>I would like to murder some easy man
Live the acrimonious whole of Northwestern European lore
The bits full of colour and flags preceeding acronyms
I would demand you come along and hold my hand but
Of course, understand should you have some other plan.

>Early one morning
On an early morning hike
He pressed a prettiless plant
Between pages in a blank book

Late the next night
On an emergency late-night flight
He thought down on his darlings
Getting on in age, he couldn’t recall

Had the weed the sore right ankle?
Or little Geppetto’s book? He remembered
One tubercular grunt beneath his favorite quilt
Though the details of the graces were sanded flat

So high up, he thought, so impossibly far

A rose or possibly the Bible
Would shrug off such a persistent cough
Simply swat away the pest, he thought
Tripping into sleep, on his ass a pleasant bite

So high up, I thought, so impossibly far

On my
Knees begging
At your
Feet hands
Clasped insisting
Indulge in something
Sweet and so
I stare past where
Your face should be
Staring back at me.

>A particularly terrible evening to find oneself a slave
To soaked wool socks, a full pink cap topped with a firm button
Nothing like a cherry. She doesn’t care much for this parking lot
She doesn’t care about description in the negative, women drivers
Nor does she mind the extra attention, the broken yellow boxes
This is what life’s become, even the dark, cross-eyed passerby
His lurking, bowed shoulders and smoky-green sweatshirt
Eyes rolling downhill; even he proves to be just another now.
Sidling questions bugger each vision, all beyond reproach
Like the causeless rain overwhelms every hungry pore before
Flooding the less-traveled corners of the strip mall’s exterior.

>The critical stare of green flipflops on blue carpet
I am outnumbered & unable to work or the work comes slowly
Common folk pad the round theater, award no books
But gaze up at passing sky framed by the curtain wall
Then, perhaps, bury their beloved corpses under the bailey
This blue grass more darkly & desperate to be fed.

>argon and glass, the STARDUST sign, when fed left-to-right, curls proudly
from the S at its base up to the T at its tip, inhales then cocks out its chest.

>

>KING PHILIP: 

>On reading Jonathan Franzen’s ‘Freedom’, p121-127

(From a very early point in the novel, the author makes the “good guy” very complicit in the innocuous “bad thing” that leads to the small cacophony propelling our love of the characters. We are ultimately redeemed ONLY should these small transgressions occur, but in retrospect, in retelling, in novelization, are allowed to spy, but must pass by, dark alleys into which we could make our escape; as in a dream we pilot the vehicle of reason yet soar only with passion’s blessing.)