I fixed myself a cup of coffee,
this morning,
taking my time as I poured
as the ***’s cracked near the lip
and leaks quite badly.

I enlisted some creamer
for help,
as the cups dark depth was
quite foreboding; no sugar
though, there’s no need.

And then in my early morning
forgetfulness
I left the cup where it was
on the counter top, alone,
growing colder every minute.

Sometime later I walked back
into the kitchen
finding my old, lost cup, its
contents still swirling, in a spiral,
And strangely, I felt like god.

You drew, quite adeptly I might add,
a comparison between me,
(or your thoughts of me)
and the billowous smoke drifting,
softly flowing,
from the flame charred nostrils
of some old dragon.

I would, if you’d allow such a poetic
intrusion, add some minor details
(As I enjoy the image immensely).
The first is that the dragon be a figment,
a glimpse of mountainous countryside
conspiring to be, from one angle,

A dragon of momentous proportions,
its nostrils the dual chimney of some familiar
house, its occupants keeping some stoic
dream alive, stomachs slightly less full of
asceticism, feet full of soles. The dragon’s teeth
an old picket fence, a relic to an outdated

conception of “living” and perhaps that
scaly plaque at the center of its forehead
is not armor, as I would have insisted
in those years prior to our meeting,
but is rather a patch of dense forest
not yet explored  by tiny pittering feet,
not yet absorbed by the eyes of children.

We were once a binary star
System. Gravity that loving thing,
Lacing our parts, with grace
And from whose mighty arms we swing.

Poured long, drip dried on
That black canvas we call I
Beads of alabaster dawn,
And amorphous goodbyes.

I will tell you not of our
Secret mangrove tenement,
Tunneled through the space
behind both of our eyes.
A place meant for whimsy
and bioluminescent fauna,
fawning faux sun light
out into obsidian night.

Nor will I tell of our
soul’s soft meridian,
served on the half shell
to both kind and prying
eyes, distant though
unarguably tied— ribbons
spun, fastened, dyed

For what end should I tell?
When your very presence is
Heaven.
And your very absence
Hell.

I met you in the foyer holding a dish. Your torn screen door propped open with anguish, you took me for a ******; I didn’t know the meaning of the word. You chopped right through me with ocular swords, left my mind shedding, exotic snakes and cheap down bedding; and I fell for it. You Said, melodic, “Hi, I’m Trish,” then forfeit your tell, which I’d come to know so well, pursed lips, a squint in your left eye and then a terrible, shaking sigh. That wasn’t your name, though I never asked why, of all the lies, that’s the one you chose to try.
You heaved the child off your back and stood there eyes wild still; pressed your lips against the window sill and caught the breeze in between your cheeks, while I was checking out the pair underneath, (your scrawny physique) those sweaty lumbar rungs, like Jacob’s ladder sprung from some mystic place. Your skin clung tight to your face as if afraid to stray, even half an inch my way. “Well, maybe another time,” was really all I could muster to say. Though you begged me to stay, it was this or the alleyway. I complied, without even questioning why. Then you led me in, on through to your pig sty, without so much as a grin. You put the little one to bed. He’d sleep sound you said, as my chest began to pound. Then your hands on my belt, and all the guilt felt began to slide, adrift on some illusory tide, dealt with by and by, by some other far off “I.”

Missed the bus, walking
Book in hand, thinking of yew
Trees down the street
and whether they’re cold.

I feel it: that hardy rumble-
Melodic waves. That beat:
A hearty surge shifts, crumbles
Time’s thin ice sheet.  
Melt.

Excited- a series of burst
quivers- sweet hormone floods.
Flames gathered- Flames dispersed
In rippled bouquets- Incandescent buds
Bloom.  

Shimmer soft, gold arched sail
Breathe, ribbons dancing twist.
Float moment’s nervous inhale,
Pursed lips shiver, a subtle insist
Dealt.

Time’s tick rings a splendid quiet
Drags silent- seconds’ clever caught.
Tagged, weighed, a balanced diet
Slowly savored morsels, I ought
Consume.

We were twenty minutes outside
Asheville when we slipped, carelessly
From the edge of the earth
Into an oil painting.

We were, still are really, perpetually
Twenty minutes away when the traffic
would clog, and Michael would blow
Into a tissue; trying to clear both.

Every curve would birth another stretch
Of road, another ridge of mountains, their
Sight not unlike the unlikely vantage of seeing
your shoulders for the first time in film.

