Nightmares

Don't stop those slices of death that visit me every night:

the one I argue with my father on a high rooftop
under a burnt swirling sky,
I am naked and standing on the edge fighting the wind
my rage disappears into the rushing gusts
the impotence so heavy and longstanding...
I embrace the emptiness

the one where I sit naked in a metal chair,
the steel cold traveling up the back of my thighs,
my anus and testicles into my chest and just behind my eyes,
the cold so deep my every pore screams
and I watch myself from a distance,
perhaps from behind a two-way mirror,

and shiver

and wish it to end

and wake to a pounding
aliveness better than a near death
car accident

these little cuts and the black flow
are mercy sweet.

Autumn (second try)

I breathe deeply watching Daisy sniffing the roadside,
thirteen pounds trotting forward and stopping,
her spring loaded leash reeling in and out,
as she reads invisible secretions,
which make me wonder, and smile,
the smell of pine lingering in the air
in the growing evening,
and the thick bush to our left
made me anxious,
the wild grey coyotes have struck before,
so I hurried her along
and I resolved to leave earlier the next day.

Then I felt the breeze cut across my neck, cold, part of the gloom,
and I heard a wet slap loud over the chirping birds.
I shivered and heard several more slaps, realizing the leaves were falling
for the first time this autumn,
the trees overhanging the road were letting go of their dead,
and I, a rare witnessing of the change of seasons, the everness of time,

the breeze became wind, thick and dark
and I hurried her along puzzled and wide-eyed,
sniffing without stopping now,
looking at me worried,
but it was too much for me,
that heavy wet slapping of the dead on pavement
like the amateur video of the falling
(oh God, how many dreams has this haunted)
the shouts and screams, the shaky picture panning,
and the crunching slap
as they hit the ground
zero.