I
remembered you,
you
remembered
me,
I believed in you,
You believed in me,
We were both sea creatures
traveling
uncommon seas.

We had taken to that
unconscious ocean
to see in the sea,
What we could see.

It's been a strange journey
of that there is no doubt.

Where everyone walks with
their insides in,
We travel these seas
with our
insides out,
We don't know any other
way to be
when you're swimming through
these
uncommon seas.

It's often a desert
out there,
But inside here
all kinds of musty
characters
drudged up from
anxious memory
inhabitants of this sea -
Sponge Bob Square Pants
has
nothing on you or me,
We are all travelers
in this uncommon sea.

Our bathing suits left far behind,
the temperature sometimes
too hot
too cold
depending on our state of mind,
There's strife
confrontation
character assination
often
uncommon seas
are far from placid.

The joy of traveling
though
you and me,
Sea creatures
feeling
the longing,
Finally belonging,
Where somewhere
and
sometimes
out of the blue,
A Beluga whale
speaks
your
name
so
perfectly
and
swims alongside
you and me
in
uncommon seas.

floating backward
on my back down a muddy river
at a cloud's pace banked by willows & sweet clover
with long branches of oaks stretching across to meet
hot sunshine burning spots on my face forearms & stomach
an invisible hand forcing my eyes to stay closed
& projecting dancing pinwheels of
curled peacock fire on my thin eyelids
i can hear the echo voices of everyone on
shore whirling in the soft wet part of my brain
so awfully warbled by the water in my ears as
i lay there with top water debris spurting playfully
from my lips with a pinched smile
carved between my cheeks
thinking what a shame it'd be to drown
no longer caressed by willow branches trailing
across the surface

to sink down
under a blue sky during a cloud race
into a quiet place where words no longer mean anything
& all i can hear anyway is the profound hiss
of a dying airbubble slipping away from my nose
open my eyes to look i can see it escape
& explode ascending into sunlight
refracting just eight feet away
how wonderful it is to drift down into
the soft silk blanket of dark water
with all the pain & piano music in the world
trapped in my pounding heart
as my friends dive bomb to save me
the drumroll kicks in with the dramamine
& sweet pear wine i had in a pack lunch
to keep away the eager panic hunger
it's accompanied by the soft indie
plink & pluck of violin strings &
someone in suspenders blowing a harmonica
as the nothingness struggles to enfold me
crawling over the shiny pores of my face
while my friends peel back
at it in layers
by re-breathing
their whiskey into my lungs
beating my chest
with their closed fists
& blowing my nose into a t-shirt in the sand

I spent
my life
designing a
border,
between myself
and the
world of
disorder
But the
border was
breached by
a world
so sick,
with hearts
of stone
and minds
of brick

©

i'm searching for the comfort
of an old flame to keep me warm
tonight knocking on familiar doorways
to foyers where my boots have already rested dripping
with snow or shedding beach sand and all i want is her
the one i remember in bouts of photographs
bright hair hidden in a knit olive colored snood
with big blue eyes set on full power
as we set out on the open road together car
packed full of soft blankets groceries illicit drugs
cigarettes and the fumes of santiago ***

she convinced me to quit smoking saying
she hated kissing the marlboro man and
i'll take you to the coast i said meaning
every single one because i had harbored
my love for her in a million ways of secrecy
and only survived on a currency of torture
pain inflicted
pain withheld
pain drugged away

she was absolutely perky for the first thousand miles
hair haloed and face lost in shadow as we drove
into the sun out of a cocoa beach condo
leaving behind bikini squeals and smiles
she was with me like an ethereal dream
eating scones on the boardwalk beach
in bitter cold new jersey and that night she was
a long legged american girl astride me
sweaty hollering in a secluded gazebo

she was a blur of parrot colors to me
spending most of july dancing in a daffodil field
in oklahoma while i changed tires on the
hyundai her daddy bought one after another i
just gave her the pink slip to my heart
under a pavilion of light pink fractal fabric
pitched on high beams ascending into
pale gold otherworldly billows

she's sweetly ****** and surrounded by patchouli haze
hanging off my back like a monkey wearing a
wide high fashion soft brim hat she found before
i surprised her with a bunch of freshly picked
wild violets from the roadside she
cripples me and we go tumbling
wrinkled and aimless both exhaling plumes
into the paisley purple sky already full of clouds
blowing straight north hair tangled together
full of windswept snarls barelegged now
and writhing creating craved friction
just two souls of pure energy on the loose

