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.

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? 

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.

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. 

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. 

Systems

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.

Click here to read it.

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.

Another Going

Then flail, or break with false standards, ever going, and wall up in your tree for the rite. In this lasting final spring, a year is only time to watch shields flare, the forge drop, and the crows. Determine your rate of loss and slide through endless rooms of plastic yellow pails: all the forgotten ones from beach days with the kids. So many little worlds give up sun and dance, as recompense for all the meals we had to miss. My hands would hold you if you could be a torch at the dawn of this ending. I want the curled cradle of your legs under me, to tarry while the earth stops.

How The Torrent Moves The Plan

What, then, is this world, slippery thing, made for trying, or just here? I am here as you are, unsung crowds of shuddering lovers and night redactions. When I step to the door, an old man steps inside me, wagging a finger at the encroaching cosmos, like he could direct it. Then the boy I always wish for shakes free from the squall, and I tumble out of legacy into bright new sweat. Always is always a word of last resort. I don't need it now, but I might when the blue O of my scared mouth finally finds the tune of your breast. As if your lungs gave only gold. We dawn in each other the way the river ripples in the risen light: always the same, never the same, always falling.

Upon Thinking

To write. Or, to writhe. The shell is human, but the meta-factual is even money now. While transcription is a heartfelt thing.

Some Gone Wings

In Cuts

Black wreaths for everyone and the meat that we are falls down, evident. The glassy silt from my sleep last night shakes from my ears. I’m drinking in the noise. 

Open The Night

Not Of A Sudden

At the bottom of the bric-a-brac shop, I saw you veering. You were wondering if we could put it back together. You were wondering how far away we were from quiet.

Words Like Fun

Moving In 2

Even The Ghost

Moving In

Steady Two

A Crowd

Steady

4:34am

Wake up, meditate: get nowhere but notice a few finger tingles. Read poems, listen to Dolores breathing while the dog licks his dirty feet. The baby sleeping restless in the next room, which means he'll wake soon. A few houses away the wind bangs hard against some porch, and I hear clanging.

These Roots

You Are Little

So swim me a river. I stand working at the edge of your bag. Your hair is my last resort, where I walk the beach with my little umbrella. Drink me, but forget me. The qualifier is the feeling that something is always missing. I give advice to myself but never take it. That’s how I keep myself crazy. Joy is a grasshopper. Now the meandering edge of the world. Quiet. Quiet, you little muse. 

This Might

This might be earth. I am riddled with questions and some third thing. There are species of color and all along the way you look at me. A high mocking majestic sea mothers me without the kindred low hum in the elephantine night. You could always be caught wallowing in the telescope. That truth I could find myself falling into, cool with a look of what gets green always merging. Diabolical and shorn, I stood in my spindle dancing. Then the bragging wore off and characters emerged, collecting drums at the edge and making the blaze a furious spun collective...jewelry of the head, festive with cracked glass, et cetera. But even without hands these pages here are moving. And a small mouth comes lipping violets, gardenias in the dogwood park of nasturtiums, so whatnot it has to have a thrum to verb its end. Rather glorious without the burning parts. Just a ho hum of a sketch here, just a trinket in fingers. It wasn't just me, holding rocket food the eleventh switching timber. That is the show we gathered to see, bright fiend of the medium and then shucking the medium to be alone in air. And air rang so sweet with murmurs of silent arms, quickly mustering more excellent air. Queasy and musty is how we are going to play this electric gearbox. A trick with the hand finding the mouth and dark finding us both ready to emerge from the business end of the universe. Like, where is the atom just the beginning? And could we go so very much smaller? A crinkle isn't even the threshold anymore, as it's all a funk of goo and grasping sliding. These are stories for both of us. Me and all. It has been long since we sat down to build those things we need to be alive. That finger of wire, that hand in the murk. Behind low growls we ache to swing.  Black mask with rivet-holes where eyes once went. That smash yes and the busted car we crowed off the cliff: they are tall for you when you get to where you stand. Charlie was the name of this bum galaxy that had its wayward eyes shorn as I tracked past on molten everything. Like a kiss in the wind, it's still there. But going numb is part of the goodness of it, as your face flies homeward, up to bric-a-brac stars.

