those quiet
lonely nights
when long shadows crawl over defeated days
and the red orange sun drowns beneath dark waves
a resonant loneliness
washes over me
dulling love and light
and hope
like the slow deliberate movement of the clock in the kitchen, hands that mark the passing time between jade scarabs
like the soft lilt of a sparrow left outside my window, alone in the twilight
as a church bell doles its distress, slow and deep in the distance, breaking the still darkness with its lament
water cannot cover the spectre of memory
I pour another whisky

i'm sitting in my truck
perdition by my side
the wanderers shuffle past me
quizzing at my universe, which must seem out of place here
i watch them walk away
and disappear into the darkness
of a city burning
under a cruel sun

and she will always torment you with honey and hemlock

I will stay
until I'm dismissed
and will walk beside her
through the dark thicket
and sunlit meadow
I will cut my hands
to retrieve roses for her
I will give her all of my unbroken pieces
and nurture what little she has left
I will carry her when she hurts too much to walk
and I will leave her side when she wants silence
but I will stay
until I'm dismissed
until I breath my last breath
until she falls into the wildflowers
until my reflection fades from her eyes
until my face no longer drives her imagination
until she hates me for loving her
until we walk no more in the woods
until I fall over her
broken and empty
where she rests

the old man sits
every Sunday
in a fold up chair
under the blue sky
on the corner of 40th street
by the gas station
he sells the sun
from the back of his van
of oxidized white
and teal pin stripes
and rust under the wheel hubs
while cars buzz around him
and addicts shuffle past
he sits alone
chair and ice chest
on concrete sidewalks
weeds stealing upward
between the cracks
I remember when
a man was murdered
down the street
in broad daylight
on electric avenue
two blocks from where the old man sits
he sells the sun
but nobody seems to stop by
except me
I drive up
every Sunday
he greets me with a smile
he knows my face
he cheerfully walks toward me
paper in hand
keep the change I always say
and he bows, grateful
earnest
he sells the sun
and I imagine I'm the only one
buying

two terrible beauties
Daphne and Phoebe
whose hearts are my heart
they whom I would die for
and there's not much left for me
or anybody else

the sun, shimmering white through the blue, fathoms above me.

a thousand ships were launched
on the night I saw you
beautiful in the corner
of some Texas dive bar
you were wild
you were magic
your hair was like fire
eyes like the emerald isles
drinking shiner from a bottle
reciting Greek tragedies from memory
I called you Athena
and you looked past my awkward
air

fireflies dancing in the garden as the moon lords over a still night. in the distance the train sounds it's arrival and I breathe you in.

she sells hope and a little more of the highway, but that road never goes anywhere

and it never ends

as ink violates paper, scratching in jet, deep, the stygian stamp of iron through ribbon. paper and ink are innocent. the blood is mine

the way her fingers turn the page
the way she holds her wine glass
the light of a candle in her eyes
she's the essence of transcendence

a canary yellow house stands a silent vigil over a garden and the rumble of the sea below. the sun is dying beneath the waves.

let me be your dying sun and you the parched Earth beneath me longing for the taste of water on your lips.

reading the psalms and hymns dedicated to the love of your life is how I learned to love you.

I love your words
and the mind that drives them
and the way reading you makes me feel
and how I wish you wrote for me
how I write for you

I'm driving along the San Bernardino highway
it's hot
the sky is translucent brown
below me speeding past
are the clapboard and stucco houses
the untended palm trees
trash on the side of the pavement
brown weeds choking the berm
a city of lost hope
and strangled dreams
my exit is coming up
and I expect to find a disheveled man or two
standing on the side of the road
under the street signal
when the old man is not there selling flowers from plastic buckets
they always hold cardboard signs
with words written in black marker
though I never read them
all cardboard signs say something about god
I see many faces here
there is the one armed man
wearing matching red shorts, shirt and ***** ball cap
he has a ******* on his forehead
sunken eyes, unkempt beard, *****
he looks just like Charles Manson
crazed and desperate;
there is the young man listening to headphones, his bike against the fence;
and the aging cowboy leering under the brim of his leather hat
sometimes I see true desperation in the eyes of the lost
but none speak to me
like the young man with the distant stare
witnessing some tragedy
in the mist
his olive drab bedroll lays next to his feet
tied with a worn leather belt
his sign simply says "Oklahoma"
there's a vibe about him that says hope has sold him a little more of the highway

passed by the candles and flowers for the first time today, the first time since we lost our innocence

