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08.11.05
Three Poems
The Captors of Courtship 

It starts with examining our shores. An elastic shove 
could inch the edges out, said those who loved greatest 
and with massive breakers. Acrobat and brilliant. Treachery, 
steal me another moment, romance and treasure me 
with pinch of tambourine and shark guitar. Knowing we are 
built on an intimacy of inaccurate moorings, they deepen 

these seas, immortalize our fleeting monsoons into everywhere 
lavish and habitat. Paralyzed, we quake for their chameleon 

message in every inkblot that heaves from its hands sapphire 
sparks spelling tender, tremor, seized. Found uttering 

and inaudible, we are hanging from our knees. Excavating fire
from slaughter, they salvage inadequate bliss. Aqueduct

over most addictive of upstream fevers, throw me your vest 
of life parables, rescue by glass ladder shattering in chest. 


 



Before the Disappearing Act 

An affectionate gesture, she asks of him
the way a ship aches. The sea beneath them 
shakes up a shovel of tragedy: ephemera, 

knowing its poverty in perseverance and felt
of fast beauty. She still sees gold and pharaoh, 
not a rain that bears gift of roses-wrung stealth 

slung around a pole with dilapidated wanderings. 

He’s become to her flesh from a mythical shiver 
with his thick mustache and scent of pistachios. 
The chorus ahead of him pretends to shatter 

the eerie magic stirring in the oratorio: 
their voluptuous vocals pouring its lava 
down something gloved awful, sovereign, voilà


 



Gloves for a Wooden Dance 

Once lushly wine, he was suddenly marooned. With just 
a steam of lyric always boiling in the larynx, he was lacking 

and depleted, gathered crests of new monsoon. Cattycornered 
in arrangement with a brightness called aphasia, he rolled deaf 

into bereft and cryptic slave. Turned rages into vacancies covalently 
while bonding to her inner hazard lanterns in their haze of nightly

beige. He was flush and lusting fluster till he plunged into a star 
that was heralding compulsions, extrication plugged with flaws. 

                                                  ~

Wearing marionette gloves to pirouette stunts of love, she’s heiress 
to an indistinct and changing thing as gorgeous and grotesque as

spherulitic patterns slit with eyes. To desire all that clarity of vision 
cut right into raw obsidian destroys, means to die a little more. 

Though he wanted, she was gone and wantonly, uncommonly 
a thief, with no shadows of an ode. But with dragonfly departure 

of a kind who saunters higher till she’s blackened with her blues,
and whose fists will slack unlocking with a roguish scent of ruse.