is prohibited.

Cover designed by Catherine Blue

& Kaleb Martin

First Edition

ISBN

0-692-66135-2

When one finds oneself with a warranting quantity of recognizable talent in word arrangement, but lacking in the discipline required for a respectable profession, I think a collection of this kind is a sort of inevitability. Feebles in Night is the aftermath of some five years of wholly irregular & nocturnal thought spillage and nostalgic memory fragments, but I have made my most valiant attempt to compile it in the definitively optimal manner for reader enjoyment, reflection, or inspiration. You’ll note my tendency to play with wordage – sometimes violently – but such is the privilege allowed me by this medium. From my perspective, it is perhaps the most essential quality to my works’ originality. It is my sincere hope that some soul- derived insight and value will be manifest for yours.

David Blue Columbia, Missouri

U.S.A.

December 2015

Lifetime Membership 7

Sieve 10

To My Little Tractor 12

346 47

clump’d plastic Shermans and creased Army men under the baby-powdered bathroom’s drain

and remember

The Bomb

and smell death

It’s not good for it

Always, Susan

Suzanne, at least?

I tried to cycle a gritty cap gun but cowboys bore me

It’s just candid cadence, so his pacemaker’s ok, right?

How tiring

Tear a whole day from Kiwanis’ year Examining up and down,

an auger under load

than Ghandi, superior lucidity

Asked politely to soften on the organ

(pot-luckers absentmindedly exchanged recipes and are ess vee peas)

Granola flakes on colored paper but Slim was always with me from Peoria,

thru-front flaring

nibbling on a ham sandwich with a splintry broom entombed by the fireplace under die-casts and lanyards and taboos

Bite me, Cold

I’ll stop at the y-lot

No isn’t always no

Blacksheep from the secret tower rooms since forgotten stage wiring

is infinitely more enchanting than

distant cousins’ water balloons

Mesh-umbrella’d cheap labor born around her open switches and chandelier moods

I leave my body for the knobbly ceiling, note the Lutheran taffy wrapper

in my pocket

Sieve

The swath of energy, constant

swivels over chaff and stalk,

alike

I come down from the great pinging creature through the rainbow’d pockets of heat

it’s already released

I’m always thinking about the loyalty of gauges like simple friends or

the starchiest click’d acquaintance, they point as best they can

to the truest truth of the moment

Communication is never tangible but it can be aspired to

through it

you can tame voids or in haste,

consume the fawn bedded ‘neath the stalks or ignore the odor

until the flames lick out the hopper

Tell me

how the brigade goes earnestly chaining

so we’ll visit at the bar later

Even hacking up black dust,

I am grateful

for my hours of seeing it through the panoramic window of the county bathysphere

I spin with my feet my right hand outstretched

if I go fast enough

I feel the air on the pads of my fingers A cool counter top summoned in any time or orientation I desire

If I could eat it, It would taste like sherbet

It's too bad there wasn't ever any mystery

in the marble smoothness of my own little atmospheric disturbance even when I was too little

for my hand to make an audible whistle

To My Little Tractor

I heard that you’d found a new family recently and I wondered

how strange it would be for anyone to do with you the things we did once without knowing my name

I think about the condition of your fame

as you approach your centennial and what people will say

and what they haven’t

I remember the day we met and an old white display, covered in ashes

I was military-marching through a muddy field

full of tired old implements

Some had rusted beyond identification others were clinging to the better side

of the line between usefulness and nostalgia

It was so wet,

the ground didn’t seem itself

It absorbed my cold rubber boots

They made sucking noises

in tune with their smacking against my calves You sat with your ridiculous face

Your fading orange paint

That big black cylinder with the flush pulley I couldn’t stop staring at it

Some bolts were missing

Your wide bus steering wheel that left black grit and an old smell on my hands

I laughed at the placement of your pedals and the deckplating noise they made when depressed

I looked right and left,

and saw your cracked tires peeking above those old gray fenders

like shoulders

in perfect symmetry

The inside of your wheels

attached to orange drum brakes with a mechanical rod I pushed and pulled your shifter

through old gears (without synchromesh)

and watched the stale boot as it bent and split, its lips forming

some personified embarrassing function Even your cooling fan was orange,

with the belt that drove it

Your throttle looked like an orange thermometer When I pulled it down through the notches, your fan sounded exactly like the great night fans on the grain bins

