Concentration Camp (I dont know why it's called this, it just came to me...an overpresiding feeling?)

Like a stifled sneeze, I feel uninhabited

at times--waking from dreams

in which I have been blinded by chemicals

and pitted against stranger-adversaries,

and while a faceless bloodied, ravenous

onslaught powers toward me

a sudden wave rushes through my body

pushing it all back--waking dizzy--

waking later than I wanted to--

slugging my hands through the day--

a miracle is tea and lemon, a miracle

is ginger and quiet noises of fires

and the shifting plaid and flannel

of autumn, to walk and see reddened

oaks, then to fall away from the world

at night. And in this am I ever awake?

St. Patrick Duck

Now is when I climb trees,

cerulean sky and oaks and others

of red ochre (once love was

red ochre). Shaded underneath

these feet like roots

are timely footprints meshed into cement--

these are names these are rowboats

twisting around lakes

in Maine and Manitoba

where I am eating chuck steak

repeating again and again solitude,

solitude, solitude, fire, duck

and then am happy in certain

moments of spring.

Curtal Sonnet

My eyes closed and my shoulder hunched
like bejeweled solitude,
a pen run out of ink and the cold slip of a missed-placed s,

hard as lust, a violin tremolo,

a clicking wound round my ear the massive growl
tight against my jaw--how the undead

measure God stackable as glass

how room for both whisper and hiss

a clicking, wound--this terrible lust

to know what it is to crave, to roam

searching.