When he entered the room, she was naked. She sat stripped of her mythology and the bare curves of her hips made his hands shake. He hid them in his pockets like seizures in winter and told himself it was just the morning coffee.

"Jesus Christ..." His jaw slacked and tightened and he waited for a response; something witty like, odd time to pray or not quite, but maybe his cousin or oh, honey, he moved out years ago, but we still get his mail.
But soon waiting gave way to waiting, as waiting is wont to, and things became uncomfortable. Her deadbolt eyes. She blinked in slow motion, no lash out of place, and he felt foolish.

See, he never expected her to be a woman, and he almost said as much, had the look on her face not shut him up beautifully. Besides, at this point he was pretty certain that cities definitely don't speak--not English anyway--and even then, his concrete dialect was, at best, as atrocious as cracked pavement. He lisped with too much wind and not enough asphalt.

He looked around for somewhere to sit but the only chair wasn't even really a chair, it was a stool with a questionable third leg that sat over-turned and tucked in the far corner and he found himself at an impasse. Retrieving it would not only involve taking his hands from their linen hideaways, but she hadn't even offered him a seat and he didn't want to be rude; he being a man of manners with the cotillion lessons to prove it. On the other hand, there was a more-than-decent chance that his knees would buckle at any moment. He cleared his throat.

"May I?" he motioned and crept around her with a weird, dainty tip-toe. He would later reflect on and regret this odd step choice because it was undeniably ladylike, unlike this lady whose face seemed carved from marble and gave nothing away; she just cast her eyes slightly downward. He uprighted the chair that wasn't really a chair and checked the sturdiness of the questionable leg and shrugged in questionable approval and dragged it back to where he was and returned his hands to where they were and felt, aside from the girly walk, that went surprisingly well.

So it was in silence that he was left to sit. Sit and think. Think about small things, trivial ****. He thought about the small stain on his pants and hoped to God it was toothpaste. He thought about the itch in the dead center of his back where he can never scratch without looking like he has a severe case of cerebral palsy. He thought about his pockets, full of trembling leaves that fluttered with spare change winds and hung delicately from his autumn tree arms. He thought about bigger things too, like how if two people on exact opposite ends of the earth simultaneously each dropped a piece of bread, for a brief moment the whole world was just a really big sandwich. But mostly he thought about the difference between hard and mean.

Hard is the bottomless tumblers of American dream fathers, breathing scotch like fire and promises that were only ever half-way held true. But mean... Mean is a different kind of machine entirely. Mean, he realized, is one solid kick in the nuts past hard. Hard is when your ice cream drops mid-lick and falls in the cinematic drama of a-hundred-and-twenty frames per second to the unforgiving pavement, and even though there is a split seconds chance to reach out and catch it, you don't because, let's face it, sticky hands are gross. But mean is the little junior sonofabitch dog that comes a-waddling on in, laps up your deliciously sweet sidewalk treat and stares you right in the face while he does it. Mean makes you realize the sticky fingers would have been worth it. And before he could decide which category this Angel City would fit in, she stood, with a slight smile curling at the corner of her mouth and one hand behind her back. She slinked over to him with snake ankles and reached out and ran her fingers along his jawline and hooked his chin upward and kissed him.

It wasn't the delicate, thin-lipped kiss of embarrassed virgins and ex-stripper-turned-born-again-Christians. It also wasn't the Californication kiss filled with carnal tongue that he might have expected had the idea that she was going to do anything but intimidate the utter **** out of him even crossed his mind. It was somewhere between the two. Between shelter and apocalypse.  Viperous with a tinge of motherly protection (which, actually, gave him some confusing feelings). When she pulled away he felt the slight clink of metal against his teeth.

A bullet. Round and smooth, he rolled it between his thumb and forefinger and watched his fingerprint peel off and mark the lead skin with little, oily mazes. He looked up to her, unsure of what to say or what to make of whatever the hell just went down. She stared silently because, you know, that's her thing and he felt he had to say something because, you know, manners.

"I thought we said no gifts." He laughed. She didn't. He felt like an idiot immediately. Then, like the other half heart of a best friend necklace, she drew from her back a snub-nosed revolver. Her thumb flicked with outlaw elegance and the empty chamber rolled open.

"Let's play a game."
It was all she said. He didn't pay attention to whether she spoke in impeccable English or if the words were lit in the electric neon of Sunset Boulevard. It didn't matter and he didn't care. He didn't even notice when he took the gun and slid the round in until after he spun the chamber and slung it shut. When she lifted his arm without touching him and he felt like he was her marionette. When the snub nose found it's way to his mouth, he was certain of it. The feeling of the metal barrel against his bare teeth made his skin crawl and his stomach turn, yet even still he grinned.

He grinned because he saw his hand and his hand grinned because it wasn't shaking, not anymore.

He grinned and cocked the hammer back.

You believe in control
Like you believe God
Put Man here to make things
Better.
And that's cute.

You are a limit left wanting
For letdown;
A bandaid in desperate hold-fast
To a punctured hull, with fever
Dreams of Flotsom and Jetsom.

When my grandfather passed away, my brothers and I held my dad with slanted eyebrows and stiff, silent upper lips. Because we are young and foolish and still learning. Because we’d never really had to do the holding before and, as far as we knew, this is how men mourn.

We dusted antique left-behinds with delicate, moth-wing hands that fluttered here and there and never stopped trembling -- dead giveaways that within the corridors of our arms our heartbeats went stampeding, arrhythmic. We couldn’t quite bend them into the proper shape for prayer, so instead we ran them, with touch somewhere between float and feel, along every ashtray and age-stained picture album. In that moment I think we each wished that memory read like braille, but no one ever said as much. Because this is how men mourn.

We honored our patriarch with whiskey, hidden away for what must have been twice my age, between the carved out pages of old stacked books.
We drank like secrets. His portrait played witness.

We promised between our teeth with tinged lips tight, keeping words in that might otherwise crumble us like great ancient empires.

We singed and smoldered in a burn that coated our throats, quelling a choke that kept climbing its way up from a chest that never quite stayed sunk. Boys grow up loving the clinking twist of unlocking deadbolts but men peek through keyholes. Because this is how men mourn. Silent and straight with head only slightly slanted.

But when my father betrayed his rigidity with words that clicked clean like unfastening locks, we traded this stale air in for wind laced with the electric taste of thunderstorms. We forgot how men mourn.

When my grandfather passed away, my brothers and I held my dad with lightning behind bleared eyes. Because we are young and foolish and still learning. Because we have umpteen days left to dress in bittersweet vestiges and, as far as we know, this is how men live on.

Play on.
Pretend.

Drum your anxious fingers out
In sync with the drip-drop of the melt,
Seeped prolix, distraught faucet mouth
Leaky kitchen sink, we drowned
Everything we could think to rinse
Meaning from
Down the drain.  Our thumb prints
Scrubbed smooth away,
Quicker than crumbs
We followed and rationed and named
Stale keepsakes to keep us thin through Winter.
Thumb drummer, play on.
Pretend.
Facetious rhythms could kindle us
Warm enough to hibernate.

Thumb drummer,
Play on.

I.
Well you know that I sip on my sadness, my dear,
filthy palms, filled to the brim.
And I know that you watch trains
passing by, dizzy eyed, still drunk with sin.
Your teeth reek of reality lately,
You smile facts, figures and cracked calcium.
Now, once more with cupped hands
leaking, shaking delirium up to your chin.

Well I know that I’ve missed the point, honey
I should get it tattooed on my wrists,
but you know you talk like firecrackers
so flinching gets awful hard to resist.
I make believe that I’m right like craters
make moons believe.
So I’ll comment on comets and ignore
truths popping between parentheses.

My delusion has your lips liquored up,
but I notice your tongue...

II.
You say,
“It’s fiction we live in. You play in pastels
and fake hollywood rhythms and I’m tired,
staring up at your screen.

You're addicted to this diction. My voice is lost,
screaming these words you keep stealing
and twist for yourself what they mean."

