If you want to know
what is happening
to the world,
don't just watch
the news every night;
watch what happens
to yourself
after watching
the news
every night.

I found god
on my front porch
and we drank vermouth
from 12:00 to 12:00.
He spoke of how
he's trying to quit
cigarettes and women.
We raised our glasses
to that one.
I spoke to him
about how much I enjoy
asking people
how they really feel.
I told him how the earth
is rotating very quickly lately,
and that the centrifugal force
is improving the circulation in
my fingertips,
and how I'm starting to be able
to feel again.
He spoke of how
he had quit his job
to pursue a career
as a ceramic artist,
though he also claimed
he had always been one.
It turns out that god
is a neighbor of sin,
cut wide open
by the hope that lives
in the hearts of people
younger than us.
I told him
that I understand.
He filled my glass up again,
and then his own.
We did not speak of women.
He lit us a cigarette
and we shared it.

I feel like god
has been misunderstood
all this time.

I think he feels
the same way.

Wisdom lives
not only
in knowing
our power,
but acknowledging
where it exists
(and flexing it)
and where
does not
(and letting it go.).

A large
and important part
of the human experience
is getting this
wrong.

Tell me about how how you are a just a tourist everywhere you go.
Let me pick you up from the train station,
and drive you past
balance beam sidewalks
you once walked on
to get home after
you bulldozed the night
out of the sky.
Our lips tango
at every red light.
When they do,
I forget myself.
The light turns green,
I change the song.
I the mouse.
You the cat;
playing youthfully
with the terrified dinner you caught.

Some days I feel
like a guitar
that is missing
a string.
It sounds sad
but I assure you
it’s okay.
And I’ll never know
the sound that string sings,
but my foolish heart
believes that string
is the one that says everything;
the one that puts me in the veins
under your skin,
between the synapses that fire
in your mind,
between your inhale
and exhale,
and on the tip of your tongue,
so that I can taste you
before my moon
splits in two.

I am not the lion
I am the impala.
I am the cabinet
in the kitchen
left wide open.
I am here
for so much of my life
setting alarms
on my phone
for the next morning.
The ash tray
is filled
with exactly 73 cigarettes,
but not exactly 73 memories,
and not exactly 73 regrets.

There are 7.6 billion people
In this world.
Behind every set of eyes
A different universe.
I’m in love with yours
But not you
Anymore.
You made mine
*****.
The strings
Of lights
On the trees
Make me sad.
We put them up
In December
And they make us feel
like basement
Temperature
Flat beer juice,
And then January comes
Like law enforcement
To the rager you held
While your parents
Were in Doore County.
And everyone leaves the party.
And we all take the lights down.
This is
1 of 7.6 billion.

There is a ballroom
full of gorgeous off-beat
dancers who wear dresses
made of childhood dreams
and shoes that sometimes
still sing
when they jive.
It's a terribly chaotic
and heart wrenching scene
where you can find peace
on a dopamine drive
as that airplane chases the moon
through an open sunroof,
your lifeblood tuned in perfectly
to its frequency.
Go ahead,
play in the traffic
of the extraordinary things
you regularly neglect.

And we sat there
drinking cold beers
on a rainy front porch day
wondering how
there could be
so many good people
in such a sick
world.

now it's just a tree,
then it was so much more
than just a tree.
i've been trying like hell
to get back on that street,
and in moments like these
i feel i'm getting
closer.
rain and garbage cans
full of beer cans,
fresh cut lemon
and a dog
of many homes.
a sister who said
it was always as
simple as our mother
told us;
some days I don't believe it
and live for the days
when I wholeheartedly do.
that rain on those beer cans
is the best show
i've seen
all year,
and the dog applauds
with his tail.

In the courtroom
there are incoherent murmurs
whispers
"I wonder if it will change"
siblings
strangers to each other
bound by blindness
and gorgeous imperfections;
each an abstract reflection
of another.
Guilty.
Not guilty.
Human.
Human.

