from “elsewhere”
And if I am sleeping thru the lullabies of a summer
storm, you are screaming
an arsenal of auburn
cellos into hiding—
Your lipstick desperately flamingo.
Soundlessly agape as Civil War daguerreotypes.
We have arrived
at the scene of the film where the first bullets hail down—
All sound cuts out—
Your larynx
banished brailleward
by explosions in the sky.
Toward the more taciturn outskirts of:
anywhere but here—
The nowheres
we/ll no longer witness together—
Scouring burnt lexicons in search of the perfect word for:
murmurs of wind
caught in a vacant stairwell—
from “elsewhere”
There are words
like: heartwood, petrichor
for lumber resistant to decay—
For the fragrance of rainfall on dry earth—
Their patents pending
as medicine for hummingbirds
to resemble a pageantry of elaborately feathered insects
rather than spies
transmitting the twitches of fractured lips
to the flapper girls dancing
the Charleston
just outside the veiled electricity
of my peripheral vision.
from “elsewhere”
There isn/t a word for
the distant moan
of Bozeman locomotives—
Soft caterpillars of the vacant night—
And I refuse to evoke sousaphones trapped in Nerja Caverns—
The way my army of
mascara skeletons
will be more dead tomorrow than they are today—
How apoptosis
means: programmed cell death
means: the moment our eyes first adjust to florescence
something inside us
conspires against us.
Yet we don/t exactly wilt like lettuce left
outside summer mausoleums—
from “elsewhere”
Sprinklers have been planted between caskets we call
buried
so rapture, rush
hour traffic or massive plague
won/t prevent the daily watering of the dead—
Revived
courtesy of percolation
as interpreted by the cerebral cortex:
Still squinting on bended knee in the cannabis garden—
Or nakedly losing at poker in a Russian submarine—
Oceanward as the undertow
that took her away
& by her I mean, ultimately:
All freckled girls who one day won/t breathe
pollen nor premonitions
of midsummer rain
on freshly paved blacktop—
from “elsewhere”
Here, lawnmower blades latticework as DNA
rust dull in brushwood—
Crabgrass uproots one wayward gravestone three infants share
namelessly—
Lukewarmly
assuming room temperature
just shy of translating screams into speech—
Fruitless centenarians of this day in late July
equally unalive
as the Siamese twins
named: Aven & Trillion
we parted ways before making—
Who came gently in a dream where nobody chases you
darkward thru sewerways
& all your teeth remain intact—
