Earth risks freezing for lack of sunshine at Star's absence
green blades of grass turn brown
fallow ground, brown soil hardens
invaded with spiderwebs of white frost
the animals, frozen in place
the world - a tomb
there is no warmth without the world's
shining orb

the Moon is lonely, no light
to reflect
to hold it
to warm it

She is the One, the one and lonely Star
Burning bright
and like the Sun
it doesn't matter how far her orbit takes her -

the Moon still reaches for the light, his hero...
feels the warm photons
to reflect
to hold it
to warm it

until She spins back to Him.

There's a clear stretch of land ahead
of that broken dessert landscape
shattered in atrophy and assumptions,
wrong.

The things I took for little,
weren't.

That stretch is ahead,
though our heels are leaning back on the precipice
behind.

Ahead may seem empty,
but it's not.

I'm filling it with a road lined with dates,
trees a girl draws in journals, hope and want.
And just like those tree sketches,
skulls growing into cartoons that are non-threatening,
in black and white
like your face concentrating into that mirror
on March 5th,
the road will lead to wherever
we need to go.

Scold this abrasion
in weakling poses
dance with me,
Memory.

Awaken me
in the hold of your breath,
stilted in the lapse.

Our lights are bending
beneath the weight
of your gravity...

let it go before they break.

I can't see anything else, I've become blind
from staring into your eyes, like stars.

He's running to catch you, Marion
at the end of the dock
stretched out over cyan waters.

His hand arched out like vellum over dry bone
reaching for his dream
hoping that when he reaches the end
he finds something other than a requiem.

When you are tired, feeling alone
please know that I am waiting for you
in our home.

When shadows run marathons to catch
and hold you down,
blocking out the bright night sky
making the stars seem so far away
you only need to come to me
rest your face in my palm

Where the starlight of your eyes
reflects in and back out of mine
and pushes back the shadows
and you no longer feel alone
in our home.

I've lost myself
in you
but much prefer the me
that grew.

If I write it in words
here on the screen
how much remains
between what seems, and what's real?

They slow down the journey,
rattle your bones,
and so I will always put the passenger-side tire
through the middle dip in the yellow concrete bar
when I drive.

They say it is one of the rarest things in the whole universe
that there are only three known to exist,
(coincidentally enough)
but there is a fourth I know
that is so close it makes me wonder
how rare can they be, really?

I realize it only speaks to my fortune
to be so close to them.

Hollymylove, orbited by two smaller bodies
white flaming hair that blows in stellar winds
lighting up the insurmountable darkness.

So many wounds,
bled out over years
like ink on a test
failed over and over and over

turned into

So many scars,
raised up on the flesh
like the rounded sides
of speed bumps made too high.

will become

So many forgotten memories
faded like ink turning invisible in the sun
like cement smoothed by the erosion of time.

I wanted to write you a poem
but the words wouldn't come
I searched across my mind
I searched between every line
but found nothing and suddenly I realized...

There are no words
I could use to describe
the way these butterflies spasm inside
the way my heart reflects in your eyes
the way the starlight can trace your lines
the way my tongue ties up speaking desires
the way my life is more by your being alive.

And so I sit, silent
in front of a six-foot tall altar,
carved of white marble and onyx
covered in black raven feathers.

She has become my idol
her image replacing the god
I no longer believe in

and I pray to you each night.

It comes to fill an empty space
to fill in the spaces left by the loss of

our pores opened
our saliva blended
our sweat mingled
our velvet moments
our staccato line of site
our time spinning in reverse
our words spoken with our eyes
our family held together by a thread
our love stretched so thin over our bones

It comes like a dead wind
filling the emptiness left behind,
and I don't want that inspiration.

I had enough of emptiness,
the shallow grave I've been digging myself.
Lying to myself all this time
thinking I was digging to China
but only inches down
ready to fall in and expire.

But there is no expiration date
on love.

I didn't receive anything
I could hold in my hands
from you
But the best gift I received
this year on my birthday
was a chance.

I hold that
in my heart.