She couldn't go back
to her empty apartment.
It's not that her feet
couldn't handle the
five block walk,
it's more that
Lafayette street never felt
like home.
In fact, no place has,
at least not since
there first were new
colors in the sky.
She curses the sun
but not other stars;
they had never burnt
her skin.

And somewhere
out in the cosmos
between black nothingness
and star glitter
she was hoping
to find someone,
someone she mistook
for me.

It was the kind of love
where when her heart would beat
blood would pump through my veins.

The world is burning
it lights the tip of this spliff
spiffy satisfaction is what we want
what is the market price for that?
And so tied tight and hard to get undone
are the sun and the moon,
midnight and noon,
me and you,
soon,
maybe we don't sleep tonight.

I don’t know
where it comes from.
It’s not like
a song from a bird,
or a baby from the womb.
It’s less like a bullet
from a gun  
and more like
the constant
breaking and mending
of the heart
as it exhales cold chains
and inhales
the fireworks
on her lips.
I don’t know
where it comes from.
I only know that
it is one of the only things
still worth fighting for.

Take the smoke
around the corner
with a grain of
tequila,
life is better
like this.

The mornings
are the worst.
Writhing between my sheets
like a night crawler cut in half
by the piercing apathy in your
permafrost eyes
the last time I saw them.
I'd cut off my own arm
before I went back to Barcelona.
It's that special kind of pain;
where I feel sick to my stomach
when I see young people holding hands,
kissing.
That special kind of pain,
where no girl is beautiful anymore.
I am the black hole,
the mouse hole,
in the bottom corner of the room.
It ***** out anything worth savoring.

I can act like I'm fine
for approximately 22.2 minutes a day
22.2 years I lived without you
two too many to count.
I used to be two
Now I am barely half of what I was
and I can't bear full moons.
I have the right to bear arms.
Especially after what you and I did to me.
But now I'm armless
You're careless
I'm handless.
I can't pick up the pieces
you scattered all over Denver
Appleton
North San Diego County
Barcelona
Valencia
Bilbao
Cumberland
and West Falmouth.
Maybe you can retrace that trail of blood.
I can't,
but that doesn't stop me from trying
every day.
And I keep arriving
at the same dried up
empty ocean
where only salt is left behind.
9 months later I'm still too ripe.
I'd cut off my own arm
before I went back to Barcelona.
I want to salvage
the parts of me
that sank with that ship
struck by whatever
the **** that was.
Whatever the ****
we all keep writing about.
In your defense and in mine,
no one as young as us
could ever be ready for that.


The world has two poles.
I was 23 when I was told
that I do too.
You brought them both out of me
and everything in between.
But now I'm stuck on the lower one;
a windless white flag at half mast.

Nightmares are just dreams
and nothing could be more real.
A heartbreak to a poet
is just a dream that came true,
and so are you.
Daymares are not real,
and neither is the frozen hemoglobin
they **** from your veins.
I used to get so high,
and laugh.

I've had one first cigarette
and a million last cigarettes.
I guess that pretty much sums it all up.
And back I go to Barcelona.
With one arm.

I won’t fight in your war,
I’m too busy fighting in my own.
You make sacrifices
That aren’t yours to make,
A heavy bill you don’t foot.  
there are white roses that have grown
In a field you turned into a battle ground,
They are red now,
Stained by blood that is not your own.
And it drips onto the grass,
Into the soil,
and from the soil,
Into me.
Into all of us.
Into you, but you don’t know that.
I’ve been growing white roses lately,
That’s my war.
And they grow towards the sky,
Despite the fact they sprout
From the rubble you’ve left behind.
And unlike you I don’t pick their petals.
Their thorns don’t scare me because
They belong to them, not me.
They don’t mean to harm you,
They are just protecting themselves from you.
Though certainly
You have been harmed by others.  
A bullet.
A bomb.
A bombardment.
A breath of fire.
A bulletin board of things
That don’t need to happen.
I come to find it’s better
not to point the finger at white roses
Or their thorns.
Or myself.
This one falls on you.
So no,
I won’t fight in your war,
I’m too busy.
I’m just way too ******* busy,
Fighting my own.

