by Patrick Doyle

          Over the last few days I’ve felt like I have a crocodile on my body, all jade colored and sparkling like a beautiful rejection of everything. He snaps lightly at most who come by me but a few times he has really let it on someone.

          I apologize. I wish he’d just go away most of the time. He makes me feel like I shouldn’t be around others for fear of him biting, so I go from wherever I am to where I am going; which is a bed riddled with blankets that I wrap up in to a dreamless sleep of nothingness. In a few days he will hopefully go back to the recesses of my heart after he has had his fill.

by Patrick Doyle

yr freckles are like triumphant
little sunburns of beauty.

every one of them is a lilypad
on the pond of your soul.

my swarm of kisses
hop from one to the next.

by Patrick Doyle

hunting in the trees
of Maine in 1969,
a psychedelic
phenomenon would launch
itself like
a pinetree version of
NASA:
a curious little owl would appear on
the tree branch
and if you stuck your finger
out like an existential
love seat, they would teleport
onto you and their eyes
would appear to be dinnerplates of life.

by Gerald George

He just kept buying them in
antique stores, the old framed
photoed faces with no names on the
back, so many displaced identities, of
course he felt he had to buy them, and
then of course he had to, well — why
rescue them only to leave them in
oblivion, and so he kept buying and
putting them all over the walls of his
house, wondering, until one day it
came to him — even nameless, they
were,
with eyes, expressions, and such
costumes! — hats, mustaches, uniforms,
parasols — and he went out to more and
more shops and got more and more
photos to put up on more and more
walls of staring unmoving people who no
longer had to be anything more than they
appeared to be.