We drove 70 on 88.
We'd be a blur of gray
if some photographer was studying
the shutter speed of his camera.

This land has no trees to breathe
back into this earth,
no mountains to reach up
and stab at the sky.

These fields are eternal,
and in winter when the sky is faint
with clouds and the ground gray
with aging snow like old men,
the horizon blends into nothing.
Nobody can see where
this earth ends and the sky begins.

I will never escape this place;
this universe of physics and evolution.
Like old trees in a winter wind,
I will erode like dead, frozen roots.
Somewhere, in a polished wooden box,
they'll remember me in my best clothes.

If I dare test this balance,
And step upon the ice
Only God knows if we'd survive

I distract myself
With circling thoughts looping endlessly
Hoping to stack these bricks
High enough to hide you

Cause I know you're not my kind
And there's rules to be followed
We're taking drags of bad ideas
and blowing out the smoke

You've got letters from your anchors,
and I'm not sticking around for long
So I'll say whatever I can
to ease our excuses:

We'd have fallen off the wire
Had we walked any further

Their noses share an awkward shape,
both too large for their faces, drooping
low and out, the crests aiming down
toward each other's chest.

My mother holds her youth and beauty
tight as a red and white bouquet in her hands.
Her smoky white veil falls behind her shoulders
and down her back, folding gently like summer curtains.
It wasn't love in her eyes; she's admitted before.
but here, anxious and barely 28 years old,
she wears hope on the smile reaching across her cheeks.
Perhaps it was a single thought, a flicker
of a candle's teardrop flame: Maybe
I will love him forever. And though
it was a lie, here it forced an affection
that pushed long black lashes apart,
and each hazel iris gleamed
with momentary faith, light flooding
the sudden click of a 1/100 shutter speed.

My father looks like another man.
He's consumed by fervent confidence and swagger,
built upon conviction and certainty.
He ought to have a big wet rose in his teeth,
and a big wet bottle clenched in his fist.
His shoulders, broad and rigid, push his chest
toward my mother's fragile collar bones.
His gaze meets hers, and he admits a stubborn smirk,
the same one his father had wielded
in an Army portrait 30-some years before
—that you could see on me now, as well.

This moment is dishonest,
those candid smiles were sudden
and fleeting, a bolt of lightning
splitting the sky in half.
But it's captured here, forever.
Two wild hearts in a moment
of sincerity, toeing a wire
they'd come to learn they
could never balance upon.
But I caress this photo some nights
slowly with my thumb,
knowing neither is my mother
nor my father, but two kids,
who might just hold on
when they're swallowed whole
and buried under rubble and silt
of all the world crashing down.

Suddenly everything made sense
and all my tragedies became one
They were woven together
like a sad, sad country song:
"I've been alone forever and all along."

I stood slumped into the corner
of two converging granite counter tops,
struggling to focus on what
he's remembering next—some bland anecdote
or an irrelevant detail: Larson,
I think, he says finally.

Between pauses—with small, contemplating eyes
set deep, split by his dark, Italian nose—
and dragged uhhh's and hmmm's,
a sowed adoration splits and grows,
a seed (a supernova now).
A man—half my connection
to this world, to existence,
to a trickling, patient bloodline.

He, I; a rambling, scatterbrained mess
of neurons and hard-wiring, sparks and electrical fires.
My father: plagued by anger and impatience,
a sitcom of clumsiness and a tied-tongue,
blessed by conviction, faith and reason.

I don't say any of this. He'll die first,
never knowing how easily I'm reminded
of what I am to become, 32 years from now,
unless he finds me drunk, perhaps after reciting vows,
now vulnerable to cheapening emotion into language.

We stared at the ground
because we knew we said too much.
You lit a cigarette
taking drags and burning your lungs.
You said you have to leave.
You had some things to figure out.
"We'd never last the year,
we'd burn ourselves to the ground."

We floated on the raft
wading tides colored dark and blue.
Shipwrecks passed us by
slowly sinking out of view.
We couldn't find a break
in salty horizons all around.
So we kept our lips sewn shut.
If we spoke, we'd surely drown.

These killer parties pretty much killed us.
That music was loud and pulsating and violently fresh.
There were kids tripping on some stuff
and over some passed out bodies on the floor,
always laughing and saying, maybe just one more.

