Varmint

Silence of a viper's shield. 
Sigh and shape the earth.

Oil drips on the infant's brow. 
Die in multiples of six. 

A wax-paper hammock
holds a napping lummox.

Sixty-five sunsets tacked to the sky.

The Hours I've Spent

Time is a concrete web.

Like a syntax for alien gods, it eludes my understanding.

These days, my stomach protrudes like a senator's:
feet forever cloaked in shadow.

Keep me sane, my hired hand. 
Hold me close as the earth careens.
Watch over my aspirating physique. 

It is the smell of nursing homes and flowers folding,
the sun declining on the works of man. 

A Recollection

I fell into this world,
given birth by a void. 

Womb-wrought,
I sat and stalled
on the periphery of time.
In all directions a silent space. 

Grim leather doctor, 
with gnarled hands and tawny skin, 
you tear me like giblets from my sanctuary. 

Slap me on the counter-top scale and
swaddle me in wax-paper. 

Mark my status: alive and feeble. 
Hand me over, choking on birth-matter. 

Tall figures cast shadows on my form:
sinister giants who tower over the disinfected landscape like Titans.

My mind is a template,
my bones are gelatin.
A weak vessel. A compilation of empty echoes.

Eventually a nipple beckons. 

Brad

In Idaho, you killed a man.

He eyed you funny in a tired bar,

so you broke his brain in with a pipe

and buried him head down like a lilliputian. 

Out in the dusty nowhere,

moon like a cut eyeball behind your bent silhouette, 

you give the earth a symbolic pat.
"God," you say, "He's my man. My one true buddy."

An ocean of pain,
a lack in every utterance.
Time crawls gut-stabbed and
clutching at escaped organs
under a sage-green sun.

You look toward the highway,
a calcified shrug of gray on the horizon,
out where the pioneers shook their heads.

A tumbleweed sighs past like a spitball aimed at the stars.