Mind is an island.
Setting sail on conceptual ships with charts of stars and atlases
only limited by imagination.
We look to the sea and our reflection shows in calm or turbulent waters.
Waves of wonder crest and pause
in the moment when the sea sees it’s reflection in us.
Peering out at the horizon
pondering ways to reach the other islands.
Feelings bloom into language used as planks in our ships.
Taking magic and turning it into science.
Growing into a symetrist seeking balance.
Trying to stay afloat in a jolly boat
to breach interpersonal moats.
But a parched heart wants to get wet.
Eyes turn from where the sun sets
and into the self.
Unflinching, I abandon ship.
Care for a swim?

(Written to be spoken to babe-y)

When it comes to putting what you are
into words
do you trust yourself?

I understand there are many ways for another to mistake their symbols
for your sound

I've been wrong about more things than I care to count

and I still try to count on all the things up in the air that I haven't nailed down

but my love is so unreal it's getting kind of hard to figure all this unreality out.

Harder than stilling shaky hands from all my mental pacin around

and impossible as that one poem I read to you aloud.
You know the one
 about how heaven and hell
are also just trying to figure each other out.

I can imagine the view
 from up there and believe me
I know my sleeves shouldn't be so ******* filthy

because from this distance and from what I wear, some may confuse 
my heart for the muck

all the love I've tasted with a pinched nose trying to stem disgust

I could never wash any of it away 
but



I should remember

I do remember and recall much

that has made me into someone I love.

Born of dirt and trying to be enough.

Just two in the running tally, 
of my error.

There is no volume control for my daydreams

and there are no knobs for this kind of radio

so when living poetry around the clock

you either you dont like the song 

or your driving foot gets a little heavy and the windows come down.

Faster, faster coming to me faster 
across lines that blur into the trees

that blur into the blues. 

My favorite song,
a kindred color that without

I wouldn't be able to see you

Dancing on the edge of my vision 
blowing bubbles in a see through room

I've made out of the words beauty and grace

glued together with tiny memories of your face.



I remember.



One eye staring from over a pillow full of a moment we'd rather stay awake for.

A tangle of your hair bolting across your cheek I liken to drinking black coffee  

and those electric lips owning the words that almost drown

in the wake of your thunder

but I'm listening

and oh god I hear you. 

Sounding down my spine with lighting striking from your mouth into mine.

Under a storm of blankets and mixed limbs that become the eye

A perfect stillness

a weightlessness

where there's not enough gravity to go around 
for all my weatherfall still there

rain snow and shine stuck hanging mid-air 

you are a timeless weather woman

with no need for percentages

because you give me

what I've always known to be real

that the other forecasts 
predicted only to exist in a halo

eternities chance approaching zero

the circle that's but a fraction of an instance colored in you totally

smothering me slowly in a symphony sparing no noise

impossible to be wrong about

the correct answer

nobody ever told me to jot down

and baby I've been tested

I graduated from broken records

and the bad side of town

from black sheep flocking to 
darkness
with clothes shaven from the light

Top of my class with a degree in acceptance

at a university where we take left and use it to make right.

My friend, these are some heavy credentials 

so I hope you understand the weight 

behind my certainty in your footfall.

I'm some authority on mistakes and heartbreak

so treat me like a scholar 

or a weatherman with forecasts known to account for everything and the decimal.

A dotted i

Hear me place the you in me down to a point

the one I'm making

with all I've ever been wrong about

beckoning us

but never doubt.

You will forget everything you know
the lean legged woman, gone
as soon as a cup of coffee
or an ****** thought
hot becoming cold
like the body keeping you here
The monster made whole
by a mirror
Even this gets forgotten
despite how often we are reminded, then
shrink from every moment
to grow into what comes next
I do not want to be certain
however sure I am
of a bare bodied thought
I wrestle with words
my language becoming limbs
that reach for tactile friction
on fingertips to remember that
even now, we are dying.

Fine fellows ******
with rare and bitter darkness.
We've seen a bit of life
just a bit
tiny divvy of self import.
There is a trail buried in this field
left in the wake of transit
we walk like two wheels upwards
inwards
towards something whole.
Like an engine run on sweat
and trust.
My man,
this is not done.

Summer beats
                                                   down on me
                                                                                         owning the sweat

                                                                                                                                       on my body

                                       the kind of heat

                                                                  you equate to distant memory

                 sweating and swearing as mother

                                                                               attempted to beat the blasphemy

                                                                                                                                            out of me.
How fitting that now,

                                     I should find myself baptized in a lake by the place
                                                                                                                                          where she has wrestled                          

                                                                                                                 a mortgage into a home.

                                            Her hands grabbing at digits

                                 from her master the banker.

                 My hands reach down

sifting through debris,  

brush

and

discarded

cigarette butts

all for a stone to cast into this baptismal bath drawn by mother.

