more so than gnawed wishbones
cold on a plate in the sink
next to an empty wine glass
(still purple)
Last night left room
for more than life can offer
My feet are here on old carpets:
all orange, blue, raging yellow patterns
(the coarse and unforgiving fiber)
I misalign meanings
while angles insult me,
tilting this house I call a home
while everyone I love sleeps
I stare at the circle
on my leg-
ringworm and a swollen tendon
on the same side
God stopped looking
when I needed him most
and the goldenrod is growing
so I know that fall is here
I am not Odysseus
“Just as this snake devoured
the sparrow and her children, eight of them,
their mother making nine, so we all fight
this war at Troy for nine years. In the tenth,
we take the city with its spacious streets”
I stand before the marble block,
its cold breath waiting.
Others see stone~
I see the boy already turning his head toward light.
My hands ache with the old obsession:
to free the form God hid inside,
to follow the faintest curve of muscle
as if it were scripture.
Day after day I listen
for the whisper beneath the hammer’s strike~
the pulse of a shoulder,
the tension of a tendon preparing to rise.
The body is a language,
and I must carve every syllable true.
Patience becomes my companion.
I chip, I smooth, I kneel,
studying the marble as though it might breathe
if I only learn its secret.
I chase the form as pilgrims search for the sacred~
aware it forever retreats into light
yet unable to stop searching.
When, at last, the dust settles,
when David’s gaze finally lifts
toward the giant only he can see,
I feel the quiet truth:
I did not create him.
I merely uncovered
what had been waiting
for someone stubborn enough
to believe it was there.
It was not one thing—
not a single blade of thought
but a field of them,
thin, dry, whispering
against each other in the wind of my mind.
Morning came like a bill I could not pay.
Light pressed its hand to my face
and I turned from it,
as if the sun itself had asked too much of me.
My body—
this animal I have carried for years—
lay down in the middle of the day
as though struck,
as though it had run too far
without water.
I could name the losses
like bones in an X-ray—
each one bright,
each one undeniable—
but naming did not lessen them.
It only proved they were there.
The rooms were filled with ordinary objects—
a glass, a chair, a door half-open—
and each one seemed to say:
you must go on,
you must go on,
you must go on.
I did not want to stay.
That is the simplest truth.
But something—
not hope, not even strength—
something smaller,
a thread, a tendon, a quiet refusal
deep in the muscle of being—
held.
So I left.
Not because the world softened,
not because the pain spoke kindly,
but because somewhere in me
there was still a witness
who would not leave my body behind.
Rad mad hatter batter approach
Kiwi coach who Key did poach
It seems he is beyond reproach
When it really matters in tatters
Castle clatters Ashes hope shatters
Our guys bowling pies on platters
Memes scatter legacies splatters
Egos not heroes BazBull flatters
The urn won’t return with the Mac
Yearn but burn totally out off whack
Concern can’t learn not got the knack
Brendon a torn forlorn tendon on the rack
But will still earn a packet deserves a smack
Bitten not smitten his racket of cricket crack
Wouldn't change tack and deserves the sack
The hack pack giving him a stack of flak
Finally a step back from just all out attack
Too little too late the recurring soundtrack
Whittled & skittled fate well we were cack
Drunk monkeys just sunk spunky flunkies
Lack guts gumption gusto were so slack
The lies spool pulls over our eyes the wool
Must backtrack no crackerjack comeback
Debunk the funk & gist of narcissist gunk junkies
Cool over old school fool rule of Baz (load of ) Bull
Time these harlots & charlatans brought Test best back
Written: October 28, 2025
I press my palm against your shoulder,
dust-streaked and aged
You unfold before me.
Heat rises from the folds
between the tendon and the tender dough.
I savor a bite of the dough.
reminiscent of the stars I once folded,
now scattered,
akin to lost receipts
in a tempest.
I arrive with my stained skin, as a flyer
marred by hurried typos,
hastily printed
by a restless intern.
Here, I consume you wholly.
A vendor presents grief in palm-sized parcels,
with you wrapped in sensational headlines
That twists the truth.
I swallow every piece of you,
even the mustard staining the captions.
But then the rain begins—my likeness of you blurs,
my ink a wing in flight as a winged creature.
A man in uniform smiles and brushes
the sugar from my scalp
casting it into the tide, a final farewell.
I have been watering it for months—
the small black bulb in the cupboard
that I never let touch sunlight.
It swelled in the dark,
fed on steam from my cooking breath,
fat with the whispers I never spoke aloud.
I told myself it was only a seed,
a pebble in soil, nothing more.
I would open the door,
look at it once, and close it—
like checking the locks before bed.
It learned the shape of my glances.
But today, I reached in.
Today, I held it in my palm.
Its skin was slick as a fish
and when I pulled, the roots screamed up from the earth,
all tendon and white hair,
and the cupboard air smelled of rust.
You said it casually—
your mouth arranging the words
like setting a cup down on a table.
As if the syllables were a button
popped from a shirt, no one’s fault.
I felt my chest open—
not like a door,
but like a letter slit with a knife.
Paper-heart curling, bleeding ink.
You were already talking about something else,
your voice trailing petals across the floor.
I sat very still,
the bulb still in my hand,
its black head beating against my pulse.
I did not crush it.
I only held it tighter
until my fingers forgot they could let go.
She snaps like a brine tendon,
spilling embryo chords across the basalt shelf.
Tongues of nacre split her sides,
each vertebra strung with gravid silence.
Kelp-blind, she threads the continental rift,
her fingernails seeded with unfinished continents.
Magma foams in the pouch of her pelvis,
grinding up vowels like crushed coral.
How do you build out of context?
A river surges upward, defying gravity,
twisting like a tendon torn from bone.
