The cannibals all said
I am not fit to eat – 
too old and stringy, too
gamey, not handsome enough

Is this what is meant
by pot luck? I am out 
of hot water but thank 
goodness you are still 

sweet on me, I’m still 
to your taste, you chased
me for years was I
fast food? I'm your tall drink

And supersized feet,
your happy meal with
love the free toy – 
its hot wheels and  

Wind up vroom (Woah! Not
appropriate for all ages!)
the two of us a moveable 
feast until the time

Comes we celebrate our 
Last Supper. Like children
we're still skipping rocks across
the stone soup of graves

For Shay’s Word Garden

Who was it on TikTok that held
Joy of Cooking in front of his chest
and had his wife shoot a Glock at him?
Béchamel a runny red. Holes in the 
bullet bread.

What story goes bang bang
through both my eyes?
I see more clearly when I'm 
shattered, jelly, shards –
blindness relieving me of the world.

I think Aristotle first said:
"Load your words like the clip
of an Uzi. Shoot first, ask questions
later." I touch my books,
line them up for target practice.

Libraries fall. Their voices and songs
dragged into a courtyard
behind the orangery. Blindfolded, 
a last cigarette. The Comandante raises 
his sword. 

Words and truth,
will not save us.

For Shay’s Word Garden

And Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge

Formaldehyde night –
the remains of etherized evening
that didn't make it out alive.

Its pickled eyes –
its bricked, blank gaze 
of darkened apartment windows.

Dead snow fluttering
in a snow globe.
My skin shaken, not stirred

by the gin-cold wind.
What miracle will vibrate me
like a break-glass cello?

Not high notes to shatter,
but low – thrombosis low
music like an absence

So the vessel implodes –
releases my cadaver
back into the wild.

For Shay’s Word Garden

This is a poem in which I tap my body 
against the curb to knock off fingerlings of ash.

This is a poem in which I jangle my heart 
like coins in my pocket as if I have love to spend.

This is a poem in which I bite the world 
and rivers of peach juice run down my chin.

This is a poem in which I'm cooked – I caramelize 
at 425° after 2 hrs. You may prefer this version of me.

This is a poem in which I play Three-Card-Monty 
with rage, skull, & star. Pay your money, take your pick.

This is a poem from which I vanish – vamoose is both
an animal and the color inside a mirror.

For Shay’s Word Garden

Time worked my mother's ashes finer than quarry dust – silt of memory settled on old end tables, lampshades, couches, the hard to clean lattice-work and blinds.

Motes sift through sunlight – I draw my finger across the furniture and bring it to my tongue. Not bitter, but dry: rock, brick. No trace of perfume she wore to dinner parties. The last pack of Marlboros.

When the furnace clarified her cinders – the exhale of her body rising from the chimney in smoke – did cities burn, turning sunsets the color of sorrow? 

Were we children made extinct from a comet smashing the world, ejecta of truth blotting out the sun? 

Did we pray for mercy and forgiveness to volcanoes, offer ourselves as sacrifice? 

How many years do particles of marrow, bleached white, circulate in the jet stream? 

Flecks of pistol-blue eyes, iron filings denatured of blood – rivers high above the earth, tributaries splitting and joining, eddies turning above every city that I live.

How long for the sky to thin enough for light to yellow, skin to thicken from salt rain?

The body must breathe the air it finds. 

Inhale, hold, exhale. Like a last cigarette.

For Shay’s Word Garden

Paul McCartney called me on the phone. Who does that?? – phone people up without texting or emailing in advance. I’d been asleep and no I wasn’t really in the mood. I shake it off. OK, Hey Paul.

He thought I should build a barn from the Norwegian Wood, it was all just sitting under a tarp behind his castle, Maybe it would look cool, and a place for birds to nest.

Did I still have that blackbird’s song packed away in my boxes? A tweet before Twitter, the dead of night wrapped in newspaper, a bird’s tongue folded under scotch tape, the way you tape together screws from a bed when you move.

What time is it over there anyway? If you had to pick a Beatle phone friend, would it be Paul or Ringo? I’m glad John doesn’t hit me up with that ghost thing. Probably saves it for Yoko and she collects his wisps. Tacks them  to her canvases, paints them black.

