the heart keeping me alive

When spiders build webs it is from the center out.


They are fishermen in their wordless devotion, traversing gaps far too large
			for their single bodies. Releasing their webs to the wind and hopin
			it will be caught on the other end.


			Then they cross with the whole world                          			
			underfoot and dizzying.


Spiders have very few confidants, but they trust
the trees that hold them with a fervor that can only be seen as religious.


They pray every time they follow their sole purpose,
and then they still die.

Spiders do not have a heaven, and they also do not have museums
			and that is why spiders are never victims of hesitation.
                               

My grandfather said,
A spider is a chained beast; something feathered and Greek.
	
	
	He would spend his work breaks hungry and watching them
	in a local park in his new country, a dollar bill for paper and his imagination for a pen.


Admiration is the line that keeps us foreign– desire is the wind chaff that fools the arachnid.


When my grandfather finally could afford to become a painter,
	his canvas was many chambered, held pockets that took decades of staring to see, 
	and when left to bloom in the light of truth, they grew copper smelling with gold glittering 
	inner-workings; became timepieces of ice that performed their own smoke-heavy smelting. 

    
When we die, we become violet clouds over the sea,
expelled from a New York crematorium,
and the spiders continue to work in the shade our new forms make
While they weave themselves homes seen in that day's break.                                                     

 Pick-up truck rhetoric 

I.
It’s easy to grow hooked on detecting hazards in the dark–
	a local boy starts running to stay in trouble.


Headlines have been walking about, stretching inked legs,
	and local guns have been pale divining rods over shifting land.

Big mouthed men keep buying speakers
	to remind about the gap between platform and vehicle.

Certain muscles begin to flex their owners. Becomes hard
	to move through life’s soft afternoons with dusk on one’s breath.


II.
A pick-up truck’s headlight radius is the hand above a crib.
It moves sideways through the dark felt like silver scissors 
skinning a rabbit carcass. Rips through the the day’s subconscious 
like a lucid thought trapped in a coffin. Stalks its surrounded prey 
with big cat solitude, purring in perpetual idle, driven with trigger 
finger and boot heel.

The working men have light wallets
that bend to weight like a rogue planet cut from tether,


		and in the night every shuffling figure is a new north star– 		
			commanding despite its fixed condition.


Patrolling needs no jurisdiction, simply needs need like a full cup drunk 
	on the narrative of half-filled states.


High Beams– like two lines of final advice– state:
	Run from the timid gunpoint, there is lust 
	living in the sidestreets of fear– blood in milk