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Measuring a Rotted Tooth

I watch you watch him
waste all cotton balls of clouds
drowning out the stinging hail
of grief embraced he can't define.
Booze is like formaldehyde--
preserving soiled integrity,
pickling the rising sun.
Divorce's smell--a failure clue--
blood clots in a pile of flour
our mothers taught us to knead
and serve in even slices of our strength.
His drunken state, a wallowing
where candor is a bug to squash
crawling up a hapless leg.
Anger is a grid to walk
and mirrors are a narrow ledge.

You start the car;
it lurches in the morning's famine.
Bottles roll from under seats.
They own his heart, his soul, his pulse.
Loving's feckless entity
can't buy it back,
cannot return a broken limb
to standing tree without
some dose of willingness.
He fumbles down the unlit hall.
Hands can't find a simple
light switch on the wall.
I've been inside that submarine
where pounding cold is pressing in,
where migraines fill a coffee cup,
where tongues run fingers over flaws,
measuring a rotted tooth.



Beer Breath

Another day in ravaged
villages of dream.
This cannibal you cannot see,
but smell like busy hunting dogs.
"Tomorrow I will quit for sure!"
Just another country song--
your ears have heard its beat before.
Promise is a rhapsodist
buried in his leaving rites.
Every hour, you walk the tightrope
of his shakes. Mood swings
are an acrobat without
a tendon in its legs.

Night is quite anonymous.
The bed, a canyon blowing dust.
Sleep, a traitor to the watch.
He fumbles for a can to pop
like anchors in a raging sea.
Giving is a gravy ladle
bending 'til its metal snaps.
Love has spilled another feather
from its cloth, stained
with semen of a tear.
A pillow, pickled baby's breath
you save in case a rose returns.



Against the Storm

Clouds drip in complacent rain
on gray mouse earth.
Slight wind bends trees
like creaking doors.
I watch you from
the window's bay,
hunching over prickly shrubs,
scissoring their briny arms,
picking up the limbs I can't.
Motion's sea has rocky tides;
pain is always swallowing.

Against the storm,
our sparrow legs so miniscule.
All my joints are organs
patience has to tune.
Our flesh, a minstel losing bows.
Some days we hear elegies;
others just a broken waltz.
This love, a bird nest in the snow,
a fragile wedge of crust-less bread
between the jelly of the sky
and coalish surface of demise.




Positioning

Standing at a waterfall,
wondering about this leap.
Will its aqua carry us
or split these guts upon a rock?
This phone line's almost beating pulse.
May is the right month
for this palette to wiggle
its fragile tray, spill its drops
on canvas of awaiting earth.

Can I say that hearing your voice
makes me bounce, kid-style
on the mattress of Sunday's sun
and dream of us putting our feet
(such as they ache and burn)
on the couch, crossing our legs
like firewood to light with the sly
slim match together brews.
Breaking rules we didn't write.

Light a cigarette and talk
without a lie to yellow
our remaining teeth?
"Sister" has the glint
of music in its word,
even though our nights have not
been dustless iron thrones
or sets of silken negligees.

I'm sounding like an Elvis print
in sucky velvet wishing wells,
a Hallmark card we wouldn't buy,
but want to live in secrecy.
I think about positioning.
A darkroom full of negatives
ambushed by the aureole.



The Welsh Love Spoon

This paltry juice of dream with seeds.
Our tenure here, no longer
than an orange peel
around a pulp of possibles.
I listen to your peace of mind,
marvel at the force of age
in touching bedsores of the past
without tart grains that finished Lot,
made a pillar of his legs,
froze him to his reckoning.

The spoon you carved gives us tools
to cope with times, cradles us
when struggle is a flipping bass
outside an ocean we can't trust.
Shape of wholeness, porous wood
whittled down to fit
the needy bill of lovers
thwarted by a chasmed land.
Its magic both withdrawing storm
and music running up a tree
like chipmunks for a coarse pecan.

I see your fingers near the blade,
fear the blood that might escape.
Steadiness is everything.
Carving is a brand of speech
that tells me beauty's form is there
in every twig and every branch
a human eye might not have
sighted through a tear.
That fingers sing of competence
only when they leap and reach,
make the most of passing chance,
slurp the paradise of earth
like runny ice cream
dripping down a dimpled chin.