There was a butterfly
With one wing
That whispered in my ear.
It said,
“Don’t make anyone
Your everything
Because if they leave you
You’ll feel as though
You only have one wing,
Just like me,
And then
you’ll have to fly
In circles
For the rest of your life.”
I replied,
“She’s prettier
Than a blood moon,
And that would be
A gorgeous kind
Of pain.
I could fly
In circles around her
All day.”

There’s a battle
That they don’t see
Between the david and Goliath
Within me
Some mornings my feet drag
More than they skip,
I skip breakfast
Because it doesn’t make me
Less hungry
And courage is fragile at times
Because it’s most often the sister of fear,
I want to be the way she moves,
Slow motion,
When water is white,
But also the river when it feels still.
I still feel,
And David loads his sling,
David got me this far,
I believe in him more than god.
Do you?

It’s the small things
that get us through
and eat us alive.

Worms eat the dirt in
front of them
and leave their ****
behind them.
It is a ******,
yet noble existence.
And when the sun comes up
the robin will pull
yet another juicy one
out of the soil.
Until then,
leave me behind, love.
Eat your dirt, love.

This whole thing
might be harder
if we were more aware.
Ignorance is my EpiPen.
Tell me stars are just fireflies
putting on a show,
all for me.
Convince me
that you are not from here,
but here alone.
Persuade me
there is an after party
where you will meet me
and we’ll take the tram
out of the skylight
and fall asleep together
in a bed of telephone wires
carrying words of honey.
Assure me that rivers
stay the same,
that days never end,
the nights don’t either,
that the world is static,
and that I’ll feel this way forever.
Lie to me if you have to,
but do it with the same
sugar cane lips
you press to my shoulder.

In a past life
I think I was
an elevator operator.
Like one
back in the olden
days.
Going up.
And down.
And up again.
Back down.
Talking about
the weather
with people
who were somewhat
strangers,
even though
I saw most of them
everyday.
And when I first started,
I liked the music,
but anything played
over and over again
starts to sound like hell.
It was an elevator
I had never gotten off.
And I know I was
an elevator operator
in a past life
because it wasn’t
so long ago.
Now I’m somewhat
more of a crane operator,
or a train conductor,
the card in my own
back pocket,
or the time it takes
the occipital lobe
of a child
to register the light
in the pupil
that paints the picture
of everything new.

What if the lion was scared?
What if what goes up didn’t come down.
What if I placed a bet,
Somehow, against my garden.
What if i stopped looking,
What might I not find?
I know they didn’t build skyscrapers
To get closer to heaven.
What if the moon was no closer.
What if I could barely acknowledge,
The force it takes
For a blade of grass to grow.
And somewhere along a horizon I’ll never meet,
Lies the exploding of a star,
I named after you.

We lay there naked
loving and laughing,
soundlessly saying
sweet things
with delicate finger tips,
escaping, for a moment,
from the fire
burning the world
outside the bedroom
door.

Life is a perpetual act
of learning and unlearning.
I remember the wisest
I've ever been.
I didn't know it then.
Intoxicated skies
where stars would spin.
We had smoke shadows.
We would two step
on curled boards
and swim with catfish
as the river ran,
as it always did
and someday
no longer will.
We put our bones
into motion
while the rest of life
was innocently
still.

Could you love her anyways?

It hit me
so much faster than I could fly.
And here I am
on the windshield,
immobilized by glue guts.