(They could blow me over and hurt my ears) I giggled,

bouncing on your seat,

enjoying your beauty in every angle

You were still a snotty little bully among the larger things

seventy years later Font tires so thin, they appeared useless

I loved watching them so much,

I once lied to dad and

said I didn’t notice their sodding of the pasture grass as they tilted and turned

You must’ve seemed ahead of your time ten years after you were built

A cute accessory to the returning soldier’s ten-acre paradise

The crowd moved about the field, following a red-striped auctioneer like old donkeys led

A mass of faded hats with bankrupt seed company logos,

denim shirts, cigarettes, and Dickies coats

I’m guessing they smoked and laughed at crude jokes but honestly,

I never bothered to notice

Though it was a little embarrassing when the mob surrounded us

and the auctioneer used the word cute

a few times

Oddly enough, we did make a pair, you and I

A seven-year-old kid

on a tiny tractor ten times it

We weren’t worth much to anyone, together or apart

You’d seen as much as my grandpa and you expected to sink down

in that mud with dignity,

holding eye contact with the old house as it shed shingles,

both of you giggling at fate

Appear in some old farmer’s field of vision every once in a while

In his thoughts, even less

The picture we made humored

the murder members who’d had enough coffee, and I grew angry

The red-striped auctioneer yelled for someone to start you

I whirred my little hands to convince your starter

wewopwewopwopwewopwop I pulled out your choke You spat black smoke

that smelled of old lubricant remedies

with exclamations on the can The whine of your orange fan as its blades turned

to a sold translucent pancake

I carefully modulated your controls before looking up with pride

But all we’d done was stop the smiling I hadn’t redeemed you much

I felt like crying

Somebody told me to stop your engine and the bidding began

Nobody was thrilled

The process reeked of obligation

I tried to figure out where your ears were so I could cover them

But then dad raised his hand

and it didn’t seem like much of a surprise We’d already been matched,

you and I

All the others sensed it too, and went about their business of obscuring wisdom

And so, we came to be together

Dad’s attempts to get you on a trailer with a slipping clutch

bore the first time I laughed at him

I laughed again

when we drained your oil

It smelled as if it had soured

and looked like soupy cottage cheese

I laughed at

your darting travel method Dad called you squirrely

I’m sure whoever made you was

very confused about what you should be not that it ever bothered me

We mowed a lot of grass I did a lot of sneezing

The heads hit your grill and

I wondered if you were allergic like me Maybe you wanted some antihistamines? We didn’t always mow straight or fast, but we’d get the job done

Our pace and reliability equally frustrating for dad

Remember

that evening we mowed the acre patch West of your shed?

On top of the hill,

we could see the red sun

as it began to hide in the neighbors’ milo and you crawled through yellow fescue, humming in reliable intent

I knew you were observing the moment like I was Maybe you thought,

too

of how we’d always be together

Twenty or thirty years from then, we would live the same scene

Except it would be somewhere a little colder where I wouldn’t sneeze

and the three-point’s discharge would smell like tea

Dad wouldn’t be there to be frustrated with us

I’d have my own money for gas to pour under your flying cap

I could drive you to school if I wanted to and

show you to all my friends

We’d participate in those stupid parades, milling around town,

throwing candy at children, looking our best

I’m sorry to say now

I have no place to keep you where I’m living I’d get ticketed if I took you to school

(I don’t have any friends there anyway)

