Kindred spirit, the privilege is mine, it's just that I,
I never finish because there is nothing going on, nothing to go on.

All right, all right, all right,
you're right,
I don't write as much as I used to,
but in all fairness (to myself)
I feel a bit more loose.

Never mean to,
but I guess I argue
a lot in order to hide
how much I really don't care;
Celina said it's not okay
but that at least I know
it's insulting.


I only want to be in my body
when you are touching it.
That tone an angel loaned
to you can ripple through
the void, make a soft,
translucent puddle out of reality,
can you see me
on the other side?

Don't say I'm angry,
it's just that
no one has ever really tried
to impress me, so I'm scared
I guess.

Remember you are here,
don't be weird about the types of things
sentimentality will bring,
will string along to the
forefront of an open sore;
no one pours the sink a whiskey
drink until the girls are crying out above the stars,
better yet stirring them from afar
for their own faults, for being
fickle with their hearts.

You know I don't sleep much,
You know I don't dream of such
pretty things but I could imagine
how you, in a different life,
were gifted eternal wings.

Those that brought you to me.

I would weep

if I wasn't made of stone.

I feel like I have fox-holed my gut
Sleeping only in the shape of a ball

And I have folded the thought of you into a trench
so that I might sleep safely tonight

But I have learned how not to be lost
In the sharpening of my shoulder blades
I have learned never to shrug
In the off chance I will
shed my wings
and truly be lost

Come back to me

I have been drunk for a week now
and I feel like your breath will sober me up

I want to hold your head like a sunrise
strands of gold drizzle out to the tips of my fingers

I am buzzing
Lacking structure

Your smile
like a hammock hanging from the laugh lines in your eyes

You laugh like a runway held up by your own cool breath

I want to place my mouth there
In darkness, aquatic nightlight glow

Your skin, goose bump braille
a language I am still learning

My fingertips
tracing the topography of your smooth

Your landscape
I want to get lost

My hands
your skin
My drunk
your breath

Come back to me
Sober me up

incogitable is the question
you've asked yourself
since you could form
thoughts dense enough to grasp
quandaries these daily citizens
are encouraged
"not to be contemplated"

unthinkably aware of your surroundings
that you tend to notice cracks
in the side-stomped concrete
three-point-five seconds before
my ankle ever twists

and yet, your eyebrows carved canyons
in sweaty, porous sediment
caked onto the blood fed sediment
stretched below your hair

you didn't believe me when i told you
cameras will litter the city streets
innumerable greater than the lampposts
illuminating your view of my sprained ankle
(you missed that one, by the way)

you honestly believed that everyone
thinks about everyone else
because that's what you do

but boy, I gotta tell ya,
you are not like anyone else
you're the high-flyin pilot
star visible to the naked eye
caught behind the crescent of the moon
yet still shining through
and some may even come close enough
to brush heat waves you emanate from that hot heart

unfortunately, your perennial denizens
rely on waxen wings
crashing anxiously homeward
to moss-laden paradises
they make up
twisting neural networks into bundles

here i recline
pierced through the retina
held fast iron-gripped heart
legs tight and fingers licked
incogitably cognizant
of each
and every
answer
           || Restricted Access Memory ||
will not permit to ponder

ponder for longer than
a second anyway
but a second is all you
need to receive
seventeen-thousand-four-hundred-and-forty-two
percent of your daily value
of vitamin E




(that stands for Enlightenment, people)

I had a soul, once, like a live animal
full of life and love and excitement.
It is dead now, quiet,
hunted,and gunned down
by enthusiastic hunters and self-infliction and wine that drowned
and bled it to death, skinned and hung,
with bulging eyes glazed like glass,
leaving only sun-bleached bones and foul odor.
I had a soul, once, that flew like a bird,
and spread its wings at your voice
and the call of God, who has grown silent,
whose conversations once held in trust in dark places
are deaf to answers and questions.
It was beautiful, once,
beautiful enough to be part of this beautiful world.
Everything was a succession of fireworks,
Bursting bright with color and light in a loud, dangerous
and glorious display of life and passion, and most of all love.
It has withered, now, like a dead flower or an old man,
back bent, senile, ignorant, and
too broken to be a semblance or remembrance of its once former glory,
dead.

What is music?  The heart rendered?  What life
Is to a dream?  The eyes object in rapture?
What is the soul's shell, but a half note hollow
Contained with music?  Art is cold—
Echo, mute repetition, poor traits for nine
Dead muses of memory, a fiction after
The fact, nor can there be a shelf for credence
Without cadence.  And though the painter's eyes
Remember rainbows colour, his hands forget
All, save black and white.  Though the sculptor sees
The vein of nudes within the sparkled rock
That stone, still, looks back with grieving half-
Heartedness.
                         The chambered heart is beating,
The droning gales are sighing, but like the one bird
Who flies three ways— before and after song,
My middling wings pronounce two kingdoms part
Music.  The felt fingers of rain consort with well-
Tempered earthly quays and everywhere there is
There is the bright organic instrument—
And actuality is sidled with dead metaphors.
Music is but purest feeling given air to,
The mind soothed, the spirit seduced and a quell
For ache of heart, music is pure making—
Existence itself, another plain, a well dressed
Traveler, a border with life—
Body and spirit, who hand in hand and each
With each, are bound as wings are paired;
One flyer soaring.

My mind's bleeding out, and no one else knows. My thoughts plague me with doubt; and my world's full of holes.
I better pick up a pail, and start saving myself, cause this water is rising, creating a hell.

So on frail wings, I am learning to fly, making up things, to put on my mind,
Now I'm so far from land even these angels have died, I look in the mirror but I have gone blind.
Left now to wonder why oh god why.

Fly high,
Know your dreams have wings,
Be an albatross...
Clearing above the blue seas,
Until the curve of the horizon,
Can be bent and seen!

Fly high,
You know you can steer,
Tame the winds...
And break the waves;
Even storms can clear,
Giving way to brighter days;
A new season blooms,
Fear not, nay!

Fly high,
And break off from the hibernation,
See yourself with a redefinition;
Even a single prism,
Gives birth to a spectrum!

a stripper.
a girl without wings.

she reached for her phone and
sat up in bed
typing.

"dear journal," I said, "he shaves his balls and won't
let go of the bottle."

she laughed, then continued,
while I slumped over the sill
sucking that tit raw:

"read it to me when you're done."

"okay," she said.

it went on like this all day.
there were a thousand dancers in town
and I found the one who hadn't been
penetrated in two years.

"he says he gets ill if he doesn't have sex for five weeks.
am I just the five week girl?"

we were both so right,
yet so wrong.
but at least I got a free dance
out of it.

"listen," I said, "don't think I won't send your ass packing."

all you could hear was the tapping
of the keys.
she was hard at work, she had
her muse.
Diary of a Lonely Stripper,
she called it.

"you know, it's actually not the worst idea ever.
if only you could add a little wit to those entries..."

I stood up to take a piss,
but had another drink first.

"he's going to pee out the window," she said,
"and he doesn't like my writing."




from Dizzied By Chance: Poems of a Fringe Existence (2013)