"My mistress' eyes are nothing…"
Gone from view, vacant stares through empty glass
where boxed orchids now hold your station
by the rise of not enough occasion
and too many glances past.
I once held your gaze through the reflected glare,
the sun obscuring encircled simmering eyes
unrelenting in the search, seeking surmise
somehow, and now your portrait still
replaced ironically in nature’s pride
perched on sills
peering inside
out where you refused to shine.
The mistress holds many secrets,
not just the corporeal of clandestine sex.
She collects clues in nature’s trails
in bleedings
slathered like massaged love potion of entrusted lives.
And trust there is–not to tell
while the other reveals:
all sorrows and aches, disappointments and joys, dark desires and flighty fantasies.
She swallows words with their heartbeats inside her body
and emanates fumes of lust as interpretative salve.
She is whore-preistess.
A mistress locks like a safe.
Her world shutters in space
like the smoke-stale, nylon-curtained windows of a cheap motel screening daylight.
Her misty spell casts doubt and fear, longing and dread.
Will she tell?
She is harpy-savior.
She can tell–
how hungry he is for affection, how desperate she is for care.
She recognizes the drift in the gaze that lids evanesce in the throes,
orbs inward facing a racing heart of agonizing desire, painful pleasure’s release.
She is spell-casting springtime.
She knows the cards that contain the house,
which ones can be plucked without disturbing the structure,
without crashing down the careful construction.
Sentinel at gargoyled castle keeps,
she is creator-dragon.
The vault she is has no combination.
Her honesty and trustworthiness stare ironically into the abyss
of human heart relation–re-kindling the rhythms of lie and sleep,
walking and waking,
truth and destined failure to hold neither an eternity nor a lifetime.
She is prayer.
Let me wallow in the warmth of losing you one last time;
like sleep, let me wish for more.
Let me pumace dead skin of my heart layer by layer–
again, this time for sure.
Polished, it shines to the pulse of another now
though never too late
it is, but how
to let you slip past me in one more rhyme?
Walking away
into the folly of night
my eyes followed your heels
as they lifted and lightly pressed
against the notion that keeping is outside
when everyone knows losing means never having.
Spoke a spiritual self,
and my world swelled
my head full visions of life
intent on living with intention;
realities and modalities flickered
like moths worshipping tensile light
before me like a card bridge in mid-shuffle
soon folding in flattened before the game begins.
Observation and witness transforms without elimination.
Pure illumination: Intend first and the rest unfolds manifest.
We visit our then, a scrim of sense, diffusing pleasure like burning lemon oil
and surfeit our now, a false dredge of real, deferring the candy-colored recoil.
Bodies heaped in undulating ether, sweat-sore and sticky smiles, lie assured
the way it never was, but ever lives in imagination craved of slick-thin succor.
I was never that woman, you never that man, and yet we perform our analysis
like religion, like cookie dough on a sheet, anticipating the rise and melt of us.
At last I ceased tracking the trailer down an outstretched road to preview then.
Steady we blow, chime-sounding earth’s heaving guts of it all in resolved amen.
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A phone call,
the muffled tunnel voice cracks,
“Mom, I want to come home.”
A wave hits the transformer and it’s blown.
No connection.
No contact.
Stunned, mouth agape–
Forgotten exhales, a mind cries, “no, no, no!!!”
No breath, out of an airless burn, searing lungs, stifled scream—
“This can’t be. I have to jump!”
Over the cliff, falling the eternal drop–
and the shards of rocks jut through the sea to meet gravity’s slam-tossed burden,
through the air and…
((Gasp)), “huh!!! I’m up, I’m up. [catching breath] Okay. Okay. Okay. [quickly glancing about the sliver moon-lit room left to right].
What time is it?”
Not a single paper, not a wrapper, stub, shoebox, tag, container, cookie box or article, never intending to wear, she throws nothing away.
No castaways, no delusions, cares, tidbits nor morsels, not a dream, fantasy or truth, nothing gets past the gates of her need.
All she has touched, received, and placed on a shelf or dresser top, even dropped to the floor, never leaves her.
She retains everything.
She lives knee-deep in it, until the inevitable; they come with a shovel, mask and plastic bags to remove the amassment.
The long lone bedsheet melds with the mattress, unchanged so long; once the whole mattress got tossed out.
Not even shed skin may be shaken from her. No, no loss tolerable, nothing must abandon her, nothing left, taken, discarded, out of her control–a sacred keeping.
She shudders and screams in spasmodic yips and soul-shook howls in skin-ripping pain at the disturbance, the violation.
Skull-red circles emanate from angry, forsaken roots.
“Get out!! Nooooo!!! This is MY room! You can’t just come in here and throw my stuff away. I need things you are throwing away! You have no right!! My door was closed!
Oh? Which side of the door shuts out and which closes in?
Why do I want to know that a bicyclist was killed by a hit and run driver way up north in the state somewhere, some place that may as well be Mars for all it has to do with me?
Shouldn’t the news delivered to my phone via text be something more urgent, more relevant like, “nuclear bomb just dropped in Los Angeles” or “meteor headed to earth in about an hour,” something more significant, enough to sound the incoming text alarm and make me look?
A bicyclist down hundreds of miles away.
Well, no doubt it’s a shame, and I can go there with my heart and my mind, that place of family grief and loss, and I can make it my own, especially now that I have a more specific piece of death than people dying everywhere every minute.
But it’s still too far for me to muster up the feels, the agony of killing me pain in the heart over losing someone I love.
Why do I want to be there when I don’t have to be?
And this is how we operate 9 times out of 10 of any given day.
Sometimes I forget not to be bored.
I only remember when I am wishing some horror would end,
like when pitched to the pivotal moment just before a pronounced sentence,
a reading of my fate.
Or, little less than terror, a performance evaluation
by a man sitting at the back of my classroom with a pen, eyes, ears and judgment,
leaning on every word, gesture and response.
I am notated.
Anticipating the fall while peering over the precipice,
these are the times I pray for the ordinary I eschew every other moment of every day:
the groans and dull-eyed drudgery of waking, pissing, showering, caffeinating
and driving the drive in unrelenting heat circulating about my head
blown by the broken air conditioner of a beat up car awaiting the junk yard,
or the crying mop times of late night I’m-just-too-tired-to-do-this moans of despair—
for the boredom, tedium, godawful-lobotomizing numbness of mindless repetition
like factory fingers twisting bow knots on an endless assembly line,
the industrial rosary, sans soothing rhythmic sync.
Deimos and Phobos, moons of my memory, usher me back to boredom,
box seat of the stadium, luxury of the lucky lottery winners of life,
born colorless, coddled and cocooned.
In the gaze of the other 