There is so much that goes on in that pretty little head of yours
un-shown to anyone with living or something instead of words
that mean so little when so much said causes burns.
So abbreviate, punctuate, silence and contemplate,
hold these conversations using only your face
those eyes of blue, convey everything inside of you:

the perfect despite what you tell yourself
the flawless despite how you rate yourself
the endless rattle of colic baby rattles
the voices telling you that you equal less
than the shocking
the breath-taking
the gasp of first love

that made this never-at-a-loss-for-words boy
stumble-stutter over himself
in his first attempts to get inside and learn what
goes on in that pretty little head of yours.

I am writing a new story,
but don't look here for the narrative,
because
I am not writing it with these words you think you are reading,
or the patience that I have found.
I am penning this new manuscript,
and all the illuminating circumstances that make those reading
wish they were the characters in the joy-tear-jerking plot,
the parts everyone passes eyes over in order
to make their own lives richer...
I am scribing my way through to the end
not with words, letters, jots, tittles,
but with
actions.

When you're missing something
(like a piece),
the only way to go,
is forward,
and one day soon,
you will roll over
what you
were
missing.

I should pull over,
but I'm speeding
through myself
too fast to stop.

I'm hurtling towards my rest,
not where the happy go,
but where men like myself go when
in need of water, warm,
to bathe in, cool
to drink
to quench this sandy-fingerprint throat.

A people wandering, lost
the temple, cracked
like spiderwebs spread across the surface,
pain captured in its lattice.

My sight lost from the goal,
for forty years it seems,
I've been lost, but...

I see the oasis, with its
materials with which to heal
the temple,
bring it back,
like the words that are now
coming back.

I go to sing with the gospel,
to cry tears of relief,
in the arms of you,
my temple,
where I kneel
in worship.

How the warm water seeps over your skin
in a bath that is too cold as it slowly pours into the water,
How the purr of a cat sometimes hits that cracking note
as it sits, legless, on your lap in Winter,
How a man can feel like a child again
when a woman undresses,
How I can feel so certain,
your bared back against my naked chest.

Oh son, my porcelain prince, if only your eyes were flesh and not glass
you could see that these things will pass.
Oh child, my fragile leaf, if only your roots reached deeper,
you could feel that this is only a short while.
Oh little one, my broken boy, if only you would grow up slower,
slow as nature deems,
time will give you foresight -
be patient.
I say this to help you avoid stumbling over roots,
or falling under the weight
that will surely come,
and too soon it seems.

My son, my pride, my knight,
my willow branch,
you will grow strong,
but remember to bend,
and do not let them break you.
Do not break under
the weight of words
the cold of shoulders
or the pollution of popularities.

Hold to those around you,
with deeper roots,
who have grown through the rough dirt
you are pushing through.

Hold to those around you,
because we love you.

Sometimes we feel a bit of pain
over things missing from our lives:

gifts,
childhood
toys,
that old silverware,
memories...

But there is a special kind of pain,
a person feels over people missing from their lives.

There is a trick;
it is not this simple,
see.

The trick is this:
Often, it is only when that person begins to come back
into our lives,
that we realize just how great,
acute,
that pain was,
and is,
and this mutes the happiness one would fully feel
at the reconnect.

I am the caustic clarity in a thought
I am the clearest day covered in storm

I am the brittle bit of bone
that Old Men toss onto the dirt floor
in deep emerald Congo

I am the Winter

I am the glass tube sliding in
the steel cold to the plastic.

I was once something that meant something,
but you see,
I am that lovers' kiss,
that first cross-room-glance,
that needing-you-like-the-desert-needs-the-rain,
that poetic ******* cliche'

And like them,
I,
too,
have become meaningless.

Hey, Starchild…

Can you feel me lean  into you?

The weight of the moon -
immeasurable tons,
yet somehow making you lighter?

(An astronaut on the surface
gaining more height than you expect
with each leap-step.)

In the end, it may in reality be that
the Sun
is illuminated
by the moon.

Of all that stood by,
he alone
ran into the water, fully-clothed
on that cold February day,
to pull her (flailing wet-noodle limbs) from the water.

He alone
recognized she was not waving,
but drowning.
Coincidence they had recently
discovered that poem?

He’d heard once that Bob Dylan said something like,
“When someone is close to suicide, they don’t ask for help,
by sending family a letter in the mail.”

He’d heard,
many times before,
How dangerous it was to attempt such a thing,
but love muted those mnemonic memories,
replaced them with muscle memories
(the heart is a muscle)
and he flew, wind-like,
into the ocean.

