Finding your hair in my socks
All these ugly parts of us
That make me smile
...
how hollow my Messages looked
How blanched and hush,
after a while.
May 7, 2019
May 7, 2019 at 11:55 PM UTC
Day simmers
Mutating as we speak
To reach its zenith,
A short afternoon leaves when the dark breaks;
Nestling closer
To this more stable form
Of unchanging winter,
Of death tirading in pearly vestments;
Pitiful critters,
Eyes beady-black and weeping–
Go reach your summons,
A short path lies where the mind breaks.
Nov 27, 2018
Nov 27, 2018 at 4:39 PM UTC
Planes streak across the wide October sky–
The sun is setting–
Contrails stream behind them,
glowing scars of the evening.
The highest ones, they exhale the day’s gold,
pure and sharp
like fields of August wheat,
dusty and late-summer charred.
Redder and lower ones hug the skyline,
No cloud to catch them,
Fall like meteorites,
the slow burn of a dwarf star
Memories never print so vividly,
slow burn sees fast death,
Reds, golds and what's between,
A brain is all catch-and-release
So afterwards what should be left of this?
Not but an umbra,
Impressionist beauty,
A mere relief of its source?
Beauty’s slow fade is not the tragedy,
–rather the reverse–
That we fade to beauty,
To never hold it in full.
Oct 21, 2018
Oct 21, 2018 at 5:09 PM UTC
Clusters of lights like lilies,
Or like boiling craters in obsidian
The black is inky,
It could swallow me whole,
I'm thankful to be strapped in
The horizon scrolls back as the plane lilts
Like an image in an old slide projector
Suddenly the moon is below me
Icarus should have winged by night
I’d be god if I weren’t strapped in
Clusters of light like lilies
In this lolling pond we skim
Light strung like dew on spider silk
A flattened web to stretch the land
thankful not to be attached
Shimmering grids draw nearer
Enveloped in their seductive shimmer
thankful not to crash
Oct 20, 2018
Oct 20, 2018 at 3:52 PM UTC
Rings on rosewood linger
from a cold glass of ice
that warmed but soon after,
whose contents evaporated away.
My chaser became the room,
matching it twice
in form and temperature,
Would never have stayed.
So I roll the glass
with a retrograde tilt,
but keep it in place,
but keep it at hilt
such that knurls on the crystal,
jagged knuckles on the base,
make it thump in a path
and it steps and it stilts
in its own kind of track
while connection with the ground
through multiple laps
stipples neatly on a plane—
infinite curve by singular tack.
And this motion is contained
to the confines of the round
of a bullseye-mark stain
where a highball was put down.
Reminds the afternoon patina,
the hunching over my piano,
the warmth of its shade of cocoa.
And the mug I placed on its bench,
where subsequently the lacquer
gave way to warmer matter
and a matte “O” was forever etched in print.
Reminds of sap-stuck fingers
that ailed us backwoods explorers,
that neither the soap nor the hottest water
could manage to separate.
Reminds of the smell of the road
that gashed through wild mint
with its tire-milled dirt pounded thin,
and the hazel dust that arose
and managed to stay ever close
when the little Sahara was traversed again.
Those clouds would form and move and clove,
and the dry would pinch in your nose;
yet it seemed the only stretch of land
to never see any rain.
And now it strikes as strange,
and I’d love to explain, but can’t—
the green was never killed,
while cleaved, and beaten, and grilled;
it managed to weather the dust
and ride on the cusp
of the electric months after May.
These things don’t peel away.
Reminds how none of this strays
too far from the path,
or too far out of mind,
and the nature of present and past,
how inseparably they bind.
Like the light to the glass,
one moves through the next,
and all the moments hug tight,
each forebears another's context.
Sep 21, 2018
Sep 21, 2018 at 5:51 AM UTC
Starlight pierces the shroud–
What is my mettle in this contraption?
Like a mite of sand
Which can stop a clock
But for it to align the wrong way?
Yet something tells me I’m less–
A wink folded into the rift,
A little joke played on a cassette
Good only to a hipster’s ears.
Sep 2, 2018
Sep 2, 2018 at 1:20 PM UTC
I catch little bits and pieces
like krill in a net made for bigger fish–
noticed by chance but as present as mist
in the places where clouds form.