III.
Your lips liquored up,
but I notice your tongue's not numb.
Drink deep, darling. Let's inoculate.

IV.
And you say,
“It’s fiction we live in. It’s intended for men
like you, bottled, up-ended,
but I've watched you drain out in my palm."

It's this clothing, from bedpost to box-spring,
It's all wax-coats and smoke screens,
live lit-candle lasting
When did skin begin to fit wrong?

V.
So they say, one day
Or, one day, they say,
we’ll find ghosts sewed to the seams
of Fringe Wolf bones picked clean
who waltz wicked and crooked a foxtrot to show
that sometimes loss is beautiful.
And when I ask for your hand you’ll look tragic
like this dance was only ever for me
and my feet always fall off beat
Like I beat off any discreet romancing
To pretend that this dancing was
Anything more than masturbatory.
I guess I do dance the way I drink:
Heavy handed and troglodytic
And a little listless, but I always fight it.
So while you walk away, I’m drowning drunk in cinderblock boots; Toe-tapping a slurred S.O.S. like some song you kept whispering.
You keep whispers like keepsakes.
You speak so soft but
Baby, your voice sticks with me
like sickness.

VI.
And you say,
“It’s fiction we live in. It’s intended for men
like you, bottled, up-ended,
but I've watched you drain out in my palm."

Alright, it's fiction that we live in
It's intended for men like me, bottled, up-ended,
but at best I just seeped through your teeth.

VII.
I stitched script to my chest like a scarlet letter vest that attests there's no Soul here worth Saving but ******* come save me anyway.
Your voice sticks
to my ghost-sewn, sea-floor bound foot steps like sickness.
Tread lightly, my love. Let's inoculate.

VIII.
So when they ask for me at the after party
With neon eyes and harlot tongues,
You can tell them I traded this stale air in
For forest fires and tornado lungs.
Because I’ve been reading up in matchbooks
how to dance with disastrous fate,
and I'm finding my rhythm so wake silent
or sleep long, my love. Let's inoculate.

In between sips of skim-milk splashed coffee; in between the sharp, fragmented, ink-drags of pen and indentation of paper and the simple sketch of a fish in a lake [the fish like the hand and the cog, and the lake like piano keys and copper machinery] The Imagist explained to me the conception of music and clockwork.
And the Human Condition.
"Humans," he sketched, "have a very peculiar sense of self - it ends at our skin. Cut off my arms and I'll survive, but sever the air from my lips and... At what point did our limbs become more a part of ourselves than the sky?"
And after a moment of measuring the weight of words, he thought to me, "Man, I don't know why I get myself into this... What made me think I could write a children's book?"

I told him how I wished I could write music. You could read it in my poetry; my metaphors about sheet music and night skies. My yearning to explore worlds that my starfall has never blinked in. And it struck me, bittersweet through the roots of my wisdom teeth, how we can never choose our art. Rather I'll bushwhack through, leaving trails of half-started, stutter-stepped poems, looking for something that sings like guitar strings.

The Imagist and I, we are children of a visual age.
I try to sculpt our twenty-seven minute attention spans through sporadic hand gestures.
He told me about his trip to Montana through drawings of the people he'd met,
from the three friends of friends who were a quarter of a face or less. Like Bob, the right eye and jawline, who knew something about everything  [He said it's like having a conversation with Wikipedia], to the deeply detailed dreamy girl who played the accordion.

Sometimes we wake up feeling like Mr. Potato Head, with our mouth where our eye should be.

In between sketches of friends who fell out of touch and John Ashbery poems, we gave credit to palindromes. The Imagist drew HannaH with a handlebar moustache and I realized that this poem ends when Two Creek closes - comforted by the fact that poetry can be about the simplest moments, the ones that I never understood exactly how beautiful they were until I read them in my own shaken handwriting.

In a mix-up of words, He discovered how sick he was of writing with something, rather than writing for something.
I evaluated my own pen and chewed on my tongue.

I wish I could draw portraits so that I'd remember first impressions.

When The Director showed up, we exchanged science and art. He explained to me the imaginary horizons of black holes and Hawking radiation, but even he taught it through a sketch in the top left corner of his science fiction movie script. At the foreign end of the table, The Imagist continued a conversation about the complexities of children's books, and theories someone developed through observing their attention-starved cats who bore uncanny likeness to kids, and the appeal of Furbies, while The Director asked me how I write a poem.
I told him it starts with a single line, something that zings in my mouth like cavities and canker sores, but not to take my advice because I have far too many illegitimate, ******* sons; clouds of words daunted by the clear skies of the rest of the page. After The Director's end credits, eventually I joined the foreign conversation where we had begun it, with The Imagist saying, "Our skin connects us to everything, it doesn't trap us in to our own narcissism."

And then they were gone too, each dissolved into a part of themselves and each other - to fall into place in a world that runs on six-billion beating hearts.

In between the grain of a yellow birch table that's hosted the gunfire of mouths and lonely bones, I stayed and played my part, losing my fingers in the varnish and pages of books, believing that I, my entirety, my open borderline skin, my wooden grain, my air in the wind, my ballpoint pen finger, was writing for something.

Dear Mom,
Hey! How’re things?
So, LA is weird. It’s all sticks and stones and billion dollar homes. Last week on the Metro I forgot my headphones, but it all worked out because there was a homeless man who was naked from the waist down except for a pair of Spiderman underwear with the tag still attached who was singing “Sweet Caroline” at the top of his lungs.
Everyone here is someone important. They live the philosophy of Descartes like scripture.
I think therefore I am... exhausted. I haven’t been sleeping because my mind has taken up running, which means it’s acclimating to the culture here quicker than my body because everyone in this town ******’ loves running almost as much as they love vintage shoes and car horns.
It’s strange though, I can’t shake this feeling that I’ve lost something.
Anyway, I love you.

Dear Mom,
Thank you for the eyes.
Last afternoon a stranger told me they were beautiful, and on a day where every mirror seemed to be of the funhouse variety, it was a welcome compliment.
I’m sorry I haven’t called in a few weeks, please don’t think it’s because I don’t miss you.
It’s just, lately, I’ve been feeling a bit like a marionette whose had his strings clipped.
Slumped and crumpled.
Small.
Collapsed and sprawled cracked in some forgotten corner--the hollow knock of wood bouncing across the walls of this mezzanine dressed in finer things than me that have been fostered by
Father Time and his Mistress Stillness.
And I know how you worry.
You worry ‘til bones bruise and still your skeleton aches to shoulder my melancholy yourself, so I can’t bear to bridge this distance with crestfallen phone calls where the past year locks fully loaded on six-shooter lips--the way heels cling to cliffs edge--before finally, reluctantly, free falling; firing off each round.
Six words aimed with eyes closed as if it were up to God to decide where they’d hit:
“I wish I could come home...”
Then your silent, empty-cartridge, catacomb sigh would just teach this telephone how cavernously a mother’s heart aches for her children.


Dear Dad,
I know it goes without saying, but thank you for the check and the note attached to it.
It’s hard to describe how much home I find in the deft curves of your surgeon’s cursive.
I hope you’re doing well. Last time I saw you, you seemed a bit like a lit cigarette filter tip watching the singe approach.
Maybe it was just the embers of your eyes glazed over by one too many heavy handed nightcaps.
And this isn’t to say the Superman who stayed up late nights holding me through fits of anxiety has up and flown away, this is just to say you seem to be flickering.
This is just to say I hope you still laugh at bad movies with the thunderous bass of July fourth fireworks.
This is just to say I’ve been staying up late nights holding on to yesterday.

Dear Mom,
The care package was unnecessary.
I now have more Skittles than any one human should ever consider consuming in a lifetime. So thanks. I know I told you, at some point, years ago, that they were my favorite… but *******.
Really though, waking up to that box on my doorstep choked me up quicker than a swift kick to the nuts. You have a way of weaving through this heartland like a Middle-American interstate and I love you so much for that. It’s just next time, maybe try something that doesn’t have the nutritional value of flash-fried butter sticks.
But not too healthy. Maybe fruit leathers?
P.S. Keep the homemade fudge coming.

