Swallowing is the Issue

The doctor tells me, the feeding tube is the size of linguine. There is no irony in his voice. Facts. It's temporary, to get nutrients into the old man. He had two small strokes in bad places. 

Carnivore octogenarian dilemma. The old man hasn't had a meal in five days. A man prideful about his choppers, his cock, and numbers. A temporary feeding tube?

B.F.M.

Stroke

Reborn, a butterfly with paws, gnarled breath and fangs. Letters crumble from your lips, your right blue eye dips, your brain hardens to an anvil were the darkest blacksmith pin points his pounds. Your hands fist, tongue strays, your swallow gone.

B.F.M.

Mothers See

The right hand is darker than the left. An apple is flecked with yellowish specks. Peeled tangerines sit on a blue and white checkered tablecloth. Horses are ridden.

Schooners hoisted sails fill the innocent bay with blood stained sheets, puffed up and out, gliding hulls through skipping waters. Gulls squawk.

Mothers standing on crescent shores seeing there daughters number, 543, 782 or 314, hoisted, skipping into bluer waters.

B.F.M.

Ox-eye Daisy

After plucking and eating an ox-eye daisy’s pure white petals one by one, her bright yellow central disk stood firm daring me to eat her too. So I did. This simple act of devouring, flooded my eyes with a million past meadows filled with generations of ox-eyed daisies, deer, buck, butterfly, buffalo, dawns, dusks, wooly mammoths. 

Out of my right eye a single tear, a sacrifice to the sun, out of my left a rivulet that became a creek, that became a stream, that became a river, that became a lake that fed a meadow, that fed a fallen seed, that sprouted.

B.F.M.

Four parts

In one part of my brain a man wearing a tweed jacket rides a motorcycle round and round a Tudor house; in another, a ten year old child counts to ten looking for the perfect word to describe the lasting effects of an alligator taking his ten toes, three brothers and whoring mother back to the swamp to start a new life without him; in a third part there’s a spike so I laugh when I should cry and cry when I should laugh. In the fourth part is a corridor banked with windows overlooking fatty tissue that insists there is an I in there.

B.F.M.

I know what I'm doing

Rita kept her fuzzy strapped pink slippers and matching laced negligee chilled in the lower neglected family waters at tentacles reach.

Her skin glistened like frosted dew in the moon's wane, ready to melt under the firm embrace of an intellectual bipedal man, if only he’d risk a late night swim in a losing tide uncovering tentacles flailing with knives, forks and mirrored shards.

B.F.M.

Best Wishes

I wish you could see me. Now.

But you never did, I wasn’t metric enough;

too weighty on the air side.

B.F.M.

Drank Drunk

I gathered my-me, my-self, my-I under the silver maple’s spout. I unlatched the hatch that covered the cup that’s hidden in my head. I drank drunk her unfettered liquor hoping to cure the hole that is my chest. However after all the ounces, cups and pints I drank, my gray matter started to crank, first left, then right. I spin ‘til spun falling deep in grass where I slept under a quarter moon’s light, ‘til two roots of Ms. Maple ascended pulling and pushing me through Br’er Rabbits doorway, hall, bedroom, bath, down his drain a thousand leagues beneath her leaves that gathered stardust for her toes, as the roots dangled mine three feet above flame bringing her consumed liquor to boil, then steam, then distilled. drop. drop. drop.

B.F.M

Time

The curve of the hand 

and hourglass

feel the slipping sand.

B.F.M

Walking Blackett’s Ridge

The shiny fleck of what is, 

radiant, 

until the sun shifts, 

then it dulls behind dusk.

B.F.M

Fly Fishing

The nymph sailed then dropped, playing him the way water plays a river bank, floating atop with a whisper, lips brushing against his cheek, gazing through clear cool water, easing into the arms of an eddy. 

Abruptly, she’s flung into the blue sky, zigging an zagging at the mercy of her mistress wading forward ready to cast at a newer bank. Repeat.

B.F.M.

Trollhood

I didn’t become a troll on purpose. It happened after the falling in love was done, when the fog filled costal valleys, when the silver tarnished and you no longer saw me in the silvery light of a spoon.

