ESP.LITERATURE

from Conversation with a Hypoxic Dog, a collection of essays, stories, & poems. CwHD available through Barnes & Noble and at various ebook retailers.

AMERICAN CENTIGRADE

lean dogs crisscrunching backyard paths
frozen puddles of december rain
blueblack night ...

	a satellite crosses the southwestern sky
	standing on the snowbanked
	tumble of riverroar
	boulders grumble midstream
	jetstream desolate unseen

american centigrade
too much colder than farenheit
the litter of frozen crows, bleak blueblack nights ...

	someone saying the ol' mercury dipped
	down to 9º just before sun up
	jumble of ghetto poor
	drugsters gamble and preen
	maelstrom havoc undreamed

blueblack night
frozen puddles of december rain
lean dogs crisscrunching back alley trash ...


SIMPLIFY

simplification of density
reminds skin
of hangu pass
scudding clouds and snow

past to future and back again
	take my hand

simplifying skin
reminds heart
of spaces between
hard feeling and tears

past to future and back again
	take my hand

simplify heart
remember the sensuous touch
of fingers
tracing lives on skin

past to future and back again
	take my hand



THE CHILIOCOSMIC LEA

in the chiliocosmic lea
energy and matter are pointless;
grammar and syntax become the
blocks of children playing
cowboys and indians exchanging
morphemes so vicious
prepositions bleed ...

the digression remains unresolved



BOSOM FRIENDS

night, a blackness of darkness, heightened by the prick of star, night: obdurate, obstinate, obbligato, now graying ever so slightly with a moan as the oppressive lightening of the eastern sky comes once again with the spinning of the orb, on and on the turning, relentlessly on and around, the blackness forced to yield to mere darkness, to shadow and snoring, to a crowded concrete cell, the odd grunt and guttural voicing, with a sweep of huddled forms, faces upturned, open mouthed in restless dream or nose to knee, the faces, heads, and shoulders of mexicans or indians or mestizos slumped and sleeping or feigning sleep, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, the dingy room dubbed jocularly la camarilla de los cochinos and the much begrimed bit of bare floor, just a crescent in the corner surrounding a protruding pipe that bubbles back gaseous sighs into the cell, a pipe dubbed with equal measures of gaiety and disgust, el soplo, the militaristas conceiving informants, the ancient fishermen conjuring the sleek quick soundings of dolphin, those yet holding some semblance of religion calling up admonitions from distant gods, the scientific materialist marking the beat of measured time, the mystic embracing the timeless chaos of the universe, while the inmates themselves, with few illusions, burden themselves with no notions at all, having no room for thought, no energy for contemplation save perhaps for the arched portal in the west wall, a low, incongruous slot framed with hand hewed posts and lintel, this paradoxical breech that invited passage, escape, but that all knew led only to the alley of death, no bargain that, better the discomfiture of pitiless incarceration, better wedded to hopelessness, to nothingness, knowing full well that even nothingness is something to hang onto, a raft in the maelstrom of snorts and coughs and groans and angry shouts from the mouths of near comatose men