Bass Track

Boosting music and screaming at the windshield,
remember the dance and the army man shuffle
at the Christmas party wearing bright gold box bows
on asses and clapping to the beat and on time.

Matched up like teeth on gears
motivating the engine to go.

Faster, slower, faster.  Screaming at the windshield.

Stand next to the tree and wrap tinsel
around the neck and spin around and around
until caged in itchy silver and red and shimmer green.
Without falling over.  Slosh noggin and
better than what's ever been.  Come out of the skull
like sunshine rainbow lions.

Road and sidewalk and telephone pole
parking meter and dog walkers and mail carrier
stretch to vanishing points
screaming at the windshield.  Shatter glass
goes like glitter in the kiss
and the second and a half
after the music cuts short
circuited memory.

Come home, maybe?

Pick glass out of the face.  Be sincere.  Dance
the whole way home and roll up the walls
of street fronts where footsteps fail.  Clap
to the beat.  Doing bad robots and
stub toes on coffee tables in the right times
at the wrong places and laughter and touch
hand games woven inbetween
to kill for
these days.

Straight on 'til the morning.  Third star on the right.

Bite the Tongue Depressor

I never was okay with toothpicks.
Jilly jilly cuss cuss.  Mouth to tooth kind
of shards with billy billy bloof.

Blood. Mash the motorway.
Driving is still strange.  Drift across the
double yellows

and laughing all the way.
Meaning something escapes again,
but we still have

ripcords.

Tracking

Static, static, everywhere and not a drop.
Some things get
I was thinking
the apple in the freezer
the story behind it
ashamed that I
accumulation like big ol'
clouds.

I was hard up and I laid down
in a field not mowed fresh and
looked up at the sky.
The same sky
someone saw
not more than a day before

and remembered that I have not been
poked so hard by an idea broached by

a long time.  A bumblebee managed
to stick the landing on my nose.
It was dumb.  Near the gas station.
Smart to the.  Gracious.  I have been

chopping off words to integrate myself better with
the people I have grown
to be friends with.  Cohabitants with because
if you kill everyone on the face of the Earth
all you have is you and your
imagination.  Machinations.  And your.

Time out and time ins and break stops.
Curly squib pops. If they mess with us.
Right the ship.  Write everything.  Right the ship.
The only thing keeping my teeth from
your throat is
rules rules rules.

I wrote a sonnet once.

So did my ____ and then we all
shed tears into the

Have you ever dreamed in stereo?

Wake up laughing, wake up screaming, wake up
harder than you ever thought you'd be
and softer than you ever thought you could be?
When it reached ten draw an eleven
and then put your fingers on her
just to see how it sounds?

Beloved.  Shield yourself from.
It really is a system.  A self protecting.
Gorgeous.  Eat.  Then power

through the cages.

Come hell or high
slaughter.

Pittsburgh Black and Whites 12

You don't know how that touches me
hearing the fight a floor down and a floor
away. Walking around my truck
happy to observe her
and then asking if I feel like getting kept
once our eyes match up across the bed.
You don't know how that kind of love
squirrels my nerves and I go back eyed
into "hello, it's nice to meet you this morning" tonights.
Someone is screaming a few blocks over,
domestic, and someone is screaming
at the corner ballistic.  Hunt down and dee stroy.
Not today.  Not right now.  Not ever again.
Strings singing to the tune of well.
You're doing alright kiddo.  You're done nothing wrong
and the man in the hedges two blocks off
keeps nodding and,
for Christ's sake, orange moon before the clouds,
the night has not lied to you.