And as I lie next to her I feel as though I’m falling
From the stars down to an earth I don’t recognize
At a speed faster than terminal velocity.
I don’t know if I can’t sleep or don’t want to,
The lights of the skyscrapers ooze through
The bedroom window
And cover her anatomy
Like the dusting of the first snow
On new dahlia,
Earlier than it came last year,
Or the year before,
Or any year I can remember.
She need not dream about me,
So long as she awakens to me.
Her chest rises and falls,
My body throbs in waves of merciful tepidity
And colors drip into her dreaming mind.
I don’t feel scared.
For the first time I’d rather sit than run.
I listen to her with my eyes.
I see her in split seconds when I blink.
There are people who don’t know each other who want to go to war.
We don’t know each other, but maybe we could end one.

Don't sketch me
the outline
of a broken heart.
That would be
like wearing jeans
to a funeral.
Instead,
paint me
a granite boulder
fractured
by the roots
of a cottonwood tree
that grew atop it.
Drench the rock
in golden
leaves
that the tree cried,
but leave a couple
on the nearly
naked
branches.

She asked,
"How've you been?"
He replied,
"I've been getting older."

What no one understood about her
was that all she wanted was to feel loved,
and none of those beds made her
feel that way.
She went to the highest mountains
and to the bottom of the ocean,
only to find fleeting satisfactions
that flew by like birds
too busy to stop and sing her a song.
Her eyes didn’t stop,
but the places that she looked
had no interest in making
a home for her.
It wasn’t until she found her goddess
in the mirror
that she went back to her own bed,
drifting in and out of the dream
that she lived;
drifting in and out of love
with herself and the world around her.

When she woke up
her heart was met with the song
of a bird that finally stopped
to sing her a song,
and I think I just might
keep singing to her
as long as the sun
continues to rain
down on her
and kiss the eyes
that had finally found
what she had been looking for.

I wish
I believed
in god;
that way,
I’d have
someone
to blame
and thank.

I tried to trade love for freedom,
but ended up finding out
that they are one in the same.

She told me,
“I want to be close.”
I replied,
“It’s lovely to sit by a fire,
less lovely to be in one.”

I didn't really know
how I was going to feel.
I was in a room
full of things that sparkle
[champagne
streamers
firework pupils
diamond teeth
sterling saxephone
a ring
that was once hers].

Girls with castles
in their eyes,
princes in those castles
whose faces
the girls could not draw
with their minds.
Guys with hearts
in their hands,
and hands hidden
in their pockets;
maybe they'd use those
tonight for the first time
in a long time.

When the ball met the ground
and we met a new year,
lips met lips,
but mine remained mine.
I don't even know
where she is
now.

In a room full of revelry,
all I could hear
was my breath;
In.
Interval,
equanimity.
Out.

In a room
full of things that sparkle
[champagne
streamers
firework pupils
diamond teeth
sterling saxephone
a ring
that was once hers],
I found one more
[a part of me
that I forgot was there].
Spring in January.
I smiled.
And I didn't
even have to fake it.

Some of the best
of me survived
her.

Just like the gun
and the bullet,
we were made for each other
but ended up
so **** far
apart.

I won't fight
your war anymore.

I've seen it
from the ground
and I've seen it
from the sky.
And from these
vantage points
my eyes
will always
remember
the picture
of the blood
that my heart
no longer pumps
yet will never
forget.
Your killing machines
are the brightest blue.
They used to be
as loud as
fighter jets
but now I
only hear them
in the whispers
that haunt
the rubble
of who I am.
This poem is
nothing more
than a waving
white flag
atop that rubble;
the dandelion
that grows
from the vestiges
of what remains.

I won't fight
your war anymore.

Look at them all,
Falling in love
The way young people do;
Walking toward each other
On a bedsheet
Tight rope
Between two towers
While wearing
sparkling red
High heels.

There’s a lighthouse
On the horizon.
It is the mother
Of the child in me.
For a time
I’ve worn
This cactus sweater
And have gazed
Through the lens
Of a night sky
Without stars.
But the way
That lighthouse
Throws its beams
Keeps something
Alive inside
Of the seemingly
Abandoned shell
That I wear.