B.F.M.

Near-Sighted

My eyes see you 

inches from me

my heart feels

you’re

a marathon away.

B.F.M.

Show You the Door

If I show you a door, do I need to supply dialog? Would it be the same as a window looking out into gray harsh misted field where buffalo once roamed in rooms as large as dinosaur skulls? There is a Neanderthal boy in the field, running, playing or fleeing it hasn't changed. All these, are things of a changing order taking millions of years during which a trillion-billion-million snow flakes will fall, then you will be born. Broken. Healed. Broken. Chased across a field of dandelions. Loved. Madness bouts. Loss. Then you or I will be eaten by a yet to be named virus that causes someone to dream a reality that makes you believe you are the beginnings of a sun.

B.F.M.

Haunting

When you’ve grown accustomed to spring water springing between polished rocks, it’s haunting when its cadence diminishes to a drip, drip, drip, stop.

B.F.M.

Dog Story, One

I didn't see the hit. I saw the old dog, Australian Shepard mix, motionless. I saw two cars banked, two wheels on, two wheels off the roadside's ledge. I saw a women standing over the dog looking down, and a man walking toward the dog. All three looked helpless, like a dog that's been hit.

B.F.M.

Medium Grind

Coffee ground to medium, shifted to French Press. Water to almost boil. Five minutes, then pour. Dark like early morning. Half & half like the sun rising. Drink.

B.F.M.

Fishing

Two kingdoms 

face-to-face

thumb side up.

One life line 

a choppy sea.

The other, 

a smooth lake 

from palm bottom

to Thumb & Index Bay.

My pen bridging 

torrid waters

resting on edges, 

waits for a nibble
on the cast line.

B.F.M.

Tumbling Heights

Poets may not be hero tough, but we can walk between clouds. Live off thin-thin air. Shoot flaming arrows at the stars, tumble gods to earth.

B.F.M.

Wildebeest

In an effort to stay hidden, I wear a cardboard box over my head. I've painted faces on each side. Side one, my mouth is a cerulean crescent; side two, my mouth is a straight black charcoal line; side three, it's a 4h penciled "O"; side four, I leave blank, as to appear that I have it all. 

On walks, I skip.

B.F.M.

When to Bluff

My love, we’ve become an ordinary poker hand, 

a pair of threes thinking we were a flush.

B.F.M.

Cistern

Cut glass distorts your eyes and my seeing. We continue on, as if the cistern hadn't been rotated and filled with ice. We practiced — okay and fine; two amateur ping pong players in a polite warmup.

B.F.M.

Annoying Lot

Brothers. Holmes. Both think they deduce motive, flavors, favorite colors. Decipher voice inflections. One of them read too much of the other.

B.F.M.

Spell

Quiet dirge,

twilight.

Moon born

half light.

Mind, mind, mind.

Snow drift,

midnight.

Dark raven's 

vexed sight.

B.F.M.

Anxiety 2

Floating on a tide that ignores moon and sun, who’s true masters are relentless pictographs – a historical fiction writer and an one eyed seer in a meat locker with a cracked crystal ball – my cooled breath quickens as I watch shark fins circle my predilections for thunder and lightning. 

B.F.M.

Two Things

It's one thing to chain a man to an anchor, to drop him overboard; it's another to leash him to a buoy, to let him drift.

B.F.M.

The Fair

Over and over we rode the the Tunnel of Love, Tilt a Whirl, The Flying Dutchman.

Ate pussy and cock like pink and blue cotton candy, pretending it was nourishment. 

Looked into each other's eyes until they turned drab-empty. Smiled, like we were still having the time of our life.

B.F.M.

Quiet

Dead sparrow lays quiet,

his fellows pass

the mourning in silence.

B.F.M.

Not Me

Who’d a thought

a broken down mule

would find a home

in tender arms?

B.F.M.

Coming and Going

Willfully I clinched 
two poems
white knuckled tight.

You honeyed my
fingers open.

Two monarchs unleashed
flitted
to purple eyed heliotrope.

B.F.M.