Resurrection
haiku for Mickey

Death is like
sleep. Grinding

your teeth
you wake at night

in a cold sweat,
fucked.

Message Written on a Sunday Afternoon

This is where
it begins to arc

upward, then
at a certain point starts

its descent, although
its trajectory

isn’t finished yet, but
it could be

in just one or two
seconds, see!

Life
passes quickly. Fo

cus. Breathe
quietly. Learn

the call and response
of history’s flow. Let

your spirit be
the animal it is.

Seekers

No matter what they recall
-- a campfire
taillights fading south of Spanish Fork
a gaping wound
in a dying soldier’s neck --
they remember it
wrongly, the red
always seeming to them
a heart
and so, shivering in the night, the misfits
gather around it
while sharing stories and drawing
diagrams with sticks in the dirt.
Each time one
of them wheezes,
in the sky
a feeble star flickers.
By dawn it’s cold
and according to their routine
the seekers
wake and depart, all
that is
but those
who died during the night.
Hours later
too anemic to have gotten very far
most of the survivors
in spite of having walked all day
haven’t even reached
the campfire’s other side
and yet a long journey’s evidence
is visible everywhere --
banged-up suitcases
rumpled tickets to distant places.
Once more
they regroup.
What’s left of the heart
is still with them, small
and red,
a campfire burning
at their feet.
In this way
the seekers, alone
and without hope, live
in a state of senseless grace
even when asleep.
The handful who subsist without eating
the flesh
of their friends’ corpses
are decent folks
but no more so than those
who do.
The next morning
at daybreak
the first light, slowly
like a woman in search
of an idea that will hold up
under scrutiny,
cautiously approaches
the treetops
while the seekers
as they do every dawn
wake in the cold.
Later, after counting those
who died in the night,
they again regroup
and go on their way
carrying their memory
of the color red
with them.

It

Comes. Ri
zing above

tool
sheds/elms. Glo

bal sea. Thought’s

waves, quiet’s
ebb/flow

Can't Make Song

It broke. Bad. What’s real circles because.
Dark core there. Lydia knows bout
shrieks mean nuthouse. Look. Tiger’s claws
open their mouths and shout.

Scared. Leaf shaped like. Ring around
the rosy, want your toesies,
gotta suck. Want out! The grounds
not nice. Gimme fuckin’ posy.

Bee goes buzz. Filth window. Four score
en seven year back, Uncle Bill
brought home the bacon. Adore
the doing. Done spawns phase-out. Ill

follows health like shit does Ex-lax
Aunt Kate preached. Get the fuck off!
A lily’s mean height is. No tracks
on this arm. Oinker slurps from trough

with syllable mush in it. Face fends,
nose clogged with gunk. Wheezing, on fritz.
And? Can’t make language distend
into clear. Bad norm ill. Mindkiller is . . . >