The tongue is an arrow: We draw it back then simply open when we’ve chosen our mark. Elf-shot stroke-shot, they said satires could raise boils on a king’s face — reddened as sloe-dye, the words let fly. Kama, you can tip them with roses and passionflower, heart-thumping to the target. You can tip them with […]

I don’t want to consider the rain tonight only how we extract the penalty from the kind as the wicked walk unfettered. How we stone the saint for the slightest of lapses and ignore the stain of crime on a king. There’s something reprehensible we find in a half-word, an imperfect gift, a lack of […]

I cannot yet love my enemies: love the will that breaks me, love the fist and the sting, the dust and the insult matted in my hair. I cannot love the heart as a weapon which crushes love. The saints say this is a deficiency in me. The fox says nothing but slips bush to […]

Would I shine up the coin of your worth pay it back to you for all that I’ve seen: When I shivered in court, you sat behind and gave me the gift of your witness. After long years, I will give you mine: All good things, John; I would unshackle you from the chains of […]

O stone heart you can see the mud in me the roses and you forget the root curls deep in the rock, a relentless anchor that anger. Underneath the moist soil the clay and crumbling shale, deeper still that slab of bedrock our feet push against and deeper still fire that moves continents and magnetizes, […]

The last of the light that wondrous star as the blue dips to black — and we are awaiting the passage into dawn and rain. This possibility gone with the sparrows into taskless rest, without prize or premium. I confess I have lazed, I have sought to notice and not much more. An eye-accomplice to […]

Harvard held a book bound with human skin an exploration of the human soul in French — the text, and not the human soul — and the physician who did the binding said that as the soul is bound in flesh, so shall the soul of this book be bound in skin a textual mirror […]

A gap yawns. When a hand bridges this, you say this is corruption, only war scrubs us clean. Meanwhile the trees are yearning for bees, the candy-colored tulips go unnoticed. We see so little when we throw punches and words like fists. Meanwhile I’ve made it my mission to notice the yellow holly-blossom, the sparrows […]

Never been missed — maybe this is a strength of mine snake through a crack sneaking out a positional celibacy like the veery after the summer’s done just another small bird with a fine voice half-hidden in the hemlock and then gone as birdsongs disappear by that gold month the green gets old but before […]