I speak of hope
like the dawn it comes, there, on the horizon

july
so sweet and shy
passive yet
pass swiftly by

july
a long goodbye
and every year
you make me cry

july
don't even try
cause when you're done
the end is nigh

july
if only I
could hold the tune
of your name
sigh

does a voice ruin the wind?

I worry about the words I will say, forgetting that silence is charged with meaning,
and is easy to share with you.

l'appel du vide

I remember the wind,
howling, messing up my hair like invisible fingers,
hollow with ghosts;

I can see this memory in fragments.
you are there,
but it is your absence that I recognize -
it is the lack of you I see.

it is easy to know the despicability of living,
and a surprise to see the kindness when it comes.

i cannot name what i feel for you
but you mean something to me

plastic bags hang beneath my tired eyes
but i got up this morning and i did it.
and i did it yesterday and i will do it tomorrow, and the next day too.
and i will keep on going even if the bags get darker and longer
and i want another five minutes of darkness and comfort.
i will not stop for nothing
and then one day i will wake up and i will have no purple eyes
because i am used to early mornings
and i won't want to sleep in
because i need the sunshine
and i will look back and be proud,
even if i skipped some days or slept in.
Because I did it. I did it. No one did this for me.

And trust me, everyone.
I promise that you can do it too.
you can do anything, even if your world is catching fire,
be the phoenix and renew from the ashes.
have a little hope and you will get there.

The asylum is the biggest building;
we called it the spider because from above,
its wings looked like legs with a body at the centre.
The windows are framed by metal grating,
and crosses mark each of them in the middle.

Now it is no longer an asylum.
It's marked as private property,
yet trails surround it in the fields of tall grass and the woods behind.
In the morning, runners sweep past it in a dreary march,
and in the evening, kids bike past in a race against the sun.
Sometimes they get off their bikes and peer into the windows on the ground floor,
plaster their faces against the metal grating,
see the peeling wallpaper and the over-turned tables,
but mostly the empty rooms and the view across to the next window.
Inherently they look through the building, onto the other side where a window, parallel to the one they are looking in, transports them to the other side of the walls.

On the second floor, there is a broken window,
forced from the inside since glass covers the lawn and pavement.

Maybe it is tragic,
all the people from the north side of this land shipped up here and trapped,
some of them sterilized,
confined to a labyrinth.

Now the building sits empty and deranged,
locked up from the outside world,
not for any purpose anymore except to sit there,
expired.

starlight does not shine
on the shores of lake despair;
waters quell longing


. . .

Let me be a stranger to the consistent licking of melancholy
For her's is an anchor that I can just quite out swim.
It is tiring.

seduced by that
innocence
sounding so cruel like deer who
do not know to wait
they run head on
and live or die by chance

that is always the fear -
not even the timing
but the doing

an entire world is waiting
on the other side

so admire the grass
say things
ask.

two bodies
parallel
one is lost
the other dwells

one sees the other
and watches, invisibly
but there's no sense
in plea
because neither of them
can break free

from the roots
of this old tree.

One has loved, though,
endlessly,
has watched the other,
helplessly.

I'll be in love when I can dance in front of them as if I was alone.

where there is love, there is also pain.
but where there is love, there is hope.

born with the water
the lotus opens in the moonlight

a man fell for her,
and every now and then they dine
on moonshine

above the surface she is rose and white
and below she is tethered to the world

no one can hold her
except for the water

I gave my happiness as collateral

Hillsides of endless green roll
like clouds before a storm,
but they are stilled by the mountain.
And within that valley, a boy no more than what life's made of him yet:
he will go on to foreign places and make them home,
grow into a place that he does not know,
build things, and a family. And he told me of that merry place
locked into the ether,
where a teacher made honey from the bees and gave a jar to his mother,
a gift. For nothing, for they were poor and so was the teacher,
and the honey was gold in his mother's hands.

thump thump, thump thump, thump thump,
a heart bleeding from love or from burden?

legs burn and weave the story,
a tapestry of snow

and wind yawns in a flurry,
a sanction that we go.

too little

TOO MUCH

(I should just do my best and risk losing the security of their cares)

someone once said,
security is a prison which you give up your life for.

hello children.
our lesson today will be on patience.
she is like fire when you try and touch her
but once you have some
it burns for a while.

Where there is lightening, there is thunder.
Sometimes never to be heard.

I'm feeling somewhat melancholy,
thinking things that make me so.

It feels like such a gloomy ending,
but when something ends, there is a new beginning.
And beginnings give me hope for what's more.

I am a product of collision
an incidental incision
A dead flower rotting in its own soil;

and so, I shall be dust returning to dust -
a product of myself, collapsing like the stars that made me.

They embraced. Two bodies clashing together, silencing the cheers and holding onto eachother as if the world burned around them in triumph and destruction.

too high and you die
too down and you drown
too carless and you lose
too careful and you choose.

