Simple


Salt is the opposite of ice

mix of acid and base we launch with gunpowder
to rocket into the new July night: sunburst and pandemonium.
A sunbeam though is old mail---over 4 billion years–
no cause to crane our necks, cry out.

A stone is for carrying under your tongue
or filling your pockets on your way into the river.
If it's soft carve eyes and ears holes. Grief

is the long fish
with gauzy filagree of scales
that moonlight paints on the bedroom wall. The one
that swims toward you, or away,
on your saltwater tears.

Love is nothing

you ever saw— and satisfaction's just a hole
you fill that you dug and dug
tearing your nails raising blisters.

Dance
a while in night's back alley
and loneliness lumbers out

a wall-eyed beast

wraps you in his arms, his stink,
and maybe hands you your pen:
your last straw, your slice
of life, your wafer of transubstantiation,

your third eye with its psychic powers
and little clocks, your courage, your rising tide,
your price, your poison, your prize,
duty, modus operandi, your hocus-pocus.

Your Barium salts burning wicked
green, your Strontium-red
your Copper Oxide
blue cascade,
your blinding
white
titanium blast.


First appeared in Notre Dame Review