Vaudevillainy

Can it really be
that the understanding of
the meaning behind the song and dance and
the torrent of gesture and the peeling mouths
to squared teeth are signatories
to a playbill born of
unfortunate and
still-changed
broad lit truths?

Western Son

The wind kicks my coat wide
like shutters before a saloon's entryway.
There's enough sand in my eyebrows
to make a snake's belly itch & I spit hard.

Half to clear the grit
from the space between my lips.
Half to clear my disgust
at the pale & shallow earth that lies ahead of me.

Smoker 6 (for my best mate, Jack)

They dismantled the carousel

with the cheese grater platform

and rusting willow bent arms.

They replaced it with a rubberized purple thing

shaped like a cross and mounted on springs.

It doesn't turn about.  It is no safer.

I cranked it clockwise till my sneakers slipped

in the flat and sharp and splintered wood chips

and let it go.  It cracked the neck clear off my empty beer bottle

in a shower of green bits and noise you would have yelled at me for.

I sit on the purple idiot proof machine and

the spins close in regardless.  I'm lying on the ground

and I can barely see, in my fish eye, the tips of the trees

edging the soccer fields where you used to get lost while I spun myself senseless.

The clouds are gentle as they rotate about my field of view and my cheek prickles

in the breeze and I remember the feel of your fur

when I carried you home after long romps in the park 

in your breathless, enthusiastic, and twilight years.

Fear of Flying

You mentioned how the world felt
ten pounds lighter
and the sun shone brighter
and whether you were right or
your soul was bursting through
at the cracks like a loose flame
from your human furnace
before failed containment
turned you into a wasteland
I saw through the grates
of your dimming and thinning eyes
the part of you that starved away
and shed its countering weight.