Day After Blues

New day, same vantage.
I’ll tell more about it sometime,
but for now, we rumba.
Leaden whispers drop
decisively in the ear.
Mangled mind devoured
by recurrent dawns,
I keep my gaze contained.
Future stained a livid shade.
You must be wondering,
and in so doing,
dissolving.

-r. miller

It’s a Mood

On the chaise longue, on the chaise longue, on the chaise longue,
All day long on the chaise longue.

-Wet Leg

Following the great pause,
mild epiphanies flow like molten silk
through the multicolored canals of the mind.

Indeed, I was just pondering
the aesthetics of the chaise longue.
The curves and rise colliding seamlessly together,
crushed velvet absolving the body of its responsibilities.

Sometimes what I want is to be ethereal,
and this isn’t one of these times.
I inhabit this woozy moment,
imbibing its nectarine sweetness.
Kinda warms the solar plexus
with nuzzles and nifty kisses.

It’s uplifting, no?
in a generic brand sort of way.
And so, what do these curtains,
so carefree and barely parted, contain?
Merely the night, my son. Merely the night.

-r. miller

Is It Time Yet to Get Down?

Somebody’s got a case of the Mondays.
By now, it’s Thursday,
and the forecast is calling
for sophisticated violence.

Get ready for a heartbreaking drip, ignoble tease.
Observe the ease with which these sidewalks
issue their promise of meaningful passage
toward a future circumscribed
only by the city limits.

You know, like I was saying.
Feels like eons ago
that we last donned luxuriant corporate regalia
and got our fill of each other.
Sustained only by heaving gulps of pure energy.
I dig not what the others dig.
This resonance has failed to please.

-r. miller

Feast of St. Valentine

You don’t understand; I don’t have
these pictures in my head, can’t have
them even. Abandoning vacation mode,
we have the appearance of jet streams
against a soft red sky, and the bills come
one by one to be collected, off
again seeking the next fucking letdown,
the pen low on ink, evidence
in tatters by the incandescent roundhouse.

I like the look of lacking
through the melted glass of private lives,
stitching together a vast theory of everything.

You weren’t supposed to see
what it is you’re seeing, even glimpsing,
at this merry moment of reply, and me
as haggard and horrid as ever, wearing
the feeling in my cheek the feeling of you
bubbling cool and classy as you whisper
to me through the crescendo of afternoon,
clapping me real good with temptation.

-r. miller

Another One About Being Tired

Alright, I’m going to need a moment.
A haunting sound, a haunting image.
A single sigh swathed in sheets of blue.

To think I once thought myself capable
of measuring the will of the earth
using only extremities.

I’m afraid I must retract the following:
past statements, past indiscretions, past lives.
Rosy dust coheres in an out-of-touch space.

I caress the finer points of time’s edge,
singing to myself and myself alone
a litany of little deviations.

-r. miller

That’s a Wrap

These aren’t the words you’re looking for.
Please rise, later descend, to the occasion.
The histamines hum vigorously.
The irradiated muscle contracts.

We can have these problems too,
can feast on fallacy and strike out
together into rosy solitude.
Such feral machinery, this thing we call life.

Truly we’re not safe for broadcast,
what with the inky disputes which shroud us,
the not-so-pleasing implications
for the full-bodied Socius.

I’ve given my all, I’m fond of telling myself,
or my all has given me.
Drowsing ferociously in the artificial heat,
my darkening nerves absorb me.

-r. miller

Good Luck With That

I’m guessing the division is unsatisfying.
The undistinguished whatever nags
from behind a gathering storm.
His tsk is eternal.
Unluckily enough, I’m beset on all sides
by crass emojis, sinews
unable to replicate, duress on course.
The main thing is compunction,
humming it up with the demonic.
Trembling aloud
the worst of several indiscretions
that so impress our generation’s battered countenance,
we take to the air, the field, the crosswalk.
Casual Friday won’t ever be the same.

-r. miller

In Deep

Go ahead
and crimp those remnants.
We find whatever
never-sought conclusions
we deserve at the end
of a long memory about fields
and ancient stonework.

A cataclysm is underway.
Just say you want
the contents of your head
shifted up a bit, sifted through
slightly rusted mesh
so as to impart flavor.
How are we proceeding today?

Confetti canyons stand between us,
and all New Year’s resolutions
take up arms. But
this is merely one part
of the perception.
The clattering in the eyes.

-r. miller

Sure is Something

More damage than expected,
but considering all things,
we’re less maudlin about it than we oughtta be.
Still, what strange duress.

The weary eye contains
the disco of a dying age.
Thus the denizens of this haunted place
rage rage against the drooping of the beat.
Now get lost in my bones.

I was an upstanding citizen in my heyday.
A pulse for every finger,
a figure worth drawing.
Of course, the wall of wavering hands
shot up out of the nothing my passions made,
and I stayed on the line
until the dial tone sounded itself into obsolescence.

Adolescence is a mighty fine tragedy,
wouldn’t you agree?
We still can’t get our gaze out
from underneath it.

-r. miller

New Year, New Me?

What is there left to dislike?
Thus uninspiration takes its toll,
bigger and better than the last time,
before shoving baby beneath the bathwater.
Winter disrobes slowly,
revealing a slightly less ghastly sight
than we had thought.
Circumstance chimes insistently.

Much dancing and feasting is required.
Tongue-tied, I’ve learned to let each word
fall where it may.
Six times a day I check my reflection
for signs of rejuvenation,
though to my immense dismay,
it’s looking as withered and destitute as ever.

Maybe if we took a vacuum to the ruins,
tidied up a bit, some long lost radiance
could be recovered.
Bold of you to assume
there was ever radiance to be lost.

-r. miller