Fragment

Thoughts worn thin by winter’s five o’clock shadow shaved off sheet layers of the moon,

laid them in muscle-string tombs,

the bare belly quake and stutter and stay—

Day light in the morning no more finds its way through the deep fog,

the languorous waver of last logger breath passed from mouth to mouth to mouth to

mouth to mouth to Southern doubt massive quadruple bypass surgery,

neurotransplant symbiosis achieved naturally,

weaving ivy leaves hold back the trees from the highway—

I can see them reaching underneath,

straining to find sky light,

the open hole in the canopy leaks in weak beams of twilight,

the Over-soul, the claster cold sinks eider-down and

alabaster kindly knits the fall to stillness stone in rock bed tome of Eastern grown fairy

tales, and moss-covered fairy stump homes, garden gnomes snickering right outside the back doorway to the lower bay dock, where the castle rock jetties spit knee kettle injuries at capable juries of our peers—

the learned fear of hearing what is coming at you before you see the whites of their eyes,

Paul Revere rides down the Nascar speedway waving beer cans and betties flash their ankles, getting skanky down to the bones—

I’ve come too far to be sniddled down by nitwit mummies and their dead booty

daddies clambering right outside the kitchen door—

the warm summer war pours blood out through our stainless steel two-tub kitchen faucet,

and we toss it out the window as we fill it up in pot after pot after pot after pot after Johnny apple seed threw Jill’s panties out the window of the pink Cadillac,

you got your hair pulled back and I got my seat leaned back, my right heel

kicked up on the open window sill,

in New Mexico, sunflowers grow through cracks in the road, crochet me cacti

walking for the water mirage—

Ozone warbles the horizon and the hot metal sky sits weighted on paper atlas shoulders,

fizzled out to whispers on the radio dial—

subliminal messaging system protected for and by the government,

the supplemental Patriot Act-slash-

minority trap the neighbor food mentality,

the questionable constitutionality of our every day life—

the wife, the daughter, the mother, the father, the son and the husband of holy and hope

for the fire to burn through the night:

it lasted forty days, and we found a lucky gold fish in the middle of the Mojave, salty

sand drying out our long cow tongues like jerky,

my hand was jerking at some thought lurking like a letch in the jeepers,

the sneak sneakers squeaking down the sinking Poe stairs in my cerebrum—

my constant breathing cleaves me like two rivers split from a single snake,

the garden rake battered on the young dogwood trees to beat October snow from their

branches green, inside before the storm, and now the bark is dry, cracked at the

elbows and knees and knuckles,

and eyes in the bark,

eyes in the dark tell me it’s time to shut up.