Time Accelerating
(dedicated to Helena)

My Monday and Friday with all of space in between,
I feel the same as then, when presently, my mother,
elbows on the table, was exclaiming “72? so young
for the obituaries” and my click of tongue, so so old,
more life than I can imagine, me 18 and it taking forever
for the first kiss I’d get at 20, all my friends blushed with theirs,
my Monday and Friday with all of space in between,
and presently me, 78 so soon, me to turn the age of Balthazar,
my Monday and Friday with no space in between,
my child retired and needing my care again.
So recently my mother with her newspaper.
my Monday and Friday with no space in between.

mob violence, the eternal font turned read
stain consciousness, flogs sink in, read
and read unceasingly enclosed in the heat
of heart smacking you about the inner ear
lobes red with excited fear, smoke, dust motes
yourself in the shaft of sunlight, all specks
from black angel’s wings. Blink
the breath of chest of cat matches
that of your own. Eye the rhythm of real time
cover lowered try to follow the cat curled in sleep,
touch what is, listen, no screams, no violent nausea,
no hunger, no chill of coatless cold, wet kisses
of snow, romantic keepsakes of ache, no sunset-glasses
of doom, no fomenting, tormenting abuse. Use your
fingerprint, feel the pulp of page, feel air gap
as other timelines out of time fall away, collapse in
to ink on ink, nightmares of a child.

vegan barbarity
I take the long pasta in hand and break it
to pot length with the sense of ill of having
just snapped though the neck of a goose

as a poet I am to court depression,
not with powdered wig and gavel on
charges of disorderly conduct unbecoming
a community pillar, exemplar, no, court,
not with love or score in clay footing
with racket sport but as in hoop skirts
flirt and perchance ask her mother muse
if we may perhaps, dance, gloved, find
our way though the pale tight steps,
sense her glance, catch the lowered lash
the cats of ninetails closing over her eye
lowering her face to mine, stiking us both
milky blind. She is immortal but I would die
of grief if she did or didn’t take me. What
have I to lose? Behold me, her suitor,
I would immortalize the goddess in mere
font, pouring, read and soaking into all
who splash themselves with the sweated ruby beads
in honor of her sparkling tears, running deep
riverbed troughs worn into her anorexic cheeks
as she ignores my beseeched shaking hand
for another dance, and I pine to glorify us both.