I'm lying on the bed, it's a cold day.
I'm in my robe,
and some blue sweats
and the black tee shirt I wore to work
at 4am.  
i'm struggling with consciousness when she comes into the room
and wants to talk
about wine
and the new decorative fan she brought home
"What was the brand of wine our neighbors bought us" she asked
           I don't know
The cat jumps on the bed
"You don't feel like talking"
I'm tired I said
Not quite with it right now I added
"Well, I'll let you off the hook.  You don't have to go buy tampons."

I love you
but I don't know how
with swelling words
that burst in cruel secrecy
hidden from you
I am the worse for it

she's the spilled ink
on wan paper
shrouding the words I wanted to tell her
staining my fingers
with the missing words
I could not write

my heart slipped and fell into a chasm and shattered into half a million pieces, each one a reflection of the little lives I tried to save

in a sylvan mountain meadow
beside my house
is a copse of incense cedar and
live oak
under which I imagine a fairy
circle to be
I sometimes imagine watching you
dance there
under the shuttered branches
kisses of silver moonlight
touch upon your shoulders
pale in the electric night
and tiny flowers bloom
under faint footfalls
as you dance
with the intensity of elegance and
grace

well
you all have a piece
of my soul
now don't you
go ahead
use it for a coaster
or a dog eared bookmark
for one of your ****** crotch novels
use it in a pinch
when your nose runs ******
or to cleanup after your lover
you have a piece of my soul
and I have this bottle
and the words that explode out
and splatter onto the counter
and onto my suede shoes
staining my freshly pressed shirt
you have a piece of my soul
feed it to your cat
that piece probably tastes like fish
while some of them reek of ***
like the dark girl I once loved
the one I would die for
the one who took the biggest piece
and wiped it all over town
you have a piece of my soul
and though it isn't worth a whole lot
I thought you might like one
for a good laugh
when you show your friends

the blank page is the emptiness between beats, it tells you the gates are closed, of darkness abated, and just how many deaths are too many

the weight of age is the price we pay for experience, we know where the edge is and it was never the girl

I've seen the edge, standing over purple blood stained sand, bullet ridden Red Bull cans and a photo shrine for her next to his dying body

I watched as he lay in self inflicted agony, legs flailing next to the shrine of the cute blonde, "somebody" on repeat on the truck radio

I went back to the dune days after his suicide, purple blood still there next to a latex glove, nothing else remained in the lonely desert

obsession playing out its macabre hand in a desert panorama, but I feel for the girl who got out while she could, immortalized in the desert

It was less about love and more about mental illness

she loved me best when I teetered on the edge of self destruction, bottle in hand, her addiction to the danger, the dead in my eyes

without you all my pages would be abandoned
in barren desolation
and all my days would run into nights
and nights into desperation
and mornings would come and go without notice
except for the taste of ash in my mouth
staining everything your love didn't touch
as my world would lie in ruin
and I drift into the remainder of my life
knowing that I had once loved
when I was more than a shell of a man

although it's been many many years
since our love faded
and we went on to live our lives apart
I still think about you sometimes
when I see a museum
or an art show
or go to the ballet
you were always a lovely dancer
dark in your beauty
and in your love
and I wonder what life would have been like
had we not broken our affections
had I not burned all my journals
containing the all the poetry with your name in them
a few slipped through and were published
but they should have died with my past as well
now looking over an ocean of time
I wonder how the girl you were fared
as you became a woman
and found love again
and became the center
of someone's universe
I look back at you
with stoic indifference
like the love that burned
was a sun exploding on television
I can't say that I miss you
or the pain of our breaking
which seemed unbearable at the time