Then we’d break again, sure that this was
Some sort of ******* afterlife, full of minor
Inconveniences and signs warning that
‘Bridge ices before road,’
Mocking us in our perpetual summer.

You’re a canvas hung,
Framed soft by
Birches sprung
From dew fields, and I

Am that cawing thing—
Aloft, flying—over head,
Seen from our beached bed
Content to hear its self sing

Siren songs—and sand,
Stuck sticking to every strand
Of our matted hair and you—
Planting kisses long past due

I want chalance,
**** it!
Give me your unadulterated
caring.
I crave the taste of a well formed
opinion.

Spit bitter the dregs of conditioned aloofness, my children,
Turn from your beds that long dawning yawn of complacency,
The sickly lacksadaze of comfort and all those uninvited demons
posing as house-pets and affordable phone plans.  

find a flame and
fan it!
reject the televised red
herrings.
propaganda’s best honed
minion.

Careen from the brink of total self destruction, my children,
Bite deep into the fleshy face of death, its opaque nascency,
filet the present moment at your leisure, for whatever reasons,
Make your life a gun loaded with demands.

I am that wounded dear, humbled
Stumbling ‘round
Rabbit holes of you, under—Brush
The I’s from my mist
The kidneys from my stones.

Elaborate mumbles deerly missed,
By habit, eye drowned in tones
Siren singing seas, under—Blush
Something subtle: easily kissed.
A human homophone.

Oh, how the stars in their firmament love to creak.
Sounding off, in order, small to large.
A meek tinkering turned, slow, toward cacophony.
Mice nibbled wires finding, in accident,
The secrets of life and electricity.

What French doors your eyes used to be,
(Or not) nor would I dare deny that
They led me from that foyer
Across thirty thousand fields and still
Found you none the closer to me.

My hexagon’s long gone out.
The wax we stole off petticoats and
Barnacles liberated from the hulls of boats
Turned honey from the stress; fermenting
There, amongst the mess of our salty wares.
And
It wasn't long before the bee’s came drifting,
Pollen ridden beggars with empty bowls worn
Like terracotta crowns, souls freed from their
Geometric cells—And Love, that howling beast,
Not content to ring one lonesome bell, rather
An
Orchestra of buzzing offbeats. Chimes
Let resonate to some queen frequency,
A cheesecloth hive; a makeshift bag of tea.
Let it steep—Just be— Aware of the metaphor
That can be drawn between you and I:
A
Honeycomb kingdom of orderly
Disorder. The halls composed of sound:
A knock-knock-knocking rain. A circle coming
‘round. A muse, the notion of patterned chaos:
The fluid markings of Jade; rigid wood grain.

Sweet rippled midnight, poured
silver chilled cubes shiver
icicles cuddle
a tent hung huddle
priceless frostbite savored
mornings warming drip,
lovely defrost

I am not that whomever.
Cat, spilt from the night
Onto porches, clever
Thought out of sight.

Nor am I that nose
Bridging the eye's gap
Fore the knower knows
Nothing whence I’s lapse

This world’s a plum blossom
Bound to fall in its blooming.
Ten thousand leaves shivering
for the trunks sappy *****.

In attempts ill, to arrive:
A syllogism, best left unsaid.
Peace known only by the dead
And those that cease their striving

For the fall is easy, the road
Slippery. To abstract in words
Seems simple, yet birds
Don’t cling to their branched abode.

Nor should we, our own constructions
Lest we rouse misconception from its place
Kiss it square on its blemished face
And with it, bury our logical deductions.

For the Zazen mats are warmed
Not by the coals but fact:
The world is burning with emptiness
What’s left to do, but the dishes?

We are a tuning fork let
Tingle, spewing off in crests
Of interference,
Concentric circles met
Mingle, in rippled patterns; lest

We sink our pebble cupped hands,
Tiny polished eggs spackled
With inference,
And us, but mere cosmic sand
And gravity’s weak shackle

My wrist to beddings iron frame,
As the evening chirps quiet; chisel
Through indifference,
My marble block, blown by flame
Reduced to dust and grainy gristle

Smelled you while reading
Dickinson, in the sun.
First day of spring.

Why do I crave that terribly monstrous hunger?
Some feminine form to devour my poetry.
A lumbering beast shrouded in curly brown hair
hidden under supple skin, wearing Birkenstocks.
Kali in all her frightful intricacies hell bent on
destroying my word through consumption,
pregnant with my verbose imagery,
craving, forever, one more line of verse,
one more syllable to wet her tongue.

