Love Love is lick and a run of luck – Runs hot, runs cold, runs amuck. Rattles your cage, pumps the old blood – Pours from your pores just like a flood. Ever so gently it touches your heart Then stings you meanly like a dart. Fills you with feelings that make you shout, Other times makes you want to pout. I love love. I crave love. I need love. But I rather go without.                            

Slowly, ever so slowly, I peel off the layers, uncover your firm white flesh and stroke by stroke I make you ready – you are hard now – but soon you will simmer till soft.

I can feel you like the nematode that runs under my skin leaving track marks as it goes, those long meandering red lines causing me pain. I feel you in my flesh and want you out, you worm, so small and fast, antibiotics don’t do the task. Like a succubus you have come to harass me. I cannot sleep. I cannot eat. I do not hear songs, my heart does not leap. I am Pauline in peril. And you, vicious villain, have me tied to the tracks awaiting my fate as you drive that steam engine full throttle. ...

cud-chewing days of pasture graze bovine weight a winter of nothing lying about learning to walk after the cutting and sawing of limbs. lumbering remembering forgetting it was nothing, the planting joint and socket makes one bionic never again to bend at will to kneel before any god or master character of steel though now a cow you survived the operating theatre.

Snow streams under acrid flames burning scrub pine into blackened lungs on high mountain reveries of wasted plum dreams with unacceptable partners in lead lederhosen who promise moonbeams then hand out slugs for the slot machines. Round the fire ring we dance till we ferment.

Maverick stars have no magnitude, hers formed the constellation Cancer, on film, on the right of her brain, indicating points that were eating, without reason, life’s desire. She scoffed at this, laughed and had attitude, early found, hope her stoic position. She paid no attention, losing touch and then vision, When she no longer laughed, she didn’t lose heart. That would be the last to go. Taste, she was told, would be next. Now she made a request: help me pick out my dress. She was a woman ...

The New World Dial-O-Matic Wonder God The HDTV is my window to the world, as i lie on this sofa in despair. Blind though it is with its powerful eye I wish I weren’t here but in there – trekking the hot Serengeti or the Bridges of Madison County, where, as I last recall, I had an affair, before I lost on American Idol to the winner of last night’s Jeopardy. Is it kin to the one-eyed monster I love so dear? It offers me no carnal pleasure to satisfy my needs. All is transitory, a mind trip, a ...

Rivers of blood steamed through gutters from hides of beef dissected at night by men in white coats, not those men you think of when you think of sterile hallways in quiet nights, parked along the street semis ran their engines to keep the trailers cold – meat won’t keep in summer’s heat. Dumpsters swelled with carrion bones as bloodied men with stained white coats piled up heavy cartons sealed and strapped with plastic wrap curbside for the truckers. I’d watch from my window this nightly sce...

Listen Up! Your mind is gone. It left no trace, not a sound you make. You stumble blindly grasping words, stuff your mouth then spit them out. Stolen words left behind in fits and starts of ire and fire by lovers and liars floating in air just for the taking. You speak in tongues of sucked in words found midair and sound like a chorus of dissonant voices. Others look at you askance for now you speak such silly nonsense.

I wend my way through willows in riparian dreams of rushing streams to the time of cattails and bulrushes, eels snaking around my feet. I was cast into a salty river to float upon jelly fish who meant me no harm and no longer frightened me with their song. While floating on my back I saw the sky turn almost black and the world, shrouded in darkness, was concealed. Only the tree line in the distance was aglow: the sun had lit only this to a radiant magnificence, translucent – each leaf magnifi...