We strolled to a halt in our own space.
We seven, spanned the open pre-dawn park
Prepared in dew.
We gazed up and east with wingless chirps

To where the rustling is neither wind
Nor the highest leaves blowing, but
The laughter of two hours prior--
The bubbling of water and endings--

As it takes my greatest sin to realize
That life is what it is.
We could lie in the grass but
Our taut necks mean/give more

And if we stay long enough,
Stare long enough
Into the faded blue-gold world yet to rise,
Maybe our eyes will never close

And with them our steps
****** forward and away

We stand with a city
on our separate porches celebrating
neon-lighted rituals and candles.
A summer night is sweeping,
seductively relentless.
We celebrate stolen yard lamps,
midnight chases.

When the world becomes profound
for a moment...
nothing to do but sit...
watch.

And perfection won't present itself
too often...
it's the feeling after the fact that remains,
the French smoke a feeling,
the shadow by your side a feeling.
A day's inspiration, once inspired, never fades.

Do you see that...over there...?
Milk legs holding hands, pigeon toed ***,
taboo *** and constructioners pounding spikes.
It’s as if...the leaves know where to blow...
It’s as if...the leaves crawl...and crawl...
Do we all see the wind blow the pages of poems the same?

Follow this poem as it escapes my lips, smoke from a swisher.  Follow before it disappears, slithers away into thin silky threads.  Follow the mass, the transparent cloud.  It’ll take you somewhere far from here, far from what you deemed necessary long ago, the pointless **** that drives your wandering mind, the pit opening up again within and underneath and above you, crushing you, making you less of what you are, less of your baser self.  Follow this poem as it coincides with the wings of bats beating above your shallow head.  Follow their darkness as they hide in barn nooks.  Let them graze the tips of your dried draught grass hair, carry you away, and dissipate with the smoke.

I have never walked this path alone
at this time of night.  Midnight.
Exactly how it should be.
The uneven slabs of stone catching me off guard.  
Squares of brick, red and gray and littered with autumn leaves.
Bike wheels glued to the Earth,
progressing with grace and ease
and hair flowing one strand at a time
in the breeze.
Buildings with staircases that lead
to towers of finite knowledge, but the top floor is
silent,
Save for the voices behind me, beyond
the jungle of bare trees and lawns of fallen death.
Fear death from above.

I will never understand why they talk
so loudly.  No intonation, no change in pitch.
Only a deafening roar of a hundred voices 
speaking out against the same Earth.
For they say that human nature lies outside the self.

There are columns that hold up the educated,
mad at work.  The lights are not bright,
but it’s enough yellow-orange to understand
where you are situated in this world.
“Let us both take the obscure route, for we are both obscure.
But he says we’re all nice!  All of us our nice!
He judges by the level of obscurity,
so it’s a good thing that we are both obscure.”

They wear the smallest shirts with the smallest sleeves and the smallest pants
and they witness the landscape before them.

We pass this age, in pipes,
pass hazed bathrooms
on river outlooks, fleshy and brown.
The walk up walk down,
they stain us in tattoo colors,
us in memoriam, us in spite of them.

The roots of our habits lie,
lie, and are laid in secret,
above our flat hats smart pants;
we tire from a fight, a pose,
from watching flies drop around us.
We end in smoke, us in ozone.

Through the trials our tongues are tied
to trying times; so many unsaid lines
underneath the rising tides, so many unsaid lies.

No pit burrows behind my grin,
no unlocked chains to rid this graveled ditch.

A picture of a boy, bloodied tree exclamation mark on his chest,
plants the seed for an aesthetic axe.

A glass windowed silhouette,
the infinite effect from eye to window cuts
to millions of pieces of mirrored selves.
The water drains from the watering hole,
A clay bed reflection.
The banks crack, crumble, coalesce into a bed
where two faces meet,
one lacking eyebrows: exasperated, emptied.

Our lives started with the first note ever played,
in the couch cushions where the second **** is displayed.

And our vision for this world,
it will not die when we are dead.
Death brings moments:
trees split by lightning,
grown men struck by screams
growing from a seed
planted in a field of dusty branches.
To plant a seed is to say we’re dead.
And when we are dead,
a weeping willow will grow from the ashes.

Let’s suspend a butterfly as we would
a person,
clasp his hands and legs to a rack
as we would an angel.

Stay still for a moment,
our grass it grows.

His butterfly eyes, those owl-less eyes
hover and dart in suspension,
but not enough to spot a hooooo...
or a hawk.

Moments are moments still
in a time lapse.

That bed was made for us both.
That brown-angeled stretch,
stretches for us.
No: we as butterflies hawk the day
and below come forth our prey.

The center bleeds down damp and up it dries.
But we enclose the bulb with petals
and the stem becomes as red as purple.
But its colors reach beyond and become
the air about it.  The air about it is an orchid.

Your colors diffuse in hushed streaks
across synapses,
as empty spaces also become orchids
and butterfly petals reach for a scent
their counterparts in rain.
A fringed April is actually an orchid.

Let’s divide the sky, you and I,
With Wilco tapping our gut, our eyes,
Supplanting the clouds from our grape cigars;
We’ve been folded, too creased to remember
Those country nights, those starry remnants when I would

Always point east with a fettered finger.
If I held it long enough, just enough,
Horns would bud, deviling my digit,
And the fireplace froze over.
I destroy homes and fall, fall, fall with them.

I play the bench observer,
Cigarette **** to people with permanent smiles.
‘Relax,’ you said ‘you need to relax,’
But your lips chapped and bleeding--
They resemble mine in humid daylight,

And the sky moistens and melts
To the tantalizing tune, yellowed summerteeth.