Daylight, dawn, penumbra of lost last nights and shrimp impalers,
Steel skinny skewers through the heart’s pumping dagger,
Turnstile of breath’s travel, stream chord and guitar belly
Of interstitial niceties and interglacial periods of thaw.
Make lists and shifts of Tom Thumb faery tails and snaky goblins
Clucking along the trail where the golden felicities do their best
To make good with dogs and gather fry and spawn of minnows
As darting warblers dive, and spurt and spray are lifted as prayers arched
As obsessed bodies leafing out like trees come Spring.

Making a nice place for warblers,
One and two timers resisting the urges to lie down sleepy
With the dead on a fiery chariot to heaven, black as sin,
Beginning to believe again in the durability of the far shore,
The white sands and muddy waters pushed as by the flood of Noah’s
Across the justice arc of broken history and continuity in celluloid and on film.

Her prankish otter and his other sum, derogatory of those present
To spur toward a future homeostasis of the butterfly storm and the
Aging meat ball on the counter. Is it good for your skin? Is it good.

Crunch crunch goes the snow foot and
The creature with doubloon and machete, that is man.
His woman in tow wishing steadfastly that first and last could be proposed
In some other place for another time.
A real game shoe.
I am sure it is. You paid your money, now off with your clothes,
Your debts, your things owed.
Off with you like a river always building on itself.
Always tonguing its start and finish,
Its hound tooth proof that monkey blankets and forest canopy leaves,
Hanging over the water like talk, eventually will tell all about the bathing beauties
And the rocks they throw from the shore.
It is sure,
Believe its sand and
Be a washed down and away as
The drain pipe iron and the chain link of stinking fence.

An offense, great, gracious, still coming to plump fruition.
Weed fruits, jackal, crackle in the fire, the red rosy of the fluffy bunny
Where all of the post apocalyptics send senses of their seizures to presses
Inky with blacky of dead screen sky and skitters of rash postulates
Swollen on the skin where the oil rigs broke the surface and vented
Like so many aged bodies of the earth,
Coming forth we hope to save us in our coughing.
Well spread for the difficult bits that tarry and
The counterfeits that bargain in the basement
Where trades are made and cards filed by the future.

Fortunate providence knowing all as a kind of emptiness,
A sky salamander carved on a rounded stone of Bikini Atoll,
An empty portal where stars play in the surf
If your eye or contraption telescope
Is quick enough to resolve light,
Distill sea water diffraction bands,
Science fiction dogs on long leashes wrapped around the laundry pole
Pulling and tangling the lines.
Shelter, cover, crazy sheet shredding in the wind.
The old familiar chaos at the door chasing her own tail as a kite might spiral
Seeking a taste of its sharky self.
Marooned self on the sand spit in the bright sun.
Orphan loops of film on the splicing floor,
The scissor snips, piles of graded papers,
Dorothy’s own turning whirl wind, cyclone, water spout, whirlpool
Dust up to the camel’s eye, her long lashes winking,
Her padded feet plodding.
Hold on, hold on you evidence of first causes,
Hold still for our snap shot at the pull off for the brink.

Cabin fever, cold compress, laughing letters
Big as clown red shoes and paddles,
Probe on of new men, clone stinkers and same tarpaulins
Stretched tight as whiskers, close shaved as a near miss of
Ships and ice bergs, the hidden depth and the radar bidding
On the market to come again and relieve us.

Man on the Sunday pedestal bloody as fugue and shaman
Rolled in one wet and messy pen.
Water won’t save you,
Walking out beyond town’s reach now takes a month with proper papers to dream it.
Imagine it waiting without us, all of these years, centuries, millennia.
Craven hood, beak, claw night pupil round as a black moon as
A straw poking snout from other diementions
To suck and spurt and bubble us as we fly or cuddle or make fun of how long it all took.
Nice to meet you, nice to have you.
Please come again.

