Walk Like an Angel (junkyard mix)

I'm still getting used.
The hammers fall
and heels kllonk.

Onward to the sun.
The powder mixed wrong.
Stepped on again; Gods damned it.

Films slide by
the way skins peel off of lips.
My glasses.  My glasses!  My glasses!
Have you ever been stranded
two miles offshore
to swim for your life if you want to?

A horse and a slay
to carry the day.
Grandma was senile when she died.

Something so beautacious
so silly gorgeous and sporting
so fresh, you ragamuffin!
"Yeah" is not "Yes".

Or was that Marie.
Or was that Harvey.
Envy the extended families and
burn them to death that
you may collect their bones
if you deign to take the time to know.

Tea, with a dash of
concentrated pet milk from a can and
two cubes, decaf of course.
A walk to the salon and a
car ride that stinks
of the carpets tread plastic shoes.

Plants grow, windows shut, insects
stuck to the laundry tree.
G.I. Joes and laughter and matchbox cars
and tiny apples and fear
hanging in the corner of every room.
Grandfather clock chime.
Twitching blue nailed toes.
Why didn't the nerve sever.
56 books beneath the coffee table.
Mirror wall for space for what.
Dead dog statue.
What was its name.
Why are the plants not outside.
The garage is packed.
What is that smell
inside of my backpack?
I don't want to sleep on the floor again.
Is she going to die?
The clocks are unfit.
Where are the encyclopedias.
The chairs are many.
The jokes are thin.
Be a man.
Bury your secrets.

Tube Socks

Arrayed beside the new pack
you're nice.  Pink from the day I tossed you in
with the red hoodie I've been meaning to return
to that lovely fellow, Justin.
Thread bare, some of you, when I forgot to clip
my fingernails and pulled up to my heel
a tiny bit too hard and your ankle opened
with a "yowch!"  Floppy necked from
days behind the wheel, sweating, sweating, sweating,
never the same after I peeled you away
from my brown skin turned gray
from a sauna boot.
Black half sideways stripes from the time
my bicycle chain locked and my shoe
tangled in the toe cage and my foot
sprung free of the laces only to catch in
black greased chain links and slowly tip over
unable to get off the finicky road machine.
Timber!
A new pack.  Is there anything nicer?
The thick threads not yet beaten flat.
The odor of odorlessness.
Empty odometers, the lot of you.
Excitement ripping the package open hurling
them every which way.
First the left foot.  Then the right.

Well there is something nicer.

How about that first stroke of a new deoderant?

Ooooooooh, that is a good one.

To the general store!

Migrations By Day

Near the bend of the rosy afternoon rays
and the elbow of tail lights shuffling
through the tall grass of radio towers
and high tension lines rising through
the ebb of tree limbs
announces the trail master, with a huff
and spray, "this way!"

Along the line
each humped beast replies,
with a huff and spray above,
"yes, this way.  This way to home!"
Some mist, some sway, some
trundle along content
to snuffle the footprints before to know
which way.

The turn comes ours and
trunk reared up
the windshield clouds with
washer fluid misting from ahead.
We join in the display
for the ones behind
who may not know.
Thumb into the shower knob,
the wipers go
and purple deicer fluid, unchanged from
the seasons of snow,
fills the air and joins the dust all around
the orange cones of construction
yet to begin.

"Yes this way," hand out of the open window
to cool the day's heat , "yes, this way
to our weekends and home!"

August Scream

Some evenings the air feels uneasy.
There is no wind, no crickets.
The familiar embrace of starlight stiff.  Cold
as if it is speaking through cinder blocks
or not at all.
A warning that something is coming.
Something is tugging at the seams,
gnawing away a thread here,
a stitch there.  Something is trying to get in,
you must go home at once.
Street light bathed windows
follow you like the wide plastic eyes of
Betty Boop clock
thick with cobwebs and the tented legs of
dead spiders.
You must go home at once,
something is trying to get in.
Hide.  Hide.  Hide!

Falling

The familiar metal glide hiss

rises beneath the church mum shush

stream of faucet water through the aerator 

into the pit of the bean boiling pot

planted in the kitchen sink basin.

Darted eyes see the glint of 

an exclamation points blade

begin its baton tumble

from the bars of the overhead rack.

