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

poems come from the abyss
one always hopes to fill,
at least for me ,
no lines from heaven

behold the joy proposed of being an artist
worrying that you really did fail
in turning your soul to statements

the true nature of what we do , unknown to us
letting the decay of sanity sink in,
we hunt beauty by way of letting logic fall to abstraction

close your eyes, let the right line and word and image be a piranha
hand goes in the water, hoping for a bite, for something to
latch on so hard you can pull it away with you

the loving breast of an artist allows eggs to be planted inside
it, only for them to devour till fat and mature, to burst away
and take flight, as far from you as possible

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

No matter how many
love poems I write,

Or times I try explaining
all of it to you

None of it would be as effective
as if I were to simply
place my heart on a platter

and that would be an act
whose gruesomeness
would be profane,

no statement is proper
no statement is effective

and you tell me that I don’t need
to try explaining it ,
but then sometimes lying next to you,
I am afraid that I am draining too much
and not opening my own floodgates

Poems sometimes
aren't enough ,
just
a hunger falling
from fingers  ,
hiding in paper

pretending to
be a statement

the less you write,
the more relevant
it is

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

it will start

as a dream

slowly rotting to

a memory that

you can’t burn

from your mind

it sticks to you

like it did to your skin

and no matter how

nice life is right now,

still it will swell and show

that you are

a basket for shrapnel

of things you survived

but

don’t worry,

there is more

than just surviving this,

there is also the joy

of just knowing you aren’t dead

and that maybe life can be great

despite the fact that you’re still in it

say you’re at risk of becoming a partial optimist

just rest assured that this likely isn’t a terminal case

keeping yourself alive
by believing in
the gorgeous cause ,
the idea that justice is real
and that you can see it

But then, you actually pay attention
and these things you hoped for
become stained glass portraits
in church windows
as seen by Atheist eyes:

dedications, so very pretty,
likely to nothing at all.

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

I will avoid the ocean waves of epic love poems
and just say she is a small fire that burns,
providing the carbon base that makes me a life-form

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

something
stays here,
in the broken
glass world
of my memory
my blinking eye
looking back
because all
the sharp edges
of the past
keep my walking
ignoring wounds
I move forward
only because
looking back
proves that
I never should
have been there