                                                          While the only memory of my father is him teaching me to skip rocks.

                        Smooth

                oval

                                            in the wrist.

                   My record is 7.

                                              A much smaller digit than the ones that concern my mother.


           I see myself in the seven.

Gliding,

                                bouncing,

                                                                 resisting

then








sinking.

So I wonder,

                              from this place
where I peer out of my

tiny

human lens;

How much of my wrists

                                           can make my heart skip.

Seen plenty of far off faces
removed from themselves,
layer after insipid layer of the "free world"
just trying to fit inside itself.
Matryoshka dolls
painted in the fashion of a Mona Lisa.

My darlin,
deep down are you smiling?
If I touched you would paint chips curl upward
like arms made of wet paint
I am peeling back with no friction.
Something certain to be there
but cannot be touched
something I feel so sure to be in want of.
If  only I knew what it was.

I am eight keys
of a singular octave,
in a stairway of pianos stretching from here
to the sun.
Much like the visible spectrum
clamoring to amount
to all there is.
So much of the world, ourselves included, fumbling in the dark,
unseen
but never untouched.

Here you will find oncoming lights
roll against waves of red traffic.
The crimson tide is like a landslide
along side a river of white,
bereft of blue
on this morning commute.
Not a single star to dot the predawn gloom that blooms
into today's paper.
Children pantomiming parents
for the rest of their lives
while the adults bicker over the right blend of color.
Kids being new to the illusion have no experience
to reel in the meaning behind ideals
that have been rewritten and only go on to
learn the bloodlust.
A wet rag
wrung
with bodies
that soak through a toy balloon
full of hot air.

(- This is originally a spoken word poem. Read aloud for maximum exposure.
-Asterisks indicate the necessity to pop your cheek with your thumb.
-Answer the two questions correctly and I will give you a hug.)

He fell asleep while traveling time
where a true name
becomes everything else.
So please give me a minute to explain myself
through the doorways
that I see champagne on a windowsill
walking across the room with blue
and fine china feet
saying again and again
drink me.
Until somehow
the words become a song
singing and swinging the bottle like a dinner bell for thirst.
A kind that we've settled to quench
with television
and somebody else's dream.
So don't pour my drink.
I'm trying to uncork it with my thumbs.

POP

It's flat
and I still have a tongue
so I will use it and I
I will dream of a time
where ******
becomes a baby.
Dr. King becomes a baby.
Until the left and the right and every dead genius in between
becomes
a baby.


Tiny feet trying not to crush the wet salad of the lawn
because it is green,
like my heart
that has learned
how to break fine china.
From experience,
let me tell you
it's a lot more tiresome than a blue dream
but he fell asleep on a boxcar crossing Germany
where mustard gas
drowns you in your own lungs
and he tries to breath between the joints in the track

the

click
...                         
click
...
    clack

as years
hurtle by.

Asking again and again,

"Who killed me?"
           &
"Who am I?",

until dinner was served without grace.
Until my head becomes stiff and bubble shaped
having been conditioned by
their
piles
&
piles
&      mounds

of
obfuscation.


So we should tell all the baby Hitlers,
that become children
that become us,
that a lie
is what you become
when abusing language to distort a reality.

And when you make a fist
you are handing worlds out at random on a silver tongue.
But I still have one
and I still have thumbs
so sorry to burst your bubble but,

POP.

Child,
I don't mean to put
barbed wire
between us.  
I know it hurts
to have something so precious as the world
taken away.
But walls hurt worse
and through them only muffled sounds are ever heard
until your world is made of mute prisoners
that have forgotten what silver
really sounds like.

Blessed be
for I also have ears
so give me second place
and I will throw the medal against your walls.
Ringing out,
the universe doesn't look like an ebony tub,
with knobs we can't ever see,
full of infinite shining marbles to everybody.
Your mind
is a library
so free will isn't a book written in just English.
And tourists,
those know nothing infants trying to travel,
belong
where
           ever they
are
                             going.

Belonging like this medal bouncing trying to sing
off your wall
and
falls

into


your world.

Where again it will ring,

we've all been runner up

and somehow
we still can become disappointments to ourselves
when another doesn't enter our library
instead of loving the stories on our shelves.


So,
let me say grace.
Let me set l o n g tables
with the gruel that's been given
served on b  r                     n.
                         o
                           k  
                                        e          
china,
spooned
with sterling silver.

At the mirrors edge I strain to see what else.
Tracing the frame, it’s there I drop out,
into a symmetrical arena.  A personal hell.
Longing for the last after each new bout.
Every contender’s aim is one that can’t be helped.
Shadow boxing polar aspects of myself.  
The only wager is penny-less.
A counterweight to doubt.
When the verdict is in,
who is it that wins out?
The bread winner of recycled debt
owed to the sentinel of the self.
The indelicately celibate
having *** with themselves.
"*******. Thank you."
"*******. Thank you."
*******. Thank you.

