(Looming Cancer Disrespect Edition)

Belts gibbous waxing hum 
through the blackout  curtains
crushed red velvet,  
  once clitoral
  as bones cradle that 
relentless fear of death

Inside one’s self
  pistons grinding 
against night’s lubricated hours 
   Awake.
Does the lean wolf’s fast align 
with your field’s meager harvest?

Finally dreaming,
Oak calipers clamp 
   Virgo’s nubile nipples, 
    as swelling clay and marrow 
  melt beneath a 
metal harvest moon.

Broken Gears on Mars 
  mesh with phantom unemployment, 
There are no roots 
in the lifeless  sterile soil
  Velokovsky’s ancient civilizations
 waiting in the timeless 
void of space

Off a distant coast the Lotus 
  idles  in neutral dawn, 
  meditation sparks petaled
 spasms in the 
 wind exhausting 
the chrome horizon’s heat.
  wrinkled fingers 
  decode these iron bars, 
How longs this cage of stone?

The most innocent convicts 
   hide in fenders and in the trunks
   of broken down race cars with 
  language etched 
in shivering thunder, 
 indecipherable in the winter chill
Praying for escape

Saturn yields to blooms denied, 
  fusing delicious raptured bodies 
    into molten planetary sleep.
Venus murmurs 
 as her gardens remain shattered 
   by wild pelvic thrusts, 
The Lotus petal love bending through steel corset longing.

Mercury’s wheel turns, 
   dripping heat from 
 thought’s naked fictional cage.
Broken open by ancient desire
This, my age-
haunted by suicide chasms 
  are under memories 
shadowed moons.

Altars of chrome emit 
  religious gleam; 
  as female tide draws circuitry down towards 
the divine menopausal immersion.

Constellations slowly breaking  
  weary solder’s souls,  
    in luminous asphalt 
    prayer’s of distant peace
  The tank tracks crush
 through twisted metal, 
 clothed in railway dust.
as silver tumors glitter like mercury pearls beneath the ribs.

Throats collapsing 
  inside labor’s sticky heat.
    the tangle of rusted desire looses the 
  Interstitials  decay of 
  long lost passions and
 Now the glands 
have fully calcified.

Each night I count  
 metabolism’s halted assembly.
Desire, once voltage, 
   flickers to standby; 
   a colder circuitry 
  governs this aging corpus.
Hands no longer spark, 
   touch becomes inventory. 
 Flesh registers 
its’ permissions missing

Outside, engines of youth rev 
  in feral ecstasy, 
Their music shedding elders 
  like paint.
They mock our rituals, 
  film our frailty, 
   and archive us 
as stoic hieroglyphs 

Where once the body was a forge, 
   it is now a storage 
  of failed promises.
Rust does not hurt — 
   only refuses to shine.

The young no longer descend 
   to the scrapyards 
  of bygone days
  to learn repair.
They accelerate instead, 
    bright in their disposable flesh, 
   leaving us unclaimed.
Abandoned in the icy refuse of memory

SGL Brunswick, ME 2/2/2026