LAMPLIGHTER

It isn’t any clearer to say it straight out

The angel and the devil, one body and nobody

To be a better perversion, a person with a mouth

I want you with me      the white-green clouds

and the thousand screamy, on fire recordings

of speaking over the water a shadow in our image

The two of us missing our turn in the sun,

but making our connection in the here-to-ever after

We make the meaning      We blast the giving

insistence terrific     one vision     all of us

more vehement than different, and these words

for what they’re worth, cascades and some salvation

Reminders of throwing ourselves against the wall

Myself and yourself and laughing and drinking

to wake us back up after long living hell

Wake us back up after fire breathing blackout

You ghost, you owl     It isn’t enough just to wait

One person’s apocalypse, another’s brilliant rapture

This message much slower, my call for your response

Don’t die on the porch or anywhere else     Life is

our eternal nature     Lamplit reflection

in the prehistoric dark     Sermon bubbled over

in the obvious present      Red tricycle     This beer

with black pepper     For the longest time I thought

the lying mess in the lyric was a lioness out to get me,

and today it snowed a lot or a fever choked me up

I talked on the phone to my friend about the future

My heart started singing     Fits of leaves of Whit-

maniac grass     I tickled my daughter     The house

caught fire     Deeply this winter     Or in summer

all at once     One always has a choice

what to do and what not



EFFUSION FACE

When it pours it rains smoke, and the color drains

into the drain with strands of red hair and mangled,

tangled leaves, and also with thinking a clear thought

through intervals of music all morning,

of a sad lifting sadness, or otherwise…

It takes a lot of movement, of diaphragms and branches.

The bronchial passages collide with the book you might be

reading, and suddenly as suddenly the air is almost

an idea with a mouth going brightly, weaving gently.

To make an ambiguous noise is to make it a bird

with hands for wings, or to make it the context

for real, true feeling.  You decide, or you decide not to.  But

either way you glimmer, making everything change clothes

with everything else, and this creates sub-atomic particles

in a bottle some seconds or absolute white physics,

the beginning of another year together, where we are ever

a fever coming forward to distortion, queer symbols

and dying to continue, or cotton shifting slowly in a bluebird-

smeared sky.  Note and throat will always rhyme.  And when

one beams a fusion, it’s the end of spinny darkness.