Slip into a familiarity with me
Of longtime friends
We’ll recite the past to make us laugh
Keep pace and bark at hens

Slipstream with me
To our graves
Whole cities apart
Hands over hearts
Still chuckling until it hurts

Slip with me over the icy years
We will stumble but never fall

We extend lives
With each word written
An expansion of feelings/rhythm
A bridge/hideout/sidebar
We reach the derelict places/
Holes in souls
And reach in
When others run/paper over/turn away

Intelligence in poetry
a maze of probability
But some parts blocked
By higher promises

A desire to dance
Tugs me along the paths
Propped up in the hallway
My partner masked

Swirl your tailcoats
Grasp my hand
Leave me breathless
Even bloodied as we sway
To the music of our scuffing feet

violins silenced
stars in attendance
As our pens skip

Stitch my mouth closed
Else I speak love
Or bid me cursed in caresses lost
For this art
A bounty’s set
To pull the strings of the heart
And win two souls a home in poetry

light betrays the fine wrinkling dust
The scars of asteroids
The finest starship dancing with space junk
An odd jig circling the hemisphere
A fortune its radio sings
Of human love
Of humanity at all
A pilot who treads the stars
Knows the Earth
Speaks of hell
In such pretty language

In every bakery shop/motorcycle stall/concert hall
I breathe you

Miss you in ways I cannot miss you
My phantom/companion/brother

Lines in the sand blown to nothing
In wind’s tongue
In poetry
We speak