Dear Dad,
Forgive the handwriting of an earthquake.
My hands are shaking again like when I was young. I’ve been finding stillness, though, in between sips of five dollar coffee and midnight cigarette drags beneath and incandescent moon that seems to use breeze hands to play cat’s cradle with strings of smoke.
Life is fast here. It’s all gas pedal and touch-and-go breaks.
P.S. If you see mom, don’t mention the cigarettes.

Dear Mom,
I got your e-mail about smoking and the ensuing health issues it leads to. Graphic stuff. That was super informative and totally unprompted. Thanks for that.

Dear Dad,
...

Dear Mom,
Stop worrying so much, you’re making my bones ache.

Dear Dad,
In my dreams I am a lighthouse with an unfocused beam. I’m searching for something, I just don’t know what.
At least I’m sleeping right?

Dear Mom,
These days blur together with the fading speed of a half-life hardly lived to its fullest.
Was it different for you when you were my age? I shift between a drifting stick stuck in a current and desert stone.

Dear Dad,
In my dreams I’m a lighthouse.
There’s a fog horn distant.
I’m still searching for I don’t know what I’m searching for something and there’s a fog horn far off like it’s from someone elses dream but at least I’m sleeping.

Dear Mom,
Do you believe that streams take sticks where they need to be?

Dear Dad,
Have you dreamt of fog horns lately?
I am a lighthouse looking for a nameless something in fog so thick I should be choking.
But I’m not.
At my feet there are rocks and they’re jagged but I’m not anxious because they stay up late nights holding me.
And in the distance there’s a fog horn that seems to be saying “All is not lost.”

Dear Mom,
Do you think that desert stones are waiting for something?

Dear Dad,
In my dreams a lighthouse is built upon jagged rocks that are shaped like your hands. I’m searching for something and even though my lamplit electric torch eyes can’t touch the sky through this ******* fog, I keep them burning because I should be choking but I’m not, I’m finding stillness in the way breeze plays with smoke strings and far off there’s a fog horn distant promising “All is not lost.”

Dear Mom,
This town is all sticks and stones and broken home drifters.

Dear Dad,
All is not lost.

Teach me to flay this skin --
to strip it away.
To strip it all 'til all that remains
is an ornate foreign origin story
stowed in an impossibly tall tower
buried brick-before-brick between lines left
dressed in dust, overlooked by
well-read-over-thought eyes
rushing through a sadly-ever-after true story
that somewhat resembles what I think
a song should look like.

But I was never good at music.
I was never good at music
the way you were good at falling in love.
Now harsh tones come screaming
from my cell phone to wake me from
memory disguised as dream
where your voice strummed
telephone lines like guitar strings
singing softly that you love me
because of  the way my arms were carved
from crescent moons
as if, for no other purpose,
than cradling the curves of you.

So when did your shape change?
Was it a shift in your spine
or did meteorites ravage your resting place?
I think maybe this skin is in the way,
like a one night stand wardrobe
begging to be flayed --
to be born again by serrated hymn;
a sung sermon in the name
Of some razor-edged savior.
So strip it away, because beneath it,
I swear to God, I feel the same.
Can't you see that
these crescent cradles never changed?

Bless this dusty bookcase
Where they prey
And lie in waiting;
Bound in pages brown
and fading. Fed off tremors
Echoed from the desperate hand
That made them.

Bless the poem that's forsaken
By the tongue that begs to taste
Words written for false promises--
Dipped in cedar, dripping rhythm--
Unfurled to breathe florescent lighting
Of a library that's spent decades
Searching for a new way to say forgotten.

Heirloomed ink is grave-worm risen.
Bless this second coming
But expect to find no Mesiah here.

You broke bread and cracked voices.
Accompanied choruses of songs
you never bothered to learn.
Played God with radio dials and
sought salvation in airwaves,
leaving translation to the speakerbox.
Like a proper disciple-turned-prophet,
the static air took artistic liberties
and ****** up the message.

In all honesty, you wanted
so badly
to believe that this time, together,
you could out-live the reckoning.
That this time you were
something divine.
But tonight you're too sober to speak
and too tired to try.
Once again, you apologize.
She'll cradle your cheeks just so,
with such delicate touch
you're almost convinced it's done lovingly.
                    (You've been trained to speak
                                   between such parentheses.)
You always tell her exactly what she wants to hear
but never what she needs to know.
You both leapt from this bed, aiming for Space,
Hoping for something biblical,
but found, once again, that the sky
is nothing more than a mausoleum of stars.
                              And what
                                     goes
                                                            ­     up
                                                         Must
                                                come
       ­                       down.
From that funeral view
the truth collided into you
quicker than the avenue below.
Now you know what the moon must have felt
when the rockets came promising that
after this, things will never be the same,
then left just as quickly
with their pockets full of rocks.
You know what it's like when they steal part of you
just to put it on display.
It takes this distance
238,900 miles,
from here to the moon,
to leave your Me at ground level
and plummet into the
second person singular.

From depth like this
it's almost as if,
it never really happened to you at all.

I'm leaving.
Less like, Peace the **** out,
more like, I gotta go.
I'm leaving the way ships are wooed by waves,
under the pretense of more promising continents.

I can see where countless hands have pulled at my shoelaces,
wrapped my arches in ribbons of origami,
left me second guessing how well holes burn through soles.
It's been a long day of finding breathing space between double-knots and bending
broken fingernails back into place;
the self-constrained chaotic embrace of something supposedly so
straight as string brings forth beckoning ghosts of
those figure-eight souls who laid themselves
horizontal
to waste their Sundays tracing the Hills
on the breath fogged side of some painted-shut window sill;
trading the promise of Infinity
for the Religion of Monotony.
Praying through agoraphobic day-dreams
raining across the night sky of their eye lids
with the brilliance of meteorites,
imagining how earth-shattering they could be
if only these tyrannosauruses would just look up.

I have come here;
Less like, conquest
more like, exploration.
--Abandoned the comfort of quaint, suburban
ruins of the American Dream, which buckled
like widows knees mid frail-voiced eulogy
mourning the death of their Salesman--
and wandered aimlessly into the improvisation of some story-book jungle,
wishing I was better rehearsed.

I have come here
to congregate with the snakes and beasts; to feast beneath
the din of carnal sin and primal instincts. I've chosen to begin jumping
from stump-to-stump like stepping headstones
in a graveyard of fallen trees, where men,
                     who grew up too quickly and forgot the importance of pretend,
                     who learned early on how to black-market trade
                              the need to imagine for something a little bit more
                                                      tangib­le,­
                     who, smiling through serrated teeth,
saw it fit to clear this wilderness for something a little bit more
domesticated.

But thank god, these brambles grow so thick!
For every hail Mary their metal tongues would lick
into the trees' skin, a hallelujah of vines and branches and roots
would erupt in confused medley,
and their finest mathematics couldn't begin to calculate
the thriving division of a place so ungoverned by logic.       
In a jungle plucked straight from storybook pages
I'll band together with these untamed brutes
--these feral barbarians and unbroken monstrosities--
to howl at the moon with the effervescence of a Ginsberg poem.
We'll forge a tinsel-town crown and take turns
playing king of Where the Wild Things Are found.

See, unlike concrete cities
The Wild of Atavism has never forgotten that
Tradition is a catalyst for change
and that nothing is permanent.
Hell, I've been having laughing contests with a mountain
because every now-and-again he will crack
A smile, and when a mountain laughs
He does so, so gutturally,
From deep within his catacomb chest that
the whole Earth quakes -- everything shifts--
And I'm not gonna lie to you right now,
I've sort of got my heart set on being a part of something so
significant.

So if you follow,
shipwrecked and mapless,
Keep your shoelaces strapped tight
and run off the infinity of double knots.
If you go looking for me, continue
past the paint chips, through
the open window;
Set your sights to the far treelines.
And don't strain yourself listening for
the laughter of mountains,
Because when that stoic disposition
Finally does crack, you'll feel it in your feet
no matter where you are.
And from the way his ridges are crumbling,
I think I've almost got him beat.

They say,
the Scarecrow stares straight
and never blinks
he thinks, but never speaks,
just listens to the writhing vines of bindweed:
Turn the earth, sweet arteries.

