boneless nights

What I like about night—

nothing like the day with anatomy edges,

dangling limbs, hefty torsos, grimaces & staring anger,

dirty mirror-colored, smoked, broken horizons.

Night is smooth & continuous ebony silk

eyes sliding along black-only distinctions.

Lace, seams like feeling a bra with eyes closed.  

Big-legged skyscrapers, steeples, industrial plants,

femurs crushed, industrial vertebrae pulverized,

jello-ed forms, structural complexes ooze,

white-ish whalebone cities bleach to dusk, darken  

to nothing but viscous breezes, camouflaged moon. 

Finger telephone poles, power lines, smokestacks,

extended digits fisted, bent, palm flattened 

to hot waves, heat escapes fingers like fumes

writing on invisible cool night strand surfaces

with silent sentences punctuated with stars. 

Snaking interstates, crosshatched county road nets,

asphalt flypaper trapping rush hour trains of cars

turned to intestines rumble heard but not seen.

Like the night took the body of the day and

surgically removed the bones.

pulp town

Town smells like barbecue & farts

Rancid steam & dump burning smoke,

Old perfume on sex sweated bodies.

Clouds look like clouds but are disguised

Drugged, low & close like a poisoned pillow,

Ozone holes tethered over main street,

Part of a killing jar for a way of life,

A toxic Macy’s parade with no crowds.

This is the kind of timber town 

That fells trees, ends up with stumps,

Every log out has part of a man crucified

Thumb here tacked to cedar bark,

Arm pinned on a Douglas fir,

Leg sandwiched, pressed into plywood,

Stenciled pleas scratched on the log ends

Codes, messages crying for help, but

Foresters minimum wage has been paid, 

Profit made, 911 calls no answers at all.  

This kind of paper town chips, whittles 

At you day by day, pulps, pulp liquors you

Until like hate it digests muscle, soul, 

Consumes everything but the redneck. 

Takes upright, ends with thin

3D life flattened to one inch by three epitaph.

Even the bark, slash and saw whine 

Into Presto logs, Kingsford charcoal briquettes

Dying, dead cremated alive driving 

Around in a 4×4 six liter urn.    

We all live in pulp town—our capital.

Bar-Coded Life

The sun is hung low hammocked in the coming winter south,

Felling great slabs of Ponderosa Pine shadows and light across the highway 

Like thousands of piano keys becoming a Cascade highway bar-code strip.

I scan along at 65 mph picking up signals from the asphalt, the mountains,

Steering a grocery cart of feelings, heart and memory laser scanning each,

To value them, add up the costs of life today, so I know what I owe.

I think of my daughter who worked as a grocery checker last summer,

Scanning the stuffing habits of normal hurting crippled hearts from Tacoma

The tampons, feminine hygiene products, National Enquirer

celebrating no pregnancy this month yet pleading for any intimacy,

Wine, beer, cigarettes injected one way or another to deaden the

fears, quiet the loneliness, and let us dig the grave for our dreams

again today,

The long on image foods stuffed with fat and carbohydrates,

as if we were trying to glue up every tear duct escape to the

outside world,

So we could scan in and see like x-rays parts of ourselves.

The products of my life are barricaded, registered and tallied,

Lost marriage, missing in action behind friendly lines for my children, 

Debts to lovers, debts to the ideas that have given me mental breath.

I drive only several miles, the car zebra-ing through the strips of shadows, 

But I have scanned my life of the cost of what I bought—a lot,

And like any consumer much of what I bought I didn’t need or want.

The treetops tickle the fall sunlight,

My tires keep scanning the shadows, 

I feel now as settled as any shadowy thing can.