working despair in progress

what a price others must pay
who write for money
who run for money
who drive for money
and come home to porches
that have been foreclosed
despite their best efforts
at belief in a sand-filled Christmas.

we here are not worthy to have children,
we who would keep our mouths
close to our kin,
whispering fables about
a winged knight that seared
a wide rent in a fated Nazi dirigible.

nobody is interested in delicacy,
only delicacies pouring into garrulous
throats that claim passion
like a pitcher of beer;
with a shudder and a mug
pounded on the bar,
a glance at that dirty mirror,
and a run to the restroom
for some quick cheap
pleasure.

everyone is drunk, I alone am sober
"everybody is clear, I alone am clouded"
and tell me that you care
and tell me that you've fallen
like the winged knight we
couldn't show our children,
the wounded one with a
cracked breastbone who's
heart had been pulled out
by witches, who still flies
with scythe not sword,
slicing sparrows in half like
kiwis while growling at the stars
for their curse of meager light
that would illuminate his
breast's cavernous shadow.

Pity him, for even he has a home,
even he believes in Christmas
and even he has been foreclosed
by kings who cast him out
like a worn suit of armor,
like an old price,
like the whispers left upon our marrow.

agape christi

what we eat
is considered nothing
in the annals of our spirituality
our legs are buckled, bruising
beneath our beggars mouth
and all we taste in communion wafers
are the winds of someone else's beliefs.

you hypocrite morality espouser
who claims to drink the blood of a god,
you have nothing to search after
but how to become a better thief.

the factories you blessed with water
are stuffing bodies with cancer
the politicians you pledged with
God's approval are selling bombs
on Christmas and burning down
schools on residential streets.

if what you're after
is a cloud with dead relatives
then i hope they break your lying teeth







But you can't see it
as related

angel of suffering,
do not pass the shadow of your skeletal wings
over the thick bones of my door frame any longer
for you have proved to be inconsolable with lust
for misery, even after inviting you in to drink
my best wine and putting you up in the guest
bedroom.

I should have known
that no one may make a pact with you,
I saw today how you withered a lithe
young brunette with an incurable disease
and then foisted a congregation of surgeons
upon her, furrowing the snow field
of her belly into the image of a slaugherhouse
floor. You didn't even smile,

merely moved on to a four year old
and mired his lungs with so much
fluid that it leaked out of his dead
mouth for hours.

And my family, the human race,
what have you done with them
but replace their hearts with wallets
while handcuffing them to the
bumper of a moving pick-up truck
filled with enough petty cash
to buy gasoline and Corn-Nuts.
They are still running,
and still they fall.

But know this, angel.
We were the ones designed for flight
in over-sized sweatshirts flapping
the sleeves like frantic birds,
running through grammar school
lawns and sneaking into the
teacher's lounge, cawing our
indecipherable languages
that are moral if only because
they don't include the words
you know so well from
dictionaries, words like
'fragmentation grenade,'
'sarin nerve gas' and
'private health insurance'
(i know, even the common
things invoke you).

Meet me in the peonies
below a watercolor sky
and like Jacob I will fight you
even if I come away with something
worse than a dislocated hip.

short wordly motif

eloquent musics unheard.
harmful fantasies unconfronted.
a spinning beauty on the dancefloor in red lace
that has been condemned by a nuclear weapon,
and you know there are still people
who are laughing with greed like addicts
drunk on rubbinig alcohol; vaporous and volatile.