They say,
the Scarecrow was once a man.
He had hands that knew
perfect flavor of skin
And had red, winding veins of his own.
But that was a long time ago.

They say,
the Scarecrow blistered his tongue
on blunderbuss barrels;
Spat bullets.
Waged war against himself,
and lost his speech when the time came
to beg for forgiveness.

They say,
That by August, the Scarecrow's
Blood forgot to boil,
or simply didn't care anymore.
That when he found love fleeting
it was indifference, not hate,
that desiccated his chest
like prairie drought.

Dear Hollow Martyr who fears not
the white heat of sparks
or dry-weather wildfires.
Stand devout in your inertia,
bleeding apathy like canyons bleed echoes.
After all, it's all you've got to offer
except dead stillness, they say,
so callous it keeps the crows away.

This one's for me
and I'm gonna watch it burn.
Watch it flicker and pop and crackle and spit.
Gonna take lessons on how to dance with the draft,
also hoping she doesn't ******* out.
I'll make poems out of smoke and shadows
and fading, lonesome, sepia-tone summer photographs.
I want to make dusty picture frames feel like well-loved tuxedos.
I'm gonna see if candlelight can be all the company I need to keep.
Gonna sweep this floor clean,
like it's not what we say, it's what we mean
between the lines of
one too-polished table setting:
one knife,
one spoon,
but two forks for wishful thinking.
I'm gonna eat my fill
and fill my cup again and again,
to the point that I begin to make conversation
with my reflection in the bathroom mirror.
I'll tell that *******, "My friend, you are drunk."
and he'll tell me, "Kid, look who's talking."
Then it'll be back to a glass
that treats its brim like a suggestion.
Gonna have whisky and black lager and champagne
'til my toes and thumbs tingle.
Thin blooded and numbed;
Steeled by my father's novocain.
Come morning, this house couldn't get more hollow.

In these hallowed halls where I wallow in the way that
I only seem to appreciate the preciousness of days
Once they've passed,
here's what I'm gonna do:
I'm gonna write questions on one side of the wooden window blinds,
and write punchlines to completely unrelated jokes on the other.
I don't know why. Maybe just to **** with people.

I'm gonna reminisce with full streets of ghosts
That glow like kerosene lamp posts
all the while, stomping my feet, just to prove that I can.
Gonna make toasts to the isolated;
to the quarantined and the misanthropes.
I'll boast that lovers are not unlike poachers,
but I'm not gonna mention that in every other under-cover dream
I seem to swoon like ivory elephant tusks.
I'm gonna gamble on Dusk
because I think it's got a little less honesty,
but a little more promise than its
attention-*******, good-for-nothing, go-getter big sister Dawn does.
That flirtations *****.
Gonna give Christian names to half drawn caricatures
of people who only ever existed when the lights died out
and the snow fell heavy.

I'm gonna let the levies break.
I'll go insane, just ******* lose it--
do the Boot-Scoot-'n'-Boogie in a onesie
with the hind flap flying free and the Greek Theatre masks of
Comedy and Tragedy painted on my *** cheeks,
(because no one should ever take their art too seriously)
And I'm even not gonna even care who sees,
partially because there's no one around to watch anyway,
but mostly because I want,
more than anything, to just be me.
Or at least I want to want that.
See, I read somewhere that,
"You should always be yourself…
unless you can be a unicorn,
then always be a unicorn."
And that really struck home for me because,
even though I've never really ached to be
the ******* love child of a Narwhal and Zebra
(In my imagination, unicorns are
striped and impecable swimmers)
I truly believe that Men will always dream of being Titans
and Titans will always dream of being Gods
and Gods want nothing more than to be Wind--
to twist with lit candle sticks
and teach the lonesome how to dance.

A one-step waltz tip-toed to distract.

But the fact is, I'm bound to take a few back steps.
I'm gonna think about her.
Gonna harbor hard feelings towards back bedroom dealings
that I have no right knowing about.
Gonna pray like a desperate atheist
that they keep their knees locked in a one night stand.
I might break down.
Only once, just long enough to regain my strength.
Then I'll tame the earthquakes in my hands, like I always do.
Gonna find what it takes to move on.
Not just regenerate, but to grow stronger than I ever was before.
So I'm gonna meticulously straighten these place settings:
One knife.
One spoon.
A healthy dose of wishful thinking.
Gonna try my hand again at dancing with the back draft;
I heard she's been aching for a duet,
and with all the life of candlelight
I'm gonna ignite the coal shafts beneath my eyes.
Gonna finally see me as the man I am,
not the titan I wish to be,
because I heard somewhere that,
"You should always be yourself…
Especially when all you've known
all you've ever shown
is some mythology."
So raise your glass because this one?
This one's for me.

What we have is pretend.
We don't make love, we make believe.
I'm just learning this now,
But you,
You've known it for quite some time.
The trick is, you can switch out of this--
Turn it on and off.
Differentiate.
You're the girl who plays with dolls,
discovering the similar power you hold over
Real-life boys and these
Plastic, inanimate objects.
I'm the kid who wears his Superman costume
To school everyday,
and truly, honestly, whole-heartedly believes
that if he tries hard enough,
he will fly.

I've built a fine collection of scars on my elbows and knees.

She says,
“Speak to me in poetry.
Baby, I want to see what I look like through your eyes.”
And immediately,
Like ripping through each word Webster put in his book,
I strip my vocabulary of every cliché about love and beauty
And loosely string them together with shaking hands,
Which my hands have grown accustom to.
I want to tell her how every time she enters a room
My stomach does this funny thing where it ties itself into knots
And my heart seems to start beat-boxing
Like it grew up in the grid-locked street blocks.
But I don’t tell her this
Because if I were to let these words out of my mouth
I know that there’s a good possibility that I will look like a crazy person.
I want to tell her that I just want her to be impressed.
To look upon me with longing in her eyes
And I’d steal her breath away like that no man ever has
And keep it in a locket concealed in my buttoned-up back pocket.
But I don’t tell her this
Because, honestly, I can’t impress with they way I dress
Or my white boy dance moves,
And the only time I ever stole anything I got caught.
I want to tell her that if her toes go
Somewhere that mine can’t follow,
I’ll sacrifice my eyes to the sky
So that I can see her every day when the sun sets west.
But I don’t tell her this
Because I couldn’t hold her with my arms dressed in flames,
And truth be told, one dose of her a day isn’t enough to get me my fix.
And so we sit in that teasing mix
Of fixated eyes exchanging
A lustful desire to unlock jaws and collide our lips,
In a beautiful disarray of tongue and teeth.
And the calming restraint to let the moment linger
Just a little longer
Because in just a little longer
This moment will be perfect.
And I am silent.

And He says,
“Speak to me in poetry.
Brother, I want to see what the world looks like through your eyes.”
Time and time again I’ve humbled myself by denying the fact that
I am extraordinary
For reasons that only clear eyes can see,
Like this man,
He seems to be more fed up with the repeated routine of each and every yesterday
And envies my hope in tomorrow so he asks to borrow my insight.
I want to tell him that on those days when nothing looks familiar,
I wind up fasting;
Eating nothing but my passed down last name.
See, that’s how I meditate on my individuality,
But I don’t tell him this
Because God knows I can get starved for company
And borrow philosophies from question marks.
I want to tell him that there is beauty all around us.
It’s in every breath that’s whispered through pursed lips
And it drips down from the sky,
That’s all rain is.
But I don’t tell him this
Because sometimes even I watch the world
Through eyes filled with acid.
I want to tell him that the only thing that limits us
Is the shackles that we keep strapped down
For safety’s sake
But if we want, we could break free and run towards better days
With our heartbeats pounding in our ears.
But I don’t tell him this
Because maybe we are just two people
Who have nothing more to offer than sparks
In a world taken with fire.
And so I retire my voice
Since I don’t want to make a liar of myself,
I’m no street corner gospel
False profiteer
Selling twisted rapture to any lonely ear
Willing to empty their pockets out of desperation.
And I am silent.

