Staple Back Into Place This Mortal Coil...

Tim Russert.
Stan Winston.
George Carlin.

Enough with the dying already! We can't take much more of this! We needed these people, you know? Hell, Carlin alone was among the great pillars of reality. Now who's going to keep us in check?

Jon Stewart, I'm looking at you.

R.I.P., guys. You will be missed.

Dearly Departed

He was gone, just like that.
Not even a note.
No smiling geisha with an armful
of cryptic cue cards slowly revealed.
The skywriters held no clues.
We looked into the spinning of spiders
and only found unconnected webs.
The radiation blast
did not capture his shadow.
He was a phantom almost overnight.
Gone, just gone.
The court reporter read it back:
It wasn’t anything we said.
He was just gone.
So why was that purple tabby all a-grin?
I bet it had something
to do with that blonde girl
and all her colored gemstone baubles.
Drink us, they said
but his blood samples were all
clean as the bib of an old sleeping nun
in the shadow of a peach tree.
He must be chasing after the tail of summer.
Must be.
It’s the only conclusion that
makes no sense.

It Doesn't Hang Together

Regretting the last line just long enough
to cross it

that acute sensation of existence

(featherweight heartthrob)

a life of choice given but unchosen,
unspecified warrant for animation

served, you are
imperceptibly raped by your own soul

soft pet caged in a sunbeam,
cars faulting by the open window

a cheater’s peace
of crushed greens

Commonplace, commonplace and desperate

to shell and fuck,
a stem with interesting leaves

the first and foremost crack in the foundation.

Note To Future Mark

Dude,

Today's weather was as good as it gets around here. The sunlight was perfect, the wind was perfect, and the temperature was made for walking. If you ever find that time machine and decide to come back, today would be an excellent destination. After you've gone back to the 50's and talked to Rexroth, of course. But immediately after that--you totally have to come back to June 17th, 2008. Heck, bring him with you. Remember, though, that as cool it might be to see real, live dinosaurs, you'll probably just get yourself eaten. So skip it.

- You

p.s. September 11th. 1995.

Signs And Wonders

Finished with threshing the mowers sit dead in the pit of this cochlear on-ramp; concentric circles like alien fields blaze with the heat of a June sun at noon. And what scant meanings could attach the image from retina to hypothalamus and back? It’s just municipal trivialities, yet wrings recollection from the sponging cortices. Fifty-seconds later a green arrow still ticks, forgotten for these words. I rush in, jot and expand the thought into a red-tailed hawk unfolded by wind. Cool fall air, crisp blue sky. My how time passes in the mind…

Bush who...?

Oh, we still have a sitting president... I almost forgot.

Absence Before And After

The lime-bright spaces of being when you’re here
and adjoining darknesses to follow
stack together the ricket-wood structure that seems
to hover under every insubstantial observation
I lay down like floorboards and call my current thought.

Hook ‘round, fall back, veer nearer my vicinity,
my invisible allocation of intentional warmth
which you know, my superlative, the waxing majority
blows waves in the wheat of you, gusting adoring
with the draft of a nest your blue egg never forfeits.

I sit here, the surgeon with a surfeit of patients,
a stethoscope’s bell pressed firm to his aegis
reaching forth to stenograph the slightest murmur of a life;
long lost painter with a palette of embers,
you must remember, I am your knife.