I always figured we'd out grow these things,
crooked walks home when we were a total mess.
But you got caught up pretty bad in the scene,
and pretty soon Los Angeles had left your mind.
But you were always looking around for a ride.

Suddenly, I found myself in a swarm
of blues, blacks and grays,
funneling past traffic lights and skyscrapers,
up elevators, under railways and
squeezing between shoulders.
But burned into my lips
is a wiped away kiss
(a few hundred, probably),
that maybe we shouldn't have traded.

They teach you Hell is a fire
and the endless roar of burning souls.
We'll be surrounded by murderers and thieves
all suffering the same eternal anguish.

But that's not what I see:
Hell's flames are full of company,
countless charred bodies that say,
"We're all here, don't be afraid,"
compassion you'd only find in Heaven.

But there's no Hell that burns.
It isn't climbing flames
or smoke-filled lungs.

It's exile and solitude:
It's family and friends
fading from your reach,
rushing out like the house
is burning to the ground.

Maybe the problem is me.
We both know what’s really true,
I’m not good with honesty.

I was never sure about the things you
wanted me to believe in. And before I knew
what we were dying from,
it was already too late to
resew the stitches. I fall numb
onto the floor, and you strum
that guitar, the same songs
about living in a slum
and where your heart belongs.

But I can’t say I’d put the blame
on you for what you became.

Foolish, wandering eyes
Stupid, twisting tongue
Yearning a cutting scent

What a fool I am
To reach for your heart
Knowing plain, true
My arms are far too small

Raging, winds and thunder
Broken, voices and windows
Seeking an excuse to flee

What a fool I am
To allow you to go
I knew all along
I am far too small

Ain't this beautiful?
The familiar breeze
welcomes me back to where
I should have always been
While I beg her to forgive me

I wasn't thinking back then
I was only a kid with dreams
to make something of myself

Well it caught me like a claw
to the back of my leg as I ran away
And I watched every part of me
tear up in his teeth

I woke up from devils' dreams
in a log cabin
where the world is okay;
the weight is forgotten
and thunder rolls by gently
Knowing we'd seen enough for one year
And knowing we'll be back again next year

Our memories are packed now in boxes
We'll remember them again in another life
Cause they'd never survive in the city

We spent our last hours in a bar
Toasting friendship and experience
While shooting solids and stripes

We quietly express our joy
Under sighs of reminiscence
Saying how good it's been, begging for one more day

And we laugh and admit
The beauty of this place
Lies woven in brief moments
That we alone are allowed to see
Between two eternities of before and after

And we keep it a secret
Nobody else would understand
That when the days are over
We were happy just to be alive

I kept my secrets far from you
Water rushing dark and cold,
I can't seem to plug the holes

I lost my love to the wild blue waves
Lost at sea, never coming home.
California was better alone.

I'm not enough for anyone I know.
I never learned how to find faith,
I never learned to believe in anything.

I'm on my own. I'm stumbling through the fire.
I'm all alone in this house with these walls
burning right down to the ground.

Books with spines curved like gymnasts
are my favorite to own.
They're frail, aged and loose;
they've been worn to the bone
and have no strength to close themselves up
without being stacked tall
between other broken spines.

Like old men, they've endured time's unforgiving trial.
Books like these tell stories outside their pages.

At 21, my pride sliced open my spine
spattering out herniated fluid down its arches,
shooting fireworks down my legs.

I know about damage and battered bodies.
I learned eternity, as the suffering reminds me
through the dark, cold night and tiresome day,
that I won't escape this body
until my eyes fall shut one last time
and I learn eternity again in sleep.

I'm battered, broken and chewed to the bone.
But, unlike Tithonus in ashes and endless life,
I will one day rest without suffering.

I walked along the quiet streets we knew
from years ago when we were just sixteen.
We lost so much of what we had, between
the nights we shared when I was holding you
to aging slow and cold and dead and blue.
And I became a ghost inside routine;
now I'm an apparition barely seen.
And like a dream I prayed it wasn't true.

You said that you were sorry at the bar
because I built you up inside my head,
and you became an idol in my mind.
In twenty years (or more), when I live far
away from you, with words still left unsaid,
I'll love you still, with all we've left behind.

I will leave this house in a year.
Before next Christmas it will be surrounded
by monstrous yellow machines
and fat, grimy men in white hard hats.