He fights a good fight.
You can say what you want
about that boy.
But he fights a good fight.
It's okay
if you don't understand him.
No one does,
not even himself.
But he fights a good fight.
And all around him
butterfly wings freeze
and old women hack up
mucous.
Baby birds wait
in a wet November nest
for a mama bird
that never comes.
He blows kisses,
with a mouth
that limps
when it smiles,
to sinners just like him.
He's not always right,
but he fights a good fight.
Waters his garden
with tears,
reaches with scarred hands
into bushes full of thorns,
pulls out berries
and gives them to people
with thin and tender skin.
You can say what you want
about that boy.
But he fights a good fight.

I hope you cancel me,
I’m sick of you
and most everyone else.
They talk
too **** much.
Except for the mailman,
who comes
to my apartment building
everyday.
He puts every letter
in every right box.
He has made other mistakes
in this life,
but has never put a letter
in the wrong box.
And some of the letters
are regretful,
love letters
that in 2 years
will find themselves
in the fireplace.
Maybe a birthday card
from Buddy,
which will be kept forever
because it is the last one
you ever got from him.
The best letter I got
was from the queen
of Cap Hill,
and there were
no words written on it.
Blank piece of paper,
I wrote a poem on it
and threw it away.
I’ve seen the mailman everyday
for 28 years,
and he never says a word.

There’s an old lady
with curled fingernails
and proud wrinkles on her face.
She has worn a vinyl record
and a bird’s nest
atop of her head, for all of her good life.
The nest brings the music of the birds
the vinyl gives her shade from the sun.
She’s never thrown that vinyl on the record player
She doesn’t need to,
And that’s not what it’s for.
And as the birds sing
Dust comes off  
of the dancing shoes
she wore
when she fell in love with it all.

I move around
like an ant in the garden.
I see flower sky scrapers
and leaf highways.
I have no idea
how small I am,
but if I did
I’d know what things
to care about
and what to
let go of.

I've seen sorry clowns,
happy hobos,
and a sun that's tired.
Lucky black cats
intelligent rats,
and words that expire.
Today I played hopscotch
with my demons
and fell in love
with multiple strangers.
It's easy peasy
lemon squeezy.
Squeeze me tighter.

What am I to do
With all of this love?
Should I glue it
To a kite
And let the wind take it
Out of the atmosphere
So it can look upon
This earth
As a whole?
Maybe I should
Tie it around
One of my front teeth
And show it to the world
When I smile
As the world smiles back.
Maybe I should leave
It in an empty ballroom,
let it dance its way around
And out the window
To salsa with the moon.
Or maybe I should leave it
Right where it is,
Between your lips
And what remains of me.

The universe is in motion
And it feels like love.

Put me on a stage
and give me the whole orchestra
to amplify the melody
of hazy lungs and mind,
let it drown out the static of our lives
so that I can act
just for a moment
like I'm someone else.

You were my cup of coffee,
burning my lips on the first
sip of your being,
making my heart beat faster.
My hands began to shake
as I got half way through you.
But I didn't drink you fast enough
and consequently you became cold.
Towards the bottom of you
I chewed on the room temperature
grinds of what gave you
flavor in the first place.
I left you this way,
with no desire
to order another one.
One of the greatest pains in life
is that no coffee stays hot forever,
at least not for me.

I’m learning
that there is no such thing as a ****
and that the space
in which we fall
is precious.
I’ve dismounted
my three legged horse.
I’ve cast aside my sword.
I made a coffee table out of my shield.
I’m learning how to untie my shoes.
I’ve learned that
when we love,
a tiny man
at the center of the earth
puts another quarter into the machine
and the world
continues
to spin.

I’ve never considered
that there was ever
a moment
that music didn’t enhance.
But I’ve finally found
a peace in my life,
however fleeting,
where the green light
on Grant street
is the drop
I’ve been waiting for.