My face in the mirror looks raw

as seafood. The dawn feels limp

against my skin. Yesterday a friend

reported that his liver cancer

has claimed his other organs,

revising and reordering them

in defiance of their Latin names.

Six months to live, if he’s lucky.

If it would help, I’d let him look

through my gaze at this image

too unfamiliar to kill him.

Nose bulbous as ginger root,

mouth a gash imperfectly healed,

eyes lifeless behind glasses

thick as the soles of old shoes.

On the far edge of America,

he lives with a mother almost

a hundred years old and doomed

to survive her eldest son.

The slush of the timber-heavy coast

of Oregon soothes most wounds,

and Mount Hood spikes the horizon

with a ghostly presence subject

to the censorship of weather.…

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At that angle you could see that the wind arrived at the tree to lift its branches. Raising them up with a slight and determined motion, like horses go upwards on a merry-go-round, the thick and layered leaves made for worlds inside the structures of the branches. The wind stayed in there, and only after long moments let the branches and its accompanying leaves down. Up the way a chime hung from a metal hook. It was terra cotta, with someone having painted blue depictions of Kokopelli all around it. Purple flowers waited in a hanging container beside the chime, and when the sun was strongly lit these opened more than they were used to doing, and then stretched a bit towards aerial brightness.

In the summer’s end the leaves weakened and fell, each batch getting to know the ground and the curt suburban lawns and boulevards for the first time.…

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(version 3)

Someday Jesse wants to go home.

I see his world,

all it’s hidden concepts

embedded in Jesse’s aging facelife

has whispered by leaving

memory trails

wrinkled forehead,

deep as river bed ruts

dried with years, weather-beaten,

just above his bushy eyebrows

that are gray and twisted

much like life drawing memories

across his empty face.

Jesse has a long oblique

Jewish nose with dark

blue opal eyes,

that would pierce

even the pain

of his own crucifixion.

Life tears flow though

a whole new ghoulish

apparition, a vision

of homelessness plastered

east of Dearborn Bridge,

near Lower Wacker Drive,

downtown Chicago

where affluent citizens

seldom go unless inebriated;

puke-stained, or in a taxicab.

————————————–

Jesse’s hair sprouts skyward,

groomed like an abandoned

dove nest in wild Chicago

meandering winds.…

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The Ascension of David      

 

 

In the Clouds of Shame

Of the Creator’s Guild

– Ernest Williamson III …

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Elegant autumn silhouettes hang around like little men
in bars, unsteady, anticipating the season’s departure.
They fall at any opportunity and the sun, always there,
secures the dapple-drunk-dancers into cool afternoon festival.
The harvests sleep; leaves have curled. The bruised past
flickers now through scratched, monochrome re-run.
Earth, still in motion; weary and ripped, shivers.
Dead spirits form low blankets of clouds –
they keep watch over the hollow creatures.
Spellbound, they, marveling new skin.
Eyes freshly gouged from wars stitched with ego-thread,
see the wandering babies collect fallen, colourless irises.
Miniature weapons of hate and fiction – undesirable gewgaws.
Then small distractions shatter tall visions like sudden,
burnt toffee and shadows ascend once more.
They fade fast into yesterday without hope.
And the hollow creatures, bloated with clichéd
placebo, expire like the little men’s smoke,
billowing skyward at the bar.…

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Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to The Bookends Review. We’ve worked hard over the last few weeks, and now it has finally paid off. Check back every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for new pieces. We’ve already got plenty lined up.…

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