“what is the half-life of happiness?” asks the dog,
his left ear torn and crumpled, eyes moist with tears,
and his owner smoked on the porch and the grass kept growing.
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Month: June 2017
haiku (6/21/2017)
running through a field of dandelions, freshly sprung,
we wipe the spores that stick to us after the wind gusts,
unaware of the weeds we have become.
locomotion
locomotion
the girl plunges beneath the rolling waves,
her carefully plaited hair a matted mass of soggy
kelp on the foamy surface. she blows measured breaths
among the colorful coral, chalky and hard, perhaps
the bones of some precambrian leviathan, now languishing
in a place invisible to even the imagination. she finds
herself in the shambles of a sunken ship with a tall mast
still standing amid the wreckage where she misremembers
the grandeur of a sail she has never seen. she stuffs
her pockets with coins from the hull and she is suddenly
weighed down with the heaviness of mammon and
the eternal grudge of the unvindicated dead, but still,
she ascends the layers of darkness until she pierces
the clear blue surface, blind and whistling,
she flippers her way forward in the absence of light,
free from the long, slimy stream of yesterdays
flowing behind her, into the bay.
haiku (6/20/2017)
scalding peppers scorch your tongue as you stand there
coughing, bent over like a broken lamppost, monument
of exquisite suffering, alone in your mind’s winter landscape.
terrariums we live inside
terrariums we live inside
thermometers measuring our frigid lives,
leaves that stretch and curl, pushing against
the soil-stained glass. he who grows first
dies last, in this place where present and past
are tense within the same sentence, flora
that flaunt their hues, yet recoil from the tasteless
tedium of growing, aware that they will never
unlatch the lid, not even with knowing.
haiku (6/19/2017)
are you a star ascending the eastern sky
like a stairway to the unknowable? no, you’re a bottled ship
with tattered sails, aching for the horizon.
haiku
the worm wiggles and writhes on the scorching
asphalt sidewalk, longing to return to the womb
of moist soil and curled plant cortices.
the insipid lives of arachnids
the insipid lives of arachnids
dead on a dusty windowsill, the once menacing
spider sits among the desiccated bodies
of unfortunate insects ensnared in his web,
before the light leaves the half-cracked blinds
and before life’s last wispy strand recedes
from his tired eyes, he muses on how
he would hold a fly with his forelegs,
and with his pincers, slowly suck and savor
the meat of the thorax, oblivious to the urgent buzzing.
he was king of the unkept corners and crannies.
once vanquisher, now vanquished,
banished to the cupboards of consciousness.
haiku
on the ignoble shores of a puddle after
a summer rain, sunlight rippling the surface,
two mosquitoes rise into the muggy air.
today is the day
today is the day
when daisies sprout from your eye sockets,
and you vomit copper coins
and life yanks you from your dreams, spinning
in your swivel chair like a careless child or a demented clerk,
when you put squirrels upon your feet
and pour a cup of piping hot regret,
you will face the mirror and find
your shadow gazing back.