She says,
“Speak to me in poetry.
Baby, I want to see what I look like through your eyes.”
And He says,
“Speak to me in poetry.
Brother, I want to see what the world looks like through your eyes.”
And They say,
“Speak to me in poetry,
We want to see what life looks like through your eyes.”
But since my tongue is tongue tied
And I currently don’t mind going blind for a little while
The only thing I can think to do
Is smile and hand them my glasses.

It always started with a kiss.
A kiss that shocked her from her lips to her hips
and sent her reeling down rabbit holes
searching for something that sings like hallelujah.
But by the time Gloria regained consciousness
to the sound of a needle riding an empty groove,
all she found was the window he'd left open,
And a bone;
A marrow-filled keepsake abandoned on the sill.
She wrapped it in ripped gossamer from
her grandmother's wedding veil and
placed it neatly in the closet
with all the others.
And as she reapplied the crimson lipstick,
brushed too much blush over sunken cheeks,
and outlined her eyes in waterproof mascara,
she felt the draft more than ever before.
"A home can be an awfully lonely place for love..."
she murmured to her autumn tree self,
then she stepped out of the door, lips puckered
and primed of every proof that she was
anything but a ******.

One tube of lipstick, a femur, two collarbones
and half a jaws worth of teeth later,
she sat sprucing up to that same
skipping scratch of a static-air record and
pushing the thought of how her grandmother died
alone
to the back of her mind,
as she tied perfect bows with the ribbons of veil.
"A bed can be an awfully lonely place for love..."
she whispered to her bare-finger self.
Then once more, she slipped into a city
whose slogan read:
Take it easy, it's hard beind human these days

After each season changed in a dozen different ways,
and her summer-Merilyn  blonde had
withered winter-newspaper grey,
Her knuckles and joints baptized in arthritis,
She could hardly bring the religion of her hands to
raise up the ribcage, fresh enough to
still smell of morning breath.
But this time she did not retire
to the closet turned mausoleum.
Instead, she emptied the tomb of all
these ex-lovers' left overs,
all the bare-bones of the best parts of
these midnight escape artists
who never fully got away,
and Gloria made for herself a makeshift man.
One that would never keep her warm,
but would never leave her
frozen by an open window sill either.
One with an empty chest that offered no treasures,
but didn't have the guts to chase the morning-afters.
"A heart can be an awfully lonely place for love."
she mouthed to her silent-breasted self,
as she bent down for one last
unconducted, dusty kiss.

“Just loosen your grip a little,”
Fiddling fingers say to me
Quite condescendingly,
“If you hold on to something
Too tight for too long
One day you’ll open your fist
And realize you’ve crushed it.”
The breath that carries his words
Buries this stone heart like a seed
And parts the rising steam of the
Teacup he raises up to steady lips,
Of which my quivering jaw grows
Envious.
“That’s *******.”
I spit the venom back at him,
Proving my limited vocabulary
And badly developed “come-back” skills.
It makes me ill how much he tries to pretend that
Everything is fine.
“Everything is going to be
Fine”
He says,
“Everything has a reason.”
And I hate him for it.
But I can’t hide the upright curves of a smile
When he tells me
We all make an impact.
We all buckle at our knees in the rain,
Fists full with parts of our soul
That we wish to add to this the world.
It’s why we leave behind fingerprints
On everything we touch.
It’s proof of our existence
And a reminder that once,
We cared enough to reach out and
Make an exchange with the things we love.

But I counter it with,
“Fingerprints can be washed away
In the time it takes a snowflake
To melt in your palm.
In the split second of a gunshot.”
It’s too risky to wear our hearts on our sleeves
These days
So instead we push it down
Our solar plexus
And compress it like coal.
We fill the hole in our chest
With cyanogen-filled cigarettes
And nicotine best guesses.
We doorbell-ditch the addresses
Of our Demons in Disguise
With makeshift wings and sky blue eyes.
Taunting them with kid tricks
But always running
Because we’re too afraid
To strip them of their masquerade.
Naive to the fact that it might be more
Than just child’s play.
So I tell him it’s okay
To admit that he’s still afraid of the dark.
That we need to strap ourselves
With something harder than skin.
Because this world is hazardous,
I learned it the first time I saw my father cry.
That’s why I sit here with
White-knuckled hands clutching to
Everything that I can call my own
And not opening my eyes
Because I dream better with them closed.
So I won’t loosen this grip
Because it seems so simple to slip
Through these fingertips.

And so he sits.
And so I shake.
And he sits, and I shake
And we take that deadpan silence of a symphony
Right before the orchestra strikes the first chord
And we make honesty with it.
We make honesty like,
Honestly, the next sounds
To escape our mouths
Are going to be the most important words I’ve ever heard
So let's make them worth it.
We make honesty
Like concentration camp *******
Because it’s how we still feel alive
And a way to say, “**** the world
I’ve still got something it can’t take.”
And while I can’t shake this moment of vulnerability
He draws a hand up to my chest,
Pulls out a breath,
And dissects the swollen god-complex.
He filters the air
I hinder to bear upon my heavy shoulders
And slips it back, past cracked crimson lips
To ignite this sarcophagus with life.
“Everything is going to be
Fine.”
He says,
“Everything has a reason,
So explore the world with both hands before of you
Feet making a rhythmic beat on the
Black paved street
As you follow broken yellow lines,
Racing headlights to the horizon.
And leave behind a trail of fingerprints
So you’ll never forget where you’ve been.”

How many echoes did you count
before your night light burnt out
and the sheets were no longer enough
to keep your teeth from dancing?

For me, it was November
when I found my eyelids
violet and blue.
I dreamt that I knew you
before there was much to know,
and now I know that on Sundays
you still sew patches
to your elbows and knees.
I dreamt of your streets
in the folds of my palm,
but I've got to say,
I always expected more footsteps.
And so I let the echoes go by
and never bothered to catch them
because they never spelled my name.

For me, it was November
when I stood barefoot in the alleyway
Armed with open-book thoughts
in a watered-down town.
Keeping the beat for bad company.
Wandering eyeless in this city
casting sharp, midnight shadows
on the backsides of blindfolds,
and holding their hands
and aligning our backbones.
And Howling.
Howling
the way wolves praise the moon.
Wake up, you *******,
you've got your whole lives ahead of you.
Bend your bed frames into
the shape of an untamed altar and
celebrate Today,
Because it's all we
will ever really have.
And alters come in many different shapes
there's no right answer
so stop looking for it.
Just dance your feet from
bed springs to concrete.
and remind Tomorrow that
it has to wait it's ******* turn.
We walk blind to remind ourselves
that night lights only illuminate
the reasons why not to try.

For me, it was November
when the Sunday,
curved-spine crawlers
begged us to sleep.
But I let the echoes go by
and never bothered to catch them
because they never spelled my name.

From a distance designed for instant intimacy you begged me
to satisfy your earthbound,
dirt-grounded fallen-star needs with hands carved from the Moon.
Writhing between wildflowers and weeds
I danced my discretion on the definition of ecstasy;
pleasing your pleas with partial gravities—
like Atlas with sweating palms.
And I felt compelled to apologize as habit has trained me to
for loving you less like great lovers do, and more like
a high school “C” student who can’t remember the answers to the test.
But you kissed me mute.
We are daunted by the constant reminder—
from history books,  reality television shows and A.M. radios—
that, today, fame is a cannonball’s shot away
and insanity is as volatile as gunpowder.
But you,
You told me that beneath a sky bombarded by the broadcasts of bad news,
my skin made you convinced that the rest of the world were skeletons.
So under the thunder and crack of artillery facts,
for a moment we dawned the ignorant crowns of amnesia and
allowed ourselves to forget, as you let
your fingertips orbit the cores of my crater-faced palms.

We’ve both
(at the same time but never together)
mourned empty shells filling themselves with liquor and beer
at mid-morning barstools.

When we talk, we don’t need words to fill the space between smiles.
You’ve perfected the art of the gently bitten bottom lip,
while all I’ve got to offer is this goofy grin—
flashing a mouth full of teeth like typewriter keys,
craving to spell out in some brand new word,  
that I’ve never used and that you’ve never heard,
how wonderful you look today.

