The wood-burning fire
resembles a cusp of cloud
set ablaze by faith.

To place name on faith
is blaspheme—aside from the
faith one names oneself.

The irony of
a smoking awareness stand
yielding free cupcakes.

When I'm forgotten,
God will scatter my ashes
in the Land of None.

‘I set the ******
on fire with a gallon of
petrol. Overkill?’

There is blood on the
belly of all living things.
Pity it's so smudged.

'Binge and purge,' she says,
'It's a self-imposed poison:
hurts no one but me.'

What I would do to
feel the warmth of her skin, the
tremble of her touch.

We fixed the middle.
Now Gaza's desert is glass,
Israel byegone.

These Men are all in
boxes, taped air-holes and all
still, in time: breathing.

His words kept pouring
in the rain like the rain and
it stung like new skin.

In which life did your
body float the Ganges on
soft cuts of gum tree?

Boys & books & long
lines of bone-dry rosebush &
all of it burning.

Steadfast reminding
me all good plays are written
one line at a time.

Trees bent in, sobbing,
weeping as mists have weeped like
summer rains gone sour.

Chicken-scratch staining
this prescription glass grasping
on getting life back.

PSA: please set
aside time today to hug
a gay narcissist.

Wait a day and pray
your god forgets sins confessed
under influence.

Is narcissism
an excuse for worshipping
my own handwriting?

So ******* heavy-
handed that I cannot put
anger into words.

Sat in silent place
hop-pulse-pounding my feet in
ecstatic motion.

Hot breath, twist and bend,
bite down soft, release, linger,
teeth scraping new skin.

In those brief places
of prompt and pause, is it truth
if I am smiling?

Base instinct betrays
graymatter, brain left grazing,
gutted by daybreak.

Crimson red beset
on body and brainmatter,
be it blood or ***.

It has been one year
since my last haiku; one more
year spent trapped in skin.

Eyes pickled and raw,
we have wasted undo hours
stealing sleep like thieves.

In supposition
she'd laid her hand in mine and
her palm felt Fate retch

In another life
we'd have been pinky-sworn to
some ******* promise

—and in that moment
I was immovably still;
stone, impassable—

I do not intend my poetry to be
inaccessible and yet I refuse to shower
this recycled verse in pretty words
to distract from disinterest in my own life
and the things I surround.

Few things spoken
the way her hair played bingo with night air
& she grabbed my arm twice
I remember
                              exactly

1st at the bus stop (the way back)
a wind, chilly, rolled in/caught
her spin in a second—she squeezed
& giggled & goggle-eyed looks swept
the year away

2nd was the doorstep & I am not
sure this was not by accident but
her eyes fish-hooked me & reeled in
I, a hapless liquid-mouth fin-thing
lapping up *******
                               salt water
& where I'm left was/is NOW

she stirred with a spin in that dress
                               w/ the flowers
the ground/foliage/birds &
all their noises & all her
tiny exhalations suspended beneath
tiny worn wings, a current

all moving
up

I am walking for escape
Silence, darkness

It is sudden. Sound of
two-by-fours smacking grain
lit up in the distance,
                       the street

Maternal scream mistaken for
coyote howl, sticky-tongued
lamentation filling the space,
                       lockbox

Grey matter spilling
the street for a
beggar's mouthful

I could make known my notice
Or leave his peace at asphalt
rocking skull-bone;

marrow cut loose: free

Comes to pass my picture of the Middle East
(one minute and twenty one seconds of television news,
          much less than I had thought)
is an inaccurate representation of people
and the individuality of their experience.

How does one measure the merit of
I am offended?

If all I know are snapshots, misdirecting
the issue, changing path to digest murdered cartoonists
killed with Allah in mind
          (another misdirection)
and I am not outraged.

Sadness manifests as thick fog
blocking artificial light, splitting the rays,
opening up and flexing, the truth as is,
the sole truth we must attain;
          we are slow, dying creatures.
Inborn freedoms dissolve.

Did Salman Rushdie beg forgiveness for
images of his head book-ending a spear,
or did he die a little in secret?

Suppose I am a rouser marching the streets of
New York City, a gold pendant of two
          falling towers adorning
my chest-cave, Je Suis etched into my forehead
(black felt-tip).

