All that has been, out-grows itself,
becomes monstrous in a mouse hole.
Thoughts pinned to carnival garbs
hang under night’s pitch-dark tent
to chew over minds missing links.
The silence of wordless clowns
mimes the shrill music of bats.
In a dusty room, the hammer-struck face
of a wall clock is a parody of my age
for it is younger than the hands that hung it there.
What great teaching unpacks this emptiness,
is it ancient, or as young
as the sleepless pad of my feet?
Perhaps as in dandelion seeds,
that act of their dispersal
has planted yet more muted revelations.
The dry rustle of mothwings --- a whispering
of some yet other enormity
one emerging now
within a threadbare soul's
deep-set pockets.
Surfacing from troubled dreams
becomes a hasty reshuffling of plausible realties.
One by one, flimsy fibs are tested,
then grudgingly rejected as improbable.
There are always reasons to arise
and remain perpendicular
even though we may be still following
a horizontal dysfunctional track or trace.
Time to chew over a few words,
let flow the in-the-know and bluff
until enough is done, said, published,
bruited abroad, proclaimed
as a hear-ye ambulating truth.
Proclamations and declarations,
that indeed we are all here
listening to each other
explaining away our on-going
disorderly mental ponderings -
for of course,
psychoanalysis is far less revealing
that our daily abstracted, distracted,
rambling perambulations.
We must have wandered too close to the
same thought.
When I mention him
your eyes dip behind a bruised blue haze.
Blood worms buckle a hot sidewalk
in my brain.
For a moment we share the same rage,
a lust for sawing cut-throat words.
The conversation moves on,
but still your hands open and close
like breathless gills,
while I chew over his undead image.
Shadows drift away to fall asleep in a corner,
yet some return
when you sigh and stare at the blank ceiling.