Neither ever felt the earth under
their feet
again.

He always just assumed she was joking,
when he'd say he loved her more,
and she agreed.

The sting was in realizing that he could hardly love her at all,
and it would still be true.

He’s staring into the grains, wondering how what she felt
for him could  have become even smaller than those little marks and flecks on the wood.

She’s staring at the screen, her face awash in the glow she now values more
than what he offers her.

And he’s pushing and squeezing on as hard as he knows…

But she sees him as the enemy, her Nemesis, the antithesis
of what she wants at this moment,
those moments,
moments to come,

Her happiness doesn’t come from him any longer.
His smiles, and words, and care, and love,
holding less real estate in her pretty little head
than dried sauce on a plate
or ***** socks
on the floor
by the door
he now stands behind staring at, wishing her face, aglow,
would be smiling on the other side.

Sometimes
I feel spread so thin,
like a man who desperately searches for his home,
and suddenly realizes
he is a vagabond,
and has none...

I spread gravel once
flat across a lawn...
wishing it was me.

I made a trash bag-wreath once
white-pure strips of plastic...
wishing it was me.

I looked up at the delicate sky
held in place forever
crying to be fleeting
trapped in existence: eternity.

I heard family ghost stories once
stained branches on family tree...
wishing it was me.

You found the truck
attractive enough to her
to keep her standing up after each time you ran her down
Each time she saw you coming
She smiled in hope
And ran to the street, stood mid-lane, waving until that moment when
Your metal smashed her smile
Your rubber broke her fingers
and you had won.

Knowledge: My meager roadside curio is more to her than the fastest automobile hatred can build

And now, you do not drive this way very often, and nothing much makes me happier

But we both know the saying, "If I can't have her..."

And you managed that:
braces she has to wear now
slipped disks
scars all over her body
and heart...

She is a different person, and in that,
you have won,
as you couldn't have her,
and now neither do I.

But there is something else:
You forgot that my love is nearly unconditional.
Unconditional love does not exist.
My love is honest, pure,
Not the hardly-unconditional love most advertises as unconditional.
Not the kind that is plastic, and
flashing on a sign on the side of your vehicle
The one I read through tears
Each time
Her hand slipped from mine
as she ran to meet you.

I love her,
no matter what damage you have caused
no matter how long it takes to heal
no matter if it never heals
and in that,
you will never win.

There's an igloo
glowing auburn-yellow from the inside
miles of empty snow and ice around
lead-blue sky bears down:
an endless weight squashing reality.

I'm trying to remember which muscles are required to make me stand.
I'm braiding the coarse-twine letters of your name into a gallows rope,
tie it around our necks,
place the knot correctly so the vertebrate split,
separate fragile cord that brings all life to the body,
same as the delicate thread that held us together.

Did it ever,
really?

I drip away from you
charred
marshmallow held over the flame
too long.
This ceremonial rattle shakes
full of seeds within dried husk
the sound tickles your eardrums
as you **** on the snow and ice
covered with its coat of
honey,
nectar,
black gall.

I am watching black and white films of ****** surgery nightmares,
the heads concealed behind bandages, contents unknown.

You are toothpaste: once I squeeze you out it is impossible to
put you back, as you occupy my life with your carnival apathy

Research has shown
that lithium
is the only drug
that guarantees a decrease
in suicide.

So slow the trajectory in which you came to me,
not simply difficult to see,
but difficult to identify:

felt the same as walking through a door and looking back to see a man approaching,
try to judge if he is close enough to hold it, not hold it, or give it the push
just enough for him to take advantage.

Awkward as a traffic light,
yellow,
too close to stop,
too far to go through.

Some people in my life are felt marker streaks,
they start so saturated
but fade to nothing as they advance.

You are the opposite:
slowly building from nothing,
continuing to get brighter,
containing more
color,
until the end.

Skin the color of fleshy burnt sienna
as if someone took the areola's border,
sewed it on the armpits

can't close eyes tight enough to cleanse the memory of
your face from my thoughts
regurgitating in endless loops of hula hoop champions.

I can't stop the dream –
(woman who looks eighteen, lips colored same as the pastel cheeks)
watching hot pink
bob bobbing.

Stupid ****:
if I'm raising armies to invade you with,
I clearly want you still.