I have no grass to mow

and I’m not much fun anymore

So,

I guess I shouldn’t regret not coming to get you,

or my lack of time spent with you there I know what we had is something

I’ll be trying to get back

for a very long time

Be glad you’ve aged so slowly I leave you dotingly

with fondness and well wishes

I hope you dirty another conspirator’s hands and that they will become a friend

who will do with you all the things little boys

and little tractors should do

Pain is a disease Pick one tree,

plant straight beans breathe

steady

squeeze

Leaking

creaking plastic camcorder tape the noise it makes red light catch up

it drips up the sidewalk the sky is blue under haphazardly-scattered white veins

wrapping around

the entirety of everything,

a little less organized than the ones wiggling toward my hands

(they weren’t visible, then)

everything has some bright label on it the plastic seams itch my

bug bites when I slip

wobble wheel wing nut chlorined urine

on the seat

Everdrear peacing edge

between missed streetlamp frontier

treeline-plotted

arithmetic

The sound of the voice that should fill a last hour and the logistical implications of what if have come to weigh upon me as the leaves

turn

as the crawling things go,

and leave me with peace enough to hear such silence and

reflect upon the crowding teeth in my skull

and permanence

Eager, on the Milo with his gun hear ‘em waiting for fun

for the dust obscuring the dark

Botany

Live and step lightly, young lovers

Live and step lightly, old friend

The bounty deceives and the sea is too deep

Seeds newly, unevenly, recently

deposited in the soil black

Walk with your old boots v’d, joined at the back

cover them

Searching for value in tiny towns

Touching everything,

Cheaply but I breathe in every whisper of audacity

so that I can fill myself up

and become something

Summer House

The world is my ashtray

dare I seek the sight

of the spider-laden sages or the dour children, falling

or the new money-filled lake and its endless coves of desperate happening

Perpetually breathless, accelerating in a fish tank

You’re the smell of the dusk heat

escaping the city and the sound of fresh wind in my ears

I am learning

Virginia’s Place

Browning Locust leaves begin to blanket the little lagoon

Tendral-stumps ratchet the bank in place

The ticks have gone away and the corn’s tasseling steadily

cozies the world

Overgrown chicken coop rubble surrounds the shed,

sterilized by desolate decades

The spaceship’s on the dirt behind the six-row

The old Oliver is my favorite friend Reunion is always occasion

and always as I’d left it

Headed-out sneezing honing noble posture

Black Venice

Observing imagined gondolas on canals through my bluegreen memory

along with my own movements in reflection,

unnecessary

The rats are real, at least

The romance of far-off water cities is lost on me,

and the intricacy of companionship is mentioned far too little

when the robin’s egg walls

berode cigarette smoke and coffee

Rifles on the stoop Nature in the shag

between sleeping and waking, the viscerally pleasant scent

of washing denim for working

Give the rain purpose and rut the soil for a season

Broken week of fever’d bedsickness

with a drink of the brittled well’s tenacity

Riddling with clay turns bounty to impressionably fickle reality

Earth curves away too soon the tilled horizon

and the ill-grated gravel upon which so many

have tried to outrun death’s Sunday morning apparition

A little of everything every thing little

Happiness is a full tank of gasoline

a new pack of cigarettes a roof for your history where it’s admirable to

compartmentalize and discipline

one’s identity (maybe it is)

Escape Velocity

Metronomal

knoll-combed clouds approach, suspending persistent exhaust wretch of absent infecting staying assured dystopic

post-ing

tick-teetering defaulted ritual martyring

Croaking up flights

muttering downwind

their stumbles through life

She believed what was easier to believe

Shy’s notice I gave as much as could be allowed in winter’s warm

our qualm notwithstanding nigh adrenaline’s nudge

Emptying

the vacuum

Soul Water

Movement in bitter vibrations about

weighted clique in the sooted pit

Selling whatever

and approaching some place to be saved, surreal

or left or dead

but included

There’s a love of the upset condition

of leaving the bitterness in the bathroom

Fool me,

but it’s expensive

seeking and gluttoning the spirit medicine

The muse of a thousand obstructions frighten amassed

pulled anatomy of cowards to the drudged rhythm

Open something unwanted for wilting wanters

tonight

Take it

and you’ll thank everything give it all away

What is it, now?

Instinctual attachment

to your beauty means I didn’t want to leave the moment I saw you,

whirling

But you are just a face But maybe you saw me

Savage Grace

Accompany me with your night

to our hideaway from pleasant surprise

Glide me through what trees you give move’d about striding cruel stream

I am yours to reflect

and bear with noble assumptions to reciprocally know across our existential divide

to divulge few precious cross-corridor smiles

to know with only a rhythmic zest

a favorite name

Such designed convergence! Such intentful patience!

