Distemper

Time wears no muzzle today.

She breathes heavily, slobbering

over my filthy images. I crave

what is just beyond this

menacing bulk, a calm improbable

future, some past tendernesses

whipped into a soft possibility

sprinkled with deceits not yet known—

I can no longer eat these images,

coming as they do from behind.

Instead, I paw through the ashes,

stale cigarettes churning in the pit

of my inclinations, gnawing now

on buckled grunt. Time salivates,

pissing contradictions at my feet,

she marks her territory, flirts but refuses

to be my bitch. I sit and wait, knowing if I move

now, I will be the one to chase old bones

and whimper. Invisibly, she guards

the future, growling faithfully.

Sonnet VI

When life is made not of decorum, but its lapses

how am I to sit and calmly tolerate

a refusal to makes the leap beyond mere synapses

and engage the deeper chasms of a fate?

You’re a secret-cliché-agent, every instinct seeming dual

I keep expecting a sudden burst of mirrors in your hall,

your ellipses as uncanny as a young linguistic rule.

I think I might be done if you hadn’t been so tall,

so handsome, so funny, and so inventive,

you played the game in ways that never bored,

I’ve tolerated more from you than from other lovers—

(if only once you’d been like them and snored,

I could long ago have punctured my illusions

and spared us all these lame effusions)