Vol XI: Little Kingdom

Abbreviations

Thanks for the invitation
But I’m sorry to say ‘no.’ It’s just apropos.

While you’re envisioning me as the ring-bearer,
I cannot bear to watch you step-in under bells.

I can hear you say I hope you’re well, but I suffer
Inside from a television of static and channels.

It was a long while back now & I drove down
The interstate to reach you. The speedometer,

my only friend, as I watched it rise like morning
Sun, or dew on the plantation. Sorry again, to say

We were friends is a long stretch of runway
Beneath the gears: churning with electric tinge,

Turning like a hinge. The cupboard where I hide
Is afloat with cans & other necessities one can-

Not move on without. One thing: it’s a flood
Of people waiting to haphazardly occur. Utter:

You are the drought I cannot water & the hose
That tumultuously fires out streams & mouths.

The one to whom I cannot speak.

Water Table

Down the well to “patience”,
its well-defined edges,
Written in a century before ours:

The riverbed to the mouth.
Flat steps represent songs whose
muscles flex when the chorus hits

With carol-like assimilation:
What water hangs like tongues
Of a native language not yet spoken?

Men carry rocks
From one word to another’s definition,
women carry words underneath. 

Seasonal Disorder

To whisper along the coast,
To believe in you. No longer little

Handshakes between business-
Women, passwords are like
Speaking amen to the meek.
To say (in tongues) through
A long white blues, the caps

Of lonely lovers in masks,
Of children in shoes.

.

Boxes

I called her darling. Sex at thirty
Is dirty. Dedications to her
Must come from a place unseen like growth.

Speaking in abbr. is a winding road
From a to z, the sleepy days
Of what becomes known through language’s

Long lexicon: The fishnet upon
her thighs or the moment’s
after. I breathe out. I exhale these verses

Complain to the carolers who never
Lend an ear except to themselves. Waltz.
Polka. Dance your week into day,

Your days into weeks. It’s my choice
Which direction I want to lead,
For four hours, like this erection
of sweetness.

Nesting

You can hear clouds crackle
As they drop their confession,
Shining through the thunder, lights out.

Once is a long step away, this deep,
The river’s long banks curl
With each log rhythm. Curves

Like rides you must be a certain height
To call your own. I climbed like hot coal,
mercury like a fair amount of kindling

For gospels whose messages
Disguised themselves in façade & village fronts
To codify rhyme. Reign was abrupt, the last

man in a musical chair. I was trying
All along to not try, a hole-in-the-wall
Of whereabouts, shimmering in glee.

When you came to me with the obvious,
I shouted loud & outer, over fields
Of wordings & phrasings

That came to cope with their illness
Like a musician’s unattended bed.
Mother, upon us was a nest,

A piece of plastic out of place keeping
Us warm with the eggs. I fell
Into puzzlement. I dreamed of rhyme:

The simulated picturesque resting
Where I could lay down my head while,
like lightning, the music played.

Song

More than these matches that keep lit
Like lanterns the porch where we now catch-up;

Little did I know of catapulting but by
Neighboring couples, like couplets, rhyming

But not obviously. It was a sleight as “night”
Rhyming with “rye” , but more than bread. Lead

The way, darling, there is nothing else I lust for.
The turning of glass jars is your only music.

The rhythm of which hits like a trailer truck
On its way from Pennsylvania to Massachusetts,

Carrying product no one has yet to purchase,
Starlings return each year to go down &

zoom into nothingness with receipt of light outside.
I keep the conversation open while little darts

sincere as fences, hover between us.
The door remains ajar.

Lovelorn

Today I learn a brand new word: lovelorn…
Is the green hat whose blues hue dry

As a crooner who lounges out of windows
Showing up when the moment to kiss

Is near? Is this year going to be brevity’s shoulder?
Another year older twenty compasses

Inside the starboard of one ship, controls
To laugh by, consoles too thick

To lose the anchor’s weight; drop
Myself inside the ocean’s cusp of brightness, shine

Through. The undertow is wanderlust in time.
The capsule is bruised but is mine.

Gramophones drop inside of seas. Needles
So thin only bifocals can lean their thin lenses

Upon us while seabirds pair like tennis match balls
Back & forth through the mar. You’ll

Be around the sand bar. Your feet sink inside
the wake. You sing along.

Shutter

Mostly forgotten. You rhymed
Car with star through
Windshields in a city, known.
Almost timid, the city at night,
the screens
Who show up models & those
Dressed so elegantly in red.
A chameleon on carpeting; signs
Of life.

Another Lullaby

With a garment worn only on special occasions, I tossed all night, the past, an unzipped file. We were fastened in like pins in a seamstress’ dream. Every blade of the scissor, a parable of who held you the wrong way. In a room holding up fights, night walked out on us when we were on the verge of lessons. Morality: right or wronged. Rings: dangling as earrings, the weight of the world. I held the dress up after taking its long neck from my slender curve. Thrown in a ditch by the one I caressed, whose arms I felt? Whose words spelled out abandon. Sequins falling like flakes, my reflection on the floor.

Capsule

I do not know you, Boston, you are
strange on this damp night.

I get a signal
From a faded radio. I try to appropriate

Your forces
Appealed. I try to reveal all my secrets

But you, Boston, disappear. A part
Of you is sassafras, another side dream.

I am opposing all your fragments---
calm as calligraphic memories.

The open trunk,
The open trunk like buried treasures

Which meant the world to me.
I cannot know you anymore.