Postcard 147

Not in you but of you. Breath communes
The sun yearns red
Great storms batter the eastern seaboard
The west burns earnestly toward sun setting end
We are not unfamiliar with his desires
Each day some burning man at his own red meridian
loads up and shines down bullets, pitiless
Down and down, we are groomed for this
A pitiful man holds downward his gun
The sun seeks red; the pitiful man seeks gray
The sky moans with ash and haze

Not in you but of you. Breath communes
We have been groomed for this
It is pitiless how long and how
the child seeks love from her tormentor
Lead hot sun and crouch behind
Mask on because breath communes
Active shooter drills, the sun's own red desire
is a gray earth, a charnel house
And who loves color like a child?
But unburned waters rise, subsume
Where is color loving child?
Where is gray man
Where is rapacious sunlight?
Subsumed

Not in you but of you. Breath communes
alas, submerged
But all colors start in lightless deep
From spark, from movement,
from vivacious seek

Postcard 146

The story so far is bleak. here is reprieve:
Writers often do despair of staring blank at blank white sheet
The naked onus is to fill judiciously
To silent say what is a need, no more no less
To mete out hard truth and fragile beauty like rare thread

But you will seldom hear despair of staring darkly into inky well
The truth is there, that every word drawn out of it is destined to fail
The truth, I fear, is bleak. The well is most opaque,
into which a fragile truth might, like a penny wish, sightless sink

Ink black, paper white, the writer knows his own hubris
and fears any hope is a like mistake
But must hold truth that blackest ink and whitest sheet
are last exhale of pulpy carbon tree

Poets task is not as engineer. Ink in words
is only slowed and followed spill and swell
Lines laid down like ordered thought are dark water's
cutting courses to root rich earth and thirsty fertile ground

The story so far is bleak, yet it persists
of its own power, not by me but through
with the same natural mystery that drive toward dark well
both sunlit stream and obscured roots of tree

Postcard 145

We know it is too late in our cities,
seamed and chipped, utilities choking choking
We know it is too late in our nitrous fields
collapsing into blue-green waterways
We know it is too late upon our greasy seas

We know that our mighty, ocean striding derricks
stand on feet iron-oxide red
Our valley spanning damns rest on feet of clay
Drown the wise men, may as well
Let their harsh God be their judge

And we know it is too late for lightest sky
Turquoise daughter will not ascend, broad winged upon,
now white, pelican, she must at last return to ground
Life itself is, there, tenuous choking choking,
pale & self consuming

Is it too late there?
There is a pimp and there is a whore
He cuts a dripping peach
between his stained and crooked teeth
he sucks last pith from pitted core

He spits it out to speak while he beats her
you bitch you cunt you piece of shit
Why does pimp hate whore? Why
do slugs use razor tongues
to drill in shielded shell?

Is it too late, turquoise daughter for sperm and egg?
Is it too late for germinate seed?
Too late even, for dormant tuber & wind-held spore?
Too late, the mollusc pimp will spit
Too late and more. Too late and more