A BLACK BURNT ALARM CLOCK

hangs from a twenty-penny nail in my basement
next to the broken clothes washer,
a reminder of our late nite converse --
magellanic arguments, Xenophobic poems,
to circumnavigate an hermetic egg.

Talismanic reactions of glossalia,
along with too many stovepipe buds,
vibrating a blue ether between us.
Smoke of incense curling frosted window,
another hardwood slab cast in stove
glowing coals, red lit
between two hard assed poets.

At a quarter-to-five this cold morning,
while wife and son sleep,
an automatic light goes on outside,
for a shepherd marking scent on tree trunk,
a Leghorn cock roosted in white oak crows;

I scrape away thorns of long dreams --
when this discarded burnt clock,
twenty years out of the ashes of your home,
ticks.