"Chess can be described as the movement of pieces eating one another."*
-Marcel Duchamp

Relics and old wives
telling tales for telling.
Reminds me of living
in America, dying.

I think about America
when I see a sidewalk
cracked, clean spider webb'd.
There are so many cracks here.

In the dark, America
looks like any other jar
of ink. You could walk
forever without noticing the blood on your feet.

The day the bombs
drop I'll be sleeping. Oh
what a horror when you
wake up and realize where you've heard that sound before.

How quiet it gets
Just after snow
When at 5am walking out the front door
Onto the lawn
Hearing muffled road noise
Slipping like sand through a sieve
And whispering peripherally
Until sputtering out in indivisible steps
Dimming and fading
Like a cigarette
In a glass of
Water
Flowing slower and slower
Like a river freezing
Locking and waxing
Until woven into outbound threads
And creaking as it settles
Grasping on to tree branches
Yellow glow
Silent 5am scene
With streetlight
How moonlight so easily mingles

If mermaids never did exist, then who was that portrayed on pages of stone, vertical surfaces; etched and carved, because the time was taken, because it wasimportant enough.
When pen nor paper had any meaning and history recorded was the point for seeing. Poor fools, these artists and historians alike.
Quite obviously the way we go about today is to see your history and raise it lie. I do believe it's normal, for what normal is worth, to dismiss a fact of life by giving no death caused by no birth. And what do these mermaids have to do with my message, my inclination to write?
Nothing, I suppose.
I'll leave it alone. I'm some woman and I'll keep it ladylike. But I know in my inner, neither saint nor sinner can defeat a full human feinting power for dinner.
As to what secrets with me were kept from ears for centuries, I believe they've been made into full make believe.
Personally, I'm relieved to be free of such characteristics of humanity, of which the mermaids,
we call that insanity. Either way, that's that.
I now say my goodbyes and swim to my ocean under the see.

She asked me to write for her eyes
And other things less truer, true
I'm almost certain they were lies
As sure I am that they were blue

The color of the endless skies
A pretty, enigmatic hue
The sea, it rises, then it dies
Is it the color of those two?

You had asked me to write for your eyes
I can't give credit where it's not due
It was a fairly weak disguise-
You wanted me to write for you

i lie awake and i
reflect on my affection
somewhat consciously...

though i write and breathe with
the same, flowing alertness,
my thoughts, however, are not as graceful...

i find you somewhere
within this maze, with its throbbing walls
and musty confusion
to which i find no end.
at every turn, i falter
and where most routes are chosen,
i find i'm becoming better acquainted
with the ground:

it's endless, senseless detail,
lack of order.
we have our similarities, he and i...
though, as i walk upon him
he ages,
as do i,
and in the lapse of time
we only grow closer
usually by falling
and leaving our mark behind.


this is my journey to you,
this is my journey through you:
may they both be led happily
and in the same way, end,
though all the while, happiness being
knowing that it never does