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