Stools

  Closed:
quiet respite
without demands,
propped seatside down 
on a marble floor,
the night’s memory mopped clean,
and free from the weight
of butted burdens;

resting
with the good intentions
of another day. 

Silent Narrative


A silent narrative
underlies her humanness;
her every action 
an overflow of flimsy meaning,
every response 
choked with blather and woes.

No escape of disenchantment
from the vaporous mist 
of her consumption.

Lacking spirit
and amazement,
she closes her eyes
and shaves her head
to ward of perplexity.

With weary eyebrows
and caterpillar lashes
she paints herself
for war against
not enough; 
to feel alive,
to truly matter,
yet is cumbered
in the cheerless gravity
of discontent
that never fades away.

Porcelain Dolls


Bear leans over 
and tells the porcelain dolls
a dirty joke.

Mythic perfection of
their rigid cheeks,
painted blush, 
radiates the fragile aura of love;
their giggles disguise 
their ruffled discomfort.

Self-possessed, Baldy sez:
"put a lid on it Teddy,
we are to be cherished
and require protection,
not titillation."

Discourse of Enchantment

 
If the discourse of enchantment
is most heartily encapsulated
in the prosperity message
of today’s megachurches,

the program of action is to
mitigate the social cost
of adjustment, which
rapidly depreciates that display -
a syncretic zodiac of variant sentiment.

Deep mythological resources charged
and ultimately
unsatisfying eschatology;
traverses space,
foreshadowing the demarcation
of time.


Fissure - just setting in
vicissitudes of characterization,
of horizontal archeologies
and spatial aggressions.

Unseen Forces


There are unseen forces that oppose
motivation and seek to douse
the flames of inspiration.

Sirens sound,
waking up the dead;
thieves are on the run,
self-deprivation seems
both a cosmic effect
and an ethical imperative.

Memories are fragile; they 
invariably slip away,
are easily destroyed,
and as you know,
motivation can be elusive,
absorbing the potency
of the cosmic shift.

When you add information,
it becomes ambiguous;
an odious atmosphere of tobacco, earthly morality,
and pickles,
connoting nothing pejorative.

The difference between knowingness
and knowledge is only
the echo of its source;
this deliquescence into a
comprehensive resonance
is, like the slow
beating of a giant’s heart,
a declaration of ignorance.

Inhabiting a world of their own
the waitress grabs the old coot,
and with some music
and bogus spiritualism
she licks the last of
the whipped cream
off her fingers.