Doctor Faustus sold us all,
Copter chopper clips the canopy and tent sleeves
Shred up the junky arm of built reassurance.
Tumble to the outskirts.
Weed up your inner life and roll.
Capture jizzy essences from the slight oils in perspiration, semen and blood.

Slight hills on the horizon shots of Mars, little rover taking selfies with her arms out.
Love conquers fear but then what, when we start talking,
Laying out the strategies of development, democracy, then what?

Self actors in possession, differentiated by both ideas and ideals, art and practice,
Value and abundance.
Let it rain.
A thousand years is too much to ask, reign of spiders, dinosaurs, anthropods,
Too much to ask an Aeon for its shadow for us to live under and
For us to keep the rain off as we read and breed.
Forthcoming is the nuance of each voice a symphony, the symphony
A cacophony of alphabets strung and carried and hung
Publicly for all to see, as if to admire where we might have been
Had we but might and right to be.

Granted, the library stacks and dishes are as plaques,
Also nailed to the wall, the tree, our bleeding savior calling forth
As a crane might, from the belly of a ship, unload its cargo.
Cult of stuff, launch is down the river, fancy pants.
Put on the moon, visor eyes reflecting as your blue watery marble of an eye world
Accounts for the string and stream of our whimpering sound and
Her eyes pouring vision like buckets on the night.
Emptying, paring down simple things to catch ourselves in relief,
Framed just so, with blackest black below
As times’ rumination in a second stomach and
Above the high wire, the act staged just so,
To reach us at the edge of our seats, wanting more.

More for hungry ghosts never quite satisfied,
Blooming souls yellow as a daffodil.
Mirrors on to interior infinities
Just as the outer moves its Mandelbrot set around the corner
To inhabit other Universes of steel.
Grave digger, rust hump,
Clown down around his ankles
Holding a press conference for his pants.

Juniper berries or just straight gin sitting queasy on an empty stomach.
Barrells full pulled and rolled up and down the planks.
Slave ship, cargo hold, water,
Water is the world and our track is in the sand disappearing
Slightly with each wave wiping.
Each death and burial and mournful song set to pick up a little quicker tune
To move this crowd from dirge to dance,
From suspense to unleashed action world of this fantasy
As it unfurls a flag of grey on green
As whale skin and blowing eye horn and its echo down.
Soft and plushy,
Belle of the ball
All the tall and all the small,
The minute and the hour come,
Go, talk amongst yourselves.

The approach of pensive glory between acts and
Before sums and lovers deep in sleep, recovering us all
By the blankets of the future tussling between us,
The iron chain, the chaffed skin,
The bolder eyes of Sisyphus over and over eating liver on a cracker,
Snapping up cheese on the evening news.
A more mournful cry never potted a plant of such loss of leaves
Deciding upon the wisdom of desiccation and death.

The water, just the fall in the bloody desert carrying limp bodies away in a smelly sun.
No wonder we bury with sweet words and hope,
More than anyone can stand,
So we go away and can’t help but think of it all a while later.
On sleep’s little verge of hillock and down, in the veldt crease
Where a little creek wends its way through the tickling stones.
The water by drop and drab,
Pulling the feet in by the white sheet of burial,
Pulling whatever rope or help comes to hand.
It is enough to make killers
And with their watery tears anoint us, tool and sheep,
Bleat of our numbers fallen as the rows of the field and
The little wooden shacks like eyes trying to blink their clap board lashes and
Window sills with no cover, no glass, no sash or curtain but
The trouble of selves as us,
Seeking shelter in the subways from the killers.

Muster up little sister,
Bring the grab bag of selves from the stream of your consciousness
To a firm identity and a stand.
A plant stand with cactus blooming,
With desert wishes and parted seas.