I bet you’ve left stronger men than me kissing sparks out of wall sockets;
craving something that shocks like your electricity,
but I’m just happy that your static touch has got my hair standing on end.
And even though I’ve never known the face of God,
You’ve given me belief in rebirth.
You make me feel funny and young:
Like Saturday morning cartoons.
Like midnight skinny dipping
And *** with socks on.

The truth is, you make me want to fall in love like it’s 1945.
I’ve been shipwrecked on war torn foreign banks.
Lullabied to sleep by the ratta-tat-tat of
machine gun harmonies and
the horseshoed hoof beats of in-sync cavalries,
and your portrait warming the breast pocket
of my jacket is the only thing reminding me
that there’s real music in a place called home.
And even though I’ve never been the gentleman
that the storybooks promised
when you were young,
someday I’ll wear a three-piece suit and learn the piano for you.

After three years digging in dirt,
weaving roots and planting seeds
in the most unnoticeable lingering looks.
thing I’ve learned it’s that gardeners
make the best lovers,
and together we’ve grown a grove out of un-regrettable mistakes,
midnight stairwells and
out-of-state license plates.
There are things about myself that were nameless until you
embroidered them a set of initials on the insides of my eyelids.
Now my rapid eye dreams read about the best parts of me –
and the long nights, they don’t idle so much
when I have something to be proud of.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been writing
Dialogue for languages that I don’t speak.
Transcribing twisted writings of de-aligning dialects.
I’ve torn everything out of context,
Inspected it against the light,
Held it there until it burned from over exposure,
Then stitched its singed edges back into a niche where
It never seemed to fit quite right,
But close enough to be
Misconstrued as almost coherent.
And this confusion became the format for my daily
Step-by-step instruction manual.
          Rip.
          Look.
          Burn.
    ­      Stitch.
          Repeat.
For a while I found comfort behind
The makeshift ideas pieced together
With television taglines and childhood nursery rhymes.
I could count the number of times
That I’ve been caught
Slipping in certain names
Of certain people and places
That I swore to forget
On paper-cut fingers wrapped in band-aids
Like they’re next springs new fashion,
And it’s a dismal ratio
When compared to how often I get away with it.
I get away with ******
And it’s funny
How easy it is to hide words within words.
And I fall further in line,
          Repeat.
          Rip.
          Look.
    ­      Burn.
          Stitch.
I fall further in rank-and-file,
          Repeat.
Yesterdays.
          Rip.
A­ bloodline.
          Look.
The same.
          Burn.
The smell of smoke.
          Stitch.
Through the eye of a needle.
          Repeat.
I begin to confuse tomorrows with yesterdays.
          Rip.
My fingertips can testify that paper and razors share a bloodline.
          Look.
I can’t see a change, I’ve rearranged every alphabet and they all seem the same.
          Burn.
I think I’ve grown accustomed to the smell of smoke.
          Stitch.
I stop denying that I’m fitting my whole lifeline through the eye of a needle.

As daylight shines bright through cracked blinds
I realize that, now,
Instead of counting subliminal messages
I’ve been keeping a tally of every time I blink
So that I’m aware of each moment I miss while
Hiding behind blackened eyelids,
And I am drowning in debt.
So I pull tight the drawstring on the window shades
And let my skin soak up the sun
I notice that where the mountains meet the sky
Seems so much brighter than it’s described in the words
That are now scattered across my floor.
But like exes,
Old habits have a tendency
To call you beckoning back
When you finally find breath again.
I found breath again,
But just as quickly staggered in reverse to
The familiar feeling of paper
And my hands do what they’ve been trained to.
          Repeat.
          Rip.
          Look.
      ­    Burn.
          Stitch.
But my eyes are fixed on the horizon,
They start setting with the sun.

          Repeat.
I begin…
          Rip.
My fingertips…
          Look.
I can’t…
          Burn.
I think…
          Stitch.
I stop.

This must be what they mean by growing up.
Skin worn with boyish charm,
but I feel old in my bones.
The holes in my marrow house stagnant air;
echoes of unheard words
and half-forgotten dreams
keyhole-peek through hairline fractures.

There must be something in the wind,
the way the dust is kicked up from
the soles of our shoes
to dance with the last night’s
idle bedtime prayers,
and find intimacy with dew
that will never fall out of love with grass.

We said,
Black out the lights so that I can
catch my breath again…
and we looked for shade under rootless trees
and couldn’t quite decide whether the night sky
was everything our grandfathers made believe
in stories that smelled like cigar smoke
and typewriter ink,
or if it was nothing more than
card stock and pinholes.

And as the footsteps that find comfort in concrete
step over our flickering, kerosene city lights,
We hummed hymns into the
crevices of our collarbones
and serenaded the sky with
our songs of sin.
They interpreted the tip-toeing crescendos
for the hearsay of rats
and the cricket gospel of violin legs.

But what they never understood is that
I came clean with careful lungs.
Listen,
the air was a draft drawn through
an almost silent note of a harmonica,
*This Town is more fragile than a whisper.

I found a hand written letter
From the devil, left under my
Crushed feather filled pillowcase
The morning after I sacrificed
My silhouette to sleep
Underneath those
Discarded angel wings.
It read:
            The gates of Hell have finally frozen over,
             So don’t sweat it so much up there.
             You’re making me anxious.
And that got me thinking
Maybe I do take this game
Way too seriously,
Because, just like me,
The devil doesn’t write in cursive.

Your sheep skin drapes
Far too loosely, boy.
You're much too starved
to be taken seriously.

You've spent too much time
Grinding your teeth against the wind,
And too little whittling
Courtship with your claws.

They're all going to laugh at you, boy.
Your wool-woven fool's crown
Tells you it's true.
They're all going to laugh at you.

Last night,
Just after the horizon snuffed out the sun,
I raised a fort in my room
With sheets stripped from the bed,
Strewn across standing lamps
And tucked behind an old armoire;
One that’s been rubbed raw
By more hands than a rosary
And could tell you any kind of story
If you just listen closely.
And it’s within this Stronghold,
Guarded by Phalanx of G.I. Joes and
Little, plastic, green army men,
Past the “No Girls Allowed Sign”,
That I worked away on my own personal
Manhattan Project.

I Built a Box
With windows, sealed,
A pad-lock on an old worn door
And nothing more than a hole in the floor.
Then I hung it with decrepit strings and lucid wings
Thrown together using what
little shards of innocence I could find
Sporadically strewn around the room.
I climbed to hang my box from heaven,
Perhaps, perch it on a silver cloud,
The ones you hear so much about,
And use the gold that laced the place to build a gate,
A gilded gate to block out all hate from my estate.

But Heaven seemed to be afraid and must have fled
Because all I found were stars…
Stars that, disappointingly, didn't seem to shine as bright as they did when I was a kid…
Stars with rotted holes.
"Stars, shouldn't have rotted holes" I was told long ago
By a man who molded my thoughts back when colors still seemed vivid.
But ironically, I used them to hang what remains of my childhood in a juvenile fashion,
Glancing back and forth searching for a set suspicious eyes
And developing pre-conceived alibis just in case to my surprise someone
Happened to catch me in my moment of immaturity.

I waited in my Box, my serenity in the sky,
My shelter from the outside lies that can hypnotize
Until a mind's wiped blank, a "clean slate"
In which they carve their "rights",
And their "rules",
And their "Laws" using tools constructed by Machines

That know nothing more than edacity and greed,
That know nothing more than the taste of oil,
And exactly how cold steel can feel when
Grid-locked between two gears and a wheel.
So we kneel to this submissive hold
Of chain-linked fingers
That keep us encased when
We're told that Logic and Probability is all we need to know
To make decisions and grow
Now we can grow in any direction
That our branches are clipped,
Like a bonsai tree.
So believe me, I can grow
but grow to what exactly,
A mechanical humanity?
Now see, that just wont work for me
Because, sometimes, I like to dream
That I’m superman.