My escape in heavy air accepting as last heir to your

sanctuary of apathy

or so it seems in our newborn night

lit by nearly-familiar intermittent tower lights

to reveal a way devoid of purposeless reciprocation remind me occasionally,

but not this night

To hum the music and dance in your beautiful retreat with the voice

of a coincidence of a comfort

of a pinnacle

seen in sunlight one more time over the hedge

by old plotting eyes that wonder’d

in dignified legacy It was a shame

The voice of my dancer

sustains necessary function to indulge our wary dark dabbling

Too occupied to sound off for warmth in kind that is appropriately distanced

in disgust without fail,

instinctually instantaneously

Briskly striding through the blackness without complaint

or its language,

paced by ancient intuition

Ye sure-footed sage

Ye lethal lunar predator

Killing as serenity obscured by silence’s sleepy wool

Stitched and bound by effort’s promise

Visible only as correct form to voluntarily carry noble titles

through nostalgic undulations

O’ little city

of quirk and calm Whom only I know truly,

alone

Love yourself and go away Tenses meander and play through a churning human sea The taxation of diligence

for a reserve that could never be objectively respectable

(nor profane) It smooths habitual language

to their most

dependably honed state

Denim Deacon

Barreled playing

reminiscent of original daydreams

but retarded by bigger desires and obligations If you could choose to return to the place where everything could be wanted,

would you?

From the position of some limited fulfillment? Risk.

I never arrived at the horizon but saw of it

plenty,

in passing In me,

the need to work it to handle it

to pull it

to yank it around the yard Even test,

or give it a go, at least

Lich of the heading

the shedding behind troughs

and supremely forgotten instruments Child of the least-though-of places still a bit insistent upon them

upon his own illumination

Regular

By ill luminate

the suspect and spectacle

of a crowd under that duck blanket the one on the couch

the essence of affection is, in fact,

with the oldest of us

Every distraction falls away eventually

for all of us

Caught always after in cracks,

slipping

like the futile cup you attempt to hold well water with Respect and fear play together

as they have for ages

as peoples of each Holy book, respectively

Where are we really living? and is it in years?

Can it be held or kept

with enough cash?

Do you nullify sacrifice with time? Leave it on the porch for the sun to fade

On Collateral

We are magnetic fission Elastic & wishing

for the tide to come back

Geologically,

I am as unstable as the summer sea

Wisdom & I

at odds with mediocrity

I cannot ask you to stabilize me

It takes bravery to kiss a ghost, but we have little else, pressing

Vivacious blue kicking up dust making loud crystals Aimless abuse, spoiling in gloom Lively living,

rarely reaching My wildest places,

all in timing

Southing

The opulent dance on warming current, rising

The anomalous pair through the little city, haunting

Livid lightning in the gray gloom erratic stings hovered decorum on my sleepy peace

Default equations writ the heart-turned-machine prosthetic in jest; hourglass emptying

Draw of static sans companionship of loyal light Competent senses,

an ultimate sentence when the clouds have so far descended Relentless

endless Mist of all time, misremembered

Yonder tumultuous blanket of suspended gasses will give us a moment of privacy from the eyes of the universe so that we may languish on the deals we’ve

perpetuated with ourselves

Home

Pedestrian solidity is past

when the grain of the street is swept in my hour

My hour, when the city’s

too cold for the lonely and sure

and the contrast of the contact you won’t have owns one

for a moment of serenity amongst splinted trees and resting doors

Flailing through my second Earth

over and over,

into you

On Serenity

My silence is cosmic

and my peace is the morning I am the mountain

and its road

I am the unseen envy of the unseen man My breath is rare

and my hands are poets

You could imagine the Holy night and its shedding

When all the energy has gone

and the streets are swept,

I am life and death and home

I was told I’m not at peace

of all things

The Other Woman

Delicate whisper notes Fragile crystalline jewels in freefalling tumble down to my lips

They hang there in a minor wail

The surface of the pool rippled into hills

Each crest in time

with the soft balsa hammers striking

my cheeks

Light linen kisses

Night is sanctuary and observatory of

Ends Day is just the means to them Tick in arc away the rations and moderate considerations