A little longer in the chaos of glowering,
A few savage fights and then birth, middle age
Visiting the other cars and occupants – travelers on the train.
It is a thin membrane between the science and fiction.
Eyes and ears are only a jumping off point
For the rise of sentiment, conversation, memory.
The tip of the Northern ice bergs that shed aurora light in the green water.
Your trim and kit should be sufficient.
The long days bend as water funds the slosh of perpetual with eventual.
Pliant, forgiving, firm wall of surfaces as helpless and distant as whales breaching,
Coming full out from element water to element air,
But how far, how high, how long can they go, below,
Be it dark or day, their great lungs filled for a dive
As a glance, a packed lunch, a meeting for the whole school to hear a recital.

How high we must go, out of our element, strangers in a foreign tongue,
Calling on fellow feeling as if history and animosity can be overcome
Like a tram ride, a blue green pidgin with darting pink eyes and a strut
On the square where French fries, left by squires,
Or are they squirrels, grown up 65 million years?

Droppings, clippings, clues that have their own wire to consciousness
Sending a morse code load of dredgings, oily layers sentimentalizing the
Drift of continents and the apparent directions of time and our interest.
Waning, flagging, rushing on as the truck tires roll and the rush hour and
The blemish of traffic on once pink lungs, the cilia and phlegm working overtime
In our polluted world, our ship of grace, our holiday unbeknownst in starting to talk
That the dividing line between non being and our set table is as temporary as a lash,
A little pain from your eye lid fallen into the bubbles of the drink,
Black as sticks made up clunky as bars, plastic as the space that stretches,
Never full or quite empty between us, lending the stars our gravity
For contemplation and persistence.

The ship’s log is full of occurrences, well speculated on journeys tinged with
Restless boredom and stimulants. Let’s get on with it.

Page turner, ear whisker so sensitively turning the tide as if the whirlpools were
Our own devices, brown as the long turn of wide rivers meeting.
The waters mix like Jupiter comparing the idols of his clouds before washing the rise and fall,
The gasses, the murk, the ammonia welling up or waking us back
To a compartment rattling along the rails.
“You may have had too much to eat?”
Too much of not enough, say only, “I was dreaming”
A steak on a platform on wheels, the meals covered by silver lids,
Bowls and trays, the sugar set, the cups, it was all present and before me
As the ennui of your letters fades from memories known but not certainly my own.
The death, the tracks, the travel…

Marina, as they eat up their beauty, their young and the genius
Tortured by the blank denial of Russa.
Who can ever weep enough for you to be covered, washed, laid not by the rails but
In the gardens of your sweet voice and the timbers of deepest instruments
Seen in lithe movements of well worked dancers achieving
The line thought to be spent and lost and damaged beyond the repairs of
Our hearts frozen in a mountain of ice pain, cold as the mammoth who
Lay buried ten thousand years and turns to mush and decay,
Unearthed, over warmed, left as your achievement high and dry
On the steps of closed Universities and police stations
Clicking with the locks of red feet, huddled, homeless,
Carrying their cells on their backs like snails, far from anything,
Marooned, gobbled, thrown away.

Cracked carbonate shells, slick silica and settled like lime to
Soak the smell of the sand where she dies continually
As the soul of a smothered nation makes its barbarous mis-steps again
Feel familiar in the lines of the elderly and some tragedy not
Penned or remembered but vast as the tundra,
Cropped as a warming bog, feeling for being alone.

Weird incantations of twilight, gib sails, creaking staves, stagnant water,
How travel, how come and go but by momentum of needing to be done.
Pendulous, ponderous, all around as glyphs.
Sea snail, algal forest green, weedy matts and swaying kelp with feelers and suckers to
Grab its hold and move with the mountains of the waves,
The seasons of freeze and thaw splitting the road ways for a pot hole in which to live.

A weedy species we are, sprouting under bridges or in a bright lycra tents in
A field of brown grass and trampled snow.
How it shows in the margins of verse and on the faces of our super stars, dressed to kill.
Borrowings, beleaguered bow of one to another or the ships prow
Taking a dip in the next trough or on the next crest
Reaching crescendos of spume and spray.
Supine, sublime surfer calling up moments of inspiration and forgetfulness
Slow as storms bringing vapors from the water body to the cloud.
Bringing our close attention as the wave crashes its crease and the tube
Holds our one’s deliverance before moving on to whisper at the beach and retreat.
She whispers at my seat to halt my breath’s retreat,
My uneasy peace with her spent fuel.

