Lo and I am like an armadillo, jolted and rolling into a protective tuck,
safeguarding scrolls of Tibetan mantras, chanting Avalokiteśvara – compassion –
as we are shot from the barrels of our phones, armored rounds 
of blood-warm arms, legs, intestines, and organs
into the oncoming warships, worships 

My skin knows only that tomorrow it will be stretched tight, immense
across the diamond vision screens of Times Square – 
thin and translucent, burning pixels of news and all the colors of M&M’s
looking down where the naked cowboy sings in his rodeo boots,
no leather left on the sole, dubious, dub-stepped and pious 

Please, mercy, I can't hear my own heart beat
over Kerouac jungle drums in the ChatGPT jukebox,
can't see my breath exhaled and frozen against the collapsed horizon
some genius left in shambles,
malfeasance and malediction

For Shay’s Word Garden and TSM

Lincoln might be in the Bardo –
where spirits wait bewildered
in their Rubber Room souls –

But William Wordsworth is outside 
in my parking lot
waltzing with language and cars –

Foxtrots of Kias, nouns, and verbs,
Fords and Acuras tango with adjectives –
insensate and doleful dip and turn,
 
While the drivers, like inmates
of ballroom dance class, trip on overgrown
iambic feet, hoofing to Glen Miller.

In Spring he will gently blow adverbs and romance
into pistils of foxglove,
until magnolias faint in jealousy.

For him, Death is no purgatory, no dotage, 
he is as lucid as yellow,
as sharp as a blackbird quill plucked in flight,

Far less bewildered than I
between this world and the next –
if he writes of eternity, it must be so –

Poems to guide us
with the half-life of Uranium 235 –
fissile at room temperature –

Nuclear reactions of sunrise
breaking like egg yolk over the hillside –
Ten thousand daisies runny with light.

For Shay’s Word Garden and TSM

For Shay’s Word Garden and TSM

Go ahead, tell your sob story to the spoon
and the coffee cup,

how your addiction to night sky
started with poetry, the gateway drug, 

and now you are mainlining – 
shooting stars – your veins twinkling

with broken bottles
and shards of Christmas lights.


Go on, lament to this plate of eggs
and Tabasco

the fate of words like tigers 
performing tricks 

with what's left of the magician's sleeve,
or the sound of violins

playing blackjack
on their shoestrings, hit me.


I listen to your sling, your hash,
your blather spread

on whole wheat or white,
your second, or third, or fourth marriage

to sonnets, to Surrealism, to Whitman,
feeding the doggerel scraps

under the table,
stumbling down 12-steps 

into the void.

For Shay’s Word Garden and TSM

This morning I am a shuffleboard disc – 
shoes scraping across cheap playground asphalt, 
lines weathered and flaked 

I try shoving over a copy of The Waste Land, 
see if I can make points with ”hyacinth,” 
or bump off “lilacs” with ”lilies” 

But I'm too sleepy. I still have goblins 
in my fingers from last night's dreams, 
my maw dry and filled with peacock feathers 

Better, my game of folding grief like origami – 
I tear pages from the book, crease poems into 
surprise! A crown of thorns 

Forget about forgetting, 
memory steeps in tea bags of the past, 
dried peels and scabs of 1970 in tiny paper sachets 

"Are we having fun yet?" 
Outside again, the sun slowly slides 
Into scoring position, aloft 

Above the mirrored river, 
wings choppy as waves, 
geese wheeze south for winter 

For Shay’s Word Garden and The Sunday Muse

Sleepy, when my arm went over you,
the trapdoor slipped open
as always

And we fell in stuttered flight,
like bees drowning in sugar water
set out in the lids of jars

Tongues and stingers
slurred with nectar,
our waggle-dance instead a stumble

Drunken semaphores to the Sandman –
Instead of: "follow this way to forage, 
to hive, to hoard"

He reads: “Turn left at Chicago,
ride the ferry in your dwarf costume,
and meet us in the Shatterproof Café”

Which becomes someone else's dream tonight
while we linger on the veranda,
our bower draped in honeycomb

For Shay’s Word Garden and The Sunday Muse