As evening shifts with a drink

the receptive warmth 

of a spike resembling flesh 

fills my ass the faded

resolution of a Morrisroe 

photo distressed by hand

deliberately altering the picture

Opie’s circle of jocks 

punk as a hollow boy 

a boy as an Iron Maiden

T as in Tiger Beat or bored sub 

urban Eisenman 

portrait fading in cigarette

smoke the first star gone 

supernova then a hole in what’s left 

of real adventure where we begin 

after the fact as the last frontier 

flows outward in a stubborn leak 

of secrets a day’s worth of lube

loose fractal of totality spinning deep

inside my guts and spilling out

oblique song 

whose lines travel the duration

time and space and back  

again to meet us wherever 

we might find ourselves beneath 

a distant sun 

which for a moment gives reliable light

to hunt the surfaces pattern

the sensual fullness of the day 

to day decline or tontine 

pact of survival stirring the base 

energetic blood

oceans rising 

in clouds great floods 

of it born up in history

or myth as all the names changed 

to protect the innocent, the fantasy

memory becomes like a dream ‘leatherbound

in my feathered hand’

meaning I couldn’t imagine 

what this life would actually look like

after so many years of dreading it

the smell and texture of routine

day in day out a braid

drug through a lightless place

returning with a smudge of shit and floral 

smelling residue a creation

narrative reduced to sudden inversion 

of night the darkness and the deep

a diffusion of spirit moving over the surface

of meterless sound shimmering 

mirage past paradise hardening to real

love a sticky glue against my eyes

and to imagine the single star that fixes us

spinning clockwise tonight

a cell’s steady 

buzzing in the infinite 

expanding possible past words 

heard at what I thought was 

in the beginning another country

further up and further in  

from one corner

to another, uh huh