Every Wish

Morning More Softed

Bell

I’m just funny the way you like me, the way you dance. Your golden hair is all ablaze next to the lake in summertime. I sit smiling, cluttered with green leaves and tiny white flowers. The little bell you laugh gains momentum, barrels into us as we hold hands down old times. It’s this way for about a generation. Then we sleep.

A Bit Of Space

Condor In Gel Time

I’m using this truth to cover this lie: that your power is gliding around inside me: a condor in gel time. The far-seeing eyes and boaty wings are all our final loving in need. These water drops on my face are lit by the wishes I wish in the sun. Here is that moment I thought I’d lost, a little sugary thing that smells a bit roasted, a bit autumnal. A moment for only me that submits to your hands the way I draw them. Somewhere a volcano still doesn’t care. Somewhere a dinosaur bone is bulldozed. The heat of your face, your snake of a scarf, I pull you away from dinner. Hang on me while the world buckles, glittering grave.

I Do Need Terror

Tangled Cup

Today is that backwards day. The day you are your father and you are for real walking through that bright blue door. Take your hand and see what’s outside, in trees and teeming. Candles, yeah? Tiny fingers flashing in air. You hear that crack and stand as an X while leaves move through you. Clouds descend on everything you love. Nothing breaks but goes reckless over the world.

Last Minute On The Train

That’s when we meet. A gathering of sand. You lean forward, holding your arc of breath for that first step into the rain. I salute the breeze as our momentum warps together. It’s together already on this planet, and in this galaxy, which will one day meet another galaxy. Mergence. A double curve of stars to bend forward into time. What breathes then? 

Crisp Life

Everyone has a secret. You could put your hands in mud and just draw circles all day and that would be a perfect depiction of your characters. The arc of this is what you want to feel about your art: proud to make the effort. You call your general tendency The Part That Doubts (the flood, and everywhere). Heaven is a little fool that triggers lightning behind your eyes. It exists when you pretend that you do. Watch the tide roll in, riding violins. Behind the rain a little static punches up the volume. Making is containing the quiet long enough to get home.

Shadows Are Fins

All block gatherings, this solitude that puts heart in my feet. Am I my own companion, am I the one who sees or the one who obscures? This part of me that rivals my bones, is it my wobble of thought? I shadow my face in the moon and then the moon goes away. Just an icon. Then time itself whistles on a line. Time whistles on a line. Time is my known known, but I am in the midst of it so there is only getting out, or sleep. In the weeds we fell, green and wet in darkness, next to our hoping bed. Then the crushing sounds. We, you, me, all these eyes, all these parties that want to get to the bottom. A hard thing is to heft the weight of being without lights to feel around. The sparking blue, crackling the continuous question. Always in some fight, I shadow myself along the breakline of dawn. I am here in the last gilded glimmer of night. I am not here. There is only this tendency to plan, to run and be stone.

Under The Flood

Nobody will tell you: Come here inside this instant with me, across time, forever. Flesh is something we always feel, even when it's grey and folded into tiny corners. We are only drops in the unsteady unwatched rush of matter. 

More, For Glory

I’m in my acknowledgement phase, a cave of my undesign. I slip into rare bends as the dog sleeps. All the couches of our civilized world end with something we call metaphoric togetherness. Like the wild pool fills with me and you gather in a sliding song of blanket chance. Then the lions lurch forward and my hair steams off…purity for the day. That’s the line and I am the ticket. We are the angry ones, the ones who love the beginning and we put trees into space. Yes for you, nothing for the restaurant where we meet in ten years. It’s always this boyish huddle, on the bed, in the little cuts we call style, over the incessant drumming. That was how we saw what we needed: so much meaning that sketches couldn’t be ignored, like the fine horizon. See, there we are at the middle and you along my arm, outrigged and beaming. I saw you and I gathered you under my coat, in the love of lost glances. I would make this new for us, if we could share what it is again today for the mastery we need, like a river. 

The Ghost Bridge

Here is the drifted root, the bottom of the heavy afternoon: I long for the sense that time is not beyond me. But it has gone on, as I have, and we are under the bridge of rust, baked in the sun and lost from justice. It’s not that nothing right was done, it’s just that the loneliness of space took us over, and we went back to being children. We wandered along with the sun, its proud march melting our aspirations, reforming them each day. I wished I was you, even though you wanted me more than I could conceive. Trucks made their own wind on the streets where no people walked. Only ghosts forgot, and the rusted bridge collected everything we saw: all busted goblets and glittered coiffures, little starry-dusted starlets tripped behind us while we cried, deep in our joy of solitude. 

Wondering Free

All Gifts

Picture wars are for sand, returned at daybreak to vapor under owls' eyes. Looking for stars gets you everywhere slowly. When our visitors arrive we will give them the seas. High in the midst of loss, our thin hands glow yellow in autumn light. The gaze of time, like some lazy god's arm-hairs, drifts in the break of desire. A broken black cup, unbroken before, unbroken again: our mobile refuge.

Nothing Pressing

She Goes, You Go

Everything is pure concentration now, a rigid mix of what you will and won't listen to. You are here and you are not: that's how cars and people move up and down the road. An artist is here, trying something she's never tried before, and trying really hard. And you're productively ignoring her. She's everywhere except at the tips of your fingers. So that is where you focus. That is your world now. You are mocking what it means to be real. With the side of your mind you love her, this artist. She works without your fear of death and you push your fingers deeper into the forest. Life without referents, the formless breath over water. You want your fingers to ignore you, along with the world, but you are only slipping out of focus.