Ponder the milkman.
Uniform obsolescence met evolution
Occupation is what you are reduced to,
In a body
Not meant for boundaries
Some nausea from the neighbor’s perfect lawn
There is anxiety pouring from that clock
Cerebral mardi gras parade rolling the spine
Crackling bottle rockets that pepper nerve endings
Between the shouting and *******
Accompanied by beads of sweat
My love
Ain’t all in the hips, some comes
Outside of me, but through me all goes
All I could ever know
And always less I could tell you
Things aren’t the same, they never will be
That truth like a statue
Carved from ever step forward
That forgot what backwards meant
The Milkmen may be a dead breed
But I know children who have soul
Dressed all in that pearly white
Ready to deliver
Themselves
To everything.

Where does one start if not with the absolute I,
Beginning with sight,
The sun kept clockwork in check.
The kids kept their songs in their heads
The parents kept photo albums full of smiles where a split second
Becomes the cover letter for years of dread.
The page kept condensing life that is better left unsaid,
While the reader kept considering the page a part of him.

Beginning with sound,
The ocean kept grinding the ground.
The guitar kept articulating the waves that come from
A place that can be found
In the engine of muscled bone,
Arriving at what you know
Through nature's transient code,
Read between simultaneous consideration of scope
And a song that keeps you on your toes.

Beginning with touch,
The cage kept the prisoner condemned
Who was slave to the ego's violent whims.
Hunger ravages the idealism of men,
Who kept on believing in sensory over stimulation.
While rapid eye sleep kept fostering shackled sheep
Towards their only release.

Beginning with dreams,
I start to seem incomplete
Fuzzy puzzles kept flagging themselves as urgent but unapparent in meaning
And even faster in disappearing
To make room for me.
A resurgent thief
That kept insisting on stealing a mind's freedom to be.

Stick a lolipop
into the mouth of moments
your life is a child
and somewhere in there
you give a flying ****
about the moon
and no it's not cheese.
That mouth knows what dirt tastes like
but that wont stop me from pouring caramel
and cigarettes over it.
I need a fix
of candied dirt
and addiction.
I'm not afraid of the eclipse
because I'm already hooked on the dark.
So lock the door
&
draw the curtains
&
be content.

The tide wont be knocking
no matter how much you
want it to fill the room
or how big is your sweet tooth
because
hunger
is BIGGER
and eventually
anything will do.
So thank the moon we were wearing seat belts.
Otherwise we might be vegetables
eating only exhaust
like Hiroshima
force fed the sun
because
you only make war on an empty stomach
or with an insatiable hunger.

Be content

for the civilians and their children
who only know the taste of war.
Idiot flavored idiots with a hint of
dead mothers
that will bore a cavity so big
it'll put holes in the head
of kindergardens everywhere.
Who write their valentines on bombs.
Who's love murders buildings,
topples families,
plowing through bodies on city streets all to reach
nobody.

Be content

for the people
who aren't
you because when parents ******* in a box
you call a country means
you don't care
you put genocide on the menu
and there are some things that just wont do.
As I grow weary of rivaling chefs pointing fingers
in circles forever
becoming a porthole to the ****** business
becoming the unsuspecting manhole for
the human animal's existence

in crossing.

Mothers may find safe shelter in the sewers
but it reeks of prepackaged liberty
express delivery
to
every where.

Be content.

Because to start a revolution means living it
and what better way,
to ******* a reckless pace
that finishes first in hunger,
starting fist fights with other people's lives
and forgets even sooner,
than
to
be
content.

Is there a place of singular desire?
The kind of want that takes on it’s own form and creates its own world
when nothing else matters save that which you clamor for.
Does a body break when it’s borders Annex another lost and hungry nation?
At the heart of which lay a train station
Where all the tracks reach out in every direction
An odd way to reach in.
Can that one body, once two,
know all the right ways it must move
To keep harmony and rhythm in some dusty groove
Of our body’s railway blues.
Foreign to you and you and you
But we all know what to do
When our limbs compel us to move.
So heaven must be a dance that happens all in an instant
And is over even quicker when what you want
Is what’s been given.

Step away from the world
and start anew in abstraction,
moving experiences in junction
with now.
Become an island with each metallic rotation
in memetic clockwork,
grind a mirror's glass
in it's gears for your beach
and when you find yourself accosted
by the sheer magnitude of the ocean,
look for your reflection in the sand.
O tender Earth,
I love where I stand,
a place
where all things converge
on my joy.

If ever I was accusatory
it's only because I too am guilty.
I try at symmetry
only to end up inadequate.
One who cannot amount to their own ideals
cannot know a single thing.
However certain I am of decay,
I still forget faster than memory would allow me to retain
motes of dust scattered across my library
that were once skin,
places I had been,
not one returning from departure.
No postcards
save for my disintegrated cells who speak only
of transformation.
Hushed in dim light,
scattered across oceans of words whispering,
You're already dead you naive little star.