Still Trying Stuff

Almost like the buildup of snow in the mingling mountains, we word this ripping string. Diving down is how we wake: shiver out the drunky morning, sound of traffic-clang and hand goodbye. Here some meaning, here a fish that grumbles when we figure the world. Always a crosswise world, always a pale resistance. Nearly all of life will happen without us. We remember that we are for ashes, for grinning and for times. A grey-black fuzz hangs in corners and we try not to heel around it…try to go through. Here we are in the fire that sloughs us off.

I'll Memory You

The grey granite of big intentions has me in a worldly crunch. Wobbling in time before time, we saw each other and ran towards life. What innocence is it that I see inside my own head and watch microscopic sharks thrusting everywhere without pretense? What rain and what kaleidoscope? Put your hand in mine and we can sleep until the end of sleep. And small fingers come through autumn. A little garden ripple and then quiet. No one moving, and no one going to move. The them that we call us wavers and embraces--lost needles finding their way to beats. And crumpled creatures, breathing tiny yawns of singed relief. No one gazed the way we gazed that way, that day. All was a subcutaneous tide of sighs. Water in me and me missing my cave.  It’s too long a way to because. Because you found a way to think the emblems out of dust. I was wrong and right, the way a ship eventually goes down. Someone knows they should sing a song, and everyone pretends to listen.

All These Innocents

Every Little

Fun World

Here is my blank. It smells of wide white. I have been so many. I am alive, alone, etc. I allow for the opening and it keeps not. Space on the page and rent of time on earth. Then should we be two or very many? Every something in the grey of this. Weight of the whole void. These innocent catastrophes. Surviving this will take my death. Sun shows up with some new flower I eat or turn into. Bright red happens and a party rushes in, just to light it up and laugh its name. Each other to hold. And in tremolo sunset, I open. Reveal tiny turtle shell or quiet black marble eye.

Shaking It

Good, now how do you put it when you have a list of names and everyone on your list is someone you love and someone who has screwed you? There is always the reason and always the dark mud that seeps out when you try and get yourself ready to speak with whomever you try and guest out with...which is really you trying to ghost out. They are the same thing and despite your innate ability to forgive, which comes from having a saint for a mother, you rectify the situation by shouting. And even as you shout you know that moments later you'll be forgiving and apologizing in the same sentence. The same breath, even. And then the girl you are afraid of (because of how she swings your brain into glorious dreams of lust and joy) comes up to talk to you and you avoid saying the thing you want to say because you are, after all, just a primate, bent on keeping the social contract. Mostly. And then you feel like the world is something that was made by others for others, and you are here to try and find a place to fit in but you can't because good people are other people and manipulative people are other people and you are somewhere outside, or in between, or both. And so then you listen for the sound of that one bird, with that resonant metallic vibrato that trills the afternoon blues away. And you hear it and you think of having an erection, and you feel a little inspirational shame and it sets you up for the right kind of moment to slap yourself in the face when the wind kicks up and you have the windows down and the stereo bagpipes piping on the high highway. And the mountain casts its shadow over you. It casts its grey and green shadow to give night the hollow hum it needs to keep you awake and thinking of the pauses in your life where you actually learned something. And all your thoughts reflect outward from the shimmering bubble, like you inside a snow globe. Only in this one you can be the one who shakes it.

I Probably Missed It Too

I have to pee right now so we have to make this quick. Let’s try and come around the other side of death. I mean, since there is birth in this world (which is fucking bananas) then there is also music. The one and then the other and a whole bunch of other stuff in between. Take these words and walk up a mountain and find something like the golden last light of the day you’re in, and try these words: "Hey, night, I know I am a part of you, just as you’re a part of me, and the air and the stars and all the rest of the shit I don’t even know about is all out there and in here, awash and spinning. Like the spirits of everything are haunting everyone, even the sand and the ditches and the mustard in the fridge. You can’t push this out. Everything made is made with the care requisite to prop it up in the precarious abandon of the crashing world. For a time every thing and every being has its own grace, and then clunks away." Right. I’m done. There’s the poem. You might have missed it. I have to go pee now. 

