Ghosts Always Leaving

What swims, flies.

Nothing Doesn’t Dance

Quiet Work

You break. Against this ocean you break. And little significant things become big significant things. You are a horse alone on a hill. You are a tree. You go near and far but nothing gathers on you. You will not be the lone hero that saves everyone at the end of the story. You might be the quiet worker that saves the orphan. You are the orphan. You bellow out your sounds and they slap you back. Echoes in the night, in the inviolate dark. You whisper to yourself: a little chant for the world. Yet you cause ripples that won’t easily smooth away. You cause them and you put your hands in water and your hands are the water. It's like you were told, at the beginning, by your own self: you break against this ocean. There is no overwhelming moment. It happens without your knowing. You are your hands. Then the horizon. Then the sea.

Dancing Too

Those Were Ponds That Were Their Eyes

Here we draft all things, go cracking into the sun. How do questions roll forward and be wind again? I want to question everything, to fool you when you draft the plan. Help the crab crab across the floor. Help little children, help their eyes, prop up the little ones and break through whatever they think they know. Blowing in the mind breeze, is your chin there, is your light on? Wake to the ivory sounds of dogs in the night. Raking teeth and green passion in the waters.  Bearing us up under the robot dawn that whines in the street, a truck sound that makes me your tired darling. You sad in the quiet and me inside you, me listening for your looming shout. I am your looming shout. I am editing as the orange lights of all the cities glow downward. How do they do that when they are cooling in hidden ponds, lightly under rushes? 

Grief Ain't Grey, It's Glory Pink

Little pink eyes. Little thrum of warm memory. How did we get this far from one point, matterless void? Explaining light years to a child is poetry. Or stories. Or it’s a way to remember that moment when you were more curious than afraid. Oh, let’s go, let’s just bash through and clack clack for streams running through the yard. For the wild look we gave each other in the night. For the glow on your face. That strange glow, great green of want, of joy up in the dark. I have the flashlight and you have to stop everything to look at me. Tapping nails on the rooftop, glancing down for a center. For finding my way in this tap tap pattern. For making music out of time. For shoving off when I could have sat still. I mean, I am supposed to sit here, right? Right? You coming for me? Not like you could find me stuck in the white of this dumb wall. But I will shout for you. I will holler and make it all known that I am wanting. I mean, want is to feel something, yeah? Better than standing in the numb robot void of totally whatever. These fingers have to move across this page, but they are not doing that, as we both know. In fact, whatever product you are reading now has gone through so many filter moments that there’s no way anything is anything but a machine ground down by the practices of patience and dying for love. Not the kind of love that sustains, mind you. You mind, I know you do, because you touch me where it hurts when I am weak, sliding down my seat with testing hands, finding me in my written fate. It looks like I had the chance to run, and instead I chose to buckle down and do more jail. Yeah, that’s the way of heroes: the jail of helping everyone instead of the freedom of the skies. Not that anybody needs help to die, but they do. They do. They need help to die and even to shit. They need fire and loss, too, so that things count. You put your little finger up against the wall, it feels rough but looks shiny. You go loose and figure a way forward, even if it’s wet with the grief of rain. The grey glory of grief makes us impenetrable to those who don’t have it. Baby pink and raw with loss makes us know we are more special than anyone in this moment. So everyone had better just fuck and steer clear.

Rain Is Always A Reminder Of Our Splendor

We Are The End Of Conflict, But We Are Just Beginning

Not whether my hand fades or stays solid. No, you feel me going out the window slowly, being the cloud or the fog that makes you feel young. From far far away I can see your clear eyes. It feels bearable a moment, this world with you in it. Then the flood: all the gone folks, the great loss, all those graves and empty graves. Right here you put your heart and I wear my little broken face for you, crooked in the morning. I try to hold that bright, that impossible violet butterfly wing, that trilling jade leaf. The silver of your tears rolling for our whole life. These colors can’t measure the distance from us to the sun. But without our star: no hues, no warmth. “Please” is the tenor we magnify, to try and elude the captors we must be. Why are we always jailers? Cages are for opening, schools for peeling theory from dogma. Clocks go around, around for the day. The might and mystery of time versus my voice breaking at that point in the song where emotion takes over. How to master that moment and ride beauty, despite my grinding jaw, despite the heat in your eyes?     