There's a monster
    
           that's made my dreams
          
                               into her haunt.  

She's spilling into days where I wonder;

                                     How does a creature like you exist?

You are

              unreal.

I mean, the way you toss your head to the side

                                                     whenever you say something contrary

                                                       ­                                                   plagues me.

Following me like some gorgeous features that wont let me go

and a smile

that fills me with holes

opening me up

in ways I'm terrified to show

but what tugs at me worse

are all the ways this ghost could be known

I knew thunder that rolled off

                          electric lips
                                                
                                                every time
                                                                ­      
                                    pink
                                            
                   ­   lighting
                                      
                                      bolts
                                               
                                               mo
                                                  
                                                   ve

Speaking unafraid                                    she's free in that way
                                                             ­       
a kind of free that                                      makes liberty ashamed

and me calmly sm                                    ile while my insides are

gawking wide open                                down the middle with                              

clucking of a single coo                        coo clock keeping time

in this game of chicken I've           made out of looking  

                                                you  
                                           in the eyes.

                  Shaky hands swerve yet hope to collide
                                    
                                                                ­      sweet demon
                                            
                                                      rattle me no more
                                        
                   ­                        come closer

                               hold me still

                   show me how

a ghost can be felt.

Watching people compile the data of their lives.
Projecting and archiving information to stimulate cultures of us
when we give ourselves space to be about what makes us us.
To lose sense of myself is to
castrate
my own vitality
and why I fall in love with the toils of another’s expression.
The catalogues of souls that stand like sentinels in the arteries of the human race.
We were here. We know this moment.
We share it with you and you know the moment in your way,
in the language of your life
and you are heard while being spoken to.
Living to be romanced in this way,
to be understood in the ways we know
with the words constructed on top
of the emotion which was constructed on top
of a moment
now a memory.
A mortal drive of creation in evolving consciousness,
immortally moving another.
Now theres no going back.
I’ve challenged narcissism to grow from nasal gazin bathroom mirrors
into seeing yourself in it all,
to sense the language;
Lust
and fleshy aspects wrestle urgently in the song of your life.
Sorrow
and the audience retreats into the cushions of their throes
or runs from that back alley full of discarded mental furniture.
Love
and their minds explode with connections blossoming into each wonderful and terrible memory that grows into a mesh of a net cast out into the ocean of their heart.
Each memory connecting in a timeline of our moments.
The lines of our lives are filled in with dead words
masking all life to ever show its face.
If only we gave those dead symbols life
in the way life gave them to us.
The language of you while being born with the stubborn disposition
of restless curiosity of our being that begs the questions
of where our lines could go
and with what we could fill ourselves with.
Possibility bursting at our   s e a m s ,
spilling over into our realities.
Aligning our minds towards considering perspectives;
perspective being one thing that our paradigm of truth does not demand more of.
So eager to settle into a home in our head,
we chase the walls and roof of one truth and forsake non-sense of what has yet to make sense
when maybe the bigger picture
and all the multitudes of its non-sensical parts are waiting to hold hands together
in that same portrait,
framed on your nightstand
where you can see how it makes sense,
so the sense can put the weary wights of the unknown to sleep,
so that you may dream with certainty.
So then, what makes more sense than non-sense?

Despite what even the most may modest say,
there is always an element of narcissism in art, the vanity of preference.
Be forewarned the parts of myself I want to show the most here are meticulously vain.
There is a whole lot of preference in my language.
In the way the carpenter is with his tools
I want to carve into you with some hardened truth.
Taking lines, forming letters, producing sounds and pictures

touching a place in people that exists
before words.
The closest thing to us being all
right here,
feet planted, on the same world.
Of course, then there is the sad reality of countries.  
Borders for what you belong to.
Tourist! Do not bother,
only the homesick may enter.

You won’t find this sort of thing on any map.
Pens aren’t so precise, our hands too clumsy
all our tools right down to the thumb incapable of enumerating glory.
What with all of it’s digits
tightly wound around it’s bigger stick
the only kind of glory that is heard of
simply because it kills.
But my kind of glory is dying to meet you
somewhere inside, under, between, around, outside,
after, during, before my language..

With that said,
Here is the mission statement;

I pledge to be right with this moment.
To cast myself out the furthest a mind can carry one in any given
instant and bring back more of the goodness that serves
instead of white noise that moves nothing
or clutter that just makes it hard to move.
As I realize we are objects being moved by all that is around us,
for instance;
thinking of the same person every time you enter a particular room.
Romance does happen to those who know how to look.
You do not look by containing anything with separation.
The walls must heave and collapse like lungs
because my body is mostly dead things that are just now
learning.