Earth is the afterglow, the morning glow with
Dawn’s call rising to the vegetation, pools and people.
The reflective surface of souls tugged out beyond the depth by a clattering motor,
A junket on the river peeling back from the prow as a rainbow in prisms.
A speed boat for the surfer’s star,
Fading as Venus in the morning mirroring the silver moon’s wan gray and
The greater blue that pulls toward the day.

Pliant to the dark, the envelope holds a dried flower, a poem, some hair,
A gold star announcing that memory has failed again.
The expansion doesn’t need us.
Despair is a closet protest of personal development like a teen ager doing push ups,
Like America rolling over with a groan.

Fatuous, forgetful but mark the words as cynicism does run on weak feet and retreats.
More broad leaf, humbler types bring their Montagne and their Tolstoy to a farmer’s feast
And the play, late a thousand years is staged, bright as day.
A correspondence of objects and the passed on minds
In a flurry of naming and rubbing off the rough edges of language with daily use.
The tongue curls deeply to the mind’s eye as the stage before us plays its drama.

The dramaturge in a distant balcony seat envisioning how her short comings are made up
As things take their places, shedding light on the tensions of an inner world,
A moment’s half thought, a spare memory dropped like a shiny dime down a well,
A spring fed of classical, extinguished, long suffering serfs and slaves
Of the Carpathians, the Urals, the port of Vladivostok in deepest Winter,
Deepest burial of our wantonness and waste.
A certain insecurity that might doubt the riffling through of our lives
Or the destruction of our kitchens.
It is no therapy, no solution, solace or carrying on.
Brazen rock, tongue fed art,
Blood sacrificed to wind and blowing sand.
Even stopping seems sad, half way through Act 1 with
But a thousand strings, wires but no cables,
Feathers but not a proper bed or pillow.

Calls must be made, alliance with the pituitary gland,
Built for starvation we feed and feed but for the mind’s thin greul,
Living on ads and news framed safe by a government of murder, jail and exile.
File through the lines, tiny dancers on your sinking dime,
Turn on the love light that shines like mother or home in everybody’s language,
A tuna sandwich, a blistered package wrap of pills that also goes down,
Also fills up the banks so deep in their elbows of debt.

The streaming service has some new moves and we are starving to know how it goes.
Come a little bit closer, heretics, burnings,
Come in for cross purposes and tea.
Unpleasant self on a rind of bitterness
Turned to easy offense, and anger and the small defensiveness of
Strike first at any cost.
Destruction of myself,
Thanatos seems a bargain but not raised as any idea in the murk, to the clarity of conception,
So there it lurks, feeding the fires of resentments, the pot boiling, the lash unfurled.

True self-denial, penance, immolation, purgation is not the ten steps at the line or
Bending someone over backwards.
Old Lucifer in a corner crying for self, same and self.

The higher woman, the deeper bowl, the rain, let us not settle.
Let us put our fingers back in the pie for we have something to discuss.
Who put the microwave oven in the garbage. Who eats, takes a shit and
Flushes the water away daily.
Who do I accuse but myself.
How further doubt sufficiency, rhyme or verse.
Who tastes the moment’s shine, the eye (I) the brine.

“What a tribulation”
Call on my heroes in time of need.
Call on the seed in days of trees falling but
When you call on time, beware and know her little disparities,
The bubbles of absence in the surfacing of truth.
Don’t let the pavers fill it all in.
The whales and cetaceans need a blow hole, free of ice,
Breathing deep air, free of harpoons, to dive down again
To do what they do as we seem to do what we do.

Thorny crumbling crown of reason’s guest,
The intuition of destruction is real,
Threatening next corners with walls and guns,
Next refuge with a table cloth and place setting.
Let us be revealed. Sit with me. Talk with me. I love you.

By Rolf Stavig