After all the circles in your inferno
    all the accusations before the docket
    the nails through the wrist
    the droughts of vinegar and arsenic
    "For the public good"
    the first stone thrown a thousand times
    in the batting cage of our home

    Lord, let this world choke
    On its ragged masses,

    Let it gag on its damned,
    Its guilty and guiltless--no,

    Allow no innocent souls,
    But guide them all, hand

    I'm pyromaniacal, chronic
    lighter of secret fires,
    bellowser of words, forger
    of desires, &, from base parts,
    wild alloys, charged
    with hard sparks-

    Here is a peddler on my kitchen floor,
    A madman with a broken back. He'll barter
    Bits of detritus, my own black spoor
    My crumbs and soily nickels. Greedy martyr,
    Miser, opportunist. At a touch
    He flies away like leaves, takes up his pack,

    You casual letter m. You bit of news,
    We want to have our fingers smudged with you,
    To flip and press them into that white page,
    That high-borne cloud. We finger-paint, contain
    The soul of flight in split parabolas,

    This is how it goes: the lamb is bled,
    And fed to stones, and mother, on a rope
    Of clothesline, like a good absorbent pad,
    Is tugged to messes, left in them to soak,

    Gray bands of smoke are still alive.
    CNN revisits ash. I don't resist
    the black remote that
    whispered waking in my ear.
    Picnic benches near the towers
    are shards of limbs.
    Steel we thought we were we weren't.
    First waters of old liberties
    see seaweed strangling a pearl.

    When you died, my sister and I flipped a grimy nickel
    to decide which of our salt-stoned cheeks
    would tackle the stash of memories
    huddled in darkness under your bed.
    I lost.

Continuing to write away from the war and the violence of humans and machines, constructing this issue meant to me that I would search for poems that glorified the sensual and psychic spaces of the heart. Don't get me wrong. These are ways away from the war and its devilish consequences. Deconstructions of psychic, social, and emotional spaces, love, lust, desire, loss, absence: these all play a part in the spring issue of Maverick.

to speak is impossible
when the words come articulated through a dead mouth
mouth of air that speaks in whispers
skull opened by streams of another world, skull of water that
looks at the
sea and dead speaks: its dead voice observes what's around