Getting In

Use the old tools and dig up the new earth. Then wash your hands and show me. Eat. Be alive. Then your house will quake. Stand on the ground where you saw what you needed. Focus on the lights ahead. Be the runner and the one who wakes up. There are no tricks. We just pretend we know what we're doing and then shout onward. This is the way to the best mess. 

My Head, My Fins

The cloud rolled away and I found my head. It was under the bristling conifers, wavering in the breeze. I had a frog and an orchid in my ears. They moved in iridescent green pathways through my oblong conundrum. I gyred and cawed. My eyes drew close to me with tears and a hurrying hound looked back. There was me, shuttled between planets, old and new. My hands and fins made tiny parabolas in the swim.

Then Go Forth

A million miles under the lamps. A million miles in rain. A mile for every shoe you've never worn. You can see them now, shimmying in the given starlight, becoming soil in endless graves, worn and waiting in the foyers of a billion homes. And the planet wrinkles like a crow's foot, chuckles onward through night. Statues and statues of selves in the tsunami whorl of history. And history is a ruse for thinking that we make time. Of course time makes us, then lets us go. These horses in this field...what bridles and what bonds can hold you, when you see beyond the rim of the world?

The Charm Of Making

Songs and stories of infraction. I need to tender my heart, huge and weevil-addled, unfurling in wind. A demon ache. A love. If there is a love in me, may it swirl forth. I am unproduced. This is the stuff of silliness and myth. Whatever me there is begins with a goof and continues with death. The outline of my body in time. The digital wisp of night in the internet.

Calamities

It strikes me that I was replacing how much I missed you with how much I wanted her. But she was the stand-in for how much I wanted to rescue myself, like the old sea turtle. I watched her lay eggs in the sand, 85 years old and still trying to save her species, still willing to swim the high seas, through oil slicks and past the ghosts of battleships.

Restive Nocturne Two

I had your favorite music playing while I twisted her. It was the best. She was in love with me and I was in love with the you in her. And none of us was actually there. 

It was the perfect seance. Cherubs crushed their faces against her windows, trying to get out. It's been years and I can only write about it now. Because I am in time, but not of it. 

And time recalls me, works me back to those cracking moments with little bruises and short breaths. Eyes were on me and I didn't know how to do spring in autumn. It was okay to be alive, but not okay to want. In this nocturne, I'm counting the faces of my former selves like beads on a rosary. 

Your arms were long and I was in the rain. We turned wishes into earthquakes, chuckling away while the world fell.

Let X

--after Laurie Anderson

Then we went where two rivers met. We saw how we held hands the first time and laughed. We saw ourselves in pictures and stepped off the canyon edge into a willing sky. We flew for a while and knew every blue flower. This was all the roughness before civilization. We had to make complete cuts, meaning nothing and nothing again. Up against every word. I'm up against all of them and they form a thirsting army. You had a knife on the rim of your halo. Your scent was gasoline. There is nothing like a corpse. It does not wait and it does not want. It changes every minute and it does not regret. There is nothing like where bees come from. Not springtime, and not God. That was always a thick and foolish foolishness. Then we put our hands in soil and our hands were covered in soil.

Now You Do

Quick breathing in the open break, worlds away from toasty destiny, I'm with you and our past, shivering in alleys and cold hallways. In cold walls and eastern walks we gathered our stolen hearts and shared them up again in brightish light. Then fire bit our hands and we shoved off, our cabin wheeling. Cave spun, hair tangled in smarting roots, we dozed for a while and struck racking seas. The wreck of storms was for us and for distance and in my life I saw you polishing drab stars. My shoulderblades unbuckled and trees bent sidewise in a warming wind. I was all for finding perfect moments in our veering mind.   