These waters shimmer with memory;
watch as they glisten, flowing on the cusp of this age and the next.

Earthy, brown, depthless pools;
lacustrine, surging on the precipice of pearly shores,
enriching me as I look in

and see the tide's truest nature looking back at me.
Ancient and clandestine, too,
the place where youth and wisdom dwell

tell me someone
what happens when I just give in to the tentacles reaching for me
do I drown

flushed with emotion, and choking on the truth.

could say a thousand things, talk into a corner.

to be clear,
I love you. That is all.

darling,

I don't know when the next night beside the water,
sleeping quietly,
waking up to white, waveless mornings
will be

still waters sicken
at the ephemeral stream,
whose current is dream


Wading in waist-high water;
and I love you so violent,
more than maybe I can do.

September Jane,
all but plain
standing in
the pretty rain.

Her hair is stained
with pretty rain;
umbrella left
atop the pane.

My sweet September,
do you remember
the pretty rain,
the dying embers?

The stories read
before bed,
the funny rhymes
you always said.

September Jane
where did you go?
I'll greet you when you come.

September Jane
you didn't know
it is the pretty rain you're from.

"we can keep going, or stay right where we are -
because a fighter comes back with at least one invisible scar..."

there is anger in me and I have smothered it for so long.

so foolish, I fell
for the idea of you
your shadow, my dream

I do not know the sheer sweep on the bow of the heavy and weightless sword as it cuts like a river through a century of bark in an old growth forest -
only the wind knows the fabric of its edge and the balance between death and silence,
only the sun knows its blinding metal glistening in a summer afternoon,
a slow-motion dance in the song of the birds as they flutter from the stark gleam of the dancer.
It slices through matter and vibrates the continuum of air, ripples delicate waves against the cliff of the body whose extension is the knife
slashing at nothing with utter precision and grace.
I do not know the cost of what such a weapon demands, what scars tattoo themselves into skin with every stroke.
Perhaps it is a race of endurance, but still it is an endless battle of balance -
the loneliness condemned to the sheath of the human,
and the longing of the blade to be freed.

the strummer violently strums,
a glassy stare, and makes it into a graceful nell.
vibrations in the air tell me what she is saying in silence.

Poem

When I was young, I hadn't learned of wars.
I thought they lasted hours, not lifetimes.
When I was young, I wanted to live in my room forever.
I didn't know there was a world past my backyard.
When I was young I played with kind kids.
I didn't know that people were mean because of someone's home.
When I was young, I disliked school.
I didn't know how much I took for granted.
When I was young, I was terribly afraid of getting taken.
I didn't know how many children went lost.
When I was young, I was free and had infinite imagination -
now I am caged inside of it.

it will not end here.

you, the one with violets in her lap,
the one, despite her mortality, that only gods may approach,
look at me

no truth was found in the fragments of sappho,
but what lies in all those lost to another time?

You're the wayward star, blinking patterns in the sky,
burning lifetimes away;
you love god, kiss losers, hold close to the dying;

throwing yourself off the cliff of your potential as the lunatic who hies to the tall cliff and leaps into burning oblivion,

anchored now to a man who speaks at you and never could see you,
only feel your youth and covet your mind.

-

Jane! What wretched choices you were maybe forced to measure, for the shortcomings of your era.

Be the voice in the woods, the single song for the morning.

burning in the cold,
breath heavy and thick like clouds
that keep us apart

Now that the year has come to Spring,
I want to see the lakeshore,
smell the green, hear birds sing,
taste sunlight in my core,
crown every flower king,
become enraptured and adorned
in sweeping streams, in the bee's sting,
in the haste of the hummingbird's wing,
in the thrill of the rushing spring
of the blooming months, the budding moor.

hands curl so tightly,
I can see the strain in your back as you pull yourself up
to the next hold.

silence falls across the hollow space
as we watch you in awe.
your hands rain white dust on our faces.

you turn sideways, press against the wall, dyno up and across,
and then you reach the top.

armor, stiff
a sword and skiff
black eyes
beard bathed in blood
and it's never enough

the thrill to ****
like ink and quill
both bleed and brim
and slice and trim

the knight
huzzah!
the pages yell
below the stages
with wooden weapons
and hungry eyes

he'll fight for queen
or country
or fun
he'll drag you down
throughout the town

his mother prays
his father's gone
his brother's train

the knight
he has no guilt left to cry
a quilt in the night
will muffle his fears
drowning in beers
until the kingdom falls,
a knight's knighthood calls!

brown eyed girl
with sand straight hair
never smiles anymore

brown eyed girl
with sand tan skin
left out on the open shore

seagulls scream
tides sweep in
salt stains drying up her core

feet sink in
the sand is dense
she sinks
and sinks
and sinks some more