The children of liberty’s voice
has been but a mute ripple
on the drums in this march to war,
death
   and
       de
              ca
                      y.
The voice of that capricious lady’s child could provoke the evolution

of the entire ethos and consciousness of mankind.
****!
That baby can sing!
Probably can do all the above
because it never cared about
ruling the world.
It was just trying to walk.
Those impish,
little
monkeys
with hands over their senses,
to speak no
hear no
see no
evil,
were barred entry
to Club Oligarchy.
(They’d make a mess.)
No limb left
to bang
on the drum’s of
society’s rhythm.
So hush now child.
We’re fond of *******
It makes (each) one of us
feel in control.








You’ve never been in control.












In this causal verse
you’re meat in capitalism’s grinder
and we are voting on everything
(and we really mean everything ((but you don’t know it))
you live in.
We’re gonna sit real smooth
as the misers of oppurtunity and wealth,
until our outdated and stagnant values
die with us
and take with us,
                                  more likely
                                                    than you’d
                                                                   like to
                                                                                be
                                                                                      liev
                                                                                               e
                                                                                                c
i
               v
               i
  l
i
                 z
                  
    a
                                                                                                        tion.
If you stay here and close your eyes,
you can work for a minimum wage
that couldn't help much with rent let alone a dream
But if you try really hard at a game of Simon says with ole Sam
you can carry this crippling debt around for a few decades
and get yourself learn’d
and we’ll even give you some ink
scribbled on some dead tree
to wear like a badge
of your pedigree training.
It may even get you that first option.
So you can pay what is owed
to your crippling
defeat.
I mean debt.
Sorry, we’ve rolled up the ladder for the rising tide.
But “social security”
TOTALLY
has your back when you want to die,
like us.
(Really, it will be the same and we’re good for it… promise.)  
All of you
do not pass go….
Actually, stay in this square and try not to go to jail.
Oh and you owe us two hundred dollars this time round.
There are some circles to be shushed.
And Sammy means business,
really
that is what he’s all about.
When you go to ****** the free
make sure there is no way out.

The
                                                audience
         was
                   sleepy.

                                                                                    So were
                                                                                                       their mouths
                                                          throats &
                                                                         intestines
                                                                                                                                         weary from all
                                                                                                                                                         the tired
                                                                                                          digestion
                                                                                                                              white wash
                                                                                                                                            
                                                                                                                          auto-subscription

                                                                                                           that's bound to die
                                                                                    
                                                                                      like you

So lace up those boots

                                            and

                                                   live.

I'm trying to
but
I could go to jail
                                                             for fraud

                                                                                            because
                                                                                                            
                                                                           old pals
                                                                          
                                                & old sweethearts

                           made a slow deviant

from what's expected.                                                                                                                                                                                            
                    
                                                                                                                    Grown men

                                                                                                                         afraid of the rain.

When I think about how I got my first taste for words
and how human it is to know the language will fail
but dress it up and try in vain anyway,

I think it’s because all the ******* time I have spent thinking of safe and clever ways to tell people I loved them so they wouldn’t mistake my love for something less than my equal definition.

That’s because growing up in a garden of shame,
rejection was the only fruit to blossom in the
then only place that was a home.

Back when I used to think in terms of to what is what owed and how
I had accepted that nobody could ever know
what ten thousand tickets in an arcade,
while eyeing the prized Mr. coffee machine,
could mean.

It means black coffee in the black of night,
thinking I owe everything to everything,
and believing you could know what that means.

Still in motion, I struggle with shrinking sounds
of my shadow resisting the ballooning into life I find articulating so often.
What is the self?
I have been skinny dipping with this question
because I can not forget what it is to be an object,
a sense of the ever present weight of a secret word
we’ve been struggling to define.
Do I even need a diction for direction?
Could we not let our selves wash
over us like we could not falter
and if not then aren’t we already dead?

Will.

A horseshoe on fire with all the weight of emotion.
A far more intoxicating psychosis,
than being a program.

I dare the children;

play god,

there is a reason he’s known to be jealous and a man.

I will play but I’m going to bend the rules as it suits this shade at my heels

driving me further into my own lightness so that it may grow taller.

The ant and the sapling.

A sensation of of being… SNAP OUT OF IT.

Too close. You don’t want to feel this love.

You’ll become contrary to your cage

and It is that very tension that will vault me

into the sun where again I will melt back down into a wash basin

of soapy science trying to scrub reality clean.

When everything is spotless,

what will the dirt mean when there is nothing left to refer as an opposite?

The earth will become the numb halls of sadist’s with not much left of

home to live in unless we learn to fly by our own direction.