I haven't cried in three days. The napkin-white petals,
an Alyssum White blanket of snow,
piebalded by Slipper Orchids,
flows beneath my skin
as if it were the thinnest layer of water
under oil.

The feeling is the consistency of pungent Valerian,
the active ingredient the smell
of well-matured cheese,
cuts the tops off  mountains
as it fills the bottoms of canyons
with asphalt.

It's given a brain back to this anencephaly.
Where there were stitched lips,
now only paper-heart kisses.

We've shared secrets no one else would ever want to know,
but now your brothel hair has become a nest for dead birds.

Where once you were a wet marsh,
perfumed in tangy musk,
you have now become a dry
steppe covered in rotting fish.

I'm writing acrostics of your name,
remembering you like discarded tire husks
on Arizona's August freeways.

And I'm still trying to figure out how to say that without feeling like a liar
Making up a screenplay in my head: dead
lead from the real way I wish to express, again
Exiting into your u-turn I always ******* dread: descend
Melodies I learned to hum when young
To someone now no one, flashes of red

You hummed them to me; child-like: off to bed
Implanting this seed in me 
I don't recall a single syllable you said
But still memories are melting me like butter on burnt bread
Talking to a ghost
Pointless...end.

They said your footprints
were still on the windowsill
when the authorities showed up

I wonder how long my hand prints will remain

as I lean out and see the last thing you ever saw
speed towards you
like that camera trick they use where the background speeds forward
but the person stands still

I feel you in my nose here
all that remains of you is
a scent of yellowed dime-store novel pages
and I can't help but agree
when scientists say that
our sense of smell is the one most closely tied
to our memories.

They always said you had an old soul

but I know better

You lived with the clarity of a newborn's eyes.

I'm reading the Codex Gigas,
one hundred and sixty pounds of flesh,
black hairy tongue,
penitent Battenti sponges staining the robe with blood,
stalking through Campania.

Crushed insect nests,
a shiver up the jaw from food not had in too long.
Squashing caterpillars,
the insides squirt from their ketchup-packet bodies
in a spray of slime-neon green.

Pheromone cream drips from your *****, I gag it down,
curdled milk-paste.
When pulling the dress down, one never knows
whether you will get a paper cut,
or a gaping jaw of hairy
life.

We all live like pigs, but need to clean up to appear to live
like everyone else appears to live when we visit them.

You rob me of myself; a teacher
walks into a food bank ashamed and finds his student working there.

My life experiences pile up like broken infant bones,
fragile phalanges of famine,
until all I add up to are decades of
Holodormo,
the Killing Hunger.

You hide in the sea,
I lick your left palm.

She sits across from you at the group-work table in all her flesh
a coat of giant cold chicken skin
she can't figure how to take off.

A cow chewing cud
would be less offensive than the way she grinds
that gum with mouth, a hole slapping
against itself in fleshy clicks.

She is heavy, whipping cream-
colored thighs each time she slaps a hand down in laughter.

The chest is pouring out in all of it's hypnotic paleness;
the dark colored shirt is giving its all, but failing against the strain.

Your adrenaline courses in nausea
as she moves her legs apart,
veins radiation-blue,
mashed potato inner thighs,
and suddenly
you've peaked behind the curtain
the poison fish you see
makes you *****.

I'm having fists of laughter, daisy-cutter dreams in formaldehyde,
creating the worlds most loved sport by kicking the heads of Danes.

Mutually assured corruption I can feel
creeping down the inside of my nostril,
across my tiny hairs,
but I am still, let it come;
it runs out and onto my lips. I **** its mercurial
clearness down.

I was born without fingernails or teeth,
forever stuck gumming the soft pink nail beds.

I keep everyone out of my life;
it is the only way to justify never seeing you.
Desiccant children pour from their mothers' laps
as if they were clear beads from that little paper shoe box packet.

You are an apricot full of sand;
I am a Mongol stealing maidenheads.

A peach is a rose -
deep inside
drips cyanide.

She stands in the truth,
a puddle of lysergic acid
that seeps into her bare soles,
as a tuning peg twists her gut.

The single page, crisp,
bends, hangs limp
where index and thumb tips
barely touch left and right edges.

Her blue eyes quickly sweep left and right, work
their way slowly from top to bottom, absorb his self-eulogy,
drain their color out and onto the page.

