On TO IT, we track the scent, nose down zig zagging as the dog on a track.

A thing on a track is a train.

A single destination thing mindful of going and getting there.

Great circles at home like the shores of the sea holding the water like a bowl.

A beggar at the door, bare foot humble, offering the opportunity to provide him breakfast and help you.

Little secrets are told about your insides.

 Little felt people stuffed with straw like a doll but their faces are muddled, their hands prickly and too blotchy like disease to play with. 

Tempting us after breakfast with places to go and pins to stick in our sides.

In deep, on fire, getting on the bus, a pained look and the widespread onset of fatigue like an epidemic of pessimism. 

All that we can’t do and never become.

I lacerate my neighbor, masticate with the sheep and grumble with the wind about the mountains singing strange and out of tune, not knowing how to stay in their lanes.

There is a deep problem with ourselves and our world.

Making happy is a bit beside the point,

The voodoo of a thousand prisoners cast up in curses on their hunger and blood or the pale symptoms of brittle bones in the catacombs are to our window girl sitting, or to me, a vague concern but a sharp pain and as missing the dear and near one, now traveled so far, keeping track of so many, how to respond but by sleeping?

A good heart felt rest for the weary, an escapade of love for the leering and for true seekers the diagnosis of frailty in the deep seeds of being.

The sprout and spigot, the waves and implements, the many past and a few listening moisten their breath with such whims of the effervescent seeking comfort in how such huge sorrows are washed away.

Marina’s mountain with its ore and pits, with its snow and wind like an underwater landscape, a shadow of her self ill afforded but free and reachable everywhere like language.

She speaks a muffled sparrow buried with the war before the fields were cut from the forest, before the sun came up to full heat to melt our trembling, shivering ice caps that calve off in the sea.

Before she saw me, her lover in hand, she set out pregnant on the craft of the future with unused rhymes and old folk tunes coming at night and all day, the music of sorrowful spheres that came even before she could turn the wheels of gladness and hope, before she rested hungry, started to smoke and despair that with our freedom, we can’t muster kindness and sink our teeth in war.

Foul beasts, dead horses with split guts rotting in the frozen mud of Russia.

Russia, you bitch, mothering this pack of the squealing needs like a drunk freezing to death in the cold.

A mother of kittens and pups bitten by the mange, the fleas and dark sinks of your alleys where things of the last century, lives, were left to rot.

Call me the sadist optimist and my own American yard a vacant lot of wires and weeds.

Turn task and wagging finger like a mummer with a bad cold, stinking red nosed blowing the tissues, flying the flags, really believing that the second coming will roil the warming swill and septic infiltrates that pass the narcotic waters like a city obsessively flushing pills and then looking desperately for something to ease the pain.

As Morrison says “No one here gets out alive”.

No one slinks up to believers with a razor for lifting hip pocket slits and wallets and false eyes and the profit is upended like a cart of tourist wares.  No one is sumptuous in the sun after the hours and the fog and the beginning to tell of the deaths of the twentieth century.