Alphabet City

She said when the roll is good
you cannot sense the seam.

Chagall 2018

Run a little faster
Breathe slightly slower
Peculiar time-travel

Slipping around
Snippets confound
Yet it is life

In the air today
Wonderful scents
And big sounds

I feel what I flow
Tasting all I see
There is nothing familiar

Finally a new me-anew
Every moment
No longer

Nothing but
Impetus without
Any call to action

Timeless rainwater runs here
Lapping rock crevices lined with fine moss
Under trees rooted at the innermost core of the earth

Chagall 2018

An affront can cause one to be taken aback.
I think ergo I don’t thwim any more.

Chagall 2018

I don’t mind it looks wet
but not like I just did shampoo
or worse yet – poopoo!

overheard at the salon by
Chagall 2018

Dear Reader – please know that the editors of Alphabet City
debated at length, whether or not to publish Matchbook Number 87.
We stand by our decision. Art forces us to look at life squarely.
—CC (avec la langue dans la joue)

I said it smells great and I love the cracked top.
She said that’s the result of a cold-start but a much hotter oven.
Get closer, you can hear it continue to pop new crust.

Chagall 2018

Hushed frenzied glide-steps
Feet slap wet on moonlit grass
Visceral dancer

Chagall 2018

amid the ruckus
smiles, upturned faces
facsimiles of uteri
where do all the birthed worlds go
no time right now to elide that question
never to have or to not have been
but where

in a planar sense
a planet any plainer would be
poetry incarnate here upon
Gaia falling – an eternal
blue aqueous orb plummets
down one supposes but here
worlds do fall up

and fill up and fuck up
and fold up like small affairs
at the roadside

Grace is cold air
to invigorate being to awaken
to arise to a vantage above the mist
where clarity is the space within which
each is defined, small dimples
impressed like proofed-dough

small pulses aware in time
we unravel
molecular
at band shells
Fridays and Saturdays

in the wake
of the incessant monotony of
cacophony and polyrhythm, steadies
the hum of you, the haunting end of a tune that fades
within; without time there is no lilt
no melody, no quaver, no interval –
no insurrection of sound
to enable heartbreak

I dance stepping and skipping
to big bulbous beats in the fandango moonlight
with my frosty heather love in arm

Chagall 2018

sunlight falls
albeit dappled

she emotes lavender – a plume
whose effect is to leave me
abandoned

Chagall 2018

For you,
the obligatory couplet

Chagall 2018

My poems are like cameos

They show up in your life
every now and then

In profile on a bus –
a shadow off far away

Lyrics that strike you
on a dare from the ledge

Where only small
footsteps
keep you from fall

© Chagall 2013/2018