Blog Clouds Sheep Breath Jack Frost

I had a dream last night where I replaced every blog post on this blog with a cloud. Each blog cloud slowly moved across the black sky of the page, out of focus, sheep-soft. They each floated off the screen and over my wife and I sleeping in our bed. As they passed over us, cirrus wisps, the sighs of thoughts, our white dog, sleeping beside the bed, and always alert to the slightest sound,  heard their small rain-like susurrations, their hazy pixel-small exhalations. Blog posts floating over to the window, balefully looking outside. A Jack Frost of breaths which never freeze.

At some point, I also dreamed that I should add a large disclaimer to the blog to the effect that most of the posted poems or fictions are posted as drafts and I eventually either discard them or work 'em over good and radically revise them. It's ironic to me that often the potential for the largest and most enduring audience for these pieces is here, on the internet, and not in the books and journals where the finished pieces often eventually appear, much improved. Still, I don't want to replace them. There's something about cracking open someone's braincover and looking in at the thoughts as they form, before they are polished into words. Or --hopefully -- looking into this blog and seeing the words before they are polished into more polished words.

Andrew Faulkner, he of Emergency Response Unit press (a chapbook press that does fantastic work) and a very talented writer has a begun a blog collecting sky images. I read a few and sent him one of mine. Then I ended up working on a poem using images of sky. Here it is. Unless it has, cloud-like, floated out of vision toward some blog horizon over which we may expect to arise a blog new day.


ABOVEDLESSNESSLESSNESS
for Andrew Faulkner




sky is ape
heaven is monkey
I lie on my back and look at banks
they are clouds.

*

I am thrown from an airplane
grass is sky
commuter headtops: clouds
clouds I love your balding, your tinting.

*

between earth and space
sky sandwich
O jam of night
star seed my looking teeth

*

prehensile sky in sorrowful eyes
grip the brain like a water balloon
throw it far
thinking an explosive gag shower
the mouth open to visible throat
small bugs and surprise

*

bank bank bank star
bank bank bank cloud
bank financial instrument bank bank
seahorse bank bank bank
sky

*

the sky is wheat futures
is legal tender
is an ape with a mortgage
is the limit
is pure speculation
a foreign market
a reasonable return
outsourcing heaven to the sparrows