"Things you haven't thought of in years"

Hope for mutation in the copying chain, hope

recession plays out its polydactylous hand,

variations like grains of sand, raisins of sand or

trains or brains or mainframes or manned

spaceflight probes, engine block and

ceramic black tile for home, the heavy

planet's embrace always

hot to the touch --

she loves you so much (and

you love her so much) --, and

as you fall for her, to her, at and into her:

skip of the feather-tipped whisp of

white tendril atmosphere, hot rock of

ship, lake and steelyard surface of earth: where a

group of oxygen triplets used to be, now

gone of all flesh, ashes to ashes, rust and

just another bald spot, scald from within, as if

follicles fell to tin men with their skintone

hatchets and spill so much maple syrup blood from the

trees: mottle waffle-pattern stretch and snap taut to the

skin, drumbeat from within as if jungle of

brains, folds of Amazon neurons, pirahnic river

bends of thought and great

cleft of calloscum: lost

deep are the things you haven't thought of in years for

fear of discovery, disconcert of honesty, or reprisal, no reprieve but for

leave from daily life in the sun, after-

burn melanomic before it's begun.

(Edited 05 July 2009, begun 01 June 2009. A couple sort-of sonnets, or twenty-eight lines broken up as if two sonnets, riffing on cycles like Spenser's, Sidney's, and -- above all, behind them all -- Petrarch's.)