With untaxed money a thief gave me
before his death by disappearance,
and inheritance from an unnamed aunt,
I purchase a major league baseball team.  

I do it for the fun of giving them a name.
Their hometown is a moving target
on a map of Texas, so I’m thinking Amigos,
or Hombres if Amigos is too pink.  

I interrupt a board meeting no one told me about.
They stare at me with a lot of white in their eyes.
Their motionless faces say I’m the boss
they’d stab if I turned my back.  

However, they seem to know what they’re doing,
all this business stuff with columns and lines,
so I back out of the room like I’m delegating.
I’ll just work on the name.  

My CEO catches me in the hall.
He has a John Waters mustache.
I need to stay on top of this thing
or its going to get away from me.  

We schedule a meeting for Sunday
at the place where the thief gave me money.
I jot down some ideas:
Figure out how to make money.  

Pleased with myself, I put down my pen.
I’ll think up one or two more before the meeting.
Owning a baseball team is doable.
But it feels like work, and I’m supposed to be retired.  

I wake to birdsong and revelation.
My teeth and tongue are imitating the bird’s.
I’ll sell the baseball team and learn to sing like a bird!
But research reveals that’s not how birds sing.  

I lose faith in myself. My brain is a cotton ball.
Retirement isn’t where every day is Sunday.
It’s a day not among the seven that govern labor.
It’s a baseball team that doesn’t have a name.

Sun in Leo, some three degrees:
a house cat threatening emulous starlings.

Moon perversely split with the centaur and goat-fish,
fob-watched Lorna Doone like glaucous ribs,
like rice in a wine sack passably peddled as
                          some folk Cymraeg rain stick:
breakneck breath of a burpling cryptid’s stomach
obscured in the greening clouds
like fumes from a Barbicide plant
due south of old Rose O’Neil’s golden Branson.

Mercury sulkily curled in that rose quartz conch
that a crackling piggy’s still stuck on:
those erudite eructations sperm whales weave
round hunch-backed Poseidon’s knees,
who carried the world in one woeful wail,
with Atlantis tacked with a rusty nail
to the plinth of a broken snow globe snagged
on buoying rolls of a charred sanatorium mail sack—

Venus between the twins: amanuensis
for fractured factoids flung like Ajax
glibly dissembling throes of a
spoondrift brushed down glittering eaves
of a duplex squatters were piercing the septum of

Mars at home with Ares, embarrassed:
a child refining from chivalrous trophies her sister scored,
among snickering litters of proxy wars their mother’d incensed,
a flaccid plastic cutlass beat against
Joanie’s gorgeous gorget cobbled from
playing cards and Julia Child’s
recipe cards
and greeting
cards and
cards left flattened, black, and red as Robespierre
                                            trumped in a tricks game.

Jupiter, but a degree beyond the bull’s hor—

What do you got their, Goldie? Goldie,

a wheat paste golem
sprawled out among newspaper clippings and passages plucked,
curled up into ickle and ticklish scrolls,
and dandled in sulfurous vinegar,

wadded up gods and planets a toddler scrawls
in wax across crumpling crepe paper;

sulkily nestles her baubles back in their tackle box.
It was a gift she’d intended to give herself come

morning, lucid as scars of stars in the
scurvied and scurrilous sky come midnight

bay to their smoldering hearts’ delights.

source maintains answers
guessers gab scenarios
frivolous forecasts

haiku: pieta

i am not holy,
just a mother turned to stone,
who can’t let you go. 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pietà_(Michelangelo)#/media/File%3APieta_de_Michelangelo_-_Vaticano.jpg

Buzz the fall fly in my bonnet
Burr the chain saw feeding the smoke
Calming my own self as it all falls around me
Autumn’s come so settle down
We’ll be here now til winter

There are horses here
Penny, Nickels , Dime, Quarte, Half and Dollabill
A quiet place, worthless really
Eight thousand acres of nothing
On the corner of a pipeline and a dirt road

Place called Slick Rock
On the Dolores Sometimes River
Biggest noise we’ve heard yet
Gas line crew came through
With horses and riders, who knew

Nickels and Dime wanted to join them
I was tempted to allow it
But I kept them in the stall
I’ve known some horses
But these two are just flat out stupid

Penny is the biggest and the boss, a red mare
Quarte is dull and strong, eats a lot
Half and Dollabill are married
Now for awhile we have this ranch
We ride the gas line

I tell myself I cannot help

                                You’re so bad for me.  Or good.   
                                But one of the two…

the last text, from a dream, drifting—
waking to viscous ink-stained bedroom,
sweat-laced pillow cool at your back,
glaucous sky through slats, & then
the phone comes to life

I’m just what you need.

                         ***

It would be easy for you to reduce
exchange of energy & physicality
to only this
                        need & desire,
                        feeding the fire

                        left cold, in the downpour
                        of spring

but
she is
shield maiden to the dawn
vouchsafing night & gone
before light breaks.  I am the one
breaking under
          pink-tipped nails, escaping
through the cracks
                                         of puritan                             
                                         & patriarchal
                                         mold.

                         ***

When you come,
                                 you beg
I come                 
                   home to the me
no one’s bothered
                                  to see
or release.

You tease,
I’m trying to pull it out of you

                         ***

I thought
recent months
had revealed
I was
less.                         I am
                       becoming
                       More.

                         ***

                                    I did.  Dream about you, I mean.

I thought so.
                                   Why do you say that?

I felt it.

“False weights and unequal measures— the Lord detests double standards of every kind.” Proverbs 20:10 (NLT)

Consider proportionality.
Golden rule and mean alike.

(Do this all the time, pastor:
if you’d read the words in red,
gauged their scale and ratio.
you’d rebuke gluttony,
find no time to censure
what is patient and kind
what endures all things.
Yes, even your clanging.)

When our dead lie in repose,
now’s not the time to proselytize.
Spare us, this day, the real estate pitch:
open concept mansions–great location.

Preacher, conjure and animate
summon their voice, their laughter
invoke their footfall in this room
bewitch their fingers in our palms.

In the vapor haze of window light, eyes shine.

I’m working the preacher curl
at the High Street Y
to tone my arms
for my daughter’s
formal country wedding