Poster Poser

Hamelech glitters
but is really just a piece
of painted cardboard.

Eclipse

The world is becoming a ghost town
jobs families homes towns,
all sinking back into the sand that castles are made from.
Moon comes closer, pulls waves high onto the shore and steals it back.
Holding flotsam, praying for salvage treasure, praying to be salvage treasure,
out and out and out.
Dreams turn into chum,
sharks chew the last little bit of flesh and crunch the bones.

Biting the Apple

It's a cold feeling, not knowing, a cold that starts in the marrow,
leaches out through the skin and leaves a glistening stink of ‘maybe' behind it.
Holding the unknown between two fingers, holding it like a rattler,
just below the jawline,
so it can't bite but close enough to count the venom drip drip drip.
It spins, clicks against the table,
so small it fits comfortably in the palm of a hand.
Deceptive size.
How can anything that tiny, that insignificant, that disposable
take away everything you thought you ever knew about anything?
How?
If it disappeared, sliding between fingers,
coming out of ears and pockets and going in again,
suddenly flying across the room to bury itself in the trash, abracadabra,
could time turn back into before?
But it boomerangs, bringing evil ignorance and the end of bliss, and now,
genie out of the lamp like a long overdue electric bill,
everything is dark.

Summer of Our Discontent

She is bronze, no not the color.
The age, the age of bronze, more advanced than stone,
needles and fishing baskets and barley and survival,
and less so than iron,
steel tools and sharp edges and brittle armor and violence.
The curve of her spine,
that indent where the sweat pooled when she lay there, prone,
summertime, the sleek, sweet saltiness of her flesh,
contrasting with the advanced synthetic scraps
which kept her from being arrested on charges of public nudity.
That was bronze.
And I loved her, loved my bronze age girl,
with her pinniped roughness made to cut through waves with minimal resistance to touch,
occasional brush of my arm, hairs erecting as they come near her,
electric hungry for congress.
She is bronze, melting copper, beautiful tooled leather and horses pulling rudimentary ploughs,
settlements, overseas trade in the hot Aegean sun, bronze.
Bent over her drawing table, rulers, pencils, t-squares and protractors at hand,
all simple tools, or weapons, depending on how you looked at them,
smudges of charcoal and cray-pas on her cheekbones and brow, entranced.
She is that in-between age which is all things possible, 360 degrees available,
no roads shut and she takes an eraser and removes a fractured line which is me.
She is bronze
and now, I am invisible

Fragments of the Future

She could see it, staring up at the sun, fragments of a future silhouetted against the swirling orange light.

Not a waltz or a promenade, how trite those would be. Everyone saw their future or past as moments of glory or fame, but not her. Instead, she saw them turn, walk, reach out with splayed hands, their fingertips close enough to feel the air currents pass between them.

Nothing special. Her visions were ordinary, routine, every day mundane. Kissing her shoulder while she washed the dishes, the search for keys lost in a pile of mail or putting down his hex wrench to watch her type, oblivious to anything except her own words.

Fragments of a future they were cheated of by an oil slick and a rusty 92 Civic.

She saw it until they shut her eyes and zipped her in.

Watching a Train Wreck

I try not to look but it draws me in like a train wreck draws EMTs and polyester wearing lawyers looking for a quick buck. My eyes pass over them. Keep going, I say, keep going, it's not your place, it's none of your business, just keep going and SNAP! They're back, wondering what the hell that woman is doing for that $100 bill tucked in her shirt pocket, sitting there with her hands on his hips and his pants around his ankles.

Maybe she's taking his measurements for a new pair of trousers, a custom made suit, neon green with pink checked accents to offset the lines of his mohawk just so.

Maybe she's rotating his arms, legs, torso so he'll achieve the perfect stance in his Pilates series, balance and breathing aligned to optimize the transfer of oxygen to the blood cells and increase muscle strength and flexibility.

Or maybe she just finished blowing him and she's going to wipe her mouth on the hem of his shirt.

I dunno, but I can't stop looking and I'm afraid my eyes are going to freeze there and shatter.

Crumbs

Silent ‘I love you's
so many. You follow them,
shimmers and shadows.

They might as well be
crumbs eaten by birds,I sigh.
That's fine, you tell me.

I already know
my way home. I know inside.
The crumbs are extra.

Going Down

"We consistently have more job openings than graduates to fill them."

She put down the newspaper and sighed. She consistently had more openings than graduates to fill them, too, these days.

Orlando's contracting economy and rapidly rising unemployment rate had hit the ‘sin market' as hard as it had hit everything else, if not harder. When money was tight, people became tightfisted and if that fist was tightly holding onto some guy's own dick, then he wasn't going to let go to reach into his own pocket and pull out a C note for her services, was he?

Well, it wasn't the first time she'd made a career change and it probably wouldn't be the last. Soon as she filed her continuing education credits, she'd renew her license and, if she wanted, go back to her old job at ORMC as the ICU head nurse. Her mama didn't raise no stupid chilluns.