You sleep,
It‘s the drought,
how you paid for the weather
with a backhand across your face,
pain like a zipper from your throat
to the tip of your tousled hair,
jerked up just for this occasion,
for these eternal droughts,
dry surfaces parked all around you,
freed of love’s logic.

Through the window,
sight deals in ruins only,
old red brick school building
rotting like lungs.

Blood-red light sits in the easy chair,
a petulant cat
licking the stains of learning
from a sick and dying God,
a universe thin and self-centered
as a night fear.

It purrs that even now
we sit on a piteous riverbed,
abandoned cars
slinking into mud like salamanders,
swollen corpses
in a hatchery pool
of saprophytic crime.

Where do you go for a vision
when you enjoy the fact too well
that darkness shoves the beast aside,
was always here,
a sucking vermin under the coat
of such ordinary brightness.
Why do you drink so heavily
of the room's blue and rising mists,
taking the air
when there's so much less of it.

Meanwhile, behind you,
a shelf full of clocks
falls out of rhythm,
a memory starts the cars
rumbling beneath you,
or pushes the bodies backwards
into a carnival of splashing blood,
of brutal deaths
like maps of old counties
torn to shreds
by blind and deaf farmers,
by snakes in tuxedos,
by the shallow grooves
in a heartless woman's tooth.

But in your dream,
a young boy hears rain,
dashes out into it,
his palms cupped,
the precious liquid dancing,
refusing to be captured,
its escape refreshing anyhow.

Like this author? He's got an entire book of poetry out there! Check it out here:

What Else Is There (Main Street Rag's Editor's Select Poetry)