There is a knocking
Inside, much deeper still- Hear
Rain drops on lakes face.

You’re a Koan wrapped in gold foil. And as the words evaporate from your lips like subtle kisses pressed on morning fog, I don’t particularly mind that you talk on and on. Cause it’s nice to hear someone else’s crazy. It’s refreshing to see another’s ceaseless internal struggle, the sound of a soul creasing like pages turned by absentminded fingers—you ramble. Venting all your anguish and heart ache onto me, your hate and instability, and I’m sorry if it seems like I’m not listening, I am, it’s just that I’m blinded; cause with every word, I only see what you really are, the slippery truth that is you, when no one else can be found, like is a sound really a sound if no one is around? To hear it, the cosmic purr of meows over static silence, a tree free falling then by fungus found, tiny prayers for all the tiny violence, my weight in gold, which pound for pound reaches nowhere near your worth.
Though you’re godless and that’s okay. Cause a sort of abstract faith isn’t required to be a good person on this earth. It just takes heeding the lessons that life lends you, like our lips pressed on door steps at two in the morning. My heart bends for you, and I can’t quite explain it, cause with every other moment I feel like its breaking and then in the next it’s more of a subtle quaking, which is really cliché but it rhymes, and then we’re kissing. Rolling around on the pressed linen sheets of my bed, and its late you say, and so I drag the conversation on and on, trying to savor the moment with feeble graspings. It doesn’t work, though I didn’t think it would. And you have to be going, and you don’t deserve me, as if someone else could, but to me every word sounds like flower petals falling, sailing slowly from the tops of trees pretending that they’re dying. Even though we both know it’s a cycle, cause I took earth science, and next year those pussydicks’ll be back; cause matter isn’t created nor destroyed, in fact—just like those words which inadvertently annoy me with fear, they’ll pass, but never quite disappear, and in the night sometime, maybe I’ll hear them as I take out the trash under the dull star shine, or maybe on some far off beach in the oceans salty whine. Or both, I don’t know and it doesn’t really matter. It just seems like my whole ******* life is some abstract puzzle. But we’re kissing again which is fun, so I don’t particularly care. Though in the back of my mind I’m very much aware, that time is fleeting.
And you say we can’t be together; I can dig that, but I’m looking for answers and that just ain’t one, like dry helium gas in my lungs, my chest feels kind of light, and maybe I’m crazy, but it feels right, which honestly makes me seasick, cause for some strange reason I really like the idea of we, and when we kiss, to me, it feels like fiery lightning, a sort of willful treason, my vocal cords shiver, tightening, my throat a river parched in dry season. And I’d tell you all this, but by now, you’re halfway to your car. And I’d like another kiss, but I’ve pressed my luck too far. And it’s saddening, but at least I peeked a glance under your gold foil wrapping, by chance, earned a sight of your beautiful debris piled—messy happening, which is somehow both refreshing and maddening. And as you close your car door I want to scream ten thousand clichés, and if I thought for one minute It’d convince you to stay; I would, but I don’t. I just stand there knitting thoughts and emotion, my face a wincing mask at every little motion you make, sitting silent for silence sake, when I realize I really ought to yell something out, so I ask “What’s the sound of one hand clapping?” And you shout something back, but I don’t quite hear you, which to me honestly, seems all the more fitting.

Drink from it, that pearly blackness,
Instructed the trees; towering
Dark spires bleeding upward.
Not ominous, but cynical, like
They’ve seen this all before.

Take it as it is, they insisted.
No, don’t think of her, not now,
nor him, nor him, nor her.
Stop passing the buck
From your field; let it graze.

Don’t be embarrassed to be
That wounded deer. They
Offered some gesturing limbs
Towards your lunar embankment,
But refused further comment.

I sat there awhile, the low shrubs
Rubbing shoulders, greasy-palmed
Handshaking as if placing bets on
How long I’d last, How long it’d be
Before I drank from that pearly blackness.

I am thankful to this moment,
for you are not here.
You are not
weaving your fingers through mine
nor are you
kissing the center of my forehead.
And yet I am thankful,
for each moment you are not here
implies a moment in which you are.

You crept, cunning
Trapping thunder storm titans in
Wicker cages of context,
Lit windowsill lamentations
With those trick candles that refuse
To blow—Out— side with the ocean—
Tide At your back, pushed me on
Till I could finally see the sea waving

On and on and on
At me, at me, at me.

