Tuesday, December 18, 2018

Anchor Movement

Monday, December 17, 2018

Intersections

Thursday, December 13, 2018

Seeing

Where is it?

Wednesday, December 12, 2018

Tuesday, December 11, 2018

Gnostic Diminution

Wednesday, November 28, 2018

Shirtless

Starring The Murk

You put your hand in old water and pull it out, rattling little stars. The water was made of earth, before it was blue night. Something there? A bottom-glinting, a coin or an eye. Humble fish slip, freaking in the low oxygen, dumb laughs stifling everything. This is not hip or good. The fish are mainly dogs. One made you his companion and you spent the whole night wandering sleepless, fake-lost, telling yourself that you are yourself, just so you could have a plan.

No one is here with you, your family is here with you, they go to the places where you wander.

Then the light got in and you tore your hair and clattered to the floor, necklaces scattering all over, your skeleton. That frame of things has its way of seeing. You solve it like a puzzle and it jumps all over you, a family of mudsharks, or bears, or not yes, but surely a harrowing moment, thin in the air. Then the water ripples again and you see edges are crackling things, edges like the slim silver trails that made you. The bright broken fantasies, like the outline of horses, that bore you to the flood. You were delighted to be heavy.

Why do your joys feel like they don’t belong to you and yet your fears you own?

Then the bitten thorn of youth trembles in the skin and the bungled world engages you, riles you up, trips you in the murk. The murk is your land. It is all dim and a triumph of fog. Your inky body, your tumult. You foam the murk with your eyes and hands and can’t deny the damp breath of dank things.

That had a ring to it, when you closed your eyes back there, and shifted to the sitting still portion of your adulthood.

The fire went up and we were something like alone with our thoughts, and our waiting. I am alone with my waiting, and it’s good. It’s at least an oval. And then the hard breath comes, us falling in the drink of salted slush. Us falling forward and back-masking even these stymied words.

Tuesday, September 04, 2018

Meteor, Meteorite


To hell with history and the sense of history. The law is telling. The law understands that you are going to hurt yourself as badly as you possibly can. The law knows that you will punch your neighbor in the face after you sleep with his wife. The law knows you will get your act together only after your worst loss. The law doesn’t care what that loss is. And it’s not the law of Moses, or the law of Charlemagne, or even the law of Lincoln, Nebraska. It’s only the law of the moon…the law of the tide. Its window is what you call your window, when you can’t sleep and you remember those few moments in your life when you could have made a great decision, could have beaten that addiction, could have been a better demon.

The Poem After The Poem


So what do I do
after a poem like that,
when I feel so satisfied
I could jump?
What do I say
and what dreams
do I go back to?
Those are the kinds of days
I want to have.
Those are the kinds of feelings
on the ceiling.
Those shudders date back
to some dark month
when I knew the world
and the world knew me.
When things could be discovered,
and the atom was still
an amazement to me.
Why so jaded in the sun?
Why so lost in the script,
looking for my next character,
her next line?
Why make the structure
of the question
the answer?
Why make mystery
into myth,
doing my thinking
on the page
in runic séance? 

Friday, May 25, 2018

To Give Away

The right breath is everything. You put your hand in front of your face and you run the programs back again, looking for “azure,” or some other more-than-nothing word. You collect time in a bucket and chill. You wish away the slop, the lamps, and even the bulbs they held. You try to eliminate articles, pronouns, whatever might have been in between you and that thundering quiet. Your hands wait to hold each other. This is all a lonely enterprise that you feel clear enough to wait for, from a distance. This might be—dare you think it—the idea. No. It’s gone, and you with it. You thought for a moment but you had to give that away. Say goodbye like a passenger on a ship. Wave with a silk scarf: a scarlet or an azure scarf. That’s it. It’s gone now. So sit and be refreshed. You don’t have to think. You can eat or just watch the screens that make up your life now. Don’t fret over any of this. You have the confidence of your soft carpet, grey and unobtrusive. It has learned you and you can sit. It has veered back from somewhere: your sense that something should be done? No, that was gone from the day you chose to lie down and just watch the river of huddled people flow by, their dumb belongings strewn across the fields, under an azure sky.

Thursday, March 15, 2018

Oracular Theme

Send out the rocket dog, send out the ending. When the end ends we are all busted up about the death of myth. There’s no one to check if this hangout is dreamers all the way down. Me dreaming you and you dreaming the dirt I thought I walked on. And the world dreamed by some blasted leaf. Oh collection, oh page fraught with tedious wonder. Or is it loss? 

Who am I even asking? 

Our fingers test the flight from which we wrest our gods. All days are days of special finding, and every place a finding place. Can’t all skies look back down at us and ask? I’m the same light I’ve always been, only I’ve lost everything but my way. 

Thursday, March 01, 2018

Winter Waves, Ice World

I’m finally full of all those things. Bold numbness that I take pride in, rattling both my hands. I’m my own companion, whispering “someday” in the night. As I drift along your wet hillside, I hear the dogs and the rifles and I want to run. But there’s no continent without time. I’m the gutter and the aching cheap smile, wishing for a more tender history. How I work the ghosts in me, shout at them to slide me through the missile tube. Point me at that moving shadow, those drowning eyes. 

Saturday, January 27, 2018

Systems

Friday, January 05, 2018

New Poem in Matador Review

Hello friends.

Happy New Year!

I’ve just had a new poem published in the Winter 2018 issue of Matador Review.