Do you defend me?
Relish in your torment of words?

Will you bury the fire in your belly
for sake of freedom?

There lies a picture on the mantle
of my grandfather, my step-father's
father, clad in U.S. Navy fatigues
and grinning slightly, almost a
smirk. The year is 1960-something
as he enlists for Vietnam and is
shipped overseas on the USS
Corral Sea to load sidewinders
into fighter planes that ignite and
****. It happens so fast.

It happened so fast. Two months
of time reduced to blinks and
minute-long visits. This house could
be cold as Mt. Meru's peak and I
would hardly notice. The brain has
ways of placing things on autopilot.

His life has come to pass and I am
left to wonder. I am not sure I ever
truly knew the man. I heard stories,
his helicopter shot down in Vietnam,
his E&E; north of the ** Chi Minh and
how he owned a gun shop on Main
St. in the town I came to call home
before it was my home. I cannot hear
his whispering, small wind of existence
sidewinding away from me and my
youthfulness. In small time I've come
to find life is meaningful if you take time
to make it so.

The day of his funeral is beautiful,
sunny and mild and full of breeze.
The gas tank of my mother's car is
close to empty and I am worried of
worldly things, will we make it and
when can we fill up again. 21 guns
gives my heart a needed beating.

5 layers of wool
can keep your heat
from fleeing for a
few moments

The branches are
heavy as your feet
with snow

The world is at
your back and
before you and
the white world
unseen will pass
as time takes her

The white world
is at your frigid feet
and steps must be
taken

The cold
it burns

You're burned and
you keep burning

You said he was skinny and sagging
and he wore a sad face for show.
I feel as though I am the man
in your nightmare.
I can't tell you to wake up.

If only your eyes would lock mine.
If only I could stop time, wind clocks
back and back until years passed like seconds,
became nothing more than leaves
drifting in an autumn wind.

What dreams we'd share.
What things we'd see and touch and live.
What fireworks would light the sky.

Searching for answers as to
why I'm so alone is like locating
the holy grail in sand-ravaged
desert, like rationalizing human
action, like taking delicacy
with a grain of salt.

I have turned depression into self-
fulfilling prophecy, so many days wasted
on loathe and pestilence, resisting change,
shutting out what I perceived
to be white noise.

I am drunk during this writing,
This is not medicine, let it be known.
Nor emulation, for simple fact that
I am whole, a whole thing,
silently splitting its ends.

the softless slip of your
fingernail across the
bloodside of my wrist
sends shivers up my
arm straight to the
shoulder and neck
          I imagine

there is so little reward
in being sad at our
distance I'd rather
kiss the gates that keep
us apart and wish softly
sweetly that they open
          I wish

They say ****** is an unforgivable sin.
I beg to differ.

Why?
Because it's fun to differ. And also, I could fathom myself committing ******.

I'd do it with a knife. It shimmers—it's clean; cutting flesh with primal ease.
It's painful.
It emulates so many feelings we have—brings them up to the surface.
You can see it in the victim's face,
right as the blade slides in.

They say ****** is an unforgivable sin.
It's a sin, no doubt.
—I ask now for forgiveness, for what I may soon do.

A sick reasoning of mine is this:
"In some defeated way,
I feel as though you should be thanking me."

And some day
I will sit on my back porch
in infinite, consecutive jest,
staring at the night sky.

And, best of all,
I won't trouble myself wondering
why I have the itching inclination
to look up.

And, even more so,
I watch, contented,
a celestial understanding:
The stars. They speak.

So many lists
So little **** to
add
               to an expression
               of the expression
of others

I spent a decade
letting others
express my feelings
for me
               and not for
               lack of flaking

I've almost 25-
years strapped to my
belt
              and the greater
              of those years
licking evil

if I'd the ***** to
spit my faults as
simply a product of
nothing then
              they were me
              always me
in tongue-sposed summation

Hearts sparse in this carpark,
the wind feeling rowdy, biting like a
small rabid animal with no collar
wandering the city alone at night.

The car is making me claustrophobic,
I've spent far too much time with the heat,
too many minutes burning cigarettes and
my hands near-numb from the caffeine.

