Questions to Allay

The Pema once averred, "Feeling fear
_____means you're approaching the truth."

"Bullshit," is a valid reply.  Abstruse
_____sunlight reflects off jade

Waters wherein William and an escort
_____played out a drama:

Will you, natty and not a slattern as you are, play mama
_____to my sociopath paramour?

Junky

[Note:  Controversial if popular entry.  Toyed with the idea of deleting it.  Suffice it to say, it is a fictional narrative in prose, and was not intended to cause alarm or strife...]

Have you heard the plaintive cry of the owl?
Each night she begs you to remain

My love.  From the kitchen you make a scowl.
Why should your mother restrain

Herself when she and I talk under starlight, the porch
scorched with our cigarette ash?

The scholar loves a warrior:  unseemly to these
Chinese eyes.  I proselytized to a whore.

Yet you saved money well not whoring yourself.
Relax.  Under this gibbous moon

She merely asks, in a half-chicana Napa roar
why you have to leave so soon.

She asked me, as I am to her a son-in-law.
You mentioned that you wish to live no more.

Khonsu

White line of surf
crash and roar --
ocean black as night.

Sky fills with moonlight.
That old god's eye views
the heart.  He replies.

Shifting sand, high dunes.
Do not stay
Through the blue break of day.

He knows you have betrayed
a trust, a love.
Blood from your vein, flayed.

1,000 Forms of Fear

-- Inspired by Sia Furler's album title

She'd never felt vertigo until that trip to Spain.
She laughed at her husband's white knuckles as the plane

lifted off from O'Hare.  She kept secret that thrill
she felt at the turbulence warning.  Still

spill your heart to her?  The leaves and rocks with which
she weights her web are gimcrack.  A twitch

of a thread and she is the same spider, more scared
of him and his arachnophobia than he is of her.  Spare

the audience who would think nothing of her climb
to the monastery.  At the top one feels suspended in time

over a tumble and splat, that's that.  Death be mine.

I-5 (Nocturne)

Diesel exhaust
the savor of it
and the rumble, low
of 18-wheelers at dusk.

A trucker's focused
on this single point:
the yellow light
swarming with gnats.

He hands the girl
behind the counter cash;
she remembers that
detail because no trucker hands her cash.

He's hauling gravel
in a trailer pocked with rust.
He won't be seen again --
this is his last run.