Late autumn air does not so much assail
As brush past like a stranger
Mumbling something like a sorry

I have to say - well
I
Would like to say
Something about it

Cause I keep thinking
I mean, it's sorta like if maybe
If maybe I slipped and never landed

Sort of like a back lot
Like out behind the city
Away from any eyes

Sort of like a crack
Like the tiniest dark gap
An eye that isn't

Sort of like I just can't
A million miles underneath the deepest charted cave
Just behind the clouds
Details I've already forgotten
Pictures I'll never finish remembering
An expanse; a smear; a nebula

A disconnect. Eyes to mind to
I need to talk to you

Stifled existence
Limpness in my veins
In all things reticence
At least I'm free of any stains

Silent build-up in my throat
Semi-solid chunks of liquid fear
Worry what sickness might denote
Perhaps it's best I disappear

Better hope ***** is symbolic
Because now I have to go
And so, of me, my stomach's *******
Is all you'll ever know

Gold across the treetops
The sun's begun to fall
What lives exist beneath -
Beyond my backyard wall?

Across the street and just below the lilac sky
Catch ashy grey roof tiles that evade the eye
A portal of lamplight, amber and glass
Familiar strangers, imagined pasts

Memories that weren't
Things you don't know
Doors that are locked
A place you can't go

Every castle turns to sand
Every form and all the land
And it's all been sand before
Gracing some alien shore
But what I find sublime
What isn't bound by time
What dies as it is wrought
Moments made up of thought

Neither sleet nor snow nor filigree
The desert is ever brusque
Cloudless and cold, an empty gray sea
Hollowed and hid, December's decree
I wake and see the dusk

My hands feel limp and impotent
My fingers half-numb across the keyboard
I've never felt so thirsty for understanding
But nobody in the world is quite what I want

I'm not going to shut my door
Even if all the cold air leaks out
I'll stare into the frame and
Maybe something will jump out
Maybe it'll all just rot with me
Maybe something will happen to me
Because I can't happen myself
All I can do is stare

Sticks and stones
A few words rearranged
Will they outlast the bones?

Everyone forgot
Tarnished marble and time-weathered plaque
Something's just not right
Somebody is not

Far
The mountains to the sky
Backyard to horizon
One good wave goodbye

Someday
Some evening long gone by
Remember grass, young at last
Tomorrow's distant cry

A journey
Reminiscence
The gently fading day
A sadness
Possibilities
Wistfully waste away

Ever densest now,
Now, a humid haze
Scenes and stages
A VHS - the joy of painting
A DVD - it's the one with Ross and Rachel
I know it, I've seen it before
I haven't, but I know

A laugh track thuds against the humming air conditioner
It's sort of melty
Warm gummies
Adhesive on someone's fingers
It tingles - unpleasant
Water is away, and just as warm
The couch doesn't yield

Nothing invokes fear
Quite like footsteps approaching
And footsteps passing

On darkest nights, when full moons preside
Silver bullets are just the thing
When the howls are coming from inside
Silence with silver, gunshot ring

Gold grows tarnished and fractured, such fragile prizes
And bronze knights are forgotten soon as the sun rises
Leave nothing to mock, nothing to pilfer
Paint the walls cerebral and silver

Trade winds blow backwards
My mind reels
Insight in insight

Thirdhand apocrypha
Melting all the time
Icebergs within icebergs

If these webpages could talk
They did it a decade ago

These ancient posts jut up
Rotting like titan bones
Every comment another grave
Born and dead the same day

Our ancestors built this place
Nine years ago
They blew away one by one
But for a few huddled remainders

The words are relics
A rome and its ruins
Echoes and ghosts, lingering
As the forum quietly fades

I as much as the next but no more than all before
From the ground the ground again
Pattern break pattern break pattern
Break pattern break pattern break
Again the ground from the ground
All before no more than the next but as much as I

Skin dislodged
A bone in the wrong place
Just the wrong size
Can't we see what's underneath?

Cold, empty air
Wind winds through the tunnels
And here and there and there
You can see the ****** funnels

Tell me
Send voices
Swimming to the shore

Tell me
Smoke signals
Dead weight on the floor

Hanging humid
Limply from the palms
Stiffly stepping
Blood flow slowly calms

The tide drags time
Motion out to sea
Half-remember
Somewhere you'd rather be

I don't want to die
A ghost is an echo
I want to be the opposite
Shout through me

Can I leave my eyes here?
To see but not be seen?
I dream of dispersal
A trillion motes of
Every place there's ever been
Everywhere at once

No walls to see through
No body, no mind, no stride
Transcendence of senses
To fade into the blue
To know every side
To know and nothing else

Are you reading me?
Are you
Out there
Somewhere?

