A Small Eddy in the Great Foamy Wake of Discourse

The story starts with an archangel

Maybe Gabriel or Michael

Possibly even Asrael 

It doesn't much matter which

A svelte and sexy angel—

Sporting wings of course but also

A bespoke Italian suit charcoal gray

White shirt pink tie and black oxfords—

A stylishly dressed archangel prowling a wide valley

Is how this narrative begins

It's cold but bright here

And a few clouds ache bleakly

The atmospheric rhetoric 

For some kind of harsh comedy

The archangel has a purpose

Baring divine idioms not for praise

But to announce inflections of desire

The incipient resonance of hunger 

Thirsty intonations that first tremble

Then shimmy across the grassland

We see the startled gaze

Of docile poems grazing

We see these overfed lyrics

Cringe at the smiling whip of vigilant llaneros

The archangel circles the herd

The archangel smells damp fear

Some people say that angels are sexless

But this hermaphrodite

Has a serious hard-on

Perky tits too

The archangel brings no hope

Only desire

In the valley there is an altar by a river

Where exegetes gather to explicate signs

We might ask what these haruspices learn

When they read the entrails of the sacrifices

We may wonder what they discover

When they shake quivers over diseased livers

Only with the blind spot of the retina
Can seers behold this divination

After which comes double vision 
Interrupted by death

Somewhere later in the story is a stone

Where language is conceived

That’s where we ambush the half-naked angel—

Pants around lithe ankles
Fucking the sense out of poetry 

The story ends when we hear

Our own miraculously small roar

When the Sky Skins Darkness

In this violent milk of night no stars

Fall from our furtive hands

But still we open 

Our bodies to the light of a voice

We open arms

To the lustrous and feathered

Groove of a song a bird or more

Likely an arrow in vertical flight

Shall we abandon our breath

Quivering beneath the weight of a wing?

Shall we crowd the first broken note

Fluttering in the wake of discord?

We are the weary but defiant sigh

The wounded prey waiting

For the invincible laws of rhythm

To strike a final blow

Wrapped in the Throbbing of Your Soul

The moon watches you swim

Naked in the illegible sea the indelible

Source of language breaking asunder

Smashing on this ragged shore
A singular design garbled into gibberish

The oldest sound of speech

The most ancient of parsimonious phonetics

The first lie O let the chaos roar 

And follow the moon 

No words left to say

No inscriptions etched in sand 

O follow the moon off this beach 

Wander amid unwritten trees

The precise elisions the forgotten vowels

Here where locutions tremble and fall
Where the sway of whispered labials

Lulls you asleep 

Author Reading 

Eggy Mule Locked Up for a Nickel

I had a uncle down Carolina

He dead now but I remember

He was grieving real hard

Over chasing his lady friend away

So he put himself to punishment

Took a knife to his little finger

Then his ring finger and the middle

Them all bloody on the table

He pulled up short the rest of his life

And him always saying the bitch

Wasn’t worth more than a pinky

Author Reading 

Farewell Remorse

It’s only when we meet like this

That we admit our feigned submission

Only here that we may find

A dear short intermission

And in a moment we quit the debt

Immense of endless gratitude we

Cut that cord and then we fall

How soon unsay we

Dance and we recant

How far from granting we

Say we can’t repent

Now dearly we abide the day so vain

Now we go under with unsaintly

Torments we abide the night

So when do we conclude we

Who say that from fine minds

Fine thoughts ensue?

When we get here we know

We only ever do two days—

The day we open the closet

And the day we close it

Author Reading

Throats in a Tumult and Devouring Discourse

Time being no necessary adjunct or true

Ornament of love we invent

Barbarous recipes for ancient syllables

Hunted in a father’s thicket

Snared in a mother’s thistle

We wait on a porch for noon

Sipping tumblers of lukewarm lies

Gnawing the dry bone of hope

For once in our life forget that we

Are like Adam and Eve

Forget that we forgot that we

Never left this fallow and fallen garden

Beneath the bridge of our arms

Flows the weary river of our conversation 

All we want is to explore illimitable desire

The strange domain of silence of no

Words a vast wilderness where we

Finally find and kill the noble beast

In a savage land

There are no vegetarians

Author Reading