IN JAZZ.

I cannot think

in jazz, though

the sound I 

comprehend- 

the sound a

second locking

looks in the

deli line, the

deadly rhythm

of suggestion. 

CARRIED.

Broken shells
on a shelf, a
feather and
some books,
some read.

Years of
collecting us
and now, soft
and glowing,
bells in the rain.

What a time
to know you,
all along and ever,
were feeling
through -

a slender
hand, pale
and strong,
stroking -
Shoulders back,
chest out.


I wrote this early August, 2013. 

SCHOOL.

shorn apart,
torn asunder -
hard to reach,
reason
rendered
reticent,
drink.

blank page
staring,
whale eyes
meek and
wet, regret
reels, a failing
father.

i can not
        stop
seeing/
tunnel vision
withering, white
skies
humiliation.


Wrote this while working on my Masters Thesis, August 2013. 

CLADOGRAM.

I wrote this in early 2013. 

FOR MY SISTER.

As our talk leaked

like the last-call beer

dripping past the 

evening’s ash, I saw

a change of you.

Somewhere between the

banjo-bite of the Blue-

Ridge grass and your

surge to master words,

all glimmer of girl left

your hazel-flame eyes - 

you’d embraced the life

of the mind.

More Medb than maid now,

warring on and strong, a

woman who knew the true

sound of the name born

by our blood - my sister,

yourself forever. In pride,

we smiled. 

I wrote this for my sister's college graduation, May 2012. 

LUCY, LUCRECE, LEGEND.

I wrote this in the summer of 2012, as part of a collaborative project with NYU's Lucrece Project literary magazine. It is based on John Dyer Baizley's "Yellow" album artwork. 

CANTICLE OF COMMON LIFE.

Marble heart, oaken bone - 

in death’s head profile,

Sum ibi - the cenotaphic

stature of the city, all

adrift in the ocean of 

mumbled smudging light.

A picaresque foot out

my door - a slight step

of ebullient will - and I 

breathe draught air again. 

Light that blurs sight

doesn’t temper true blood.

The craft of heart and bone

alive even in this Hephaestian

husk, the street beats in my

stride-time. A wroughter of

world-to-word - I crow

this canticle of common life.

I wrote this in spring 2012. 

COELACANTH.

No gods, no masters, not even

the dusking moon and her turning

tide-time -

to swim a day as coelacanth,

scale-mail untouched by change

in brine.

To pass through the scorching dredge

of great eyes that sear celestial

deeps - 

to be found unchanged and whole,

nothing but heart - a Parthian ride,

no real retreat.

No impossible goal, no dinosaur act,

a simple fish that got it right; Lazarus

taxon, arise and swim - 

Is it the hollow spine, the uncouth taste,

or the fat of brain that wore the 

paradigms thin?

If I - dead eyes and silver stars,

wolf-paddling against the charging

depth of mind - 

could swim a day as coelacanth,

I might learn at last to understand

how common creatures try.

I wrote this very early in 2012.

YOU ARE MY PERSON.

In the fourth year I’ve known

the scar across your nose

and the uncruel peculiarity

of your seasonal shoulder,

I intone the same moan

forlorn - still, without quiver

or qualm - you are my person.

The authentic celestial crunch

of my bootsteps in the snow

alone, without your long-legged

stride to pace the too soon,

too late reverberation on the 

ragged land, roads together

with a scarlet cheek and heart - 

at the dusking of the day come 

whitherway, to see the goddess

face and spit, to only see

druidess-you again - the scar,

a creature of clay, a shoulder

golden in the white, a cheek rose

in the dark - you are my person.

I wrote this around Christmas 2011. 

TRUE BEAUTY OF BIRDS.

The willow plume, true

beauty of birds - arrowhead

swallows swoop upon the 

august austerity of a red-tail,

weathering feather ruffle to

maintain a raptorous stare

upon his park, only living once

forever. 

I wrote this one in autumn 2011. 

THUS THOUGHT DIARMUID.

The deleterious delirium of

the Styx-swimming feeling,

I breached out of a warm bed 

to a cold world and thought how

cold the bed was too. The distance’s

ache to the pill-bottle popping

for vitamin C, another silence splitting.

~

In the park, the au pairs’ arms

oil-rig pump th e swings to gush

blood to the legs of the occupieds’

orphans, their simpering smiles

shrouding the tears they knew their

mothers could keen back home,

wherever land heads lie.

~

I trembled like young December

next to the native growth garden,

new-tree simulacra of deep forests

forgotten, and listened draught-full

for advice on how to stand, when

to bend, why to grow.

I wrote this in the autumn of 2011.

CARNIVAL.

Your eyes, green as the bluegrass, 

drowning in the moon-pulled tides 

as the bass slides like mud and 

a cricket-cantor creaks up: sound 

bursts like a whip-poor-will with a 

woodgrain Ozark battle cry,

the Alabama nocturne of the 

carnival - I am gone - 

Feeling the reel, 

I hold your waist for dear life,

terrified of losing counting

breath as the stars turn.

Drunk in love and alive, I

dream to the empty bottles,

the short-cut shorts, and the

trees where the spruce-

notes roost; I dream for you.

I wrote this at some point in the summer of 2011. 

JESUS WEPT.

I.

