We won’t evade starvation to shrink
Naïve to the death of us,
We find, we find bodies
In the absence
We regress
No one remains
If we debate *** leaves in pink chalk
We proceed
through negatives without shadows
If we find nothing, I will live without
Doubt
We don’t go
May 6, 2013
May 6, 2013 at 1:55 AM UTC
You might never love me in the way I want you to. Or the way I need you to. I like you too much and I know it. I've gotten over you, but I continue to fall back in intrigue with you at the slightest provocation.
Because I change my mind a million times a day about you. And at the end of it, I don't believe in you. But against all good judgment, I recognize all the shadows that move like vertigo through my sleep as yours. And believe in you again.
Apr 2, 2013
Apr 2, 2013 at 12:39 AM UTC
The altitude clicks through my head
We join the stagnant air, neon stained
And creep through the hills
Like ghosts of an age almost dead
*I’d walk with my people
if I could find them*
In the fading light at least
I feel less like a sore thumb
The potential sparks against our ankles
like sirens in the rear-view,
Wading through the space
Only the unknown can inflict.
Fear fails to show
the way we knew it would
And the temp can’t master conversation
So we fall asleep, second row,
standing room only
Fog consumes the sound.
Mar 14, 2013
Mar 14, 2013 at 10:04 PM UTC
We steep ourselves
in jagged silhouettes
of your piano intro.
Bathe in dusty memories
like sepia-toned snapshots.
We will hear you
until we, too
are too sore for sound.
We shiver through
flickering silence
Far less.
Lost like a static low.
Where affinity breaks down,
freeze crowds against
our feeble fish-bowl walls.
We can’t tell cold
from native skin
Braking black-and-white
festers at our feet.
Extremities unknown.
Confident,
we wander.
Feb 14, 2013
Feb 14, 2013 at 11:09 PM UTC
Nightmares must be gentle to do any harm.
They stagger through my unconscious mind
the way the dead tips of palm leaves flicker in the wind.
In the absence of sleep, I converse with them
from my second story window,
through the air above the boulevard.
They break out in golden sweat
and their leaves clash and rustle
when I ask where all the clouds have gone.
In the face of such hostility,
I crave the trees of home,
happy to accept their fate
even as they begin to wreak
of the death of summer themselves.
They shed leaves like flesh
that bleed smoke the flavor of rotting earth
as they burn through late October.
Light dissolves
and shadows move like vertigo,
the way Lizzy Volkamer moved through the Midwest
the summer before last.
The palms won’t speak to me
And Lizzy watches dead leaves gather.
Until they’re burnt, she won’t speak to me either,
though she misses Lo dearly.
Because Lo only lives in the summer months
and is miles away by now.
Ashes began to fill a sky already in decay,
so she swam through August to escape.
She followed the heat to where it settles in other seasons,
where vicious sleep peruses such fugitives.
Se faltan las nubes
whisper the palm trees in her dreams
even as the wind picks up
and offers to help them say so much more
Oct 21, 2012
Oct 21, 2012 at 5:00 PM UTC
I am the emptiness that exists in the kitchen
at such hours, late and lonely.
I can operate only in this space,
at night when the answers become irrelevant
and the present tense becomes the past.
I rely on the sporadic sounds of movement of traffic below the window.
I am the scratchy sound of death cab
on the Buick’s aged speakers.
I claw at the insides of the aluminum
and seep out through cracked windows.
I shore myself against a distant past
despite better judgment.
I am born of the vivid summer heat.
I ride the train to the loop
and back out to the city’s extremities,
like blood through a body.
I sweat under layers of wool humidity.
I am the concrete paving the boundless suburban streets.
I exhale tar and forest
as the rain begins to fall, long after dark,
cooling the still-hot surface.
I crave the tires and feet that brace themselves against me.
I am the slow moving clouds at dusk, the color of tea.
I ignite as the sun slouches toward the horizon.