Occupations And Some Satellites

A cheery band of brigands cradled the thicket of silver in their eyes, retired forethought, afterthought, and simply went where the growing was warm. They took toads with them. Old toads that stammered and halted until their feet could hardly kick. Stunted feet in crisp envelopes. Under a bush a painter sat, wondered aloud in the silence and made do with hooey. The gun stunned the fly and the liar. A hokey shadow named itself King Me, and played at the lacquered instrument until my hands could almost move without. Water poured on things that grew, then went back down. A tired functionary filed the form to end addictive delirium. A banker unfroze the accounts and went warbling through the town for the sake of songbreaking. He skipped in the rain. He rejoined the fish and added the day to the list. And the names, too.

Old Man And Ants

Filing into the hovel, towards tenderness, the ants gathered at the feet of the squat old man. He had long since gone beyond disgust. He would never harm them. They were old and he was old. They were dying and he would sweep them into the jungle when they expired. He would sprinkle them onto good soil so their dead bodies could nourish it. They were confident in their feeling that he would care for them. How strange for the ants to think this way. Of course, they did not exaclty think. Their thoughts were, in fine, formations of the old man. 

Four Friends

Long gone from the boil, an old pot gathered in the corner and shouted to everyone: "I am old, a dead vessel, full of ruses and knuckles and the way you look at me is broken." It tumbled forward and extended its arms out into the dust, awkwardly rolling from side to side, with nowhere to go and no one to help it. Everyone was gone from the house years ago, and only the beams of sunlight were there to witness the scene. The old pot, rolling from side to side, the cold blackened fireplace, the sunbeams, and the dust. They made a family and agreed to stay together until that grande dame, night, came calling. Then they would forget themselves again and roll about in wasted solitude. It was an altogether fine reality. The walls leaked cold air all around them and no one had a care in the world.

Quick Silver

To be in touch with sides, and to walk along a shifting sandline, these are approaches to civilization. Then the rocket. And the fault lies with earthquakes. And children discover the mystery of solids. No souls, only spheres that vibrate when we approach. Chives and potatoes. And mercury. That silver quickening of black blood waiting in the trees. A proper face and a warming hand that adjust the collision. The comfort of dolls, the slats between the moments in time. The boy with his hand in his mouth. The boy with his speech sliding to the horizon. 

My Poem-Comix in Drunken Boat Magazine

I have some poem-comix published in a recent issue of the fine online magazine Drunken Boat:

Click here to check them out.

The Thief

A thief sits in a landscape he stole even though it was already his. He is throwing away everything of value. The sunset. Birds. Wind on the water. This has to be done to make room for the beginning. He throws out ownership and the myth of things. He throws away language and the calliope of symbols. He throws away plastic. Cantaloupes and cardboard and air. He lets his own mouth do the breathing for once.

Restive Nocturne One

Wondering a oneness, a silent conclave. Nothing goes hurtling across the sky. Everything and everyone, all shouting down from disappearing clouds. Hands shift in hands and nerves leave them behind, to grieve in their own cradle. Goners get gone. 

Distinct in the shadows: these old feelings. The dark awake, when the bright cold buildings meet me at my window.  Then a heavy breath is routed and I am without. Just a shift of thought, a glistening scarf on a velvet chair.

Meek tones in the margins, a paraphrase to busted longing, a mute descent, these coarse cuts. Hear this, and bend in thought. Hear this, and go below. Attunement. 

Home is where the cieling is. All blue and far away.

The Edge Of The Ember

Death and its requisite implications will have to happen whether or not we make it to the edge of the ember. A lonesome stinging thing will see us confused when the windows play tight and envious. I woke up and knew you, and in knowing you knew I was known. Then I lived some more. You watched and panned for me in streams. There was also how the light moved across the floor. It carried vast shoes with it, dust in a teacup, nothing for a sung hero. Our bed had a hand in the drink without losing us. Who falls? Only the story that won't listen. A court will find us holding each other in the storm, laughing. 