Sitting buckets of
lavender wishing they were
their namesake flower

“We” are potential energy,
A book poised at the edge of its case,
An icicle dripping to join its kin piled
In the sloppy snow seven feet below.

Sometimes, in the night, i’ll doubt and liken it
More to the crate of eggs, sitting precariously
On the back of some travelling merchants cart
Bound to fall, cracking in naïve inexperience

And even then the local birds would be fed,
The pasty shells ground down by the passerby
Who’d criticize as they walked, to pass the time,
That such a crate should have been properly secured.

Then, on those optimistic field trips into the forest of
Myself, I feel differently; that such is more like
A pair of sparrows, separate but dancing, alight in
A mountaintop field of grain, idle hikers

Marveling at our playfulness at such heights.
It is these thoughts that I prefer, as my
Insides don’t feel very yokey, nor my feelings
Brittle like those cream spotted egg shells.

Your words held all the weight,
but not the wetness,
of a mid-day sunshower.  

My sandaled feet not spared
the puddle, nor my greasy hair
the extra embarrassment.

And outside the pavement babbles with
impromptu brooks: Words rambled on,
unaware of that mossy sewer

At the heart of the city.

My life’s a sneeze, caught
Between fruition and these
Cyclic thoughts of ought,
Should, and “Why,
what a terrible thing am I?!”

If I had had a pocket for every time
you came in the form of a misty leaf,
(sticking to the underside of my

misbelief, drawing attention to
every old logical fallacy that
was, blissfully, missed)

I still wouldn’t have enough to hold
the amount of change we’ve set in motion,
the density of our meaning, nor the

emotions you inflict on me,
from your place on that mountain.
(as if through sorcery);

And I can’t help but imagine you
as some metaphoric fountain,
forever spouting pockets—

The seeds of your actions sprouting
in neat rows of goodwill, and decisive
Indecision, your face half hidden

in some fey magic of mythologized memory
your hair ridden with peaceful fire
and emptiness, your lips set in a

quiet compassion, ashen from
the song of my phoenix lyre,
content in uncontentedness,

knowing that bliss is also not-bliss,
and that every moment spent apart
is a melody of separation: this—

the crafting of some divergent art,
spooky action at a distance, these shadow
figments mere resistance to our own

true nature: the heart’s desire, sown
in every field, every stable, this very
word, and all the fables that persistently

insist that perhaps there’s one more thing
I’ve missed. So I’ll look once more (through
that gateless gate, perceptions door) at your

sleeping face, the oceans floor, clouds weeping,
that distant shore of sandy grace:
outside time, inside space.

My heart pumps nostalgia, and you
You’re one to talk. Leaf lipped
Sympathies, petals woven, fold
And that funny way you walk.

Sink ships, my siren song of old
Blown long across felt tipped Forests,
Cookie crumb groves, and arguably
Better for it, though honestly, who knows    

The cricket’s somber symphony,
From the obviously counterfeit?
The winds sultry destiny  
From the greasy wooden Pulpit.

O’ fruit of winter, burning
up my vine—sowing,
Seeds of spring; sprung
from flaked necessity,
along the byways and the
Water’s edge trembles
not there but—
Somewhere, you hear a sound
not unlike your name and shift
in your seat wondering
how veiling words can be, and
the day’s heat like some archaic prayer
the purpose long forgotten, but
its effect ever apparent.

Saw a pair walking down
the street. Her hopping,
Him hoping—holding a
Cigarette Poised,
A gymnast balanced
Between shaky fingers.

The whole of my efforts have been,
as they say,
for the bush outside my house.

For whom are you strobing?
In tiny white and yellow flowers,
there, then gone, and then there again.

Whose bud refuse no way farer,
hermit  bees meander,
suckle, and depart in good conscience.

It’s funny, when
I try to draw metaphors:
Silky lines pulled taught-n-
Tied; connect by poetic chores

You and grandiose imagery
I can’t. I could, but
I don’t. It’d be too easy
To compare you with what?

A lapping shore line?
Frothy rippled beauty hitting
In waves. Me, the fine
Sand crumble crushed, intoxicated, sitting.

Or maybe a great spanning tree
Knitting slowly a cool shade
For the parched grass blades of me
Who below you, blissful lay

I admit, it’d be easy, but it
Would never compare to
The lovely tang of your wit
The simple beauty that is you.

The best of my poetry wasn't written down,
Rather, was spoken to empty rooms,
The stinging silence pregnant,
Each syllable a fleshy womb
Creating, and recreating, your
Image in my mind.