My friend wants me to apply for the Peace Corps with him, 

he says we are ta-veren, greater minds - 

I promised only to be the joker to his batman,

the juggernaut with the blackthorn heart, no piledriver 

copilot, only tinker-terns to pick the bonefish gray

and trimmed in my jailhouse wake - 

I, who climb hills to feel the cold sweat seep into 

sockets on the trip back down, mocking Sisyphus 

for choice, choosing arms over arteries as the blood

seeps into safety nets. 

So swing low sweet oracle and rend off your clothes,

carry me back to the bar at Sleason and Bouldecrest, 

prop up with puppetry my rapscallion hackle, 

losing lost again in The Floating World - 

oooohhh the whiskey bitter, the supple amber irony

of eating oneʼs own words, call it love - 

and sheathe my shaking body until I quake no more: 

heaving reeling, look to the sky like a fiddle and

hold on, hold out, someone or other might hear 

that batting lash averages mean median things as

I stumble to slumber alone, shaking shaking shaking, 

where I can disregard words and replace them with 

SOUNDS.

II.

Sounds, reticent with hobgoblin resonance, reveal a 

heart too keen on keening, the keelhaul crawl of crickets 

cross sprucewood and horsehair strung sturm und drang, 

drowning in Souther drawls as they lose themselves 

to British Twee Power. It was I, 

the American Oisin in Morgul, 

walking sidelong with Samedi, died on the bayou, 

with the Backwoods Bastards and Old Curmudgeons 

queuing up for the downstroke cakewalk, 

loa low voices droning deep pagan wavers, 

radiant in the firelight of The Wicker Man - 

as goats bleat bahbah blacksheep with some 

jalapeno 100-proof heaviness, I tip my skull cap 

to the boneface top hat as I settle down for a 

long summerʼs nap, pulling reaversʼ ripped sleeves 

to my cheek as Baron and his corvid companions 

crow, raven, and rook watch Mamn quiver, 

he croaks like an oak oar salesman - 

“Iʼll show you the life of the mind...”

III.

The life of the mind, becoming ocean, 

breaching with a hunchback wail as spine shards 

clack against ribs, the husky heartbeat of the bodhran, 

leaping up out of war, Shermanʼs Hell to the sea - 

oh mare mare quite contrare, 

wash my feet like Jesus and 

batter rafts like Yahweh, witness my 

last horse in the sand turning tail and trotting 

clumps up to sting my eyes, the lachrymose oracle 

rain oʼer me, lightning a smokestack to 

center solemn solace - it kicks like a mule but

 helps carry the load to the city in the bottom

 of the well, LIUNA union offices 

brimming over with devils beating 

skins of their sanguine sins, hearts alive! 

For when the leviathans break, the seas will shake, 

and what beautiful ruins this city will make, 

cold driftwood if I could but I canʼt so 

Iʼll creep.

IV.

Creep rock steady over cobblestones, 

the wharf aglow in moth-light, where the bilge-rats 

whisper sedulously that nothing is true and 

all is permitted. See Israel Hands hold court 

in the alery, sentencing all to the stocks for 

the black-spot exchange - forgive me Captain 

for I have sinned, its been a few pints since I 

tipped the deep end. With a ski mask over 

my skull and Fifteen Covnts of Arson I watched 

snakeheads swim the Amistad mile and hoped 

a revolt would result before the kraken felt 

the tremolo of unnatural terror, fleeing fleet 

on bikeback, that sea-shanty town, 

shrieking Blitzkrieg Stuka swoop, 

Holland 1945 Iʼm alive! Counting and 

breathing, maypanzerous still quivering quills, 

the Prince of a Thousand Enemies, no longer 

hirsute but still son of the hare, digging, 

listening, running on The Long Patrol, 

bleeding red Irish bulls: 

As long as Iʼm dead they canʼt take me alive!

V.

Canʼt take me alive, my salad days with 

a sponge of vinegar vignettes, a brace of 

conies fallen, my good Great Eye down 

on the street, where the rain bitches sniff out 

bum cigarettes - one stopped me to explain 

her better-day beauty, I smiled at the pavement, 

rattled by the -how-did-it-get-so-low, the pendulous 

and reverent remnants of youth.

What if no she said no she wonʼt No? 

Then my Sierra Leonese sister never graced 

these stone shores, blown back my ballistics,

trbucheved to the bone, no Sunn to rise and 

pass through Stonehenge hands, 

nothing lost, nothing high gained, 

Marshalled Orangeman claiming the Vox 

populi, loud but not so Hiwatt as nailbombs 

or Sandsʼ silence, silence that is simply the 

sound of words all the way lived.

VI.

All the way lived, a life to own the sky 

beating black coursing green in The Waking World, 

trembling eyelids shut wide open in the life of the mind - 

I climbed out all the skin that drenched me, haunting me 

down as the seas opened up and 

I tried to find my way home, and Iʼm sorry, and I miss you - 

following salient songs of whales past 

The Baronʼs balefires in the city of the dead 

disposing of themselves, Gorbag, Shagrat and me, t

he dead eyes and murmuring hearts of those 

reveling in the absurdity that engulfs them, 

the cackling saints starving in the belly 

of cold sweats and whiskey shakes, the 

weeping Arimatheans mourning those 

who have no one on their day of the locust, 

those peaceful corpses, my friend.

I wrote this in September 2010.