I EAT DEATH DAILY
I eat death daily –
Momentary meringues dissolve
on my tongue, words and kisses
rich with high-octane promise
My glass leaves Olympic rings on wood
as I brush off crumbs with a linen –
No pharoah ever feasted as famously
as this.
An obituary is a menu.
THE BRITTLE LIGHT
(for Joanie Whitebird)
It’s a brittle light
that pierces what it illuminates
The farther one travels
the less one arrives
this door grows larger
as it moves away
I lift a candle of frozen cobwebs
tinkling starry chimes, stabbing into the wind,
hoping something will stay
Volcanoes blasting out of my fingers
would ruin the music of sugar thin strings —
I am an echo seeking its source
in the vanguard of my shadow
I believed in leather and its kind
without hope or despair, tale of my time
rampaging into a line of tomorrows
a vampire sucking its own blood
“We’ll eat the world alive!”
we sang,
but I no longer dream —
no punishment ever equals its crime,
the skipping stone loses its stream
MAGNITUDE
Though the sky forgives everything,
the Earth has gained a second moon
a small pieced of an asteroid captured
by gravity, orbiting the world,
casting a tiny moon eclipse of
six gray inches across all the lands
as it passes overhead
all the orbits of the thousands of satellites
are being bent by fractions of millimeters
less than the blip of a solar burp
on the brightest day of the season
Worst of all,
this little sister of our moon
is screwing with astrologers
who do not know how to place it
on birth charts or in the houses of the zodiac
Galileo grins and Newton chortles
as all our belief systems tremble
(Published in Agates 2025)
BUSHY BUS PASSENGER
Bushy bus passenger says something
I can’t quite catch -
“How many lives do you have?”
which bewilders me -
I don’t know what to say -
his own cigarette-stuttered answer is
“One”
But I am still counting
one life for each of my loves
counting one life for each career
counting one life for each death survived
counting one life for each crater of the moon
my confusion confuses him
as he hunkers into his winter coat
I am still silently counting -
“Do past lives count?”
he smiles stickily and repeats his answer
”One”
and I start invisibly counting again