'and a cross, never rose before me' by Tasha Klein

Devoid of the Lord I crawl along in my survivalist suit & I smell terrible things -- pale dead fish the soup kitchen's only truth -- steel upon steel another day here recreant thin as the ocean's last spray -- Welcome To The Perpetual Kind living under the Fulton Bridge or in an abandoned Pay-by-Day I never got sister's re- union invites or the news about how Uncle Welter's flatfish prostrate flatfished. No I was in the between not the moving along and up only pre tending to swing on God's slippery silvery branches my marooned breath drawn as I reached that felt gate -- the Everyone-Eye pointing to the barren earth: the remembered neighborhood where cars once filled with noisy youth 'Your weight is mine' that ancient snare still scrawled across the old water tower & somewhere deep in the posioned foliage She - the ancient one eats fake chorizo & levitates near her clustered mad the new gorey the spiritless grim relics in broken chant turning greyer into something even greyer and a sun lights me up and I become as calm, as I am tall and the eleven, slyly, becomes the seven hymns like coral curling around the dark solace of a dead tree's trunk hollow as the stray pond yonder a bone for your arid garden of rouged mid-day angels their cracked wings no longer supple enough to unfurl nightly the minds that glow hot a chemical reaction to this distorted pinball of twilight spiraling down from the temple in the sky not that one that Mary built there in the middle of all God's dead logs and stumps and before that a sea had been kind once with its endless offerings there was peace in the water beneath the re painted stars and in each footstep a gladness as we gently spooled through groves of petals eddies of roots still growing all the way to the Center our necks chaff in starched collars the hustlers the local tossers fallen wizards the dealers & the wheelers a new parade to stand before the altar altered by the sheer weight of earth's newest Sky Prophet, his childlike expression as fresh as his red-tinged whiskers he promised to cut sin and sorrow right out of our hearts through some rediculously over-glorified revival speaker who drew with great fervor a seven of swords as the official start of another year the Sky Prophet remained seated like a holy scarab on a greasy spoon until finally the band started with Bound Subs in the Jungle formerly Welcome to the Jungle only the green jungle would soon be gone up in smoke-clouds that tumbled morbid colors across that lush treeline animals cornered by the spreading fires leaving behind a poisonous residue that continuously snakes to what remains of the forgotten concrete jungles we call home

Dancing In Dreams Past Pale Trees, Surface The Butterflies

"Debussy is the sea." She said, in the voice of his favorite watercolor (if it had a voice), her make-up, all Krishna hues. The bottom of her T- shirt, tied up, her stomach full baroque of VENUS DOES NOIR, the poems on her skin -- and suddenly the garden-party turned into -- just the shadows of people ~ their conversations un-important and far away. Her sister took a picture of them. Years later, he found the photo and was struck by the color of her hair -- like the color of earth, twined together in rain ~ her eyes, the color of golden shores, circled with sky , as the dawn behind them, appeared to shift against the trees. ~ Shoegaze, he thought. Not the music but the actual sandals she wore. Just a boat-girl nonchalantly sharing her herb as his inner voice screamed, turn around, and GO! LEAVE! NOW! But he stood frozen, a blooming loon, in some, weird, outside, green-wax museum. Her eyes strummed the lines tied around him < --- a small salamander trapped in her magnificent stare. ~ How he had loved the sleepy simplicity of her hipless skirt's silk whisper / pausing / to invite knees / living legs / feet stuck in those ridiculous sandals. Ferocious, the bleeding edges. The want. The hidden hurt. ~ And Later, Smoking More Fat Numbers In A Motel Room: her hair her kiss the deep trigger of all that was / corners falling / away / always-butterflies / needles / on go / hold the fatality. Like a rocky path, she trampled definition; a trail floating as the corridor stumbled. ~ We Were. As Windows gathered, packaged, and sold our fears. Yes! I remember: the pinot. kisses. depth. teeth. then. sour. tongues. drew. away. We became the monsters. The head in the swamp, the body of all rivers, in a Somebody World. And in a city, built on cracks - we coded the castle out, but kept the royal map, tattered and shopworn as angel trivia.

Skintall/Skintell/Skinfall (tweaked)

Veranda-smirk
wave-length
tube-dart,
how have you been?

Time has no even taste

Pull your mouth off
the gloss, muppethead.

Death is:

satiny & birdless

.....................breathless

We did die ---
in delicate threads of light,
our hands full of cut shadows.

Messy-eyes
backbump-fiend
attic-doll
syrette of rosy,
hope you've been well.
I been combing empty dimensions &
need to come down
for some real funzz.

Submarine-brain
drop-whisper
sleep-tone
affixed ..

Flesh-tunnel
blue-foam
glow-ruffle
shaved-wing
bent-pillow,

see ya around,

x