Dermatoglyphics: 1) (n) The ridge patterns of skin on the inner surface of the hands or feet. 2) (n) The study of these skin patterns.

Wander winter coastlines,
Curving snow-capped sandbars,
White-caps and eddies carving
Curling glyphs into the continent.
Shapes with cold resonance,
Meanings I stand too close to see.

From here, the rimey lines reaching
Out to my fingertips feel like traction.
As if they were hooks holding my breath and then
Drawing the air out of me to hang unread
Smoke signals before dissipating like
Whispered words for distant ears.

Where the gray sky disappears into gray seas,
Horizon pours through my eyes,
And the frequencies between the sullen air molecules
Suddenly hum in sympathetic consonance with my lungs.
Some deep hollow reverberates in my chest.
It rattles me until I can no longer tell whether I am inhaling
Some communication sublimating from the frost,
Or slipping into a seasonal apophenia that grips me.

After all, fingerprints are less about friction
Than heightening sensation, creating grooved channels
To convey information more diligently to nerve endings.
Or maybe it is just the chilled air making
My exposed hands raw.

Steady circulation thrums deeper on each pass,
Bringing warming blood back up
To the starved synapses which were misfiring in the cold.
I know I've written this same poem over,
At least once for each year reaching five years past.

But each new telling scopes outward, I hope,
Rotating slightly before repeating its routine,
Encoded mathematical structures, fractal data, 
Meaning held in the riven ridges of my fingertips
Flowing into the channels of jack frost,
Drifting from each snowflake on up
Until I can see it blown big down the eastern seaboard
And catch some hidden message
Not entirely evident to me when standing
Up so close to the shoreline.

Anomie: (n) Social instability and alienation caused by the erosion of norms and values.

Being hemmed in by the night
Is not so much the issue
As the blank spaces resting in the shadows,
Absent of warm bodies.
It is when you can feel parts of your brain
Liquefy, and pour out of your ears,
and you begin to forget things.

How you were once taut and tidy,
Which words are your own,
or even how to speak aloud.

You forget why you should wait
For another three hours
Before going to bed at nine
When you’ve been awake,
and doing nothing at all,
for the last thirty hours.

Synapses not quite firing,
Nerves not communicating
Heart’s desires to the brain, the spine, the muscles.

Parts rusted solid from disuse.

Prosopagnosia: (n) The inability to recognize familiar faces

Time, distance, emotion, activity,
are all
A clouded mirror.

Jake: (adj) Satisfactory; all right; okay

When I succumb to the slow poison,
Consciousness leeched from my ears,
I find another me, waiting for the chance.

And he has a wonderful life,
Or so it seems to me. He knows
All the types of people I would like to know.
He is chasing love, and finding tiny,
Glittering motes of care reflected back at him.

Each time I wake, we go from looking up at stars,
To looking up at a plaster ceiling.
And it is a little disheartening for me,
But for him, it's just a bad dream,
And at least one of us is happy.

Mathematicaster: (n) A minor or incompetant mathematician

The careful forms,
Straight descending lines.
Too many years spent sequestered,
Too many dollars frittered away
To see the world as a collection of shapes,
To know the numerical sequence
That defines a physical world when it is
Broken down into pure, descriptive
Analysis.

Dripping information carving
Geometric patterns into the substrate,
Slowly changing the world around
From gleeful chaos
To wondrous, hidden order.

Too late to alter worked grooves
In the mind, when it becomes evident
That the tools available were insufficient
To adequately work the wood
Into usable shape,
But just enough
So that the rest of the world
No longer recognizes
The shapes presented there.

Copemate: (n) 1: An associate or friend, 2: An opponent or adversary (OR: The Insistance on Memory)

Petals falling, leaves changing hue.
Whiskers growing, weather cooling too.
Shadows aching, stretching into air.
Strong scents fading, following after care.

Asperse: (v, tr) 1: To spread false or malicious charges against someone 2: To sprinkle with holy water (OR: Upon the softening of aging bodies.)

Is there, somewhere beneath the skin,
A heart still beating flame?
Is there hardened muscle below the fat?

Or is there atrophy in the limbs?
Is there routine pumping through the veins?
Are you choked with degraded meat?

The surgeries are all retrograde motion,
And the sullied portions fade with every
New breeze anyway.

Spreading holy water across the skin
Will purify the tainted flesh, indeed,
But is renewed discipline any less vain?

Roborant: (n) A tonic, (adj) Strenghtening

Catch whispers of wood fires,
And maybe you too will feel
The hollow pull in the center of your chest
That fills with chilled excitement every fall,
A deep yearning, some primal reaction
Woven through rationalizations,
Because we are a thinking people.

But, perhaps, there is a red string
Running from my ribs to yours,
And the motors just aren't strong enough
To reel us in to each other.

The rest of the year, when the hole is patched up,
We have not stopped searching,
We are convalescing.

Come November, we will again wander through
Nights lit up like blue days by moonlight,
And eventually, we will spool our lines together.

Costive: (adj) Slow to speak or act, stingy, constipated

Maybe the reticence melts away:
When I sit here beneath the skylight
The heat flows out of me and collides
Into the glass, making a growing
Oval of condensation.

But it does little to stoke lyrical fires:
The moon above is refracted
In the cohesive spots suspended
Like swords above me.

Praetorian: (adj) Corruptible, Fraudulent

I hate fishing.

I've spent a good amount of time
Sifting mire through my fingers,
Finding my fingernails beneath.

Standing in the cold, wet veil
That smothers the ground, the lake.
Watching him in his rubber waders.

Watching my breath stretch,
Winding itself around bare trees.
He is so much taller than I am.

But he looks nothing like my father.
And I am not that small age anymore.
I would prefer wandering through the fall foliage.