but the best memories i have of that trip
are the nights we spent in joshua tree
not-sleeping beneath a meteor shower every
night for a week when her *****
was still running the show and i
was just a poison rash itching her
calf muscle before i became the master of myself
we were a flurry mess of long naked limbs
tuned to the exact same frequency

she was a fresh meadow flower naked
under taupe corduroy overalls cut ragged
into shorts walking with her arm twisted through
mine and i thought i was the happiest man alive
when we crashed in colorado for two weeks
and every morning i woke to her incandescent
hair sprawled lazy on the karastan rug under
the turquoise glare of the television or to
the smell of a gong sized breakfast casserole
consisting solely of her dreams the previous night
and i would kiss her good morning with her hair
up in curlers and my face between her knees

but she started to grow wings in montana
little nubs etched out on either side of her spine
i noticed them one night while she was sleeping
face down chest stretched across my chest
i watched them grow the further south we got
and by the time we reached the heartland
under those glistening river cypresses
or the banks of that great muddy river
canopied by huge florida palms
she was itching and molting them all over the car
and she finally flew away from me
said she was born for the city but i hope
she's waking up now not under skyscrapers but
a metropolis of oak strands governed by the tyrannical sun

and since that day i've painted her lips on
every girl i've ever seen in the morning every
face that emerges from indigo ambience is hers simply
i hear her nothing-to-lose laugh in every fog or faint haze
after every lunar prowl through a mushroom ranch by the coast
my eyes get shined up with dew every time
i find seagulls nesting in a cypress grove holding
some kind of seance for the flash of sunlight off the nape of her neck
in front of the watery green sunrise of the atlantic
and in my teeth-grinding night terrors i have
a hard-on and i can plainly see her dancing
luxuriously on a deck stretched out over a shaded creek
tight and smooth like the skin of a djembe drum

and sometimes when i feel very weird
with something like sick stomach hunger
churning in my gut i shave my ******* clean
and trim my ***** hair into a crude cave-painting
version of a mountain lion just for her
i wade out into the sea passed the orange trees
and wait for the moon or her lips
to rise and lick me full on my face but
she doesn't return my calls suddenly
having phone
trouble i
guess

right now my browning chest is
propped up with beach sand buried in my elbows
i was dozing off underneath my shades
with the salt spray at my feet
& the seagulls swarming overhead
you asked for a story so i'll tell
you the only one i know
it's about making an exodus
& the accident of my personality:

the last time i was shot at
i was making a collect call at a pay phone to my mother
i was living out of a backpack
                                                    in a hostel
in sticky sweet new orleans
in 2008 post-katrina

after spending half a year without a friend
i decided to live what i write and become
the mythical warrior-poet or
                                                 just a sun-haired boy
fighting with the sky searching for his spirit animal
wearing old wool dress slacks cut short above
the knee i was only cargo trying to get
as lost as i possibly could

they came out of an empty socket shop window
blasting through the doorway onto
                                                            ­ the steaming street
jittery & starving roaring on the collapsing mist
but i'm no one's pigeon crouched behind a sedan deathtrap
poised to flee but with nowhere to go i can only hear
                                                            ­  my own heartbeat
                                                       ­       mother screaming on the phone
                                                           ­   hanging limp

& my own feet beating a new path on gravel through a strange city
when the windows grew lighter &
i slowly emerged from invisibility
in a world sprung new not defined yet
shrouded in what i only assume was
                                                             ­   special magic

for a while i was scared to sleep alone at night sometimes
i heard downer & buzzkill other nights that i cried
                                                           ­                          beneath the ivories
& i thought i'd die alone if i had to
but i was too young
to be that cynical

now i'm rising like a big owl out of a meadow
finding good new ways to fall apart as lightning
blooms on the horizon & clouds gather unnaturally
into pale blue ribbons & dance in a pinkish sky
& the sunset burns the treeline down
                                                                ­no one else can fix me now
                                                             ­   no one believes in me
but i believe in myself more than ever
the only person i've ever really loved is my mother
& she says i can't make a name for myself writing poetry
but i'm immortal among these words like stars
being blown in plumes of dust across a night sky
i'm looking for a new better place to dive in from
so if you've got a certain star in mind or a secret
cliff-space combination treebranch hangout take me
there or whisper it to me while we're already high
& hugging don't kiss me unless it's hard & in a precious place
because i'm feeling invincible again instead of invisible &
i really really really cannot wait for someone to try &
                                                                ­                             ******* stop me