At My Table

The silent dead sit at my table on Christmas night.
They have been buried a half century of stony time.
Under thick carpets of weeds and grass they sleep now—
Old voices that once were heard within these white walls—
Old faces now departed but still mingling with the vapors.
I can see my dead mother at the end of this long table.
Pauline is young again as she gazes upon her old friends.

My mother died in 2003, but there she is with a red apron,
Haunting me still with culinary aromas from her green kitchen—
Her feast of salt and sugar still on display from distant 1967–
Her dead relatives smiling now for the Polaroid picture.
She says life is a bowl of green beans laced with bacon grease.
The whisper of dry voices say grace under a dim chandelier.
Now I can hear the clanging of forks and knives at my table.


Anti-Poem I Without A Soul

Luscious creamsicles cascading as glacier pedestals
Transfiguring all the remarkable inclinations with pizazz
Luminescent monte carlo dream rhapsodies of tuna silk
Spin and spiral like rabid frosting rockets of glorious goo
Translucent moth girls collide into the shy fires of night
Licking now the smooth verdigris of old copper mornings
Turning and extending their silver lullaby preponderances
To the sipping uncles seated on hungry sofas of leering pleats
Fingering now the electric diamonds of a comatose creamsicle


The Coming Andantes

you are flying on a hazy dream carpet —
floating up there, above these old streets, 
these ancient genuflecting pines and cedars,
rising above the sleeping dead on Broadway, 
soaring now through the white tombstones—
the low walnut branches that flail like hungry cats.
now the sudden rush out of death’s hand we fly,
whirring by faster than blood flow in a silver sieve,
in and out of the shadowed majesties far inside,
these soul itchers that foretell the coming andantes, 
here in this perfumed dreamland with only you, 
as we seep through the spinning pines and cedars,
the long extending blood rivers naked with stones,
of venison death and fish spasms in the final sun.


Nightmare Again

Another loose grind from bedtime to flickering bedtime
The white pills on my bureau sit there like lactose bugs
Lurking silently as sad dogs would, waiting for the door to close
Life is the uneaten fish inside the garbage can out back
The maggots there drink champagne cocktails with their dim wives.
Another nightmare now with hordes of death nurses sucking on syringes 
Their black marble eyes enlarging like stoned puffer fish