September 2013

Where are you now,
my poems,
my sleepwalkers?
No mumbles tonight?
Where are you, thirst,
fever, humming tedium?
The sodium streetlights
burr outside my window,
steadfast, unreachable,
little astonishments
lighting the way uphill.
Where are you now,
when I need you most?
             It’s late. I’m old.
                        ...

Where i-95 meets the Pike,
a ponderous thunderhead flowered;

stewed a minute, then flipped
like a flash card, tattered
edges crinkling in, linings so dark
with excessive bright

that, standing, waiting, at the overpass edge,
the onlooker couldn’t decide

until the end, or even then,
what...

We come gnawed by need on hands and knees.


As a creature (nosing) grubble-seeks a spring.


As bendy-spined as bandy snakes through saltshrub yaupon needle-brake.


For darkling green;
for thorn-surround.


This absorbing


quaggy
crample-ground.


Of   briar-canes (intervolved with kudzu-mesh) and mold.


Of   these convoluted vines we grasp to suck.


To...