Short Circuitry

photocredit helen ciacciarelli 

holy sons and wandering pistons

pronouncing dedications to combustive structures

enfolded into momentary violence

short circuitry—and doors unhinged

swinging, singing, symphonies at 700mph

syncopated rhythms

bearing the marks of more than two worlds undone

echoes of ordered miscellanies still unwritten

blustering through empty houses

or maybe homes, the transformation nebulous at best

and still the lodgings of countless newts and lovelorn crickets

and the insistent drumming of fingertips on the windowpane

the wallpaper curls, the paint is peeling

off the husks of stillborn memories

the branching copper veins are dormant

yet aching for a spark

(ezra pound spasms in his grave

over such domestic lyricism)

love letters from dead poets shuffled off into some obscure archive

while letters from a new lover are neatly wrapped in twine

and stashed behind the coffee in the cupboard

tidy

aesthetic

compact

is this the beautiful economy of the thing?

coauthored w/ helen ciacciarelli

Ground Shine

Seek a whole new sun,

a heavenly body still magnetically breathing

and breeding oxygen and carbon and bone.

Would I know if I were strangled by aether?

A blanket so cold and tight, crashed on a mountain.

A starry, packed-snow night 

hushed frozen; her eyes open and blue like ice

would *clink* like marbles and bounce.

Glass transitions of spectacular polymer hosts

on a Russian frontier still uncontested and dark.

For now we survive on decay and ground shine—

ancient heat and memories of blinding, towering romance,

whiteless egg, supercritical, expanding—

a perpetual northern latitude dawn.

And even if we turn away or shut our eyes we see it:

an inverted afterimage of a flashbulb pinned east.