My Dirty Mind

My dirty mind is right between the eyes
following it's own tributaries into a vast shoreless ocean
following your dirty mind
and hers, and his...
little white boats we are
calm or tossing
crossing paths or solitary.


The water rises in the steam of our imagination
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Chuck's Friday

Let's go dancin'
my feet are shod with good times
born ninety years ago
1921 to be exact
but youthful as today’s movement

the street is the scene of our uprising
sun playing second fiddle
to the incomparable piccolo
of starlings and palm fronds

we've only that white line
to divide us
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Father

Image manipulated from here

I spread my barbs

unfurling all that anger

on velvet leaves of passivity

until I catch the crack

of your eye

and the single tear

you thought I'd missed

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Insistence

It is a moat

we’ve dug with the shovel of our mouths

swallowing the soil of each retort

planting the seeds of our point

until we’ve grown the forest

but lost the trees
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Highbrows

Image found here





My words were sweet

arsenic of insincerity

she ate slowly

from my lips

and of them

fed my highbrows

with manure

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Pulled Under



by Anthony Duce


He plays bass
so fluid I am current
and with me
comes all the living colors
they would have been
could they float
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The Shape Of It

i think we give pieces of our heart away

if we knew the length of their residence elsewhere

perhaps we would be more cautious

but then we would wind up with nothing but our whole heart,

just an organ pumping

rather than the flute it becomes

memories fingering windpipe holes

like yesterday's reasoning and tomorrow's knowledge

perhaps there is no getting over

only through

as seems right

love is not something to be overcome, but to become one with

reconciled in either the having

or the have not

decks delt, cards stacked 

but there remains the space of it

the shape it was, and always is

melodic and missing.

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He Said, She Said

He: "My deal is less about being easily distracted and more about my innate tendency to stare at ceilings...stupefied, empty-headed, and macabrely moody."


She: "I've such a mood. I bring it out for special occasions."


(Ode to Shadow of Iris, and My Dripping Brain)

Irreconcilable

I think I was born in a shack on the bayou.
I've memories of it
small wooden porch
creak of a rocking chair
the gentle sway of a lantern
crickets so loud they drown out sorrow
or are sorrow
or eat sorrow.

My eyes are the color of silt
and I've the scent of the water in my hair.

They keep telling me
I was born and raised inland
a city dweller
but I cannot reconcile the fact

I do not live where I ought.

My soul has never lived here.
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Uncropped

Oh that I could...
excise the crosshatch of scars
reshape them into a frame

You'd stand back
reviewing my handiwork
hip handed and head cocked

"It's no longer art" you'd say
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Unmitigated

Humility is priceless and viral!
Oh, to let it in
spreading into my description


There is nothing greater than self
put in it's place
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Remnants

We leave scent
semen
energy
vacancy

Long after we've left, we are not gone
and our grieving
never fully done
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Tie My Hands

If I'd fingers long enough

or an extendable arm

far past a bones measure

I'd pull heaven down to me

...and weep

at what it became

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Cab with no Ryder

Your truck stopped by today.
We stared at each other
memories clicking by in syncopated time

we left smiling
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Thumbnail

Amazing how a thumbnail can obscure the moon
and how then again
in another sky
it is the moon.

We're shocked by the size
of something we thought we'd minimized
and the foolishness of ego
that ever thought it could
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Multi

I like my selves separate

all Sybil-esque

the moments when they press in

gather

as in conference

to my defenseless lobe cage

is a noisy cacophony

of narcissists
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