I think George actually leveled up his Dharma or whatever, so nobody’s going to find him creeping around their living room at night.

But Paul wants to rehash if Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da is oblong mathematical four-space – a tesseract. Topology and Fourier transforms always come up. Few people understand the elegant proofs in Nowhere Man, his demonstration of the existence of non-existence. 

We talk through the leaks in Yesterday, which let time exhaust like losing heat from cracks in a window. So never today. Never tomorrow. We’re always short, never get there, which explains a lot.

Why me? He said he picked my name out of a phone book in Boston when he was touring with Wings, playing at the old Garden. Sometimes we talk once a week, sometimes I don’t hear from him since forever. He gets lonely.

I hear the coffee maker go off, time to get ready for work, Here Comes the Sun. Sadness wheels round like an old LP scratched by love, turning around the hole in our hearts, Revolver, memory wracked on a spindle of years. Hello Goodbye.

For Shay’s Word Garden

Feeling useless after breakfast, maybe time to sort my collection of holes. I keep them in a glass jar, like mismatched screws – donut holes, black holes, an odd-sized grave or two. Never know when loss will come in handy. Not much to look at, I keep them next to the tub of spackle.

Is the Museum of Round Things open? – Circular Logic, Hoop Skirts, Round-house Punches. Vicious Circles with their incisors of gold. Lassos, Rounding Errors, Rounds of Applause. In the shop, I buy a Coming Full Circle. Will it be a gift or a curse…

Gotta get some square pegs to see if I can clown them into my round holes. Sing-along! "If I had a hammer…" Is that a claw hammer? If the clowns bend, can I pull them out by the head?

How to patch and mend. Re-shingle this claptrap day, a month with wind howling through the cracks. Take rust off the mood swings hanging on their chains in the yard. Scrape the wad of gum off the bottom of my soul.

For Shay’s Word Garden

“The voice of sanity is getting hoarse.” — Seamus Heaney, North. 



My mind a Cub Scout crystal radio kit, scratching along the coil for signal. Where are the Sanity Sisters tonight, singing in their low, solenoid growl?

I get mostly silence, then static – the Voice of Reason has smoker’s cough, like Edward Murrow WWII broadcasts. Rationality is hoarse with emphysema. Sense on oxygen.

Broadcast storms come in, brainwaves crash on the folds and marl of grey matter. Livestreams of the Cacophony Symphony and Tosca by moonlight.

The ionosphere dances and jitterbugs back what we transmit, swings with our panic and phrases of falling empires. Spectrum from sand to starfields LOL’ing at our hapless bluster.

I scan for solar flares of dot dot dot, dash dash dash, dot dot dot. SOS Diogenes, if you’re out there.

For Shay’s Word Garden

Orion looks tipsy up there in the sky – too much Milky Way nog. Oh no! About to ralph his galaxies into the bottomless punch bowl night. Such a bad example for the kids. 

Earlier you said I made a sound like goat cheese, sort of creamy bleating – my excitable holiday cheer a canapé with fig jolly.

This morning, ravens burst the outdoor Christmas ornaments, hungry for grubs and gnomes  – glass balls popping like kids playing with bubble-pack.

That reindeer pajama accident is nobody’s business.

The three wise men may have been grifters, fingering baby Jesus’s diapers for diamonds.

Also in the manger, the camel, always a comic – “Guess what? It’s hump day! Get it?” Mary moans in her labor.

The three wise men hurry off looking for wonton soup and egg rolls. Chinese restaurants the only thing open on Christmas. Their waitress unhappy with her tip in myrrh – “What the f* am I supposed to do with this??”

My first Christmas in London I thought “Boxing day” was National Prize Fighting day. Not quite the sentiment of the season, but what the hell. Let it “pow!”

We pulled the Old Year into the living room for a intervention. Time for rehab buddy. 

New Year’s Eve, I jam time into reverse as it races to midnight – the piston hours buckle, minutes grind in the transmission, seconds lock and burn the clutch. The engine wails like a newborn taking it’s first breath.

For Shay’s Word Garden