A Moon’s Deceit
The child wears the body of a man
Pulled over bones like an outstretched sweater
He aches,
He feels,
He lies
Just like a man.
Forcing his weight into the women he meets.
He’ll crumble like a child,
And he does,
Wanting to be held,
Waiting to be coddled.
Shh baby, it’s okay. It’s going to be alright.
You kiss him as you always do,
Take him in as you always do,
As a lover,
As a woman,
As a make-believe mother,
Wearing a mother’s skin,
And a mother’s tight frown,
And a mother’s lonesome heart
Which hangs off the silver sliver in the sky—
Half ablaze and quivering in glazed eyes.
**
A Diminished Capacity For Being
He sat in a chair nearest the window
drawing in his nicotine
with lungs that stuttered
and stuck to each other
like fresh bubblegum
on the bottom of a shoe.
“Oh…the love of my Irene…” he rasped,
the drips of dreams dismally twirling the swirls
enveloping the ambience of the room—
their room,
there at the naked end of the hall
of closed doors separating
out from in,
before and after,
here and now—
their room on the second floor
that overlooks the sagging tree,
its surface creeping from the crawls
of the damned
creating highways in the valleys of its folds—
the tree whose roots
scratch the base of a forlorn light post
standing with gross formidability,
cascading a buzzing fluorescence-
a hazy triangle in the dark.
He sits alone
watching yesterday’s newspaper
stumble drunkardly like a tumbleweed,
grasping on to the dying
remains of nature before being tossed
by a wispy sullen breeze.
“Oh…the love of my Irene…” he rasped,
flicking a fly off his arthritic hands
with a rickety twist of the wrists.
The wooden chair below him creaked
in unpleasant unison,
the buzzing in his ears swarmed his brain.
His eyes languidly loosened its grip
from the play disappearing
behind the pane and traced a fluid line
to the sill,
to the cracked wallpaper zig-zagging veins to the floor,
to the wooden slats buckling from the pressure,
across the tattered rug of faded red and brown crisscross stripes,
across the dark mysterious stains of scars of unknown origin,
across the path his eyes have run for miles
to the foot of the iron bed frame,
to the edge of the blanket,
to the shape lain tightly over the bare mattress,
then slowly he heavily raised his sight
up,
up,
up,
the bed
to a set of fingers curled neatly in a shape of a “C”
up a little more to a bare shoulder stretched across bones,
across a dainty dip and
up the protruding ligaments that make up the neck
and up and over the chin to a mouth
agape in silent protest—
a black fly twitching in spurts from just inside the cracked purple lips,
to her eyes,
a cornflower blue staring at yesterday’s tomorrow.
“Oh…the love of my Irene…” he rasped,
and drew his nicotine deep within his lungs,
sticking together like used bubblegum.
**
a pink-petaled haze
she basks in a palette of a pink-petaled haze
orchestrated by the moon and his twilight twinkled gaze;
creeping, tweaking, sloppy self-seeking,
death becomes he, his twilight still weeping
clouds in bedtime dorms, they lie
sheepishly hiding tears in drastic dreary disguise.
a wolf becomes she, stalking lamb committing crime,
one claw on the wheel kickin’ ass down sixty-five.
this world is her stage.
this character she plays,
and fingers perched at ten and two,
gripping leather wasting weather,
basking in the moon’s twilight of a fatal pink-petaled haze.