And can I
Be there too?
Am I more sick of me
Than scared of you?

In short, longing
Longing that pervades and longing that wanes
Longing for others and longing for self
Longing for answers, longing for questions
Longing droplets fall dancing down liminal panes

I ask you please to fuse my flesh
Let me be some other thing
Let my voice fade on the wind, I'll
Forget what it means to sing

Structures crack and atoms melt
I beg you to relinquish me
Stress will drag me to the ground
This cruel responsibility

Don't dare to cry, I cannot scream
Please let my words be hollow
I'll lock away my simplest dreams
For fear someone may follow

Burn up all the evidence
Please dissipate now on the breeze
Hide this body out of sight
Sink every thought beneath the seas
Leave nothing but a silent eye

Waxing philosophical on the porch
Beneath a string of neon lights
The lighter blinks on as the stars keep blinking out
Let's celebrate our waning nights

The old neighborhood is a labyrinth
Of second-story windows, lamplight and
Distant smells of pencils and dryer sheets
Of a Sunday dinner that never ends

Is never the end, vastness
Cerebral expanses,
Horizons, hikes, labyrinths
Within labyrinths within

Every book that ever could be written
Every ever that could ever be
Files, folders, sections
Subsections in subsections within

The human brain cannot catalog
The universal sum
The tally is never totaled
The end is never the end

Playful smears of ink
And all that they imply
Rubbed across the page
To tease the naked eye

My poetry season
A fountain of past, mem'ries overflow
Without need of reason
The weird autumn breeze, the open window

I'm not, I am not me
Ghosts and their mourners, dispersed across time
The kid that used to be
I am not me, I am not me
Strange melancholy, a sadness so sublime

The keyboard on which I type has built
A layer of gunk, finger oils, and
What have you

My houses are formed of chicken scratch
Wooden board, then - nail, another board, it's
Just practice

A Hallmark life and coffee spoon lines
Too chicken to scratch - an itch, the surface,
Toothless skin

So maybe just maybe, peel yourself up from the world
Claw the sensation away wherever it comes
For ****** mere moments, let yourself become unfurled

Stray hair and thick air
An embrace without care
— anywhere but here —
A summertime nightmare

The antithesis of Icarus
So feared the sun
That they never left the ground

When things are amiss, remember this
The sun can wait
Till you're six feet underground

The shrinking violet's
Purple petals wilt
For fear blooming might offend

The setting sun will
Keep tick-ticking till
We're all helpless in the end

A lineage of littoral etchings
Grandfather's preserved retchings
Mildew in a bottle
Sent up from below

Masses of midnight kelp
Thoughts we couldn't help
Just beyond the shallows
A hook not long forgotten

Here the moldy bait dangles
Writhes and twists and tangles
The water watches what we will not
Our ancestors' iron line

The seaweed will snare, encircle, and fetter
Our own blood will rust and tether
In murk down below, amongst marine snow
And then we won't remember

No need to worry, they really do care
They'll fight fires with floods, droughts with monsoons
If things go to ****, they'll go to the moon
If you get too hot, they'll smoke out the sun
They've even got discounts on water and air!

No worry, no fretting, no fear
They won't tolerate hunger
They'll beat sickness with numbers
They'll hire us all on
To build them a new atmosphere

Where?
What?

Just the wind. Just the window, thrown open to let the dark in.
It scatters the scattered papers.

Writing with my face in my sour hands.
Sisyphean, or something.
Shall I pretend I know mythology?
Shall I pretend I know my flaws?

The kindly woman said there is no right answer
So everything's wrong
And what's left?

Talents and cues
And social truths and
Relations and a trillion views
And still my head hurts

The wind's striking my window some more
Just take the cold and rub it in why don't you?
Why do I put up with it? Because it's here.
Because it's here and my head hurts.

There are the chimes - crying as they do
You might know the sound or maybe not
And my keyboard's stained with sweat - does that make sense?
The keys are all smudgy, you know? Don't you?

But there's the cold.
You all know the cold, right?
You know what it's like in the wind?
What it feels like for your head to hurt?

And then, you know how the wind sometimes lulls?
How it briefly calms itself?
But still my head hurts.

The laundry heap sighs, one shirt less burdened
Ever tense, the afternoon, ever still
Clouds crawl by like television static
Not a drop of rain meets the windowsill

Just a squatter, hidden away
Idle hands, second-hand body
A vacant home, a fragile world
Everything fits a bit oddly