ten percent

burn dark carbon
diamond dots luminesce
banded in a watercress
around my gin and bourbon

 membrane  of mundane filters past
and future  are hard to not boil away
heat with care or find them one day
turnt to caramel and dialysis.



chew them up, spit them out
carboxolates. enjoy them!
they glow and spin , shine from within
dis-affected from a man made drought

i****


there is a distance i've come
to be here away from you,
barely there, watching
motes slide through thick afternoons.


crows haunted my weekend
ending with a smashed baby
fallen from the nest, throat
bent back upon tail, legs trampled.

my granddaughter was with me.
i didn't point it out. earlier she'd
visited the duck nest near the road
found smashed eggs, shattered shells

despite this we went dancing
at several halls where people
spilled drinks on each other,
laughed it off. a woman jumped

so much her boob flopped out of her dress
i only noticed because it was me.
i only noticed because i was hanging on
to a man's arm and it wasn't yours.



***


i thought of you, of course
when the crow first came
in line at taco bell, it skirted
the menu board beside my window

a cheeto as grail, a missing girl,
boxes of shoes fall out of a nineteen
seventy seven red gremlin
as the deja vu takes over
and rolls me to the drive up
for tacos. the crow flies
from a tree,makes  three
on a  power wire slashed
 into the pinking sky.

i ate the taco. movement
makes the best eraser.
 and though the next day the crows
are back, i just write them into
poems, make them legends, draw them
black with a sharpie enthroned--
king of the basketball hoops.



^^********



of coure we see pictures in stars
and lines of text. we carve them
into cave walls and paint them on trains.

the sort of i am here faint finger touch
on my thigh as i edit, the sense that you're just
waiting for me to finish so you can
move on with your life, nourished.




*****



there's always so much more to say
but it's just the way the mist from the hose
waters the seedlings with chlorine. it's just the slip
of your finger from my calf
as we slip into sleep, that dreams may come.
















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