That panting belief of men;
a thirst for that which fills the glass,
beckoning the hand to grab the cup
like the itch moving the mind
to believe in
what?
Whether or not it’s enough we still fill that cup;
with some things,
others put in nothing.
Grab your cup and get drunk, get crazy,
love the world who is a capricious lady saying,
"Have one on me, fill it with everything!"
It’s a prayer without word or plea, the sound of everything ringing inaudibly.
It’s the power of song pursing lips to kiss dreams where we believe.
The canvas of our body, mind and soul
where we draw the ink,
imagine the dream,
and become reality.
The moment when the pen is the same as the beast starving for a feast only fit for men.
The same as the artist holding onto their vision.
The same as the language translating the soul within.
The same as the stars burning away the wick of entropy that ends the same as it begins
insofar as all finite things have their dreams in essence of their being
and yearn for infinity.

Cut myself on double checking
                   so I stopped.
   Did nothing I wasn't sure of
         and so I
               felt nothing unheard of.
                           Am I lazy in my knowing?
            If I saw life,
would I call her by name,
                                                        in the way
                                                                ­                    some people are
                                                             ­                                                          afraid of?
                                                 Like eye contact
      or tenderness?

Your lens is                                                                                 your language
       hurting you faster                                                        to write words
              broken                                       ­                                 beauty                          ­ 
                    slowed to a                perfect                   wonder
               ­              which could                       be called
                                                          ­  ?

                                                     Impossi­ble.
                                                      Throwi­ng
                                                         honest
                                                        ch­ildren                                                                                                    ­                                                                 ­                   
                                                           into                             
                               ­                           some
                                                      dead thing
                                                      that lingers
                                                      on through
                                                         ­ all this
                                                       and takes
                                                        the form
                                                            of a
                                                        question.

He says, “buckle up.”
I say, I AM A CAR CRASH
with silly puddy metal doors
and ****** hair and a hole
in my windshield and I am on fire.
In a bad way. You cannot tell me not to wreck myself because that’s what I do best.
I am thin ice on a popular lake.
I am an abandoned brick building and I welcome the momentum of a swinging pendulum ball.
Topple my structure,
I hold up nothing.
Knock me over, I have been empty for too long!
I am the combination of deep roots and wanderlust.
I am two colliding passenger trains in the middle of a tourist trap
that you never expected to visit this long. Long like 5 o’clock traffic amongst trainwrecks,
I am the obstacle and the road.
In my own bed and still wanting to go home
because he taught me how it is to really feel alone
like a 4am songbird
or an easter island cannibal.

When wearing moments like clothes,

which Pavlov’s ***** would suggest is a moment’s cost,

it’s hard to imagine what it means to be naked

if all you can do is remember.

In the rare occasions that I forgot,

I find myself bare bodied with a thought;

if all is fair in love and war

then all is fair and why talk?

There are some differences in the shades

between what one calls reality

and another calls god.

Both wrapped in the tattered garments of their lives

stitched together with words defined by their cause.

The whole thing was messy.
My joy, everywhere.
Great smears of dishonesty to myself on every surface.
My head, a vacant motel room.
We don't live here.
Some one else can clean this up,
this squalor,
this son,
this world.

I’m listening moon.
I get lost in your moments so often I forget what you mean to say.
At least what you were never saying.
At least what could be said ever at all.
And I guess, like the rain and the wind, it grows on us.
No shelter could say to me otherwise and like everything else it is and is also growing on me.
My planned soaks and my calculated colds erected into a home against the unknown.
Wait, what is it you were saying?
Could I hope to hear it all?
The knowing enough keeps my body dry but tonight I want to soak in your thoughts
where they’ll grow on me again and again I’ll cast them off.
Making room for the next.
Lasting never,
never lost.

I only
know
how
going
there may take time
get closer
go faster
sleep softer
dream louder
I can hear marching
soldiers insistent
with a staccato spirit
kicking in your door

It wasn’t until I had forgotten everything I had learned that I noticed the clockwork of our first world machine.
The people as the cogs spinning simply to be the dream.
Yet, not actually.
A frenzied free for all on a linear trip up the ladder with eyes on the prize and no peripheral to see what is lost to the bloodbath below.
Our modern joy paid in full with their soul.
Slave from birth to grave in clockwork that doesn't tell time.  
If only the money misers could be convinced of a two way street
to up shift the whole god ****** machine
and not just leave your brother in the gutter because you can’t believe.
Their steady faucet of the drip drop dribble trickling into your mind until it’s all you know.
Nothing outside that bubble ever gets exposed.
From generation to generation.
Grade school skill sets for a life led by expectation.
With history from the victors,
and morality from a minister.
The whole of the world,
the whole of your life,
is censored.