As each drop hits, ink blots change from explanation and apologies
to a Rorschach Test to which she will never have an answer.

Moisture leaves her body faster than she feels it will be replaced,
she is mummifying herself alive in Sokushinbutsu,
attempting to join the Xerces Blue letter-author
who flew away into extinction.

The walls around her now close, tight, stone;
her only contact with the outside world the string of her memory
attached to the bell of loss.  

The weight of the page
she holds destroys her.

I can bore you with talk
of women and children,
but it is simple enough to say
human beings.

Human beings
run in gathering storms
of concrete dust;
run from misting
of meat.

Explosions are sudden fatal therapy
for human beings
suffering dissonance,
and there's nothing quite
the same as losing words.

All of these
human beings,
cut-off
quick
in Tourette syndrome
(****!)
Pu.nc-tu-a.tion.

Caught in the concrete cloud
darker than Krubera Cave,
lost out on a betrayed Silk Road,
as bloated blue bodies
wash up on Indonesian shores.

This city of centuries
built by human beings,
has now become
almost-five thousand corpses
who dangle their toes
out of shrapnel windows.

Pieces of me sweat
away in an instant of swaying black burqas,
rocking on knees at a cemetery.

I’m standing in Beirut -
nineteen-eighty two.
I watch towers fall.
There has to be
a way to make the world relate,
even if it takes
nineteen years.

Those words are now meaningless
compared to what you mean to me.
Where I thought that there was no way to feel deeper,
you prove me wrong.

I am ice
and you were the cool breeze
that keeps me from melting and evaporating away.

No four letter-word could ever measure against you.

I was eating cigarettes for breakfast;
now I subsist only on the health of you.

I was dreaming of the day
I was born,
strangling on an umbilical noose;
you have slid your pink life-giving cord into my navel.

I was writing my suicide note,
but you came and lit it aflame,
blew away the embers,
wrote a story with a happy ending.

I dangled, atrophied, off of an edge,
my chalk-outline superimposed over the gaping black.
Your hair, strands of raven steel,
snaked their way through my fingers,
held me long enough for you
to pull me back.

You held my hand,
guided the crayon it held.
Where I saw only a blank
page, you showed
where the lines were and created
a piece of art beyond
anything the world has ever seen.

You are my life-support system,

Holly,

and without you,
I wouldn't be writing this.

There were little ways, once, when things could sparkle and spread the light
just like I spread your legs
then.

Away I could turn,
and feel your eyes on me,
the breath for breathing in always fresh and free between us,
the staleness now punctuating every sentence, drooling from my lips
and off away somewhere…

nowhere.

The infant
me lying next to the mother
of you in the creeping sun

running away over the edge of the world
like Magellan.

I could chase it,
I would,
I swear I will,
if you would ask it,
and I would tumble over that dark cusp
and off into a six-year terror of death and disease,
just to return,
spinning the Earth under my feet,
pushing it with my hands like paddles,
kicking it back with toes,
sweating bleeding shaking
and collapsing
back into
you.

There are times when I feel like I am dying,
and I never wish it were true more than when I realize it isn't.

My imagination runs wild like wind through wheat,
catching on the trailing edges of her summer dress as she runs by,
and away.

My fingers just cannot hold on.

I can see through her dress when the sun hits it right,
and I can feel the waves her hip bones made
those times when we came together in that field,

but she is a mystery now,
no more familiar than the feeling of the bottom of the sea.

I close my eyes, dream of her, and fade into the soil.

I've only got so much left
and no ones listens to me not screaming for what I want,
my mouth full of feathers and blood,
weakened to the state of living past the point of dying,
to the point of numbness
where I can cut this skin like construction paper,
stretch it over love you never had
and find something that can carry me forward
into somewhere I can finally rest.

I'm in the passenger seat
next to you
and you don't say a ******* word
and I don't say a ******* word
and we watch the world speed by
eyes ahead
in silence.

I am content.

There are three dresses,
drinking the rain
and the sky is doing somersaults
in your bones.

My burning hands caress your body's baby hair, *****.

I am drowning in you,
and I am suffocating in nicotine stains,
falling from balconies of acrimony that you pushed me off of.

My clipped wing feathers burn in bursts
of red, cyan, and lemon.

I crash down into you one last time
where my seething nails dig into your skin,
searing you right out of my ******* memory.