Silver Spring to Phoenix

Vibrations of a cavern a mile beneath silver willows.
At two in the morning beyond the Sheraton
a lumination of pollution intercedes realism.

Cardinals and doves develop their melody
progressively caught in beat/heart echoes,
as with spelunker canaries fluting noxious gas
a small negative sign to the weary traveler,
they claw from rhododendron to palm and maple.

Stalagmometer gifts of the Emperor of Novelty
their urethane birdsuits activated by cold pinks.
Then, as if handcut from antique postcards,
three blacklight cabbages bob over suburbia.

Butterfly brains of a minute Faraday compaction
their echoes of roundness animate tomahawk rooflines.
Tri-erratic whipsaws of whispered flight --
philateletic balloons inflated by dreamy mutations.
Alien eggplants, they deign epicycloid arcs aimlessly
spaced on a fragmented landscape of trap stone and tar,
terra cotta chimney caps and aluminum antennae.

With a razed interception of alpha
the scenario splits, inordinately ghosts --
prophylatic rattle of the dead closet,
looking for a lost summer's night;
a cyclumen cantelope descends from nearby cumulus,
to engulf all anxious eyes in further repose.

The hot evening cicada call
lingering in the ear, then gone:
a turn in the dim closet
bumps the head up against the hangers,
leaving no tablet to decipher
the call, but listen, separation;
spirit from ground ruins all of us.

Beneath ionic aviary, flight home
an electric railroad pulses
screaming through concrete
it phases into doppled distant repetition --
cardinals and doves develop their melody.