When I was sent up
on an escalator made of neon lights
I was rapidly unaware of the plunge.
Cut from the bottom of this cup that,
sometimes,
when filled to the brim,
resembles Christmas in Tokyo.
If ever I looked up for plasma Christ
and only felt envy
I will go on to comb the earth
for all the unspun sugar that has settled
down here with me.
Explosive notions teetering on the precipice of my palate
over the edge of the antarctic,
the south pole.
Like a trampoline built over hypothermia and bad vibes
or playing chutes and ladders alone
with limited intermissions for drugs
and the dead.

Hedons liken to sound.
The hungry cadences wielding that satisfying resolution.
The resolution we seek in between memories
and the spirit of the staircase.
Are we intricate bodies
or are we intricate worlds,
full of all you have ever known.
What is that sound?
I may be defined by my actions
but my actions are defined entanglement.
Some soft note
huddled under a hard and heavy chord.
Then victory comes in the 42nd measure
and is defeated in the next.

All of us can make noise
but nobody can be heard.

Even the altruist is selfish to an ideal,
I want then only to make music.

Will is a wish that your birth charges you with. There is a quartet of letters given to each generation, a formless trinket tossed around the human flame like some universal kumbaya that always had a face. We could learn a lot from where were aren’t if we let ourselves imagine it. Dreams of what it looks like when I poke out the eyes of my love. Nothing begging something, the body of a bonfire song. Is it not each flick of the tongue? Is it not a federation of sounds finally reaching accord? Hurt like hell to learn when I should stop asking questions.

I dodge most every postcard      
to be washed away in defeat                                                      
because there's something                  
about self destruction                
that keeps the world off my reality        
other people spitting dust bunnies
when they speak
clouding my language with their foul mouthed debris
becoming a mountain of dirt
I can't get over
these words
for real
aren't me
I
am
becoming
a valley where I hide between
the outside of everybody
and my wildest dreams
From the tops of moments
I breath
in slippery slopes
and hold for backporch memories
the neighbors are away
so it's ok to get loud and free
my darling there are
the cattails from your mamas creek
connected to the dots
that I trace back through memories
from my perch upon now
my junkyard soul
noticing wheels that are missing
from the things they were made to roll
into a tire swing
into racing streetlights
for scraped knees turning to
children remembering a wedding ring
because we told them marriage was how you take honesty
and make it concrete
before we took their honesty
and made it history
I
am trying to build something
that wont blow away with the leaves
oh I turn red blushing blood though my veins that are like trees
bound to be framed in some hillside autumn landscape of me
with words that have always been too vague
to translate my name
but as I grow that's subject to change
as is everything
so I'll consider of what I am made
and all that water may wash away
all of desire's delays
turning fatalistic denial
into some authentic decay

During it's first showing,
The Wizard of Oz's audience didn't know about the color.
Imagine, the first ever technicolor film
a surprise.
Why have we become less and less astonished?
Naive simulacrums
such poor copies
of copies.
The soul of human heart
a game
of
tele p  h     o         n             e.

An other,
outside of life,
a gleaned sum stacked into towers
that could never topple
because none ever amounted to a single stone.
This thing that, despite our best efforts to love,
often reminds us of a need to be contrary for the sake of being anything.
Still, all who attempt creation despite decay
carry a noble hope to never condemn the world
to an absolute knowing.
If described, heavier than ethereal
may come close to the tock implied in it’s tick, however neither
like now
and right now.
Obsessed only with the capture of this resurgent thief
I am attempting to draw a circle around with this passage’s entirety
knowing somehow, very well, that it cannot be contained.
There.
A phantom force lodged between complacency and rebellion.
The enigma itself
unraveling eternity for the sake of an intersection I cross
on nights where I could swear I was never a body
floating without need for up, down or any direction
because here all things reside in transit.
And it's here, with all my weight,
I vanish.

A new morning where my dreams suggest yesterday still isn't dead.

I have a new capacity for ******. I can’t put my finger on it.

We were fighting for the resistance, at the edge of the world.

Upon waking I forgot what it was that I would **** for.

We were running.

Put down anyone who tried to stop us.

We got away,

then found myself alone in bed.

Having just been a lover who fought a retreat

I want nothing to do with mediocrity today.

There's a mechanism
buried alive inside you
alive despite you
sack of omnipresent water
chalk full of code
whispers of people who no longer exist
asking that same question,
"To what capacity do I exist?"

I know some sons that come from cell division
they've won the entire human race.
I must be some mutant in the main vein
spectacular artery pumping symmetry  
trying to grow up.
Look closer.
I'm not burning ants with my lens anymore
in open ceiling
side walk heat
hot enough to burn role models.

Because they ain't sorry in heaven.
Their faces can be touched but they aren't there
and the same look persists
through spilt milk
and spilt blood.
Making me hot enough to burn flags
it's ours to destroy
we bought it with dead sons
dead daughters
and ******* so dense I'm not sure which is which anymore.