I consume the jets that depart from O’ Hare in every direction.
I am familiar laughter, striking ears in palpable waves.
I move most freely though vicious August heat,
But even in such passive chilled air, I proceed.
I careen toward what has been named peace,
though it’s been forgotten over the years.
I have fled the immortal city for one more ageless.
I crave the smell of the death of summer.
I pass into a state of suspension
like the bodies that surround me, never born but built.
I trace the veins and find no flesh,
but only bones beneath them.
I stretch willing to bridge the gaps that exist.
I am the tangled freeways moving among one another
in the heart of a city accused of being heartless.
I am guiltless in the face of isolation.
I hold blood hostage on a daily basis.
I am lethargic, gold-soaked afternoons
Bearing such spacious skies.
I lie beneath gilded light
like the lazy palm lined streets.
I am the trembling airwaves,
And I disarm the distance itself.
Oct 18, 2012
Oct 18, 2012 at 10:10 PM UTC
As the vivid heat of Illinois
sheds
the profuse breathing forest
and crowded meadows,
smug evenings
bleed
insect symphonies.
As pressurized homes
Exhale
oblivious life
cushioned in air artificially chilled,
one thousand Julys
forever in transit
traverse golden cloud ceilings
above so many absent walls
until savage nights
visit for the sake of vacant freeways,
and neon blooms
shadows, brake lights, and flickering darkness
Oct 17, 2012
Oct 17, 2012 at 9:21 PM UTC
It occurred to me today
that I like the way you died.
You died gently, the way I hoped you would,
as if the fall itself was enough.
And then I remembered that the fall itself was.
I let it draw me away
the way I knew it would,
to naked skies hollowed out,
nests for the cool indifferent air
that creeps in after dusk
And then fall crept in on you
as the violent heat we knew dissolved,
and the profuse life turned into something less alive
like the permanent muted color
of the world I now belong to.
Any kind of you and me
that ever would have been
fell,
like the leaves are doing now, I'm told.
They said they changed colors first,
like bruises blooming against the sharp, liquid sky.
And then
they fell.
By the time they sank to the ground,
they were all dead.
The bodies will be piled
and celebrated by some before burning.
And though they won't know why,
the smell will remind them of something good.
Only those of us
who have already gone might know
that the smell carries every good day these bodies have seen
a whole season of good days,
an age,
brief as it may have been,
worth flames.
Oct 14, 2012
Oct 14, 2012 at 2:06 PM UTC
The calico-gray quilt of clouds
is no longer backlit by a sun
we won't see all season.
The naked sky of summer
reclaimed its heavy covers from storage,
the ones it needs to keep warm
even on the mildest autumn evenings.
And of all the planes I study all night,
just one lands
The rest talk over me,
struggling to reach the ceiling of this town
to pierce it and flee through the bareness behind it
The metal bird sheds ash
and demands attention in the darkness.
A lack of color trails
as it descends
across the space between the ground and the sky.
Slowly, it settles on the town
looking so much less threatening there,
like a joke even, resting on the stone heads
of the gods and goddesses in the park.
Oct 12, 2012
Oct 12, 2012 at 12:57 AM UTC
In this monotone washed out city,
The traffic moves slowly,
But still too fast to **** time,
Under a desolate ever-grey sky.
In such lack of color,
These days lose their meaning.
And laughter gives way to silence,
As bitter cold seeps in,
Through the cracked door frames and slush-speckled windows;
Through too-pale limbs and never-enough layers.
It settles only in bodies
Shuddering from more than cold air
Home among the dirty-snow-lined streets,
And lonely leafless trees;
two-thousand miles from the sea.
The memory fades like melting snow.
Dead are the places that once killed time.
And lost are the ideas that enabled a hope,
That this place was ever more than a shell,
Or these bodies were more than cold.
Nov 14, 2011
Nov 14, 2011 at 9:29 PM UTC