Postcard 147

Not in you but of you. Breath communes
The sun yearns red
Great storms batter the eastern seaboard
The west burns earnestly toward sun setting end
We are not unfamiliar with his desires
Each day some burning man at his own red meridian
loads up and shines down bullets, pitiless
Down and down, we are groomed for this
A pitiful man holds downward his gun
The sun seeks red; the pitiful man seeks gray
The sky moans with ash and haze

Not in you but of you. Breath communes
We have been groomed for this
It is pitiless how long and how
the child seeks love from her tormentor
Lead hot sun and crouch behind
Mask on because breath communes
Active shooter drills, the sun's own red desire
is a gray earth, a charnel house
And who loves color like a child?
But unburned waters rise, subsume
Where is color loving child?
Where is gray man
Where is rapacious sunlight?
Subsumed

Not in you but of you. Breath communes
alas, submerged
But all colors start in lightless deep
From spark, from movement,
from vivacious seek

Postcard 146

The story so far is bleak. here is reprieve:
Writers often do despair of staring blank at blank white sheet
The naked onus is to fill judiciously
To silent say what is a need, no more no less
To mete out hard truth and fragile beauty like rare thread

But you will seldom hear despair of staring darkly into inky well
The truth is there, that every word drawn out of it is destined to fail
The truth, I fear, is bleak. The well is most opaque,
into which a fragile truth might, like a penny wish, sightless sink

Ink black, paper white, the writer knows his own hubris
and fears any hope is a like mistake
But must hold truth that blackest ink and whitest sheet
are last exhale of pulpy carbon tree

Poets task is not as engineer. Ink in words
is only slowed and followed spill and swell
Lines laid down like ordered thought are dark water's
cutting courses to root rich earth and thirsty fertile ground

The story so far is bleak, yet it persists
of its own power, not by me but through
with the same natural mystery that drive toward dark well
both sunlit stream and obscured roots of tree

Postcard 145

We know it is too late in our cities,
seamed and chipped, utilities choking choking
We know it is too late in our nitrous fields
collapsing into blue-green waterways
We know it is too late upon our greasy seas

We know that our mighty, ocean striding derricks
stand on feet iron-oxide red
Our valley spanning damns rest on feet of clay
Drown the wise men, may as well
Let their harsh God be their judge

And we know it is too late for lightest sky
Turquoise daughter will not ascend, broad winged upon,
now white, pelican, she must at last return to ground
Life itself is, there, tenuous choking choking,
pale & self consuming

Is it too late there?
There is a pimp and there is a whore
He cuts a dripping peach
between his stained and crooked teeth
he sucks last pith from pitted core

He spits it out to speak while he beats her
you bitch you cunt you piece of shit
Why does pimp hate whore? Why
do slugs use razor tongues
to drill in shielded shell?

Is it too late, turquoise daughter for sperm and egg?
Is it too late for germinate seed?
Too late even, for dormant tuber & wind-held spore?
Too late, the mollusc pimp will spit
Too late and more. Too late and more

Postcard 144

Please tell your children that you are coming soon
Please tell our children that you are
Please tell your children of your imminence

Last night a sickly light scarred
the low hung steaming sky --
a load shot into the seeded sky

Tell me your children are imminent

In this morning's feeble dawn,
eyes old and wise, wings
spanning three meters wide,
the great grey pelican -- ocean's hound --
filled it's gulping beak the final time

And then, mercilessly, Leviathan,
oil covered -- a suffocating new blubber --
blood plumbed with mercury and lead
rolled its eyes back in its head, white
ribbed belly stretched to convecting winds,

Today is merciless. Wisdom is dead
Please tell our children anything

They are compelled to scratch
their secret name in open osseous sand --
our children -- exposed and bounded by
the scaly crissing crossing trails
of slugs, mucous webs

Our children signed a blind consent
and they will desert wander
they will our debts pay
They will grow mute illiterate

They will be burdened by old laws
scratched in cuneiform upon
chipped slabs of clay
They have signed away
in aggregate, inheritance

Please tell them their secret names
Please let our children know
the fertile laws of nature will
supplant the fetid laws of man

Postcard 143

The old birds move across the sky
they look down, lantern-like
at weary angles with the weary world obtuse
She follows them with long strides. She shears
She pursues strident and acute

The paper clothed ground peels up
and flickers like grey flame
Decrepitude falls away
flutters like old lace

Her legs lift ponderous like wings
She is leaving but wishing won't make it so
One by one the wings collapse and
fall along guide wires arsenic and lead
Still, she persists her vom'tous slog
near still against the blasted sun

The bird and her describe a whirl against itself
Then whirl against the broken back of world
-- all its armatures corrupt
its chemical sky collapsing into sea
The firmament slides deleriously away
Guide-wires burn and snap like filaments
Legs and wings astride as if willing
only made it so, they are away

But look, a smudge across the rarefied
A listless smile that is a primeval tusk
and two black shines that are
mockeries of eyes
The stillborn beast remains, a stain
and like a slug, consumes the world decay

There is a bright white -- a pelican
astride being of legs and wings
And there is a sallow white that is
universal consumption, a fade

Postcard 142

She comes to a cityscape.

The world cannot help but change.

Everyone and everything pushes out.

The city has burst unfilled,

a hollowscape.

This was a city of change.

Never the same stream, 

can't go home again, 

look on desolation angel.

Wide avenues lead to center, radiate

Only laterals crowd with argument and debris

No one, nothing meets or challenges her

but the blasted glass

ground beneath her feet

The sentinels are empty and everything 

remains is scurry scurry

Heat is frivolous

spent without movement - tangled

Everything pushes out 

against what it may find

looking out with 

city center empty eyes

She stands at the center that is like a weak star

Broad clear avenues radiate like light

did it explode? did it vaporize?

did it collapse?

