precious post-dusk— a blue diamond on black canvas. It illuminates, but cannot heat the blood just out of its reach

Phantasmagoria breaks the silence— transmissions cross state lines, crossing time’s divide.

History like jumper cables, giving movement, giving white light, giving white heat, vitality renewed.

Crave that pick-me-up From the corner stop— American Spirit Black.

Lights aflicker as We sidewinder Portland streets.

She kisses tonight's Goodbye At curbside, Ready to seize the night—

Swallowed in neon and strobe.

Sometimes, in my Jagger sleaze, I strut in uncaring, Never giving away That I'd be Your beast of burden.

There’s some girls—

Yes, pretty girls. Georgia dolls Who break glass, Handle an ax For a broken heart.

Puerto Rican angels Who save you From yourself.

Closing time. The gang’s all here, Piling in, overflowing— Southern drawls, Cackles, mascara fading.

Sidewinder to street carts; A fuller stomach means A fuller heart.

We wave them goodnight A little before the sun also rises.

We’ve traded astronomy domine for astrology domine. Take up this telescope; check out our retrograde.

Then again, feelings were always air to flame, wildfire eating through the acreage of flesh, sucking marrow, leaving bodies to smolder cool in the aftermath.

Café au lait spots, cinnamon-sprinkled freckles— these must be maps to the stars, divine intervention.

Swill the red wine, though the red doesn’t register on the tongue.

Taste the marble cake, though the crumbs savor like cold ash.

I'm not averse to the finer things in life. Just watch these feelings trade Like cheap set fork and knife.

If you just take a look, you'll find you're with a hook Stuck. Into. Me.

Melancholy is my jailer's name. You're on a first-name basis too? I don't mind the solitary confines. I don't mind the cellmate swap.

Eurydice, I can’t look back too deeply, only to watch you fade again to my renewed grief.

What is the graduating class up to this year? Thumbing yearbooks slowly, scrapbooking the dying and the thriving.

The fountain wells ink and blood. Your gravity keeps my axial tilt tethered to beauty defying eclipse.

Safety net sanctuary in the nave of your unchanged timbre, memory floods carotid highways.

Carrying our good luck charms that glint like sharpened shields, tempered obsidian in youth's kiln.

Bavarian cuckoo clock crows. Sunday morning saunters into my periphery: pan-frying eggs, dicing peach platters lacquered in local honey.

Strobe of morning light scatters.

Children stirring impatiently— Wild foals. Clattering gallops pick up steam down the hickory hall pasture.

Ravenous cubs devour the morning's kill.

Mouths caked with scrambled egg entrails tugging at my mane and calloused paws— Let's break the idleness of the Serengeti heat sticking to our summer coats.

Entropy's wear and tear still can't beat thirst unquenched from the watering hole.

Sunday afternoon and still they seethe.

Sunday's yawning sun, when silence pools over the oak savanna. Lids heavy with the day's dust are teased at fluttering shut.

Then the cerebrum's teeming nightlife— katydid staccato ambience, click tracks with hyena laughs that back mask.

Lift this Venetian mask, Carnival is still in effect. Let my pores bask in the warmth of this neon wilderness.

I might have given you a fright: words and moods blurring, clenched fists like blunt instruments.

Reclamation of opportunities long since turned into mist. Carrying a thrush's thirst for life, see me spike into spring's arteries.

Lap it up— let leaves stretch their legs after sleep. Endorphins circulate like cloudbursts; let rivulets seep from bandages unwound.

Selene glows, a crescent grin keeping vigilance over winter's powder cake.

Huddled on thermal vents, half-lit by shared cigarettes, half-cloaked in the alcove, each drag frays my tongue; you stitch me whole.

What the next note is beyond this nocturne Is halfway up to us, halfway to circumstance and to trust.

Whatever this feeling for tomorrow, I'm all in. We knit connective tissue— flesh and veins, with an incandescent glow.

Bear witness with me Life's terror, its beauty— these raw nerves are too much.

Last night I caught whiff of prussic acid pills. Their bitter scent repulsed me so.

Doppelgangers shadow you on the terrace, demanding to know: How long do you expect to be content?

I never learned to swim. The tempest is here. Into blue currents I will plunge—

Aphrodite’s seafoam cleanses my scalp. My mattress of sand. Crabs crack open my pulp; pyres dissolve all that remains

Dearest, spare me with a precious view. I'm down to the rags on my thighs and back.

Neither sniper's arrow nor the mortar’s shrapnel surge can suppress what might be this writer's final urge.

May a few musings make their way back home to you...

Trace in loose leaf Parallelotelograms. By way of Western Union comes our overdue reunion.

I'm pillowing this foxhole with the eiderdown of memory. A feast of nostalgia, fresh-faced, perfumed in honey and chamomile tea.

These must be the first hunger pangs of love. Our timing is off, until it's not.

Bell sounds—my southpaw stance throwing off your opening salvo. Taped hands swell in hot leather, sledgehammer, seismic force,

you land strike after strike. And if you must know, I wince now and again. Shock absorbed,

I lean into the ropes. Still you insist on pummeling— Your right cross parried,

meet my left hook. Uppercut flashes you'll never see coming. Are you asking yourself,

what round is it now? At what age are these next three minutes up? We're prizefighting

for different riches. You want the quick hit— another TKO to your name. I'm fighting for distance,

See my precision, details and patterns stored, steam-pressed by my rational eye.

See my incision: unspooled yarn of feeling now taut.

Walk this high tension wire with me. The nervous breakdown takes no bow, not gesturing for jester's sake. A true cry for help.

Then— the green of summer fields at cruising highway speed, glazed in morning dew.

Revives. Another day survived.

Come on man—come get your joy, your kicks, your darkness. You’re too old to take trust on just credit alone. You’re too young to lose lust—like kings lose thrones. Friends and acquaintances—wives—one night stands— Half of them on the cusp of their first gray hairs—salt shaken into auburn waves. The other half are asleep in their graves— weathering away in memory like their limestone markers.