In the want of an original title I have ventured to call the following piece a remonstrance.

Elk train vert. A few years ago, no one imagined that the spines (foliage) of pine-trees could be converted into wool. Roanoke ember auroch, bos taurus primigenius. The problem Saxby Chambliss faces is that he has maxed out his support base. What about: “I don’t like you, do you understand?” Keep in mind, keep leaves in mind, keep then, using the habitat template approach, that hydropeaking pressure is related to biological quality elements, such as the ellipse of the half-moon. Lunatic lollers and lepers about, and mad as the moon sit, more other less. When passing a senior center or other facility primarily used by senior citizens, contiguous to a street other than a bleak highway and posted with a standard "SENIOR" warning sign, a local authority is not required to erect any sign pursuant to this paragraph until donations from private sources covering those costs are received and the local agency makes a determination that the proposed signing should be implemented. One thing about this, the longer you last the less you care.

What Snakes?

What snakes
in this reality hotel,
what perfect traps
and nooses,
what cliffs
of shale
might we
fall from,
wandering beyond
limits of love?

The Articles The Particles

True roaming, the everything way we go. This had me down and I was down and something made me say go up there and find the bottom for the plumbing and should you see him or her or that way that they do, then you might get in the middle the way you want to. That is just the down way of saying this is the thing. So, I said it. That had me saying it over and again and of course there was no me to be there, but I said it as I said it and something true happened. It was a cool treasure and there was a way to extract its great bulk from the bottom, but it required we go live at the bottom, so was the worth really inherent in the value? There was no there without us, you have it. Than me, she was something with something growing, and I stood marbling the hallway with my smile. Everything hit the eject button at about the same time, and nothing blasted, it all just heavily drifted upward as a sprint might fuzz out. Was good. Was real good and everyone cried all along and alone and there was both of us zanting and melting and skipping away when the prices were told. We knew they were more so we held our heads out, hands in mouths, fingers getting wet and our eyes starred the way they do.

Dear Friends,

My longtime friend and craze-art collaborator, Ben Cramer, and I are pleased to announce the launch of our very first album, Carmelita Velasquez, which you will soon be able to buy on iTunes or listen to for free on Spotify. It's been years in the making and we are simply tickled that it's finally a reality. If you would like an advanced taste, you can listen to it for free in its entirety (free!) by clicking right here.

New poems up at the On Barcelona blog!

Dear Friends,

New poems of mine can be seen at the cool blog site On Barcelona. 

Enjoy, enjoy!

Our Hero (#1)

Our skinny, messy-haired, 19 year-old hero wakes up in his small and shitty first floor studio apartment to the sounds of “Still Life With Hot Deuce On Silver Platter” by Titus Andronicus playing on his Red Firetruck Radio. He jumps out of bed, wearing only his boxers. He does 17 jumping jacks and 4 push-ups. He pulls on jeans, and a T-shirt printed with the phrase: “I’m all about understanding Anarchy." He tucks some rocks in his back pockets and reads Emily Dickinson's "I'm nobody! Who are you?" to his frog (which looks at him quietly from inside a small glass bowl next to his toaster). He fries himself an egg and eats it out of the pan, drinking a coke and reading a worn 1977 edition of LIFE magazine.  Occasionally he tears a page out of the magazine and tosses it into the air, yelling: "Montage!" (Meanwhile, outside, two thieves wearing ski masks and black leather gloves are preparing to break into and steal his neighbor’s car.) Our hero, coming to the end of his magazine, yells “To work! … Or NOT to work!” He quickly ties a blindfold onto himself and sprints as hard as he can out of his apartment door. He SLAMS into one of the thieves, whose head slams into the head of the other thief. THWACK! The two thieves fall unconscious into the street, thieving tools falling out of their hands. Our hero yells “Sorry...Maybe!” and runs off, zig-zagging, down the street. A beat cop turns the corner and comes upon the fallen thieves. The cop grins strangely, with a thought bubble reading “Now what?!” while our hero careens down the block into the distance.