I destroy my imperfections with methodical, practiced precision.
In the mirror.
Face to face with the witching hour.
I swallow them whole like oysters in the moonlight,
ripe and swollen.

I strike when I am the least opaque.
Which is, of course, when no one else is looking.
My belly swells to fullness with my mollusk sorrows
and all the ways I hide them.
I admire its roundness, and caress its crescent shape.

I am alone on this plane, with my hands,
Where every night I digest and birth myself
in endless cycle.
Until morning.
Daily, I reteach myself my own history in pictures
And try to remember how to love.

The shockwave hits your throat
so fierce, it forces your own voice
from your own body.
The momentum it contains, unconstrained
by your silent spectre
rushes forward like thunder
into the levee of your knees, and strikes
the way lightning fells trees.
You're nothing but lymphnodes, flood
and weight, now.
The rest, like last night's dream
washing away the moment before you remember.
The aftershocks ripple like echoes,
capsaicin in the nerves
of all your timber limbs
dismantled and thrown to the horizon.
You hover above
what it felt like
to exist.
It rests on the tip of your tongue, a moment.
Nobody really knows the difference between
a moment and eternity.
Below the folds of water, sweat and skin
the ground is offering whispers
bubbling soggy underfoot.
They might be yours.
They say it comes from the ground up
Channels reaching channels to connect
in a flash
a crack
again
to body
even
if only
a moment.

So tired, ******* exhausted
of tired promises, promises
You'll never keep,
You know that You won't
(So why do You make them?)

Not sure, I don't think
the cave under the falls
is worth the battering
But you tell me you Miss Me
Miss Me
So I keep spending,
Wanting the search

YOU, DEMOLISHER.
I, BRICK ABANDONED.
I am made of the substance
You were built to ruin.
You, Spender of Time,
I, Timeless Monolith.

Take Me, Take Me,
Take me down -
Brick by brick You undo
(with tiny meaningless hopeful phrases)
Bat your eyelashes while you pocket my pieces
So You can keep telling Yourself
You're tender.

A furious 'thud-thud, thud-thud' hammers my bones
as I whip shirt sleeves and scarves across my room
and into the small latch-lock box.
The one with the brown leather handle that smells
like things-so-old-they've-turned-to-air.
Long ago I lost the key but the shape of its missingness
is the most familiar thing left in this place.
Latch-key box latch-key house latch-key life.



My footsteps ricochet off the walls to the toc-toc of the witching hour.
I hail a cab and lament the bouncy back seat and pop tunes of the humming driver,
pay with an app so I don’t have to say goodbye.
Not to cab, not to town, not to room.
The high-pitched wails of the most popular human carting system
grates my melancholy between the tracks.
Claustrophobic, crammed into more boxes
I.
Hate!
Boxes.

I…
Can’t remember how I got here from there.
I sit at the airport waiting for a canceled seat so I can get the next flight to:

Anywhere, Extra Cheap.
I look at a clock and I shouldn’t have.

Footsteps haunting, tracks grating, bumping, wailing, mouth humming slow to a blur.
The family next to me carefully removing themselves from the smell of my suitcase.

“Latch-key box latch-key house latch-key life,” I tell them.

Black-penned words scratched in long, pressured strokes,
Page after page I soaked with this boon
Filling spaces in haste to match pace 

With the steady leaking of my wounds
Seeking inky cure to stem the flow
Oh, I’ve been told to dose with X’s and O’s,
but the X’s jagged edges poke right through, 

and the wholesome O’s are full of holes too.

In the dusty fields
at the foot
of The Grand Tetons,
A small colt wanders
in the vast grey-green lather
of sage brush.
Blotted brown patches
across its belly
like
black mold on the ceiling
Of my memories.
One can never be sure where
the clouds end
and the mountains begin.
Those looming chalky blues,
Not unlike the sea.
It is only a matter of time
before the colt finds
what it is he was looking for.
It is only a matter of time
before blue meets blue meets
green
meets sea
meets sky.
One day these mountains will
No longer remember my name.

I pressed my hands into the small of her back, and
Sank
Up to my elbows, in the thick and sorrowful
Tension
She wound so tightly around her waist.

She said our bodies hold our trauma so maybe, sometimes,
Mind
Can know mourning.

There’s peanut butter where the tongue used to be
All the heart’s mutterings stuck in the throat
The honey wheat lips crumbling under prying fingers
That try to set the desperate things free

Hours, days, weeks, pass, I guess
I guess my hands were deep in my deepest pockets
Pockets of - I honestly couldn’t tell you where I’ve been
What I’ve done, or how I got here

But here, here is exactly where I am, I think
I think, wrapping my fingers around the fibers
Fibers of feelings, places, people, wishing
Wishing I knew how to weave, so I could
Weave it back together, across the Great Divide
Between body and mind
Body doing whatever bodies do
When they’re left behind

I poke my cat square in the lips,
And a giggle bubbles past my own.
She throws herself down beside me,
Purring madly.
I lay my face against her soft, warm belly
Thinking how silly to learn patience from a cat
Not realizing
As soon as I turn out the lights
She won’t bury her ****
On purpose.

He closed his eyes tight
and held a straight face
Mouth a door
Eyes like windows
I wanted to ask him what it’s like
to live in that body-house
Shades drawn
Braced and braced and braced
Against
And, and, I wanted to ask him, 

Who will tend the gardens?

