new photos

those awkward kids that adopt
steely looks and
treated hair
to me betray the simple past
they spent like moments
of a waking dream, or
memories of something
new, deja vu, so it seems;
i remember one,
sprinkled, pimpled, freckled
cheeks,
now rubbed to
glisten under
neon lights,
her hair was chopped, a mop
now smoothed into
locks of fine thread
weaving around her ears and
neck,
that innocence that
hovered about her
stained red lips, now glossy hard
a visage, adult, sophisticated
but mostly
just a fleeting image of
decay

holds

there is a moment that
holds me together like
a warm brick wall
newly stacked,
gently padded with cement and
laid atop one another
across and across
by a sweaty man's
calloused hands

brunette

my renegade daughter
with hands that
unravel and explode

an adamantine smile
that rides the
easy wind over

collapsed around
decades of her eternal
growth

wrapped carelessly
in existential questions
and flights of fancy,

stirred with chamomile,
drunk in slowly

snow globe

it's all just a
tiny glass bead
and i come and go
as i please;
where i exist
within this burrow,
free from
slings or whistling arrows,
competing ideals,
stuffy nonsense
of the outside
world;
desires and memories
which cease to be
the threshold comes to pass
have no more a hold on me
than episodes of a dream

laundry

i really like taking my wet laundry
out of the washing machine
and putting it into the dryer.

to hear the behemoth
slushing, whirring,
moaning and churning, then
its gathereds coming into
dazed inertia blinking,
questioning,
eyes adjusting to the light before
being hoisted out for more

is to know that helplessness in the face
of hidden fate's enigmatic advance against us,
a raging machine
of tumbling chance
that we cannot help but to endure.

they lay stretched and whipped across those
gleaming black walls breathless
and exhausted, dripping
drops of water around the bottom of the
basin, gasping

having been dusted in a funny white powder
before being thrown and drowned inside
a maddened cauldron determinedly emulating
the rushing blow of an angry river's water
upon their cotton blend and pitable
buttons clinging to some simple threads,
they fixedly gaze in quiet shock
at nothing in particular.

"all of that,"
he said,
"is a bunch of bullshit."
"it is whack," one agreed,
"it's the language of fear," he continued,
"it traps the soul. It provides no pathway
for one to go. promotes distrust, self-destructive lust"
"disinterest," added another,
before said I, "seemingly enough."

ain't happening

march on,
through the stream-lined ticker-tape
city parades,
through piss-soaked back alleys
and cash-cluttered, overwrought promenades,
bleary half-eyed open and mumbling halfheartedly slogans,
slurping down a cold cup of coffee (cooled by time,
not by ice).
blessed be my 21st century;
breathing down a chiseled back its
mounting pressures and tangling ways,
reliving our most desperate moments,
swirled in the tar black self portraits
down, down, down the old road lays.