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.