Drink To

"I am carried along like a ship without a steersman,
and in the paths of the air, a light, hovering bird;
chains cannot hold me, keys cannot imprison me,
I look for people like me and join the wretches."

                      – from "Carmina Burana"



The Prisoners

Please, Angel, spinner of suave, delete
your palm from fortune, from reed –
read red as location;
one from which the back wall is gray,
is a pin-up of someday sex.

How confusing. How everything can begin again.

Thursday
was freedom – you remember:
diesel & teriyaki, your flavors, Klonopin backdrop
& up on Aurora John.

Is your box murder? Is it
five o' clock? Is it Taco Del Mar?
Mark off every day a moonscape of the Mother,
mark every day as one.


The Living

The illusion of possession,
a gray granite collection – something
to give away
on her death bed, or a long, last suggestion:

the only thing important is mascara.

Your weight is your place marker. Your smile
will dictate your elevation,
your frown will decide your
temperature. Most importantly,
place matching towels
at your point of origin.

I don't care how.


All Christians

What you think is a halo is a rusty spoon.
Angel waves a knife
& we think it's Apocalypse.

We no longer recognize thunder.
His spring has come & metastasized.
He sings it like an ambulance siren.

Fellow patrons
of fork & prayer, welcome the lion.


The Faithful Dead

In the space from hand to hand, at Pike Place,
sold & played
by swine donors, morels, the King
was thrown, for pleasure, for flash pictures.

Who knew his future
would be dashed by his flesh?
His slapped-butt, paprika, rosemary, brown sugar
are yours in oil, in apricot ale –
the co-sine of '98 Domaine de Thalabert.

He listens at lunch – non-empathetic,
poorly socialized bastard & Happy Easter, Happy Summer.

The Loose Sisters

Write it around the old girl,
write it around her, younger.
Wrap it around another foreign body
in the loosie-goosie bed & operate.

Numbers: pH: 164; Lovers: 30 inches;
Muscles: $832.54; Birds: 17; Oftens: 2,146;
Maybes: 2; Nevers: 2;

Drinks: 15,330; Years: 7 & weighing the glass of water –


The Footpads in the Wood

Here is a path. Here is a scythe, see –
the difference is a bathtub & a razorblade
or Florida.

Make your own impetus
from a belt or hairbrush! Look crisp
on the balcony – topographical, or else.


The Errant Brethren

A corner of half of the lower face says
he's given up on love & believes in gin.
How noble to swim
in that pine, so redundant –

he says smells like pine, so redundant.


The Dispersed Monks

Taxman swipes at elusive fairy
with a golf club & a drink.

She shovels her driveway at the first hint
of snow. Calenture
has come to impart her secular,
most inherent advice: Take a minute

to string clouds into rhetoric. Poems depend on it.
Take Angel, for instance, & his mother,
Repair, who scalds his hands
through prison bars.


The Seamen

Kneel to the poppy mouths who
rifle your bathroom, who
spit & spilled
themselves on flannel
for bent limbs & grasp, & when lonely,
suckle your image like a spring-filled balloon.

You know, by now, girls
are filthy tornadoes & street lamps
reflecting from tanned, mirrored shoulders.

Hold dirty girls by blue light,
be Jared be Todd.

We're just as you imagine –
we're Port-filled vaginas.


The Squabblers

How bumble. How be. So gorgeous & I
have pain in the quadrants,
we break.

Right, taillight kakistocracy, a filmy,
under-worn walk: feet over mountain,
shut aorta, mouth

blocked. You call to the god of birds;
we twitter. We are a blind elbow

& the floor bleeds back, when half my vision.


The Penitent

Hung in the doorway of a smokestack town
is the breath of another son,
relieved.

Mother divined this
from the pickle tray
with help from wrists & surround sound.

See how they lie, pointed in the same direction?

If you swipe,
they move like webworms.


The Wayfarers

Guitar man. That's how I say long lost man,
car-door framed. Ganymede, present
in the trailer court driveway.

Ah, swift contrecoup & weed
in the crack
of the union by-laws, union hat.

Angel,
you cupped my breast in July
& you knew we were no good, stuck hard
like dirty gills
& uncombed fins, for years