I.

Clouds frazzle, windy ice in the high sky.
Others bunch like cauliflower southward.

I snatch gnats in the thin air
and stiffen it with cigar odor.

The blue and white of the sky seems
more appropriate to another planet;
it clashes oddly with the slime-green hills.

The imaginaable distance here goes no farther
than the river's noise or the sky's edge.

I break past the earth's facade to fall
thoughtlessly dark into the void of waiting
where the healer finds no wounds to solve.

I'm hubbed in this still wheel's center,
poet's eye speaking the most available scene.

II.

The cowboy has gone fishing.
This minstrel sits in crooning sadness,
thoughts swimming like lazy trout
in the pools and currents of his eyes.

He looks down the coming few weeks
as an alley of time with no buddies.
He is not digesting well these days
and his belly feels poorly til the first bourbon.

He thanks the year for the laughs and lessons,
knowing his memory will ignore the griefs.
He has culled all availabale fruits, clearly
perceiving the spoil of further ripening.

He swims his lazy sad tunes while the fisherman
anticipates the big one that will get away.

III.

I carved the sun's raw bone with truth
I saw fit in my believing's eye.
I hung my shackles like the tread of youth
upon the eager breathing of the sky.

Her turtle warmth crawled the stony length
of our brief love's journey, fooled love's earth.
I raked the scales of her defense; her strength
I pecked for weakness, poked for worth.

I broke my beak on her shell's cold hide.
I winged, retreating, to my haunts of pride.

I probe prenatal Spring for the promise of a rose
and pray some seeds will bounce to balanced bloom.
I plunder my mind's beds of new-green prose
for buds of sensibility to decorate my room.

IV.

1.

The lines of day go draining down
window panes and swinging tin.
The wind barks banging at the trees--
Sobbing willows, wailing wind.

Humped, the hanging curtains claw
the breathless wood, the troubled straw.
Flies cuss bashing window panes,
their flattened bodies leaving stains.

My voice booms, my body's blessed
by flesh's pleasure, precious sweat.
Naked in the wind I pissed.
On narrow sheets we sang the bed

and fractured dawn with cuddling knees.
The turbulent day goes draining down.

2.

I bungled once those swarming eyes,
their brittle cakes of worthless scorn.
The failure seeks its false reward
in judgements dealt and costumes worn.

But there she flakes and beats her life;
the frame of duty cranks her strife.
We meet in caves whose bats are young
and fuel our wills and suck our tongues.

We shudder up against the walls,
believing where the furnace cries
our heaving guts must also fall
and bungle yet these swarming eyes.

Our feet feel fumbling broken boards
and fracture dawn with swarming eyes.

3.

The lines of day go draining down
the swearing wind; the beastly clouds
carve trumpets in the cedar trees,
thrusting time through throbbing crowds

of insects bumping at the glass.
Locusts babble in the battered grass.
I sail my banner, sated flesh;
I swallowed pleasure, kissed her breasts.

At rest I watch the fretful day,
yawn my gaze on dancing trees.
My rhythms will not yank away
down the prairie's surging breeze

nor scatter like the fractured dawn
whose lines of day go draining down.

V.

1.

I want a girl who wears long
dresses and lets her hair hang
free curls frazzled by the wind,
gilded by the sun.
She likely has a daughter under wing.

I want girl with dancing hips
and visible nippes, rippling music
evoking their sway and jiggle,
whose beauty suggests love
with the least voluptuousness.

I want a girl whose innocence
sparkles with the wisdom of nature,
whose smile redeems futility,
whose eyes enjoy all color.

2.

I want a girl with able eyes
to look within me and beyond.
(She has read her books
and acted parts in drama
all her nights and days also watching.)

I imagine perfectly her cool thighs
and lips open with her gaze gone.

I want a girl who laughs
and sings in the kitchen with the soup.
(She makes things for herself,
applying art to life and life
to her heart's desire and development.)

I want a girl who runs with no group,
who will let me love her in the grass.

3.

I want a girl with equal strings
between her heaven and her earth,
and balanced breath between her wings,
her judgement's depth and freedom's worth.

I want a girl with aching arms
to hold the meaning of her man,
the man I am whose wind or storms
can only kiss her open hand.

(She reacts indifferently to my sinking
or rising knowing without words
who it is that sinks or rises
and can lift me effortlessly by smiling.)

I want a girl with zooming dreams.

I want a dream with the smoothest flesh.

VI.

My anger finds no sympathy in his tongue,
wagging out his calm and patient choice.
He recalls my past attempting manners; young,
I bent myself to learn with muted voice.

These days though I let my hammers ring
where once I might have let such alterations mold me.
His advice can't hear my argument, but sings
against my freedom's power surging boldly.

Directions I'd been seeing seem still distant
and the path he's now persuading too demanding;
I want an application for my learning, am resistant
to learning yet more tasks of understanding.

Though I admit the counsel of his hope for this success,
my expansion sought new avenues, new abilities to test.

