Spaceship

Your mother is a spaceship,
With phoenix eyes and cattail wings,
Propelled by the love of level rocket fuel
That stutters her shyly forward
Into the whirling tadpole galaxy,
Into the infinity of Lake Universe,
And the nothing-waves in-between.

Three Small Pieces

I will watch you write
Insomnia-inspired love songs
And review your words
With wounded eyes,
Trying my best to
Disbelieve and judge you.

---

The choke-chalk of grinding teeth
Wakes me from panic-dreams
In pools of nightsweats,
Reminding me of my frantic pace
In this disturbing dependence
On all things ethereally,
Uncomfortably you.

---

A cornbread smile and overall bibs
Rim picture frames filled
With Friday afternoon memories
And summer evening breeze-breaths.
Your watermelon hair
And friend chicken cheeks
Glisten with youth-grease
And I charcoal sear you into me
In that glazed perfection,
Contained and remembered
As you are and were:
Never fully cosmic,
But rurally beautiful.

Showdown

I scraped my chapped fingernails
Along my tumbleweed stubble jaw
In the iron sun’s breathy haze.

Feeling for my ghost-guns,
I was waiting for Saul,
Trusting a switchblade
I shouldn’t know how to use.

The Texas sting-heat is a rattlesnake
And turns men into epics,
Drying their roots into dust
And clotting them, finally, into ash.