Strange Creatures

The Creature

A Kind Of Onward

Prescription Poem

Like a gun, a friend, a want. Like a shy little plant, momenting around, little snows, et cetering along the paths of the world. We are together for this crunch, this last ditch in historical time. We will crack this poem to exhaustion. We hold, we sleight of hand things to each other, miracle of silence. You know that train, that distant bellowing, that echo when it rains and you are alone in your head, no matter who is in your bed. You won’t be fine, humans. You won’t be. It doesn’t bend towards anything. So you have to be the grass. You have to be the fire and the bucket, and the broom. Sitting there in quiet shades of meditation, you can’t waste time. It’s fine if you sit there, but you better be in your head, brother. I’m here too and we mean like we have something. Yeah, but it’s outside. No way to rattle this cage, no way to stand in for someone else. We are the time to say something that rubs us. We are the time to roll the murk. We are the time to shoulder the bombs. This is the project, watching bombs and watching joy. I am in it and why shouldn’t I be? That last question was for someone without my long-standing sense that I have something to say. I mean, do I? Look at the lighthouse on yon hill. It formalizes space, just as you have formalized your thoughts the way you read these words. The lines, the rickety way your thought ticks in and out between the words, like shiny shells, translucent in your cold fingers, little grains of sand sticking to the sea water there, green and black. Sun, you might as well show it when you show up: your smile despite the collapse of our grand democracy, the body. Body is a body for so many fools, and so many fools we love. So we love our bodies and the oceans rise to greet us, our wisps of hair pixelated in the overbeating sun. Your gathering dust messes with us, we are just a little dance of matter, making believe we fit. But we are just the movement, only shifts from stillness, but not the thing that moves. That’s the paradox: we call it a thing but it’s just the absence of a blankness. If that’s the case, you can only touch what is already gone. So might as well walk down to the stand of trees and go, like, really go, into your stillness, to see what falls out of it, like ashes from a summer fire, warm on the beach. You try to cap the moment with a thought of beauty: wide eyes of happy child, vines along a seawall…but et cetera, as you see.  And you cheapen it when you try to circle the stillness back around to signs. Best to leave them unattended, and just tend to the cool pool, the whatever, the tug of more quiet. It’s there for anyone, you know. And since the undoing has to be a part of the doing, you might as well be the one. Look at the lines on your hand, leading you to the breeze coming through your screen. It’s not a song for springtime, or anything, or nourishing exhibitions of night affections. Take the shelves down, leave the books, the knickknacks, and try not to harangue yourself with this prescription poem. It won’t find you if you don’t stop. So just stop. Just get down. Open whatever is in your hands, and stop. It has to be this way, with you as the you of this broken poem. And you the speaker too. Otherwise there’s no in-between for us. Otherwise the windows are the cracks. And that could be the best story anyway.

With Form We Are Filled

Hosting

You, Me, Matter, Etc.

Let’s take back these elements that ground us. That roll us. What can we do when we try? If we are the ones who speak, let’s commandeer our voices. We have these arms, these precious arms. And the sky along with them. What kind of grey can I pull from the sky here, to get to the wobbly skeleton, or to its glitzy smile? I am here, in any city, weirding out these monks from the ground, these monks that shave my thoughts and see whatever I won’t let them. They are all me and they trod a slow path through my thoughts, composed while I rage. What life made these dudes, who capture my imagination alongside whatever else they are up to? I grasp and shiver, they see what I can’t, and slow down to break the rhythm. All day like this, which is good when you are the plant that I am. That means I am a plant for everyone, to help breathe and give a little green. Cue guitar smashing…feel better about whatever happens. Scrape me to find your way to some of my zest, made of blood and thought. Although not even in the night did I let you know that you made my mouth taste sweet. An energy, you bloomed alongside that purple road, toes and flowers all curled and dreaming, tiny loops of vulnerability and not much else. Here is me trying to crack the poetic. Here is me still waiting. Waiting again. It means we are over-roasted versions of ourselves, humming as the world drives us back. In waves, grab and slip the sea a quick kiss, a shine on the lip, a little flick of a wrist over a guitar, so soft you thought it would make no sound. But sound it did, echoing into the morning like it chased you, even on your errands and during meals, a little procession of listening tones. They go into your ear, those waves they do, to listen to you, as you listen. That’s how you know they wait for something, because you remain still and they keep moving around you, a curious mob, those dulcet tones. That could be the end of something. Or just the middle made strange. It feels as if I am affecting some stance here, some galactic innocence to stand by and feel less than cold in the drumming void of night. But it’s not void if you are there, or even if it’s only my memory of you. Then I have memory, at least, and those monks that came before, with their placid contemplative faces, they shadow along like a pack of hounds, using my thought as a path, even as they are me, and I am the monks who listen, the monks who watch. It’s like the song says: “All The Falls Are Down.” And the song could go forever and I would still cry at the sad points. The self is that shoe you can’t throw out, even though you lost its counterpart during the last move. You know it belongs to something, so you can’t bring yourself to toss it, even though it’s useless. Because you remember too dearly its usefulness, from how long ago? That’s not survival. That’s just refusing to leave the bric-a-brac shop. It matters that we are in a world of matter, but we don’t have to gather it all up around us.

Hail, Beings

Seeing To See

Blood Drawing With Eyes

Anchor Movement

Intersections