VII.

My thumbs gouge flaking grooves in clay
whose crumbs sift down in quaking dust.
So I abuse, erode my stay,
invade her sleep with silly fuss.

Remorse for my behavior seems
present danger to my dreams.
Though I revolve my wishful eye,
my arms must heal, my mind reply

to this man's mission, that man's trip,
with humble stance and fishy grip.
I've molded down enough, I feel,
to spend my anger, spin my wheel.

Another pot emerges from my hand
as little chips sift down in flakes of sand.

VIII.

The clouds blush blue and silver pink
and trees their solid shapes repeat.
Hum of wasp and moth wings blink,
my stout cigar, the waning heat.

I loaf this day's last light with eyes
gone smoky with defeated powers.
My occupations proved me wise
which hid me from the blazing hours.

My bourbon cools and sweats its glass,
the ice clinks tinkling to my lips.
The tan-skinned kids to music fast
play ball across the wheat's pale tips.

My scanning gaze divides the tranquil sphere
above as pinks go white and disappear.

IX.

Black shadows, black as my ink,
bite off my car's front doors,
chew the camper with the black
shadow teeth of the plum tree.

A black cat's prowling, invisible
in the black shadows. Grasshoppers
hop a leaping commotion in the wheat.

A truck drags a bucket
down Washington Street,

deep in the black space beyond
the light's last circle. Silent
as the bicycles, I lean on my pen

like a cane, leaving a line of black ink,
its black shadow bobbing against the paper.

X.

I lift the grandfather weights again
and crank up the old Seth Thomas.
The one melodiously chimes each quarter,
the other groans, grunts and bangs the hours.

The day goes quicker when you sleep til noon
and the coffee lasts til half past three.
The water runs and the dryer spills
my wormlike socks and flowered sheets

humped up wrinkled on the linty rug
and begging to be folded.

I'm down at the desk in the lost lady's gaze
while time gnaws away at my afternoon plans.
She almost smiles like Da Vinci's girl,
but her eyes are remembering my kisses.

XI.

Girls, your sweet gifts cling to you.
Harsh eyes go blind at your coming.

Raving, the sea's endless arms shatter
and the mystical islands sing to you.

Waves raise praise and cry at your coming
whose waters can fondle you everywhere.
You giggle the first cold tickle's touch,
gasp knee-deep in its wading clutch,
plunge in its coldess up to your hair,
frolic and let your laughing scatter.

Girls, you tease the wind with your naked air,
shout better stones than sand itself can bear.

You make men die of wanting your nimble weight,
too young to love. Soon your instincts will awake.

XII.

Time's pressed our love's sand into granite,
weight-pressed rock of mem'ry's crystal grains,
immovable in the mind's remembering matrix.

On rare days of strength and inspiration
I assault the solid rigid matter
with the tools of this grim imagination.

I remember the soft yes of your lips' kiss. I dream them
as I dream your pillowy breasts and the sweat between them.

Then dust billows and squinting chips scatter
and the clamor of grinding echoes in my brain's
secret creative room where your face tricks
a vivid image in the sudden flesh of the granite.

I feel all the sadness hidden by your frozen look
into knowing me, the artist whose work you took.

XIII.

I catch her slinky stare singing at me
sometimes through the nightclub haze,
grieving with the blues and I'm so polite
and formal like the eighteenth century

though we have no gloves or capes.
She remembered once she placed my face right--
it was a year ago one of these summer days,
but she played the same cool shapes.

Now you sing sweet as the angels, some
singing like birds and some like winds.
Who was that long fool feeling your arm
and who cares? When you call they come.

I've never impressed you, no influence or harm.
Yet if your whole self kissed me, you'd be spins.

XIV.

Flakes of gold shrink to gray in the longing flame
consumed in lubricating smoke, oil in my eyes,
as all my cogs and wheels whirl smoothly.

The day before, my failure pressed me down in shame.
This day it seems no failure but the first of many trials.
They only close their ears because they have not heard me.

I went to the mod's hide-away, thinking she might,
but her late hours must have sent her home early.
I had my cigar and my whiskey and did the same.

My strings buzz at the four walls after midnight
and I let the concentration of my fingers sooth me
while traces of my late despair reek in my voice.

I sing the surrendering hope my choice demands
and I give up renunciation in the smoke's smooth hands.

XV.

I perceive no movement in my rolling days,
revolving one frame to the next without incidence.
My faith surrenders, but not my confidence,
to threats of anxiety, stresses, and sways

away from any attempting as the cash dwindles.
My strength sings either in anemia or lassitude
as neither hope nor joy can improve my attitude.
Not even the wren-like lady could kindle

anticipation in my heart's dry straw.
Her sparks bark only in her own kennel's world
while I feel heat from the television girl.
(Her face I knew, but mine she only saw

once before.) But why consider lighting up rockets
anyway with such a doubtful sky and empty pockets?