The sensation is an addict’s final inhale,
a stake driven clean through the heart.
What is the formula?
Am I equipped to satisfy the hunger
as the waves batter my mind’s foundation?
Do I summon a committee of ghosts—
past and present, whispering in fractured unison?
It’s like watching a film unwind backward,
a life undressing itself to the bone.
How do I hold it?
Do I use a mirror to bend the light,
to reflect a version of me that won’t dissolve.
The landscape is serene—
a portrait of untouched stillness,
where war has no fingerprints,
where silence doesn’t taste like surrender.
I must pin it down before it shatters,
before it fractures like ice dropping from a great height.
Before I blink and it’s gone—
swallowed by the magnetic chaos
that calls me home like a hymn I can’t unlearn.
Do I have the discipline?
Or will my voices wrestle me back into the storm,
their hands shaping the snowdrift before I can step free?
Do they grant me permission to leave,
or am I only ever allowed to stay?
Your eyes a dark archipelago
Mysterious then exotic drifting across
my shore;
I perceive their warmth inviting
While those lips blow a tangy flavour-
Irresistible, poised to reach for a kiss
Brewed by the kiln of summer’s
ember…
Carefully, my logic examines the
prospects
Between reason and wantonness,
As the fluid air spins amorously
And the evening grows too blind,
naked--
The waves within my navel dilate,
fluid as current's unknown motion...
I forget what happens next except, I
was
Drunk with the body- rhythm of something
untenably spontaneous;
Coasting on a body outside a bend
ebbing flowing through a belly and
tendon
Of a conniving sea.
Feet patter through the leaves of the oak wood
Her breaths frantic blond hair bent back
Stops swivels and pivots seeing all she could
Body sways and she prays for air to catch
Then she see it lurch, lips grotesque, “Snack”
Another step, “Come back,” hairbreadth snatch
Her screams echo through the trees, crack
Snap, tearing of tendon and chop chop hack
Careful where thy wander for under the covers,
a monster hovers, in wait, to tear rip and peel
and ribbon flesh from bone, you and your lover
Boogeyman emerges burst reanimates ashes
Looking for little boys and girls souls to steal
Rictus cadaver of a mannequin after he bashes
Your brains in with his talons, meaty meal
to this manifestation that’s not fiction but real
That creak in the floor above the sound below,
in the basement or the scratches in the walls,
he’s there waiting to lick lather eel eyes aglow
take you some where dark and festering calls
He is your fear shhh dear he’s here feel that
Too late for you I’m afraid he sees you
And what he sees he ceases and disappears
inflamed tendon in tight confinement
compassionately curses
the teacup’s trigger burn
Your truth feels like a derailed train on my backbone and below me, a ravine who knows nothing apart from what has been thrown down her throat.
The gapped bridge hangs in the balance with centuries of pedestrians - loosening it’s hold between a narrative and those unlucky to have been swallowed.
You’ve walked to the edge to stand on my fingers whispering to me, “Precipice.” Whispering to me “Fall.” So when the cliff took sides, you could only hope that I’d suffer.
I finished here, wondering of a vultures preference for intestine or tendon. And I smiled while you pecked out my eyes to fill the void and tasted you pretend I’m not you’re only home.
Unwelcome Guests
(Arthritis, Bursitis, Tendonitis, Gout)
Miracle Man
10-11-2023
The “rItis” boys came to visit,
and their welcome overstayed.
My futile efforts to evict them,
they always downplayed.
Arth, Burs, and Tendon,
that very unpleasant three.
Were always reluctant to leave,
before the ravaging of me.
For pain I gave each points,
on occasion they brought a shout.
They all attacked my joints,
but none compared to Gout.
What good would it do,
Son of Peleus,
To pull that arrow from your heel?
As you lie there helpless,
Legs useless and folded beneath you.
Your hand clenched around its fletchings
Searching for the source
Of sensations unfamiliar to you.
Pain. Suffering. Mortality.
How strange…
You are only half god and half man,
And all men must die, even you, Aristos Achaion.
The god's gift to you was not invulnerability, but speed.
And with that tendon we now name after you severed,
You are just as human as the rest of us.
That expression of anguish as you look to the sky.
Helmet still dawned as if you could leap up
And slaughter hundreds more Trojans, but you cannot.
An enraged fall from Godhood
Forever immortalized in white stone.
Centuries later it still stands.
Worn and weathered
By the years and all the heavy eyes that fell upon your misery,
Like pouring rain from dark clouds above.
The paradigm of human fatality and flaws.
But you were a god, somewhat at least.
You thought that you would live forever -
We all think that sometimes.
Remember that you have to die.
Otherwise, how do we know that we spent our life living?
A frozen pulse a synergy and soon she was iced like cold hard glass.
Poor Clea in her purple orchid dress ensconced in a crevice of time,
from the icy tendrils of Ikthalon. Icy winds blow from the bowels of hell
she is rendered still as ice pellets pelt on her weakened body;
He wraps the sun and blindfolds the stars then plummets to earth with demonic intentions to search and destroy.
Along comes an omega mutant " Iceman" with a
hard packed intention to stop the villain from exploiting her.
Radiating intense cold from every tendon and nerve in his body,
he wraps a gossamer fabric round her to thaw her gently from
the frost bites and nips of her emissary, the evil Doctor Strange.
A multi-verse madness of evil it was but as the clock struck twelve
in Time Square, Clea defrosts and sashays forward in her pencil dress.
Using her tele-ported thoughts, she enters another dimension where
Icemen are heroes and Spiderman rules.
This is where the story ends folks. Tune in for a sequel,
same place same time, reporting to you from Time Square.
Aug 7 2022
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