Tone Drift

Standing high the rain and the happiness of rain. Hats and gear for the laziest Sundays since gone time. Shells closed in little hands made of chattered questions. Animal sounds in instruments: bear growls, etc. We ache the days we miss, in our pixelated haze, a ripple of limbs. Hyphens moderate the pain of disconnected family and words chunk out accordion guts. Overactive dust-motes dance sideways down empty halls. The beams of sun know how to rock the walls, like a mighty spoon. Silver in light, we came here by boat, and we leave on heavy wind. Birds are never lost in dreams, as they carry us on the wing.

What Old Dream

How The Hand

What little hand was it that scribbled to cross my dreams in the night? In the grayish wet night of uncertain stomach grumbles, warbling in sheer mob clack-Sturm. And drawn across your face is the tum-tum-tattoo of the startling goat-face drum. Symbols in the mist and my fears born into the flood. The child plays alone in the cloud twister. The child with the burnished, sun-warmed face gathering sights for a future of long pleasures. We feel too guilty to write with only the short pleasures of creature cravings in mind. And that is how the hand becomes the author, warning away time until this busted galaxy relents and all and everyone finally relent: effort is the essence: the fuel and dirt of the world under drunken fire. Grist and gristle for the million millions. It's enough. It's never finished. And any ending that could be written will always hound us with the ghosting moan of lack.

To

To write the great American nothing, you must have a mind of summer. This is the same as the great American no. Then you can feint and move sideways, into and out of the light, as you see. To write with your brain instead of your hands, one must go forward into the cave, release the ragged speakers there, and kneel on the memory altar. There you will be burned, and you will not return. That is what you must desire, to write the great American ever. And to write it you must also whisper after snakes, vanquish the bummy holidays, and go faster after death. He will catch you cheating, and you must chuckle, and nudge him with your comforting knife.

Holding Shroud

Spring was about how we opened. Sliding doors and midnight rain. Our hands entwined and wisdom in the shooting of slight glances. In the humid doom, I watch you fall asleep with my lips against your lips. And fate is not a cake. Drinking in your new world is alive with me, as we wander this museum of violins and chance. Ashes drift down from our campfire and little frog voices lift us above the early dew. It’s not random, but just a little bit more than nothing, in this pitching bucket of stars. 

Somewhere, A Harmonica

“I was the awkward guest everybody hardly knew.”

From “The Burning Girl” by Mary Karr

I was the pink kid’s tambourine, and the sun that you could only look at sideways. I was the frozen winter clarity you sought, to clear your head. I was the last best option, unto death. I was the freaky way you moved your arms when you sensed the mosquito at your ear, that June Saturday, when we were twelve and trying to build our own flying saucer in the yard. I was the hammer that lost its handle, and the bedroom window that kept banging in the wind. I was the friendly way the truckers always waved when driving by our house. I was the worried dream you woke from, forgetting where your heart was positioned in your body. I was the striped shadows that wandered across the floor at night, and the sound of the little bell on the rust-red cat. And I was the cluttered attic that waited for you, when you needed to cross over to the world of memory. 

Untitled

This will be written on the body. Our body, surrounded by spirits and wind, long in voice and happy in mountain air. This bending form is always from now on, but also yesterday. Our arms the desert, our legs the jungle trees, our breath the urging wind. All the spaces between us, charged with electricity and rain. For this is the pause after the outbreath, after the poem, and whatever you there is, and whatever me there is, drift away, return, drift again. The way is to churn and bumble, say the silence, and begin.

Because I Never Stop

My own black heart is yours, because of the break in protocol. I saw that green line down the middle of your face, and your wide dark earrings. You handed me a knife, smiling, and I gathered up my grins. I took them long, into the aisles of this grey dog winter. You let me find my own big hero, someone who could hold me when I needed to cry out the anti-kiss. Now my broken feet are stronger than ever, running alongside that old carriage, over mounds and cornices. The mix of dust and sweat kicks up busted windows. You watch me trip. I’m all in you.

How Do I Stop?

Yes To The Window

Break the heart. Break the head. Break the room. Toy up the thought: no one will come home again. Burn the ballands, in lone moments, your eyes packed with tumbled fears. This is the avalanche of lifetimes. Your hands so plush with loss your neck could snap, a dried reed in a summer breeze. Yes to the window that opens to grey and thunder.

A Thicket

Danger Decides

Attachments

The Week Of Inter-Species Biting

Fist their kid bit our kid. Then our kid bit the dog and the dog bit him back. Then (how to say this?) the couch bit the steak I was trying to cook. That had us biting each other and the halls between the bedrooms. When the dog started biting the TV, we both (simultaneously) ran for our passports at the backs of our desk drawers and bit them to shreds. We tried to cry about it, but the week was long, and there was still so much biting left to do. My teeth burn if I’m not sinking them into plaster, or a camera, or your cheek. Even now. Don’t come near me. I’m running at you. 

Almost Ready Now

A Dissipating Mist

I suppose there is at least one way to kill a song. It involves making the cat the practical matter in the downed tree. The trunk goes away with the mess and I tear something off, like the fragment of a wish. Then a colloid of ghosts holds the handle and I clean the bottom of the world. It means and rankles. It has to be this way, but something isn't right: the way the building storm takes to the fields and dances. The stranger thing is when I have my way with a song, it becomes something I think on, but it emerges from waking life as skinned and shuddering. Another tilted house. Not dead at all, I expect, but certainly beyond me.