MALPRACTICE
Though ambulances full of years have passed
I’m dependent on drugs, crutches, and slings.
My condition continues to get worse.
I still carry some fragments of our past.
Plagued by the bad, I forget our good things.
Time was my doctor, Amnesia my nurse.
DOUBLING THROUGH
the eating and the eaten
the rower and the drowned
we play two-handed poker
under allday-breakfast sky
solar yolk and lunar white
the cosmic egg is broken
my IQ equals ice cube
while i consume my whiskey
and my packs of cigarettes
my cigarettes and whiskey
are active consuming me
ELVIS, OEDIPUS, AND AKHNATON
Three wizened kings sipped and swapped their yarns
about hound dogs, a sphinx, and the sun.
Confusions among daughters, wives, and moms
seem commonplace, they wisely agreed.
“Is fate how we see, or how we’re seen?”
“Beauty is deformity’s trophy.”
“Am I isolated by greatness?”
“Have I passed or have I failed the test?”
“Did crowd gravity make me weightless,
or did I fly up in levity?”
“By grinning against adversity,
I won’t end obese, blind, and defaced.”
“Shall music, honor, or religion
yet bridge our world’s fissures and schisms?”
“If legend persists against reason,
it matters not. Let’s down another!”
“To all our followers and lovers.”
“To all the memories we gather.”
THE MYTHIC ARCHAIC CUB, HIS MANDALAS, AND ME
I wait here still for the wise old man
and his chatter of universal traits,
how they shape my acts like hands
on a potter’s wheel (but hereditary, innate).
“Archetypes are to psychology
as instincts to biology.”
I sit in his psyche, peeling my mandarins,
and wonder, is this a proper asana?
Some tables down someone plays a red mandolin
and my self stifles respondent hosannas.
My me was always confused by the we,
and I was never the one I used to be.
I used to take my tea with cream
but now I prefer lemon.
Why do I have all these dreams
about so many different women?
Decades have passed like clouds over seas
as I searched for any available lee.
The minutes pass like birds in flight
and my shadow cowers in shadows
I interpret as monstrous daytime nights.
Mandolinist fingers dissolve into adders.
Dumpster Fire Press 