My home will crumble into dust
like bones done aging—brittle and tired now.
And what once stood will no longer remain:
a white stucco box of memories,
photographs and heritage tucked within the walls.

I will run away to Chicago
taking comfort in drags of cigarettes.
Our lives will have no evidence, no proof
of ever breathing, laughing and crying
in every room that welcomed us.

My mother will leave for the countryside,
somewhere with fewer people and dimmer lights,
to make room for cornfields and starry skies.
Maybe there she will find peace.

I will be there when the swinging mechanical arm
tears away at the shingles and panels of this house.
She is a dying friend and I am a hand in her hand,
assuring her she isn't alone in death,
that I will remember her when the world forgets.
I will scoop up ashes of pulverized concrete and iron.
Somewhere within them will be air we breathed.

Heavy streetlights
drown your face in an orange glow.
And I was burning like a California forest
holding your hand.

Coursing highways
driving down through half the world
so I can tell you I've always loved you best
for all this time.

Surprised affection
holding you: skin and bones in my arms
with your head buried into my shoulder,
sheltered now.

Chest percussion;
Tremors like midnight fireworks
when we tiptoe to your room.
Will it last the year?

It’s not you I miss;
not your cherry red hair
or the crack in your voice
when you’d fight back tears
(You never did cry much)

It’s the loss of the feeling
of prairie fires in our chest
running with the wind in perfect time
like we made plans to run
out from under the sprawl
toward mountains and cedar trees
to find new languages
and faces we’d never seen

The world grows larger in passing time
and distance becomes relative.
To think we’d have made it to Nepal
to sit upon crystal white shelves—glass figurines
looking to build a new home somewhere overseas

The only time I've ever thought
to step out in front of a bus,
and feel its treads roll me out
like gold—malleable and elongated—
if the pain I left you with
was that of citrus resting on your tongue:
bitter and cold and sour
like lemon meat
gnashed and torn.

No longer holding form,
or fitting perfect
in the cup of your palm
like my hand once did

In September you spit
and cursed my name
And walked home
in the middle of the night,
stumbling,
Maybelline blurred
all down your cheeks,
with the picture of home
upon a foundation of stone
you had hoped to build with me

I often wonder why he hated me,
what it was that drove him,
and what I had done to deserve it.
I sometimes think it was primal,
with nothing he could do
at such a young age, just born into this world himself.

But my mother remembers,
"He loved you," as she hands me
a picture, high exposure,
my infant body: half-asleep, drooling, smiling,
his toddler face: eyes crinkled, lips pressed upon my soft, fat cheek.
I don't remember that.

I remember the curled, fatty muscle of his hand,
landing on my shoulders, my arms, my back,
rock-paper-scissors with everything at stake,
over, over, and over and over.
No knuckles, never in the face.

That nasal-rushed snarl,
a barb around his tongue and
razorwire lips, and all their violence.
I remember learning what I was:
Stupid, weak, small—******* ******, shut up ******.

And yet at the park,
when Mickey pulled my hair and sicced his dog,
burying teeth deep into my right cheek,
I remember the weight of a body crashing.

Mickey, crying loud, runs home,
his hand over his face, bloodied and bruised,
and my brother darts away on his bike.

Remember chocolate
when it's just out of reach
when it's stained into your warm fingertips
and clinging to your palette

Remember chocolate
when you give it to your firstborn
One morsel swooped over itself like a shoelace,
melting in their hands,
smeared across their lips

Remember the crumbling,
sweet velvet on your tongue,
the air through your nose,
and my hand in your hand

Remember the moment
has already passed,
as all good things before
So remember chocolate
when you go to the grocery store

Here in the fledgling of dawn, when the sky
has yet to decide what color to wear,
that old electric motor of the ceiling fan
sets its tempo—swinging marcia moderato
but still I dawdle with the patter of rain
lazy and scattered, from thin watercolor clouds

The city is asleep and the buses don't run
but down the street, Lorena is late
for work—even on Sunday the march carries.
Henslow's sparrows are readying to fly away
(they know nothing of Sundays either)
and the ceiling fan plans on in circles

They will return, and Lorena will
be home in the evening
but the transient sky will always
blend back into geyser blue
and perhaps I too will sway and waver
and dally along the coast at low tide
straining my eyes to remember the colors
in every moment of melded sky
dancing to the ceiling fan in 6/8 time