astrologizing the pathway

Antarres,
red friend
in the looming clouds of dank night
swept through with frost and odd twigs
grasping soil.

I once knew of a screaming
in the suburbs
born of brick and wet concrete
that couldn't have been ill
but for the dusted polluted trees
dragging the embers of leaves
around the poison of low murky sky.

Targets pinpointed like that scarlet dog star,
names shuffled through mortuary disbelief
and bodies caged and ransacked
with group showers
given by master
instead of group hugs
felt light on limbs
in party central of birth
when he noticed her costume jewelry
beneath the iridescence of city's angular contortions
made tragic by night sky.

I knew too
how ugly they were
as they cavorted on transit buses
and darted under bridges
never to be heard from again

until rowed out of fresh crematoria
in ash masterpiece
of full death.

but place
your hand
on mine
and we can ignore trigger fingers
and old skeletal traceries
born from aged tendons
that were born to grasp broadswords
instead of steering wheels
and ringed fingers arced gently
in beach fairs filled with the drug scene's
rampant patchwork
and bad haircut
like an abhorant scarred face
chewing on sickening cotton candy
as the brain is as high as a canary
shellacked in varnish fumes of garbage
the trash men sent out with post script.

hell
is a gentle misery

overlaid in single story houses
painted off white and beige
near nurseries
with iron bars over doorways
and shelter with gummed water fountain
worthless with lack of inherent pressure
until penny faced children
put their mouths on the filthy faucets
to drink their polluted city water
fresh from a button
their absent fathers forgot to explain,
where we once had window panes
and an orange grove
lain deep in dark rich brown
as barn swallows fluttered up through limbs
and twists of branches to catch a bowed perch
with limb and wing
above curiosity's cat.

gemini, thy fire rakes across an expanse
of a billion years
to settle in the twilight
of ruined lands

leo, cassiopia, taurus, virgo
thy fire of a billion years
did settle the grist of death
with its ethereal lantern
in the breasts of men and women
hammered and beaten
with molecules
from your neighboring unnamed star brethren.

watch
tired old train station
wasted in the settled Sun
could have told a story
of that auburn moon
that cut her bangs
into slices of a hair lobotomy
as cute as trench warfare
when you looked through the dead half
of her eye
and into the dark globe

stranger had a care
through woods of black lit embers
met a caped crusader
in the halls of a mortuary
bedecked with golden light

american male

tell me
as a child

what is it like to be a man

is it
having dope fiend musician friends
along with developing vascular necrosis
while you conceal your hands with mittens in the sun

is it making two children fight over a sausage
at breakfast

is it telling stories of fishing expeditions

is it driving after burning your hand
in a minor meth lab explosion
after you put a spike of heroin into your neck?

or is it merely
lying

because you were always too stupid to recall the truth
of your vomit nights in a supermarket bag
while you figured nothing about being a man at all

radiation
in the air,
sweet sunshine embroiled in gold platings
of spears
in rain
across the loam of horizontal stitchings
called a horizon.

knew of the blasted landscapes
with seeping red blood
and locked uranium
in desert echoes
of a warm shift
in motion
howling from scarlet prisons
and across purple mesas
like a soft knife
twisted into the departed.

you and i
ensconced in castle brick
poured wet with moss
across the mountains
watched the dead plains from a grated tower
and ate nettles. 

black poisons and opium
dreams of night
nightmare
old echoes
in hidden passages
that smelled of graveyard prophecy
when that brown eyed wonderment
led a charge across the flank
of sleeping soldiers
to burn down their battle casement

radiology

love can
shotgun says
love won
in an artillery strike
too bad
the priests of that power
invented nuclear fission
to run the cities of war
off a cliff into radioactive night
where thermometers
could be striken off the history books
forever
by the fact
of their obselesence
when exposed to waste temperatures.

or jesus
him crawling back through books
with ragged fingernail polish
looking like an old crow
in the nightmare of man
covering the truths of iron and blood
with drugs for wet bandages
in a humid environment
the knowing called Hell.

Hell, we got enough to get buy
until we get obliterated.
Shut up is all they say
so why don't you just shut up
and go there, by the way
just got off the phone
with dry trigger clicks of static
caused by cancer of electronic termites
scrounging for data energy translations

one day
they might come
you know
i can say
thank you
without regret
and i can wave
with a smile
that caught the attention
of that smile politic
fresh from spring air

old times
you
me
there
today

all i gathered in open arms from the deepest purple
in gratitude for the breath in my pink scarred lung
was mistaken by people
for gratitude of their presence
when i was just happy
and alive
not necessarily fooled
by the liar
by the murderer
by the sow
by the cradle of chains

love

Darling
wrote a note.
With mention of a gentle coat
in dark overtures of the ending
we saw purple and gold
at the length of the docks
stripped of paint and people.

You and your wormwood,
old dreams from 19th century canticles
exhumed from dusty bards
spent on life.

Old movies we had never helped much,
those drunken songs of light and sound
could figure out only the depth of our agitations
as we sat in dark rooms coughing up spit
with the blood of our past
while some jeremaid couple
told us to quiet down for the sake
of their undereducated kids.

Should have sang
when we got close
to clotheslines strung out in the snow
and broken dressers left on lake ice
where a desperate few had frozen
in their last stand of love affairs
like ice held above water
in a vodka that dissolves the dissolute frostbite
of that intemperate heart of doubt

we knew
only about the prefigured stars
held like icicles drifting in concealment
of proportion.
you could make a lion
looking at all those jewels
stretched out
in the frostbitten loam

though you made your vows
and i had one secret assurance
in the thoughtless lips of a slow kiss
that rotated like gravity's flow
through the emptiness of the individual

Psychiatry

Dear,
I would have invited you over
for a glass of wine and a bit of laughter

When I first heard music, I was uneducated, a daft kid in the back of some drug addict's car, playing with his fingers.  Bon Jovi, Guns and Roses.  These were familiar staples.

Music

I saw you playing
weaving through looms of epochs
like a red
with calibrated destitution

twistin in the breeze...