The woods are full of running and games,
Piles of leaves for jumping, light filtering,
Projecting scenes of halcyon youth.

He seems too serious, sedentary,
Motionless, save for a flicking wrist,
Save for the flashing eyes.

He's thin, hungry, determined.
But he doesn't know how to fish.
Neither do I.

He just stands there like Father Time,
Rooted in the rotted lake-bed.
But each time I turn back to the trees

He gives the hook a little pull,
My head jerks upward,
Our eyes meet.

I am somewhere between those two places.
But it is starting to get cold.

And I need to eat.

Gundygut: (n) A voracious eater, a greedy person.

Oil, Lust, Blood,
Taxes, Profits, Love,
Harvest, Virus, Carbon,
Creation, Development, Birth,
Eulogies, Yard Sales, Recognition,
Happiness, Success, Rhyme Schemes,
Succession, Kingdoms, Gods, Audience,
Parades, Fireworks, Passion, Paints, Diets,
Economics, Game Theory, Hierarchies, Society.

philanthropy, atrophy, endothermics, death, sea salt,
tides, grass, dew, breezes, kittens, whiskers,
wind chimes, contentment, day dreams,
spring air, fall air, snow drifts, purrs,
birdsong, starlight, shadows,
convalescence, hope,
graphite, erasers,
sawdust, time,
milk-teeth,
kerning.

Scrannel: (adj) 1: Thin 2: Unmelodious.

Sometimes words of honey
And at others, those of pitch.
A cold trickle of water,
Or perhaps a rotten abrasion.

Words themselves remain impartial.
Only the candy-coating conveys
The undercurrent.

So that meaning can still be found
In the baying of my rasping throat.
Even when the flow comes jagged
As it does in this faltering poem.

Ween: (v) To think, suppose, believe.

We've had it wrong for years,
and we should never have
Forced so many children
Into the cold realms
Of philosophy.


Such tiny hands
Only really ever produce
Sophistry and Solipsisms.

Worthless.

Sweven: (n) Dream, vision.

Umm, excuse me?
I am way too waspy for this.
Boiled potatoes, stewed beef.
That is more me.

I find your headdress tacky and
Outmoded. It reminds me
Too much of smallpox blankets.

And anyway, shouldn't I be seeing
Wings and clouds and Jesus?

This is the third impertinent perversion
Of God's number, you know.
(The first being Lucky Number Sleven,
The second being the name Steven.)

You should just let me sleep.

Point-Device: (adv) completely, perfectly (adj) Perfect, precise, meticulous

It demurely shakes off the paleo-dust,
A little callipygian, verbal beast.
A coquette of syllable recognition,
And some long interred desire.
A fire I'd grown inured against.

Some arcane tongue sprung up
Between the cracks in our modern language.
It matches a need I have, quite point-device,
Rolling ball, blank ink, point: extra fine.

Come here, little darling.
I won't lose you again.
But the world sees only your awkward corners.

Come home with me,
And let me run your hyphen across my lips.

Garboil: (n) Confusion, Turmoil

Confusion begets amusement
Turmoil is tumult, bemusement

So this discarded word,
This jumble of garbage and earth-blood,
Suits this situation better.

The waves pass from the brain,
They become garbled.
The resultant friction from scraping
Static signals evokes distress in me.

I've grown a spoiled, hard-boiled garboil.

Titian: (n) A reddish or golden auburn color. (AKA The Popular Themes of Life and Love Annotated in Copper Ink.)

Dawn spreading gentle fingers,
Tickling trees slathered with the colors
Of Autumnal flesh.
The tone of the hair
On a Rust-Curl girl.

The same hue of steel
Being hammered into formed function.
The color of those fireworks
With the second-stage showering sparks.

What has come to me now as
Carnival-glass spheres, reflecting
Distorted images of memories and
Descending slowly into deepening darkness
Like bubbles blown at dusk.

However, I'm trying not to embellish,
So it's simply the titian glory
In a sunset that signals
The loss of another day.

Ragamuffin (n): Someone, esp. a child, in ragged, dirty clothes.

There is something less charming
In this scene.

Still Oliver Twist,
Artful Dodger,
But less Disney,
More Dickens in London.

Dingy, no...
Dirty.

No mutt dogs
Singing Billy Joel songs
To cute, grey, animated kittens.

No kittens at all,
And you know how sore
That vexes me.

In the Land of Opportunity,
Trickle Down Theory doesn't.

Only one thing trickles down here.

Huddled masses
Were supposed to stop shivering.
Please do.

You're making us look bad.
The system works, damn it.

Bunbury: 1) n: An imaginary person whose name is used to some purpose. 2) v intr: To use such a name as an excuse.

(For our patron Bunbury)

We lay ourselves full out.
String our souls long like mozzarella
Until they pool on the page.

We rub out fingers into it
Until it loosens.
Add perfumes,
Add tints.

Then we paint with it.

It takes a while,
And with each new sheet,
Every added detail,
We move slower;
Our tanks run lower.

One day the engine will seize,
The gears dry and tight.
Our bodies slumped against the desk,
Amid piles of paper.

After enough time, when we decompose,
And each iota becomes airborne,
It will mix with the faded scents.

If someone stumbles upon it,
We can only hope they understand
The completeness of that moment.

Pinchbeck (n): An alloy of zinc and copper used as imitation gold in jewelry 2) adj: counterfeit or spurious

I bit it, and I saw the marks
My teeth left. I saw the glitter.
I felt the heat left from my touch.

I wiped away the makeup.
I used astringent against the
Cloying mask to find what was hidden.

I saw the sun come up over the trees.
I breathed open air.
The road was wide, and empty.

The ring was fake.

The freckles were only glitter.

The sun was setting.

The road was closed.

I'll push deeper next time.