1
writing to devour time
as time devours bits of me,
wrinkles are gaps

2

I break through walls,
barriers made by saying
only human, if enough bones break
I will heal to inhuman

3

after a while, you see yourself
as territory others walked over,

by this age, you seek to reclaim yourself,
now, obsessed with conquest

1

The art of growing up is teaching your skin to become a mask factory
All the orifices stuffed with paper , tainted with ****** poetry

My transgression is to pretend a part of me is still innocent
calling back to my own instinct , be as dead as a statue

2

Some nights, I am left in moods
I thought I have left behind ,
guilty feelings over my wife
mopping up the mess
of my self-evisceration

I remember as a child I would feel
bad for standing outside
obstructing sunlight from
a boy shaped patch of grass

now, in my mid-thirties,
a part of me still has not
grown secure,

wanting to stay quiet
about wounds, who
still sometimes
feels the echoes

of being told
how worthless I am ,
at nine after
harvesting a whole
onion field by hand,

or the times younger

left with the responsibilities
of alleged adults,
the ******* who hated
his life and fatherhood ,

or the mentally ill woman
who would’t get off the couch
to do anything except ****
my pets in front of me
when I was behind on chores

they are the ones who called
themselves farmers

and they have left seeds
which I have tried pulling
out of my bones,
but you always look insane
when trying to circumvent
your own skin

sometimes at night,
I can feel a bumper crop
coming on

3

Because I love to be not loved

they will ask me what my damage is

and I will say impiety is a comfort

when one was raised with grace used as a weapon

my future is a success if others fail to make sense of me

4

I learned what innocence is,

birth throws us into a world
gentle and illiterate ,

we age, hording weaponry
our skin turns to armor
by reading sharp edges,

this is a world of broken glass streets
every human soul a bottle ready
to fall off its shelf

go to sleep
hoping that
all of today
that hurts
will be put away
on the shelf
in back of my mind

headache and sore back
the feeling of aging
a few more broken trophies
above cob web covered bits
of past anatomy ,
on a shelf in a darkened corner

because the sun
grows less tolerant
of us, and the fingers of cold come
I must drink more coffee before
I venture out to do all these human things
to keep a grip on a job that holds a tighter grip on me

we live in a gentle place,
but in my 13 years here,
even I have found it to be cold
I have lost my mind of winter,
forgive me , Wallace, it stays preserved
like Viking rations in eastern Oregon snow

the entire city froze in
its tracks last week,
the threat of snow that
came only as a sneeze
of sleet,
even the clouds are laughing at us

I qualified as an old man before
people started telling me I was young,
the sky is gray and heavy enough
my joints swell to birthday balloons ,
the back under my skin a stain glass church window
in the evening , I envelop my wife as I am a coat of frost and melancholy

let the outside world be nothing tonight ,
social concerns and scattered responsibilities
sentenced to hang on the coat rack ,
tonight, let there be only the hiss of a space heater
the solidarity of cats and two people who escaped
into the warmth of together,for a few hours more

love is too small
of a word,
I fill my tongue with
a billion versions of that word,

to try wrapping kite string
around the sun , no bits of sound
will do justice to the tiny earthquakes

that run through my body when I see your face or
think your name

Above our covers
I promise to keep
you warm
But I am rough,graceless
like a blanket made from
feed sacks and chicken bones
A promise I would fail to keep
while attempting it
On Saturn and Jupiter,
It rains diamonds
In a dream, I floated in a star ship
to the storm of the red spot
Then by accident, blew up
the engine of my vessel
A brief diamond
As failed as a feed sack blanket