So I turned an x-ray eye to a box the sky
My star-riding, gravity defying
Fortress of Solitude,
And it’s here that I'm safe,
Because the only hole to a corrupt world is the one I drilled right through the floor.
The one I peer through at the placid crescent right below me,
In hopes to find a feline running hand-in-hand with a spoon
Or to catch the cow that leaps over the moon,
Or maybe even see the Lunar Man, himself, crack a smile
Anything to dismiss my denial of Fairy Tales
And fling me back to that youthful state of mind
In which my mind would state that anything is possible.
Because the world we live in now tells us that Chapter Book Heroes are Obsolete,
That we should just yield to defeat
And that it takes a hell of a lot less than Kryptonite to meet our demise.
We just know that Nine-to-Five is the time it takes a glaze fade over the passion that lies within our eyes.

If I could just find anything to justify that true love isn't merely a cliché,
That innocence and limitless capabilities of the mind
Doesn't whither away with age,
And that "Happily Ever After"
Is so much more than fading ink on a worn out, final page.

This is not a love poem.
Because
I know nothing about the entrancement of Romance
It’s like watching a mime mimic antics
It makes me panic.
No, I write epics and tragedies.
About political catastrophes.
About the rhythmic anatomy of poetry.
Not about “How do I love thee…”
But let me count the ways that these days
Have grown strange;
The passage of time has seemed to stop.
This black clock’s bold Tock and
Tick have been erased and
I’m still sick with the aftertaste
From the venom of your kiss
Your toxic lips made me itch that
Poisoned twitch One-thousand times
Before my bloodshot eyes
Went blind to your beauty.
“A most unfortunate disability”
Professionals told me
But I just sighed and smiled insignificantly
“No, no, you see this,
Ironically, is immunity.”
Imperviousness to seduction

But this is not a love poem.
It’s a professional epiphany
An observation

All research and annotations state things like
Blind Fortunes and
Heart complications are just
Minor alterations that
Spark fascinations in
Lab coats and stethoscopes.
Isotopes of foreign hopes
Are my safety ropes to cope with my
Distance away from you another day
And there I go again.
Every ******* word I say will start out right
But then convey to betray me with the
Cliché decay
Of a fluttering heart.
And on this day when time has stopped
I’ll re-lock my jaw that dropped
And, with Blind Eyes, this mental case
Will try to trace the chalk outlines
Of  lucid days
With the white spine
Of the brain stem

But this
Is not
A love poem.
Because
I refuse to be Entranced by Romance.
I’m the kind of guy who would Panic in
That Frantic state of mind
And draw away from Sunlight
To find warmth Moonshine
To bite the bullet and lace up these shoes
Because eleven shots and twelve steps
Is the closest I get to refuge.
See, I dream in the Black and White
Of a first version television box set
About Bloodied tragedies
And political catastrophes
Set to a beat based on
The rhythmic anatomy of poetry
Rarely about “How do I love thee…”
Or the bedpost marks of
Fading, Chalk-Laced Memories.

Let the Moon spotlight
On this masquerade,
Some psalm they say
I think I’ll pray.
As my toes weave beneath
Crushed leaves and starlight imagery,
I think I’ll pray.

We hummed along to every song
We ever knew.
Licking the lyrics out on
Scattered starlit scratchpads
With the tips of our tongues.
Ink-dipped ego trips about love
Etched out top-chart carbon copies.
Our cursive grew sloppy,
But that hardly seemed to matter.
From tattered verses about fictional characters
To Hymns about God
To an aucapella exploring the difference.
Every song seemed to be sung specifically for us
And, Oh, how we both knew it
As our eyes jumped the stars and
Traced the constellations
Searching for inspiration in
The echoes of deteriorated light
From thousands of years before.

You spoke in absolutes.
To which I’d reply vaguely
And we dug up the roots of a tree
That we never let bloom;
Clawing hard and deep at the
Untasted foundation below our feet,
Despite the build-up of dirt
Under our fingernails.
But between the grass-stained knees and
The hail of stars that poured on our backs
We couldn’t find time to breathe,
So accordingly we ****** the sky
And lit up another last kiss
Which we’d miss again in
A matter of minutes
And make a habit of the instance
Exploring a distance supported by
Limp wrists that gave way to
Two-ton daydreams, which always seemed
Just out of reach
But that doesn’t mean I didn’t try like Hell,
With locked-joint elbows and fingers widespread.

And while I read the symphony that the
Wind silently recorded on the back of my hand
I remembered how,
Once,
I whispered a song in your ear
And my breath gave you chills
When I got to your favorite part.

Will the Sun ignite
On this matinee?
It’s safe, they say,
Don’t be afraid.
But their water’s gray,
And it tastes like silent yesterdays.
‘Don’t be afraid.’*

You closed those eyes and smiled that smile
That I write poems about.
But I shouldn’t be allowed to draw out such
Brilliant arched lips
So I ****** it back in mid sentence
Before it could drip
Through the cracks in my teeth.
I’ve chipped so much away beneath this surface
Which our toes cling so tightly to
That my bones have grown black and blue
But I’ll continue
Because this tune makes it worth it
Each time my pick-axe sparks stars when it
Collides with stone.

And amidst the skin and bone framework
Of a canopy sky, it seems to me that
You spoke about the history;
About the end of things, so many times that
For a point,
All you’d breathe is eulogies.
So momentarily
All our songs forgot
That the finest things in life
Truly are free.
That the buzzing of bees
Can be music too.
A tune so true
That even trees will dance,
Their leaves will cast sunrays
In rhythmic waves
Putting ripples in timelines
And making tomorrow’s yesterday
Something worth remembering.

My brother,
unravel your fist.
Part your lips and taste
bittersweet oxygen;
Breathe in sin
and lust and sore eyes
and Lover’s skin
and the crushed aspirin on
Her bedside
one-night
stand.
Taste the sharp-edged thrill of
Medicine,
let it make your head spin
like when children wove
Wind and Sky with cobalt
threads of moonlight
and hummingbird hands.
I can see it in your eyes,
they pray like the curling fingertips
of tidal waves, and I am
here to tell you,
You
are not alone.

I’ve seen men with canyons
cut across their face;
deep and sad and dirtied
with their grandfather’s gunpowder.

I’ve seen men who’ve blacked-out
their irises with full-feathered crows
whose toes curl from the corners
to catch drops of their
Oceans
and hide them where ‘real men’
stow theirs:
In the bottom of a bottle,
“Boy” they say,
“drink every **** drop
‘till that pain goes away.”
These are the same men who
read ghost hieroglyphics
and practice bed-sheet rhetoric
that lingers longer than
certain cases of Cancer.

My brother,
you’ve lived too many starless nights
in this era of broken jaws
and bitten lips.
I am a twenty-year-old,
sleep-deprived daylight dreamer,
naïve enough to still
believe in true love, but
even I’ve really lived life
at least once,
or twice.
I’ve learned that the purest gold,
pink and orange burn
in Mountain West sunsets.
I’ve learned that it takes a long time
to find your way home
when all you keep
wrapped beneath this skin is bone.
So turn to the sky.
Constellations pedal everything from
Prophesies to pipedreams
and the only thing that’s constant
is the direction
North.

Today, I plan on catching hummingbirds.
I kissed open the face
of a dusty, old pocket watch
which I adopted from
a bent-spined,
curbside Saint
on the corner of First and Main
in exchange of the cure
for cracked vertebrae
and an honest conversation.
I clogged its clicking gears
with precious stones
to induce a temporary comatose,
so we’ve got until the
backwards time it takes
to grind diamonds into coal dust
to string those beating wings,
feathers and fluttering heartbeats
to the weathered backside
of our palms.
Brother, I want you to come with me.
Bring your chipped,
white porcelain bathtub
We’ll drag it to the coast.
Forget about that diamond powder,
there’s plenty laced in the sea.
We’ll spell out our goodbyes
in the lines our feet leave in the sand;
messages that will only be
read by free hands,
who find the courage to cross them.
By the tail-end of dusk,
We’ll tear clouds from this overhead
Mosaic,
and moonbeam-stitch them
to head winds and comet tails.
Together
we’ll sail this makeshift porcelain vessel
to the Eighth Sea.