Olives on sticks, buds on treetops
overspread from the chatter of crowds
who in currents of traffic meander,
neither aimful nor aimless nor calm.
Sun made present for now,
and so the torrents will show
and the walking is slow,
not that speed is important;
The population straightens up
as if to show for the sun,
as if the clouds were unspun
to unravel all tensions
and break down the denser threads.
So girls turn in dresses with floral prints–
all their purples and greens and their scents–
perfumes pirouetting with pollen–
awakened in lively spins.
May 1, 2018
May 1, 2018 at 4:30 PM UTC
Caulk like chalk lines
Drawn on a brick wall
draws blocks together
like ionized particles;
and so the dust whips
up from the pavement,
onto the flat mast
of a tricolored flag
which rests in public space–
but not without movement,
but not without tension–
would fall without knots.
And so our good people,
held by conviction
prescribed by no doctor
swallow a large dose.
Fellow faces they crumple, yet
it’s poor taste to mention that,
and so the tongue is tied;
we speak not.
White cloth like chalk lines,
Red strips like bricks fall
Three-fourths down a half mast;
good people feel sad.
Hands over mouths breathe
through cracks in the radio feed,
like freckles on a sunburn bleed
when cancer starts to spread.
Good people see the bad
and so white faces turn red,
the tragic intrudes on public space
and yields nothing said;
With chalk drawn in broad lines
Knots in arteries tie,
And so I share in death
with all passers-by.
Chalk traces human shapes
—hollow forms on the street—
a dream in waking,
immutable quaking,
beneath a a flag where all colors meet.
Apr 29, 2018
Apr 29, 2018 at 5:02 PM UTC
It’s possible to speak too much to remember what your words mean.
And so is the two-fold danger faced by writers.
Danger is to pace a hole in the floor.
Danger is to stand until you can’t move anymore
like when shallow waves **** your feet into the sand.
So I try not to stand when I write.
I keep a narrow tack
without too many big words
which pedants use to dig great holes in the ground
–moats to keep others out–
or make you think they think big.
But anyone who reads knows about Icarus
and anyone with aims must beware:
to shoot directly upwards is to strike your own head
when like fate the arrow
returns to source.
You’re only as good as your mind,
your characters only as strong as you are.
—at least, this is true in so far as you know.
True in so far as they speak.
For to test them you must torque them
and twist at their cores,
and make opposing forces meet–
but only
as hard as you can.
This makes writing a hill slick with oil.
Insecure. Potential energy.
Potential failure
seated
in all of that grime
that cakes your toes like grease that coats
the teeth of great industrial gears.
So I try not to stand when I write.
But whether the better take comes when you plunge
and you slide and dissolve like so much ice,
I must say I don’t know,
the thought
seems nice.
But the same
It seems like those who let go
Are the ones
with the least to say.
I can't decide
either which way.
All I know about writing is
most sentences are punctuated wrongly.
The period is certain,
but writing is undecided.
It is the figuring-out, a quest-bound troop
that moves with all its own fanfare.
Question marks curl up—
invisible smoke on a summer coal fire:
heat twisting the air like irons in stoke
giving sign of the transformations there withheld.
For fire mediates matter,
so writing stands ever-between.
But I’ve spoken too much and I don’t know what these words mean.
And so I fold like there’s danger in writing,
while danger is imagined like borders on a continent.
Danger is thinking
I'm dangerous enough to keep silent.
Like shallow waves,
given way to sand.
So avoid letting voids form
where the mind dismisses confrontation to more capable smiths.
Writing is –at best– an attempt.
Even with shallow structures
in rhythmic din,
the silent breaks by force of pen,
and all because of the simple fact
that quiet refuses to bend.
All I can hope is my writing upholds these unknowns
while I try not to stand.
But you ask about writing?
Apr 29, 2018
Apr 29, 2018 at 4:28 PM UTC
Vacationers huddle on tour
-history of a statue-
I'm not so different from they--
Watcher in a foreign land.
Shift my shape to grow to my seat.
A student laughs, kisses her boy
-were I not so different from they--
It could be sunny,
if not for the clouds. Though,
I suppose it could be raining.
Leaves lilting, to and fro,
Organic matter, decomposing.
Mar 21, 2018
Mar 21, 2018 at 8:37 PM UTC