WHEN THE SKY SAILS AROUND THE MOON

I sketch the middle of the night
on the skeleton skin
of my inner eyelid.
You lick the essence off,
salty decay of rough tongue.
Words in formation.
Tumbleweed rats the size of cats play
by the door of the Department of Illusion,
seeking contributions.
Tails off, hats back, the seen world enlarges.
Kafka makes his way through the corridors
of everything. But what if
we are the same people going back, then forth,
in the same tunnel always?
There was no Brooklyn Bridge then.
No way to save against the Day of the Locusts.
We are just people in bodies on repeat.
That is, the universe is finite,
and my eyes are made of atoms
borne by the dew of stardust before the day
we have conceived as a beginning.
There is always enough to go around
this sleepy moon of expanding universe,
skies with eyes that dream ourselves
the silvered blackhole lining
of everything that is not us too.

BECAUSE EVERY GUNSHOT ENDS WITH A STORY

Because you are the sun and the wheat through my morning
beliefs, I mantra you all the way to the subway.
Down in the bowels of a burrowing Brooklyn,
we compose the decomposing of all that comes
apart and segregates: moonlight’s sun, howls of dying light,
the way the coffee shop is both boon and last prayer
to workdays’ beginnings. Because every ghost is a person
of haunted proportions, I work into the late hours past
the time of getting lost. My bones are female steeds,
pulverizing your steeds that would have me leave
at a predestined staircase to meet you in one hot rush. As I said before,
you can’t give up that which you fear
and come out clean on the other side. I am haunted by cloacae exits
and proximity. We listen in our distant workday ears to the abyss
hearing us back into ourselves. We make love in between.
If you pause & think deeply, you know exactly what that means.
The abyss hears us back like government bodies disappear us
in the passive voice inoculated. The sphincter of your youth
blossoms the past too, and you know this in the current.
Such is the bent way they say when they mean, Youth is wasted
on the young. We are wrinkled and limning those days now too.
We are pardonable as the years screen us and the life
that is less than years becomes our promise.
Turned inside out, we are fuller as each timeline shortens.
It is as though Medusa’s maw has overtaken the city
when her hair alone was meant to do the trick. We carry on
and court the thrill of heroic conquests in the feminine,
which contains all women & men, emboldened by cocooned closeness.
She was later fallen by the bullet from the hip of one who continues
to weave the silken city, of one who continues to die in evidence.