I’ve heard,
from folklore and
childhood bedtime stories,
that long ago
Wise men with bare toes,
grass-stained knees
and arthritic elbows
mapped out the sky
on the ocean floor there.
It’s said,
they whispered the secret
to the man in the moon
before he was silenced
by mathematics and meteorites.
a secret that
only the guy with a
three-point belt overheard,
so scour the sharp bedrock with me
because I can see the need
to feel the crunch of autumn
alpine leaves
beneath your feet.
Read the contour lines of the sky
magnified by ripples and
a pulsing tide that sings hymns
about desert winds and cactus thorns.
take a deep breath
once more
before we begin;
fill your lungs with all the beauties
of Human Pollution.
Let your dizzy vision
spin with the pale-blue winds,
which will blow us to
a decrepit island,
that once was a burning star.

Because I need you to navigate.

I’ve been there once before,
but I can’t remember the way.
All I recall was
hitch-hiking with the ghost greens
of Aurora’s borealis,
and an ancient Man
with marked knees,
calloused toes
and cracking elbows
who, with frail voice, told me:
“From the curve of the moon
sewn to the tune of hummingbird wings,
you’ll find what you’re looking for.
But when you’ve discovered it, come back to this
canyoned skin and brittle bone.
Because Orion and I are trying to find
a reason to follow the North Star back
Home."

Katherine writes songs about wheat fields and her father’s blisters
From the four-by-six closet beneath the staircase.
Aaron doesn’t write anymore.

Katherine draws music notes to record
The tune of footsteps and creaking oak,
While Aaron feels the rough grain of maple window frames
And avoids his reflection in the double-paned glass.

Katherine holds tight to her pen
Like a man who’s lived a good life holds on to his final breath.
Aaron, he never found it that hard to exhale.

Katherine knows love like she knows the Sun,
While Aaron, who once flew wax-winged,
Stopped studying mythology
And found trust in extinguished light bulbs.

Katherine draws stick figures in the collected dust
Of cracked-cloth book covers
And embraces every particle that kisses her fingerprint.
Aaron wears black leather gloves
Like a desensitizing second-skin.
But they both close their eyes
When the wind brushes their cheeks.

When Katherine cries it’s wet and sloppy
And when it’s over she usually giggles
At the feeling of being human.
Aaron’s eyes are desert moons;
If he believed in a god he’d pray for rainstorms,
But instead he picks tumble weeds from his teeth
With the ribcage he found when the vultures were through.

Katherine webs outlines with plot twists and foreshadows
While Aaron knows some stories
Are made up as they’re written.

Katherine collects crushed asphalt from both sides of divided highways
And mixes it with ****** wax to varnish her innocence.
Aaron drives the back-roads and keeps one eye on the rearview mirror.
He finds solace in sharp turns.

Tonight, Katherine curls her toes as she writes a song about
loving up until your very last breath
And caresses her lips.
Aaron chews on his and slides open the window.
They both recall the taste of someone else’s skin from the salt in the air.
Katherine’s candle flickers and pops when she moves
Her hand through the light to cast stories on the wall.
Aaron crawls down the shadowed side of hallways
And feels the grey grow in his hair as he starts up the staircase.

Step by step by step by
each breath is
step by step
loved a little bit less
An all but silent cacophony of creaking oak.

Katherine etches a treble clef but her pupils dilate
When she senses the unfamiliar feeling of a second heartbeat.
With stitched silk stockings
she tip-toes up the same song.
Aaron hears music for the first time in so long
And turns to see where goose bumps come from.

Katherine crescendos at the top of the stairs and
Stares into two full, bright desert moons.
Aaron finds it hard to let go of the breath it takes to say,
“Don’t be afraid.”
Katherine tumbles like fingers down piano keys,
But for a split-second in the moment their eyes met
They both forgot the weight of loneliness.

Mine is a generation of taboo.
We are tribal tattoos and cheap motel room honeymoons.
We are slander,
and slang,
and brittle teeth.
We are born-agains and suicides.
We are podium preachers and cracked-pavement prayers.
We are melted plastic and oxidized metal-
sometimes we gleam with the Liberty Green of corroded copper,
sometimes we crumble with rust and stain calloused hands.
We are the last stand of Art.
We are the manifestations of forbidden bloodlines
and insanity.
We are just as much our mothers
as we are our fathers,
and we are everything that they are not.

We are stigmata.
We are red paint on white canvas.
We are fast food coffee.

We were born to the sweet smell of formaldehyde
in rooms dressed in florescent white
that share plumbing with the morgues
beneath the linoleum floors.
We are the mix of ***** and innocence that lingers
in the kiss of a dimly lit basement.
We show and we tell but always only for the right price,
the wrong reasons,
or the promise of an exchange equaling to the feeling that
this is a mistake.
We are rosary beads counted between gnarled knuckles
and dragged across smooth palms that long
to sweep tear salt from flushed cheeks.

We are Heaven's lonely singles.

We are skin stretched out too thin over skeletons.
We are the complexities that machines can't calculate
much less imitate.
We are the futile cries that once tried to keep towers from falling
when the sky came crashing down.
We are the pardoned and the withered.
We are the hardened faces of those that have
worked too long
and been loved too little.
We have been told that the safest place for your soul
is in the hole of your chest,
but only if it's reinforced by
four inches of concrete and steel,
and strapped tight with a Kevlar vest,
because they said people,
at best,
are manslaughter.

But we have never been great listeners either;
when we were growing up
we pressed our hands to hot stoves
even though our mothers said not to,
because we couldn't just be told what it was to burn
we had to feel it for ourselves.
So every now and then we will crack open
our rib cages in the hopes that someone will come,
light a fire,
and decide to stay.

We hopelessly spray paint things like wings
On deserted brick buildings
So that, at the very lest, we can feed the
Hollow-eyed passerby the belief
That these streets still have guardians,
Even when we, ourselves,
Abandoned such ideologies in
backroad dumpsters
along with our deities’ infidelities.
  
We are the period at the end of the sentence.
(Or maybe we are the ellipses...)
We have redefined the American family
and proven that even Christianity knows how to hate.
We were raised by sixty-percent divorce rates,
yet we still believe that we are soul mates.
We are the jokers of the deck:
either smiling fools or wild cards.
We are cocked heads with smoke billowing from throats
coated with blisters and cough syrup.
We are back alley scavengers crawling on all fours.
We are the era of the Auto-Tuned voice,
proof that with a pretty enough face anyone can sing.
We are foggy mirrors with smiles drawn on them
by print-less fingertips.
We slip up the thighs of our lovers
and swirl down the drains of sinks with chipped paint.

We are the hearts in your hands-
Crush us into powder and brush us across your face like Indian war paint,
Give us up to the sky so that we can be revived by lightning,
Dance to the rhythm that we beat,
Squeeze us and watch as we seep through the cracks of your fist,
Conceal us in your pocket and only ever speak to us in a whisper,
Or,
with all your natural voice,
sing to us
songs about thunderstorms
to wet the dusty desert dirt around our rooted toes
in the hopes that we will blossom in the most vivid colors.

Just do something with us.

Don't sacrifice us to the tops of lost bookshelves
to collect dust
or rust in the rain with everything you once loved
but grew too old for.

Call me by another name.
Call me waspish,
or boyish,
or fountain-mouthed.
Prate about the crooked,
curved curls of my red-ribbon tongue.
Whisper myths down spidered-ice hallways
about the melted wax love games
fixed between dust-dressed candlesticks,
and the unfaithful rumors
of wine-stained table cloths.

Call me by another name.
Call me button-eyed,
and hollow,
and brittle-garden crucified;
Bind my face with burlap
and replace my spine with
a wood-splintering post;
dry my veins gold
so that my flannel fetters in
the tornado-dry breath
of fraying hay.
I'll fight off autumn winds and
the gossip of crows.

Don't fuse my footsteps to the echos
of Lightning Bearers and Stilt-legged Shadows;
Fasten my shoelaces to the
anchor dreams of drowning cannonballs
where I will only spell stories
with the sharp skin of coral reefs.
Call me by another name.
Call me typewriter-toothed,
or backwash,
or eight-legged.
Just prescribe me a name
that I can live up to.