I run laughing into night
You try to follow but
I’ve taken flight

I run laughing into night
You can seek but
I’ve dimmed my light

If you've got the vision
I'll be in sight, but

I'll always
Run laughing
Into night

What we idealize
We condemn.
Strip it from the backs
Of those we oppress,
Notwithstanding ourselves.
Cram it in a box marked “DO NOT TOUCH” -
A false preservation.
Fasten wonder and difference in
Wax-body museums.
The overture of youth, displaced.
Forcibly removed and
Compartmentalized until
Homogeneity reigns supreme
In the halls of collective memory.
Admonishment replaces admiration.
The administration demands -
How dare anyone have what
We stole from ourselves?

In all the pieces of past bits in
Collections and recollections
Every painting and every map
Intentions in all the broken plants
and ripped paper
brought to fullness;
A mirror

The footsteps we heard
Back and forth across
The familiar floor, up the steps &
Through the door
Where our father lies sleeping
When we both know
We were not dreaming

“Where are you?” She shouts as she runs down the hallway.

“Go away!” He says, cramped behind a closet door.
“Where are you?” She knocks on the door to the room.
“Go away!” He says, and sneaks off to the parlor. 

“Where are you?” She says gently, slowing her pace.
“I am not here” He says, as she closes the front door behind her.
She sits on the steps and lights a cigarette.
Each exhale as heavy and thick as the silence that fills the house.

Tracing the holes on my peely-paint wall
My fingertips ask what’s behind
So I pull at the edge & it all falls apart
With more peely-paint holes inside

Maybe we are full of ghosts
And therefore, nothing, but
Data
Patterns in brackets and matrices of Proof
buried in the dunes of our own topography
Where lies
Everything
That gives us shape.

The warrior lost her shield in the mud
in the great back-beyond
of yesterday
She lifted the sword above her head
and shouted to somewhere far away
beyond today
Then charged headlong into the fray

I burnt the roof of my mouth again
On hot tomato soup
Like I do once or twice every other week.
You tell me to wait and remind me that
I am a Patient Person but I
Can’t
And to be honest,
I kinda like it

under the table
where the wood shavings grow
where I eat my cold meals
on the cold cobbled stone
under the table
where the knowledge flows down
from callous-studded hands
to the human-shaped Noun
under the table
where no one can see
who carves the cabinets
who'd know that it's me
under the table
where the years pass me by
where I wait for that one day
the woodworker dies
the woodworker dies
the woodworker dies
THE WOODWORKER DIES

human hearts beat in rhythm
against my stillness
like a knock
against a door
that doesn't want
to be answered

I am emulsified.
Painted onto shingles
of glittering rooftops
Where the weather abrades me.
Fated observer from a distance
Ogling people and their things
People and their things
Feeling feelings inside me
and all around me
People and their things
Passing past.
But I am empty windows full of images
and antique furniture.
Never looking and always seeing.

I AM THAT HOUSE
in your recurring dreams

I AM THAT HOUSE
the one you are always running from
yet never entered

I AM THAT HOUSE
full of old-things well-loved
crooked and cursed by the neighbors

I AM THAT HOUSE
the white one rubbed grey
paint peeled away
sighing at the crossroads

I AM THAT HOUSE
my creaks and groans so familiar
you know exactly where to step
to go unnoticed

At the crossroads
I AM THAT HOUSE
Paint peeled to grey
Never entered
I AM THAT HOUSE
Always running away
Unnoticed
I AM THAT HOUSE
Of familiar steps
Crooked and cursed
I AM THAT HOUSE
Well loved by the neighbors
Ablaze
I AM THAT HOUSE
In recurring dreams

I am that house.
You're back here again.
The door is open.
Won't you come in?

What've we got to lose after we've sold ourselves
to the cold cells of objective confinement?
What've we go to say after 12 hour days
in the callous grip of the wage?
How can we know what we want to be
when we don't even know what we're eating?
When abuse comes beating in cycles, feeding
through the black holes of television sets?
We try our very best to get by,
And For What?
Where do we go to retrieve our souls
when it is we ourselves withholding
Love
from each other?

"EXIST, EXIST" screams my shape to the horizon.
"I SEE YOU, I DO" shouts the horizon to my shape.

We are lonely in each other's company,
though we are always touching.

Glitter from yesterday's eyes
shimmers on my chest where she lay her head
& with each slow breath she travels deeper
into the beat between
theta waves and quickened pulse.
she dances with twitching signals
like buoys far off in the twilight sea
if the sea was me
& with each slow breath she travels deeper
into the beat between
delta waves and lucidity
and as each breath crests I follow trough
one great rolling sea
of shimmer glitter eyes chest we
lapping the shores of the beat between
consciousness and dream.

As the fog settles in the fields
Relaxing into cold dew drops
Heavying the wheatgrass
Bending to kiss the warm earth
I, too, bend under a weight.

While the fox is lost in the arcane
Frantic and shadowed
Shifting obscurely in the underbrush
Shivering from the dark and damp
I, too, shiver in obscurity.

I, too, shiver in obscurity
Shivering from the dark and damp
Shifting obscurely in the underbrush
Frantic and shadowed
While the fox is lost in the arcane.

I, too, bend under a weight.
Bending to kiss the warm earth
Heavying the wheatgrass
Relaxing into cold dew drops
As the fog settles in the fields.

wrapped in the web of myself and another, like
wet clothes in the water I'm trying so hard to tread with.
the cat purring on my linted toes reminds me
I'm trying so hard to make Now a Home.

we can never be whole because we are empty
spaces between the lines of the things we never
did figure out if our fingertips connect
after all, we're always one
atom away
and we know
it