I like big claims

because I make them I don’t like winding down I prefer to run-leap

and tumble

River Queen

An allergy to conviction swells in the bleak face of beauty,

cupped in my hands

over the fading red-checkered fruitile carpet flooring the hotel lobby

I wonder if I’ll be allowed to slip for a moment and lapse some cognitive energy

or if the cultists spy me for a cheap

bust of pounding feet

Even so far away,

I recompile while the strange metropolis sleeps, curious for the form of conformity

manifesting before me

like dwelling in the dreary aftermath

of arranged comically diverse endeavors

The expanse could be barren or filled with trapped cascading

ripples of you

Molding the sky to a diaphragm,

upsetting my poise I’d like to play my part,

thanks

Mint Monk

For me, only?

I remember our pilgrimage fondly Our starry Spring sabbatical

With the swayful white lady and her leather hugs Evermore we knew for

every silent home sauntered by

Only best friends can impart such generosity, wordlessly

A piece of fatherhood, mutually

First-hand American grace, originally

elegant

Artifactual sage of pure indulgences, lost

Neverboring partner in a time-traveling bubble of (sometimes contentious) rhetoric but inevitably adored by onlooking admirers Easy-over the highways under ancient sky

Our chance to ask divine questions and count upon sureful answers

346

Cryptobotanical detergent odors stripe the city

Luna has just hidden away, but I still see Polaris clearly

I’m engaged in my shadowgrave, cresting mist in duality,

paved

The weary and their cars reviving

idling

as them with dew’d

shoulders

silk-enclosured

As horizons bezel gradients,

startlers find no more entertainment in the beat

and return with the owls to roost until the city goes back to sleep

There was a different smell that

Spring We departed the country,

but never left

Mutual youthful surreality, kisses in the back seat

The Landing

Nodding off with the river nomads, waking them before twilight with

down-come discoursing on Muddy’s simmering thrash

Inexplicable stirring opposite outline’d bank as she savagely deepens

Intermittently-corporeal,

Bitter-ramp postulate, Ever-tumbling vertigate,

Degenerate

with a fountain pen

and I catch a whiff of past Twain-toddling academic Mark-fetishing

(Polishing half-desks with shaving cream)

and I give a little tug on the knot that’s tethered me to the quaint little village;

The outpost of lamplight

on a bend of the widening Missouri

Graceful pressure elliptically to

my lips

My hand smalled behind you

to fit,

us as if

Over Ozark

Faith

the virus that topples

hourly wages

They’ve bandaged the road with black toothpaste

We’ve come back

dreary doom impending

My skull bounces against the window

overtime

Why couldn’t his skin to the glass be given?

They’ve reduced wing-walking, strut-hammocking, and free-loving to bags of

salted peanuts and vomit You could scoop the gray from the sky with a fish net

I’ll pray for you

My bare feet lose

heat from the passing wet wind before gaining it back

through the light of Sol

ascending above yonder steeple My book’s pages require a defense

from ranks of lonely morning spiders though they decrease from

all-nighter sleepiness

My thumb rests unintentionally on the transmit button

Our jokes are heard but not listened to

Methods methods methods glued together;

Communal confrontation

I break too many things that aren’t mine I’m too often forgiven

The clock on the ashen kitchen wall whistles on the third bird

waves of sound carrying the soap smell It floats,

Purpose-driven

Forespring

I welcomed and waited for the freezing icing every winter and relished the panic in the sparse pedestrian’s face

Afraid because their brains persistently strayed to the numbness

seeping through their

fleece

and they couldn’t calm their scurrying feet

fleeing holiday retreat out of streets

that, seasonally

treat me royally

So desperately hurriedly

into circling loved ones who’d never sink

to reasoned love for anyone

Stooped,

the fireplace dulled me to sleep

I partook in conspiracy; arranged my own robbery

I still(‘d) holler from my window so they(‘d )slip,

bewildered

(Less, so it steals from them)

Willed to have it taken from me so I’d endeavor to make more

When in Luna’dly tundral,

I whisper threats to my own being and am lucridly alivened

by its earnestness in crisentual

brittling-beget lucidity

Leave no room for empathy

down my frigid apogee

29.92 Hg

Visibility in the city must inevitably improve; the Gulf Stream shunned the flakes away

You are the sun

You saw me, serene

through the branches above the park I scrambly ignored and never missed anchorage

to my rose skies

transcended reservations, weighted

You are my sun

and now you know why

Heavens! I anticipate the day

cleansing

summer rain

Smartly

Death is defined most accurately, I think, as the journey to a place from which one can never return. If you’ve accepted all other processes as reversible, you can’t fear.