Drawn lines that we rehearse in the shower.
Songs where we exist for a brief moment
then grow quiet
with numb mouths
that have separated their speech
from what they wish to sing
divided by a distance too far to dream.
Like lobbing a football or collect call
between your own split cells.

I am so tired operator.
We need to marry these two points
by their spines.
I cannot connect the dots
for others but I can foster
my insides, out.
They exist in some capacity now.
Catch.

I am at your mercy stranger.
You naive monarch .
You impatient mortal.
You radical catalyst.
Take this and rule over it like it was yours
because by the time I reach you,
it is.
You cannot stay at this intersection for long
it's dying now
for the next.

Riding shotgun
in the span of seconds
we pass insurance ads,
company logos,
and beer billboards,
reading,
act natural, serve flow, live fearless.
I think maybe in this instance
everything I see may be tugging my thoughts around
just for me.
Or at least
some kind of sentence
that exists
in the space between moments
and myself.
It may not be true
but *******
who cares
it feels so right
to be intimate
with the entire world.

Isn't it all you ever wanted
to understand which parts of yourself
are huddled under the home somebody else
can make out of a word like grace
to hear an echo
would be to die complete,
satisfied that you did indeed
see yourself admired in the world
a bird dips on the wind
in the shape of a lovers body
while traffic
makes like ***
honking to move each other along
eagerly awaiting arrival  
here am I world
birth may have been adequately described as wet
death may be becoming dry
but nothin' is quite like catching life's eye
paper time drawing your mind
like the cornerstone
in some wild revolution

You had to be me
talking **** about Aristotle
then finding him in the poem on the next page.
We had been talking about how rhetoric makes students of analysis
feel like they live in some intelligent matrix.

You had to be me
to know that was very topical at that time in my life.
To know what wild bewilderment meant
at it’s actual size.
Two eyes, about the size of spare change, must of been going crazy,
but I couldn’t know unless I was you.

You had to be me
to feel as if you were enclosed in open space
feeling simultaneously,

empty objects come to life.
Tugging at the connections in mind
I was bound to make because of where
those same mechanical hands
had already fostered me.

Making me think something like god
could be construction lights over my exit sign
creating a tunnel out of the kind of darkness
night tells tired protagonists
exists to make you stronger.

You had to be me
to know that strength is a metric of preparedness,
and preparedness is a metric of memory.
I forgave mine.
I only know an instant,
the past shrinks under the weight of my experience
like a shivering body
under a bed sheet.

My strength dreams quiet fists and
sweats from voracious hips.
Unlike the stories,
the night has made me a tender man.
Unlike the stories,
that’s ok.
I’m dying just as fast as any hero with much more romance.

Who is this that wakes each morning
a bit like binary.
Am I on or off today?
When living for tomorrow,
it's tough to be keeping time.
A lay away life
that's not mine.
A billion year itch that has somewhere to be.
Right THERE.
Termites in my wooden spine
buckling under the day,
like floorboards under my feet,
squealing with tomorrow
comparable to rings on a tree.  
A back breaks so you may know my calloused age
layered with the things I say.
It's no secret
my branches are blushing.
Sweet sunshine I'll save you
so soon we'll rake the sugar around me
and lose it all to my leaves
for the sake of where I sleep.
I am tired of tomorrow
this thing with no release.
In the backwards country roads of my mind
I know I am already there.
But on the tip of my tongue
I teeter upon
some see-saw child's play
of knowing better
but doing worse.
It's an intimate sense of hurt
that can't be contained in these words.

She kisses me with cream
and lemon yellow
making me pucker up
for lips
that are like doorknobs
covered with red velvet
driving me crazy
for birthday cake that I don't need to taste
just light all the candles
and ******* away.
Wishing for things I don't think
I am allowed to tell you
and even if I could
I'm not sure I would
because her body is my church.

And

that's not what I mean but it's the closest my tongue will get
with words.
My god
is merciful.
She plants kisses with rosewater
and
green seeds across my landscape
and confessions are
sincerely *****.

Forgive me mama,
I have sinned.

And

she does

with gifts of limbs
from a better half

the pagan's god

                                           split.  

Because this kind of man
with this kind of woman
made them weep for symmetry
and envy
how permanent every one of our moments
are.

Had the hospital to himself
   He had broken his childhood against Army historians and mothballs
When reassembled he would say
I could carve a better man out of public demonstration and a woman's hair.
But the world had to bury him
In a coffin lined with a transparent curtain,
False perception,
And blame.
Until it all caved in
Pointed back to him
Reborn again
A stranger in  
The home town.

He is wearing gym shorts and she is a ten.
My god, a shimmering exemplar
in a new breed of **** librarians and
he is wearing gym shorts.
If you must roll off your front porch
into the world
do so with some self respect.
If you must work out
you probably aren't playing hard enough,
with a slight chance at
this being a projection
of my horrible personality
stained by the dregs in my
solitude's electric feedback.