Your hummingbird heart keeps panicked time;
a quick-step march of hollow beats that bruise
the arching breadth of your ribs

                    (ribs caged by cellophane layers
                    of capillaries and fever hot skin-
                    don't you worry that those bones will
                    someday burst into fresh air, make their mark on
                    the rigid landscape?)

It would escape if not for my weight
pressed down like stones;
my body locked between shivering limbs,
come in from January's cold to clutch at your fire.
You are only slow
When sleeping;
When your sugar water has run low.

I drilled a hole in your dish
And drained it away.

As a child time creeps forth

Too slow

Now we gallop faster and faster-

I could feel tomorrow slipping into me

Before today would be done.

(Close my eyes and I was there; the empty places are collapsing
when nothing held them up)

Years are piled at my door

Endings tapping at the back of my shoulder

As futures finish before they will be born.

Bring back the line, time

Or send it forward;

I don’t like this jumbled mess,

This shifting mass of yesterday and tomorrow

And pointless todays clumping about me in one

Seething muddle.

A little geometric order would be nice.

Shifting red-wine shadows
pinioned against your hand.
This will end badly.

I want to make love to my buried self.


I want to draw her up.


I want to kiss her on the lips,
put her head against my *******.


I want to say
“It’s safe to come out now,”
fingers uncrossed, inviting.


Then
If she’ll let me
I want to press her so close
that atoms merge,
flesh swells;


The afterimages will float before my eyes
And she will stitch into my surface
like a second skin-
a shift in posture,
in the angle of my jaw.

Spring’s first breath stirs through February winds.

Her quick tongue finds purchase in soft peaks and hollows,

brushing skin grown sweet from cooling sweat and  

lingering traces of sunlight.

Where she presses, she stirs up fires banked down by the cold.

Embers shift, sparks fly

to greet the night now filled with the cinders of January festivals,

those long nights where the bare hearth wouldn’t warm you and

an empty bed was all that would take you in from the cold.

It was safe as long as the ashes lay thick upon the coals.

But now the painful longing rises once more, an ache of bones

and ligaments stretching in ungainly growth.

Though you would turn your face away

it is too late, her breath too quick.

Your skin will pebble;

desire will thrum its presence in blood

quickened to the pace of the ice flow cracking along the river.

He took a step off the concrete and onto frozen dirt. Grass stiff with

frost shattered beneath his feet. He took another step, turned, and the

city was gone- only fields stretching, stretching- left right back front

up and down. Dirt and dead grass as far as the eye could see, and

above that the dangerous blue sky, the one that seemed to invite

hallucinations and crush down like a prison, except instead of walls

this place had space; an endless, empty world, free for you to wander

until your feet dropped off or your mind melted from the sheer size of

it all. An endless space worse than no space at all. His breath puffed

out in damp, warm clouds, and when it came back the ice went into his

lungs and pierced him from the inside out. It hurt. His face was cold

and the sky was too blue, and all that blue would drive him mad. Too

much. No choice but to step toward the horizon, the endless

stretching line that did not change from east to west to south. No sun,

no clouds; the fields dead at his feet. He knows he has to find the city

again, he'll die without the city, but he doesn't know where it went or

where he should begin to look.

Summer's air sinks somnolent into

bones of arm and leg

They drag along like honey's gold

through currents soft and wet

with dew, graced by breeze and

dappled cool by shade of trees-

and those climbing giants

burst to sky from garden's walls;

Form verdant sanctuary for

August sleep walkers lost in highest heat

and waking dreams.