Time brought increased notoriety.

Saucy times with a soupcon of respect for the artful dodger.

Givens change, an armful of orange lilies, limp & loathsome, on a tombstone door before trumpets of rain.

Graven images. Lifeless stone.

Death became stone.

Stone empty. The maggot emptiness burrowing into chiselled easel and the stone-cutter's savage magic.

Just a bitty stone to herald a pa.s.sing.

Night-jars.

Old straw-chairs with a broom p.r.o.nouncing the wall base with its touch empty, the empress of bandages leaning to rags

On table sc.r.a.ps, sorry gloom of an old building by a pickled lake leaking into ebb twilight.

The coronation of the nightmare, the moon with her billowing robes and withered spoon unfolding midstream ...

la cauchemar ou denudee soiree to discover, with wonder, ices with sherbet reek like nightsweats; a windsail of pooled light thru puddles of trees.

Brackish backwater-- thoughts of black ice and huddled ma.s.ses of silver breaking thru the sun's winter curtain as erupting coins.

SHAMROCK

Is there anything prettier than that-- to stare into your manifold s.p.a.ces toward the hook & vine of cathedral leaps, the vaults & crypts as go-betweens of an earthy worship, the supine female form?

By quiet pools, thrush in the thicket with red berry behind its eye, miniature sun proceeding by the branch to undress the bark with leaves as pa.s.sionate culprits kissing dark.

Clasped hands upward lies the sky my masterpiece angel, I bite lush meadows, tread spongy brooks, endear daring small of back, crevice taste nape and neck, a beatific pilgrim nearing a fleshy way-station, first charting his compa.s.s, fathoming a probe to collect armfuls of starlight & shade, hair, eye, lip like fragrant sea-grape --pine & cedar bough in love-lorn resin smile.

LOST PATROL

Blue walls were grottoes, subterranean panels for covert messages, the occasional mot juste squirrelled up thru paint & memory.

Something like guitar strings dangling only you employed tear sheets from Rolling Stone (counter-culture fly paper to catch the runny ma.s.ses).

The blue walls existed as firing ranges, gunpowder plots for ideas scribbled on pencil waves like the movement of snakes (or commandoes on their bellies) thru desert sand.

Blue walls. Blue grottoes.

Blue moods to temper finger oases (tap-tap of skeletal tree on your window pane) crawling thick with pregnant fruition with the bayonet lull of words.

Snippets of that legacy (hobnailed like a lost patrol) forlorn as yellowing pages or dusky petals unfolding.

BLACKAMOOR

Breaking up-- as in the cloissone jar you dropped. . .

little regard, a few brittle pieces scattered about the floor.

Let's call it "shedding feelings". Expensive?

There's always another humidor tucked away in the cranny of another antique shop; after all, a woman is only a woman although a fine, Cuban import is a worthy smoke.

"What this country needs is a good 5 cigar".

Panatellas?

He might have added tight-fitting, long lasting.

Nooks & crannies.

Little things, your ways. Fruit fly (perhaps damsel wing) as symbol of perishability. My emblematic coat of arms.

No season of regrets, rather s.n.a.t.c.h of minutes, the oasis span of a single candle.

Who knows?

The sun nudging petals at the close of another day.

Your eyelids casting shrouds (and shadows), the long funeral walk of your hair across the pillow.

Then awakening. You gathering tresses much as a bird trilling feathers.

Clandestine, these rendez-vous' Clementines.

Air of mystery and melancholy street, the moon up & poking holes in my argument.

Tedious fingers, no account matter of factness lasting eternities.

Imagine, you & this moon, dowagers together crotchety, decades hence, making tea.

Curls of black leaves, grumbling.

Blackamoor and sadness, cult king of empty transforming the bright & ruddy complexion into barely honourable dishwater.

You can ask what this means.

A cough. Twirl of spoon in a cup, deafening answers.

I prefer the lonely wine bottle, egret in flight & motion, retaining dignity across a crumpled, brown bag.

Listless, linoleum floor.

UP FROM THE FLOOR

They sit in silence. In camera, around the table. Terrifyingly stern, stares that grew antlers in my eyes.

It was as if thunder or bolts with electricity were being decreed.

The self-important, the pompous, well-fed and self-a.s.sured.

Here to hazard a fling of the dice--to decide whether another should eat.

Employment. The interview. One with yellow tusks protruding to his coffee cup. Eyes, some primordial forest cut for a firebreak back of his soul. And I think of the desperate, those lacking bus-fare to get to such a carnival. Valuable postage money, photocopying, scrimped dollars for a suit to entertain the pumpkins dicing for a worthless garment. A scavenger run, piles of white applications heaped as bones in a graveyard made careless after a violent storm.

Or elephants in tow, trunks wrapped around the other waiting for the ringmaster to signal the question important; whether a neophyte new at sharpening his teeth at a daily wage should be allowed presence onto such a hallowed ground.

And I think such things are the very matter of evil--that these are vile intemperates with their accursed shortlists deigning to be gracious, shaking hands after the fact. Mafioso manners, the sickly grins back of the shovels used to bury another.