Beastly Beast
Even if he was a bull angel,
a land whale, a million tumblers of blubber,
a horned prevaricator,
it took dirty tricks to get him.
He put up only one sign: No soliciting.
His blunder: to be generous
to a fault, his own fault only.
He took his body to extremes, packed
snow around his harvested heart. Doper,
crackhead, meth scout.
A rabbit washes her face in his mouth.
The bolt that once held art
braces a condemned man under stairs.
Sunlight leaches a tapestry to the color of tea.
A daughter is bartered easily.

The Forest of Thorns
It’s odd, such persistence,
as in the story of the sick woman
visited by her robust neighbor.
A week later the neighbor dies
and the sick woman is well enough
to attend the funeral.
The thorns never shrank fully into the earth.
Thorns thicken after they’re sliced.
The daughter of the needle is the knife.

The Shadow Must Find Its Shadow
The shadow wants to climb walls,
to escape above the bed,
to escape being sewn like a veil.
Even a shadow must tear at last,
retract its necklace of skulls and bats.
Until then, the shadow adores the wall
and prefers not to be without it.
It’s the shadow of a bear
as much as of a boy,
yet wilder than a bear or a boy.
Even a shadow wants its liberty
free of the body that bore it,
free of its little father.