She walks upon ashes and looks around 

clear blue. no second sight

The beast has been still-born and yet 

has lurched away, pushing out.

She feels the threat of violence inevitable

That is one thing overcome by another

Push turned inward.
She breaths it finely in

Her hands are metal black
what did she touch?
Somewhere deep, there must be clay and hummus
untouched untrammeled unstreaked

The suicide air lays acid down
from chromium clouds
from quicksilver skies
The earth pushes up its alkali

A shadow flits across her eyes
Then another and another still
Some ancient creatures cloistered up
ooze across the formless sun

The wings push down
push down Away
She pulls up her feet and follows
Every girl in this hostile world
needs walk on, every girl needs a dog

Postcard 141

All things, beings all, are born clean into a well worn and weary world.
Stars glow red and every cell has death drive.

Rivers -- metal ochers, metal yellows -- like bony fingers reach to sea.
Big waters barely beat.
Big waters filled with skeletons of all things,
like old coral, oily algae green
And the surface is a sick skin,
a fever sweat for greasy rain-starved winds.

A new clear creature comes up from mud,
and squirms grub-like from sulfuric chrysalis of debris
She does not slouch toward pestilent future or from corruption of past
For a moment she is pure and unseen
She opens eyes as blue as treasure-held fragments of that old sky.

This world is putrid. Each step sucks up the smell of sour decay
each shuffle through the plastic shells of shotgun wadding,
old bent butts, of straws and bottlecaps, clears infertile crust away.
Each step pushes blood poison, brown and veined, up her legs

She moves to exhausted alkali -- the world as desiccate as leaves
She moves through and to a place where other beings might be or might have been:
the strange mindful intention of piled debris,
hard ground stained by dirty fires,
corners strewn with dried black chips of feces

Everything has one property to possess and share: every being has a smell
Every sheet of paper, bound and stacked, every book, broken spined and outcast --
all dim deciduous memories, trustee of image and word --
withers in the infrared and speckles green in mildew damp
and smells like old pornography

All things, beings all, are death drive born
seeking, starving for the echo source
of clear and bright and clean

Postcard 140

 

Like everyone and everything, 

she was born of dusty effluent of morbid stars. 

She was carbon bright. 

The filament bridged and glowed. 

Like everyone and everything, 

she was born a bursting prophet of origin and eventuality. 

Rare to rich over-burn. 

She was born a single treed forest burnt crisp. 

Like everyone and everything 

she was born tossed and caught. 

From blank non-being into being. 

From blinding gestate to cold dark earth. A stone. 

Like everyone and everything, 

she was born to veiled nursemaids of pain and pleasure. 

One was called need, 

the other, want. 

Like everyone and everything, 

she was born crying out, to mark short span of being. 

Compressed together, 

screaming apart. 

Like everyone and everything, 

she was born fissured with impurity. 

That is the crack and split of 

pyrophytic seed. 

Like everything and every being, 

she was born highly charged. 

Repulse and attract imminent. 

A spark seeking the touch of circuit.

Like everything and every other being, 

she was born a one time thing, 

in everlasting experiment. 

With potential toward all else. 

Like everything and every being, 

she is diminished by neglect. 

As semi-precious as core clustered diamonds. 

As underfoot as turquoise.  

Like every being, 

she was born with unspoken name. 

Like everything, 

she was born without spoken name. 

Like everyone and everything that must be, 

she was born blankly 

grasping for a given name. 

Oh Turquoise Daughter.

Postcard 139

The water moves down,
and because it moves together, it flows.
Every ripple is the power of some unseen thing, above as below.
Every swirl an unequal resistance. Still, it moves placid and smooth.
The morning clouds reflect.
A heron, great and blue, an egret, white, set themselves like caissons
along the east shore, hunting down in their own shadows.
The water only has depth straight beneath, in shadow.
Small flies in hordes waterskip erratic. The tension ennobles them.
It is an irritant to look upon, as if all skin can relate.
The slight breeze compels the clouds across the face of sky,
compels the cloud reflection, compels the water too.
The small hairs of my skin rise and join the leaves in sway.
Ants, of course persist. Countless things we cannot see:
retreat of silvering darkness from the face of the land,
ephemeral vanishing act of each drop of dew,
birdsong and birdsong and the subtle speak of sparrow fall.
And birdsong responds.
My mind too moves unseen, and I toss back a whistle.
A whistle too loud in chamber of head startles me.
The heron, the egret, irritable, take graceful wing,
move off and away like cats.
Their shadows too, leave unplumbed.
And the water moves clear, without volume.
The water moves unceasing,
turns blue against the sky

Postcard 138

Thank you for the sweet oil of your fingers - anointing grace

Thank you for the gentle bite of your eyes - communion

And the quiet drinking in. The quiet drinking in

Thank your for the wiggle and squirm of conscience 

Is it ok is it ok - penance, reconciliation

Thank you for the held breath, 

The slight flow of blood and sweet chemicals - blessed blessed baptism

Thank you for closing warm hands, closing soft eyes

Closing sighing sighing mouth - initiate

Thank you for learning these words

For recalling me to yourself when I put them down - ordination

Thank you for the warmth of chaos put to order, of energy gathered and held

Of substance made relational, of warm bodied being holding true

Thank you for moving desperate through time to me in wild relation - wedlock

Thank you for holding this note, reading it in consideration, remembering me fondly

For finding meaning, for trying it though us, for being a being that can

Thank you for setting it down, for going on and away,

For packing up, for forgetting. A little entropy, a little death.