Can a knife be caught, snapped

out of thinning air

between fingertip's

unzipped 

wails?

By a handle, perhaps.

Certainly not

by the hairs of toes.

Misplaced for convenience.

Hidden for necessity.

Between jars to drink from

and forks and spoons.  To eat

what is on the menu.

Can a knife be caught, snapped

out of screaming air

between thick palms

resting day's weight

on cool cast iron?

Mother shush falls

beneath ringing ears and heart's throb.

Hands do not move.

The blade clatter swallowed

by the nine part percussion section

that followed it down.

The second hand moves once more.

The pot, full, burbles to the drain.

One blink.  One more.

Turn off the faucet and the kitchen light.

Go to bed.  There is nothing on the menu

tonight.  Tomorrow, perhaps.

Breathe tomorrow.  

The Ancients

Speak in dreams.
The wind sand
makes your hair
a  bubble chamber.

The last time
we went to see
the ocean
I shook sand from my sneakers for twenty nine days.

Atomic 'doo gel.
Fine and canned.
A few puffs
of "Houqsinn's Ocean Musk"

above eye level,
walk through,
and we are ready for a night out
in the city.

Shower on Sunday.
Dunes and tall grass
behind eyelids.
Drain burbles and head hiss and loaded coffee cooling.

Wet cigarette butt circles and vanishes.

Retinas send aches pleasant in the dark.

Atomic decay of sunsets in 60 watt bath water.

The half life of memory seas.

Through A Porthole

The size of bent edged metal lodged and twisting
inside her intestines is unknowable, to watch
me fall to one knee for the fifteenth time, blue
red, gold, and phosphorous white
licks of flame bursting from my suits seams.

Break glass, air driven out.  Still burn.  Chemical
blaze.  Extinguisher plumes filling containment.
Still burn.  Over radios screams and crackling tears.
I'm okay, I'm okay!
I can't help you!
Please, listen to me.  I'm okay.

Days that pass and months without incident.
When we arrive at the colony station
the stories we will tell.  Work continues. Monitors
blink and machines whir our songs.
Card games and reading her to sleep.
Nights up with me when I could not.

Check in, check out.  Cautious smiles.
Loose bodies and minds.  Guests, invitations.
Space walks and communiques.
Drops to planets and moons and back.
Stay aboard, take care of the ship while she's gone.
Let go.  Another job lost.  I don't understand
what happened.
I can do this.  Don't worry.  I can-
You have to try.
I can-

Alarms drown thoughts, seals clip into place.
Over radios urgent commands conflict.
Get inside.
This time is different.  The thump of
foot thick steel beams seat to their cylinders.
The whoosh of air gone.  Through smoke dimmed porthole,
her eyebrows broken and streaming,
a hand across her mouth.  This time is different.

Please, listen to me.  I'm okay.  Don't-
The lights turn off.  Extinguishers plume.
I cannot see through the fire light filled helmet, you.
Days pass.  The lights are gone and
the remains of myself charred and
heat grafted to what's left of the suit.

I can't help you.  I love you.
Crackles through
the radio link.
I know.  I love you.
Before it dies alongside the main lights and
the emergency system's too.

I forgive her the blast door ever fallen locked.

The ship abandoned for too many memories
trapped inside.  Too many smiles and footfalls logged.
Too many meals and doors and machine sounds we knew.
The pain of helplessness that must have tore through her
to see the blaze rise from being
without an answer
arrests me anew each year
removed from finding the outer seal lock
against containment, turning the hard key
and blowing myself into the depths of space.
Never again
to tap "I love you" in Morse on the blackened porthole window.

The empty ship still turns in space somewhere
full of memories and aches, scorches, and empty pods.
A keepsake floating in a drawer with drapes.
Perhaps a shoe and a few keys to nothing.
What system it's found
or salvage impound or
if it's fallen into the belly of a star,
no one knows.

Across the reaches, alone on my station, cobbled together
from other ships and wrecks I've come across,
through deaths and births I cannot say,
I still comb signals now and then and smile,
a bit of ash drifting from my cheek.

Once in a while the noise resolves and
I see a picture of her content and shining face.
Brush away the spark and adjust a sleeve's clasp.
We are loved.
We are home.