Poems are less like action movies and
more like action paintings exploding
in suspended motion. I'm sure we all
remember when art felt new. I can't
recall when it didn't feel so lived-in.

(And of course this poem is merely
a memory of feelings, which is not much
of anything to me or you because the past
is dry and done and does not intrude.)

Lincoln, Nebraska is a livelier city
than one expects. It is like going to an
art exhibit expecting Rothko and getting
Basquiat, bombast and immediacy.

My favorite poet is Craig Morgan Teicher
because he and I may ramble but he is not
afraid to sacrifice accessibility for
feeling. He could find the beauty in the
image of Lincoln, Nebraska in January.

I will soon need to devise another way
to keep myself entertained so let us
say this CD spins one more time and
maybe I can go for a walk, clear my head.

I do not intend this to be wrought with
sentiment, but there are times I am not
as cold as this city. There are times
the mind must scream
so the heart stays safe.

Eyes can't help but follow
long hair in long coats
wind shaking the strands like
snowflakes, their own little patterns.

The cinemaplex is open,
negative seventeen degrees Fahrenheit and
someone is still making money.

Wrapping around a blocked-off
manhole I turn the corner too quickly,
bump into a homeless man and his chair.
He asks if I've any change.
I say No, my pockets are empty.

Inner monologue firing, always,
I cop the corner and take a moment to my
physical self, ask it questions, How are you?
You've been a slight bit distant during this time.
Do you miss home?

I'm not sure I've found a home to miss.

In Lincoln
two times I was drunk
one only slightly.

I was lonelier than I'd
ever been. I hope I never feel
that way again.

Three times I felt alone.
More times I was sick to my stomach.
I do not regret a single second.

Before I went my way
I was unsure if my car tire popping
constituted omen or bad luck.
That is the frame of mind I was in
leaving Lincoln.

Now I realize most of this is temporary
distraction, soon Nebraska passes and
Missouri remains, as it always has.
One year later I will change my college major,
theatre to sociology.

Lincoln taught me lessons, not
all of them important. I found true solace
in watching others, why they walk like that,
what their hair says about their politics,
microbes erupting into civilization.

Leaving Lincoln behind was so remarkably
necessary in its devices. I will always
make time for my thoughts, my seasons,
thanks to the dull, blinding cold of

Lincoln, Nebraska.

I received my weekly phone call from Lucifer.
He sounded ill, like his throat was full of
sandpaper. I told him he should probably
cut down on the talking and let himself
heal. He let me know how the kids are
doing, and I told him about the storm
that was passing through tonight and
how hopefully nothing would be damaged,
but he told me to accept this as fact.
There are some things one simply cannot
change, he says. Storms and violence.
For example.

I felt the presence of so many souls in this empty room.

I felt something brush against my neck. The brush was cold.

It smelled of rotted meat and toiled field-ground, sticky.

I broke the ice cold quiet with a question. Who are you.

Nothing. A creak, maybe, a disembodied patter of dust, set flight.

—

Someone hung from the rafters in the attic, I'd been told.

Only that wasn't true. They found him in the living room.

Apparently his eyes had popped out of his skull and lay on the carpet.

He'd been there for a while, air soaking in his last exhalations.

I was altogether surprised the ceiling fan had held the whole time.

—

I could touch it, slight sulphur-burn on nosehair and lung.

My arms bumped up, a flat-tire-road-like indicator of augury.

His voice was soft and weak, and he spoke only to me.

"My shoe's untied. Do you mind?" Hair once of my neck ran away.

Strike, redress—I heard his coughed cries from my dented boot-heels.

I wanted to die

This house This place I can't

Tried to drown it smother suffocate deprive ******* life-force

I felt feel I belong to some Otherplace

I still feel; weeknight dim-dark

Streetlamps cities and my eyes swole shut a silly haze

No sugar or milk please thank you and could you

The owls sound off—or owl they all sound the same don't they

One too many passersby

Screams far away terrible

Wait for prescribed calm to take hold

Crows are not like owls are not like vultures

No thing is like any other thing

This I've come to sense

I can't shake this pain from my belly