The Duke

It doesn't mean a thing, really.
Those Merlot stained glasses, tilting.
The tracing of a protractor
around its plastic frame, numbers
and senseless numbers smashed
into degrees of the leaf
after it has fallen from the tree.

Shamrocks grouped together in
a green puddle the boy laid inside
when he was eight, care-freed
and free to care::
about anything, really. It doesn't
matter now that holes have been dug,
and inside those wholes dug out,
each body seeded the same way.

The world swung around
the sun on the 2's and 4's.
And as its audience snapped
their fingers on, well.. the 1's and 3's,
martini's were filled in orderly fashion
by those fashionably dressed.
The piano asked for ice, and
would you believe a thousand waitresses?

Page 178 Portrait

"Cranly of all the tumults and unrest and longings in his soul, day after day and night by night, only to be answered by his friend's listening silence, would have told himself that it was the face of a guilty priest who heard confessions of those whom he had not power to absolve but that he felt again in memory the gaze of its dark womanish eyes.

Through this image he had a glimpse of a strange dark cavern of speculation but at once turned away from it, feeling that it was not yet the hour to enter it. But the nightshade of his friend's listlessness seemed to be diffusing in the air around him a tenuous and deadly exhalation and he found himself glancing from one casual word to another on his right or left in stolid wonder that they had been so silently emptied of instantaneous sense until every mean shop legend bound his mind like the words of a spell and his soul shriveled up, sighing with age as he walked on in a lane among heaps of dead language. His own consciousness of language was ebbing from his brain and trickling into the very words themselves which set to band and disband themselves in wayward rhythms."

J. Joyce -from Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man

Nobody Ever Belittled the Bird's Song

All across the black, universe, a vast summer wind passes between Alnath and Capella. Auriga shivers in breezing dust, blown-back by an exploding astrological sign. It's falling apart you know.
Limbs quicksilver made while the sun's back was turned, fast. And that your constant gaze burned a lot like ash formed from a burning hole in the ground, its bodies gleamed in bruising radiance, the sound oppressed a dozen or so leaves. Could they have smiled? stagnancy. optimism. desire. defiance. rampancy. Wind is a depression that brushes your cheek and teases your tongue. And a dead bird is a just a bird, with that same wind at its back, quiet and content.

Photography

A representation of a hill somewhere in Alta Loma, California,
portraying the wild flower in all of its Aureolin brilliance,

:::It is smashed:::

Upon
the red clay, and muddied.