Tom Hamilton

I can tell you that darkness is not overrated.

Neither with its shadows, nor its sullen protection.

The dastardly defection of deflected glows can't grow.

Maize halos are afraid of such a hated acquaintance.
...

I've got a cookie cutter
Shaped historically like the head
Of Felix The Cat and he
Doughs me out days like
...

April you
throw your waste paper pillows,
like the billows of smoke from the pipes of far beings.
...

Sometimes the morning comes without warning,

and sometimes you have to wait.
...

Yeah
you've seen that movie,
Denim jacket, jean, muscular wrench cord boy
picks up Pink, tank, top too shy for eye shadow girl his
...

At the last seat in town,
 snug behind the three,2,2,2 desk
 in a bedeviled, rancid, glazed factory
 sits a girl.
...

I saw this girl the other day, and
her fingers were as slender as the
stem of a serious flower and
the hours passed like centimeters.
...

That golden sweat on the top of a tap can,
can resemble small desert rocks or lesser pebbles
of the sort one might find surrounding a scorpion.
Except, that if there were a Southwestern arachnid
...

When I was nine years old
my father and I went into
an elderly woman's house and it
was gasoline dry that Summer so
...

The storm tore at the pages, until the words scattered.
Every form matters, down to the last grass blade.
Though most times I try to pretend that it doesn't.
Before the pain grows so large it could physically carry me.
...

After Dickinson

Winter will
market her fresh virgin carpet,
...

The girls are posing by the billiard pockets.
Clogging the soothing music like hair in a drain.
There is stuff men don't see, different ways which they're hurt.
They are not as infallible as their pin-up counterparts.
...

Sergeant Kilmer tapped me
on the shoulder at 3 am he said:
'The flowers are very pretty near Ourcy.
Just look out your back window
...

Trash landing bumble bees search the girders for flowers.

Ride the subway for hours, searching for vines to climb.
Parking meters lose time, as the pawn shop door chimes.

Her underpinning's tied around the sewage pipes.
The dud buds aren't ripe, the concrete never grows.
...

For Joe Riley

I saw Charles Manson at a dive bar tonight.
He was talking to a bum with long scraggly split ends.
...

Me and Maggie must have spent
twenty minutes pushing
hard down on those fake tattoos she said
they'd look good with our braless suits besides
...

Some days on which the men did work.
Splitting rocks or splitting headaches.
An awesome, emerald, summer storm
quenched a fervor yet another…
...