If the Captain’s charter slips out of his hands in a careless moment and is destroyed in the sea, does he have a destination?

Immediately, of course, he attempts recovery. Though it may be riddled with panic, his mind is a habitual machine, and it is occupied by grids and coordinates and persistence. It is not the custom to question; his cohorts follow his orders. His vessel’s course is altered by his will to retrieve.

It is amidst the sea spray and chaotic shouting that he must pause. He must realize, eventually, that the uncoated stock of his manifest has already committed itself to oblivion in its tendency to absorb. He’s always known this, if not explicitly.

This is the reason it is kept in the heart of the ship – the furthest

away from the natural danger of the water.

In this moment, the Captain experiences true hopelessness and regret. He understands that he has taken his purpose for granted. He is far from weeping, but he resents himself.

When he ceases the search, he cannot explain. To burn

fuel in a repetitive grid for this Divine note is futile, and the expense of livelihoodless resupply weighs upon him as he grasps for the words to order drift.

The purposefulness of his employees has earned them respect and now the Captain cannot demand of them, nothingness. He orders the engines stopped, and he begins to sing the helmsman a sad song.

My Susie,

she comes home to me With a broken heart, nightly

I asked of her a fearless kiss

Her hand, her heart Smartly

The bridge crew have never heard this song, but the eeriness of their present situation’s contrast to the industriousness of their system not ten minutes before has left their Captain and his tune considerably beyond the realm of humor.

My Susie

requires but one fickle fee

lest her raven hair swaddle me Compass for a kiss,

no less

Left to wander eternally

His voice dies away as he surveys his song’s reception with a greedy grin. He has anchored his lot completely, and stolen their intent from them. It took him less than sixty seconds.

“I have a game to propose, gentlemen.” His arm enacts a sweep of their chins, as if to caress each one. “We are now the wandering folk, and I am the drifting noise. You may all jump ship now, but I’m headed nowhere.” “Full speed ahead!

Somebody remove ye crewman’s head and I’ll shower you with all the jewels I have left!”

These particular young men are nothing less than contemporary, and are therefore quite startled.

“I am beauty and lust. I am the leader and lost. I am your best and my worst. I am many things, but I am not a fool to burden.”

For a moment, the Captain sees in himself a frightening

rejection of the sea he loves. The grain of the helm disgusts him, briefly, and he scoffs. Internally, he sets to burning all but the reason of himself.

“I am here because I prefer. I prefer life to death. I prefer the living to the dead. I prefer free breathing to suffocation. I prefer my beauty over that which disgusts me. The sea does not prefer, but it does not disgust me, for it has always been.”

“I prefer this ship to any other because it is beautiful. I

prefer each one of you to the torrent because you understand the exchanges we make with one another. That wretched purpose to which I have pursued of late, however, I hate.”

“It was fragile and vulnerable. It was not of our blood. It was so unworthy, but so necessary that I have never been more conflicted. Because of my actions and their intellectual consequences, I hereby order myself executed immediately and I so relinquish command of this vessel.”

It took a few minutes of blank stares and an ungodly amount of energy redirected for the sailor’s more or less rudimentary contemplation, but finally, the XO stepped forward. He lightly affixed himself to the Captain’s arm and led him to the brig, where he remained voluntarily for the voyage to home & penance.

Naturally, the extremity of his outburst would be repeated and exaggerated for generations of sailors. It would even be admired for its beauty by one, but it was never acknowledged as a coherent manifesto by any, and most decent men with healthy minds would give a “good riddance” to the Captain and his tale and be off, smartly.

And so, I shall.