the mockingbird is four yards in front of me.
it is 5:47pm.
it is just barely December,
but already my heart has frozen.
i am no longer able to turn the great wheel of the stars.
i am but a fragile stem on a withered rose.
the old grandfather of winter has come to live in my heart.
night has wearied my bones.

the mockingbird is perched low on a cushion of oak moss.
he is taunting his feathers the way mockingbirds do.
he is basking in the sun.
he is wearing a beautiful coat of indulgence.
he is twitching his tail and quickly bobbing his neck.
he is deflecting and dodging and eating flies out of the air.

i decided to take aim.
i have no rhyme or reason.
i have a slingshot.
i flex the rubberband once for tension and twice for luck.
the bird sees no evil intent in me, nor i in it.
i place a single devil's eye marble into a warm leather home.


mr. mockingbird is surely mocking me.

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

she's the volcano
in my bedroom and
my heart, a chandelier made
out of fireworks
that had burned all night
in a flame-race, howling upwards

she looks better in
one of my old t-shirts
to my stretched-out eyes
than i ever would in
a ballroom gown,
i was not blessed with
the bust for a corset,
with all my life throbbing in my throat

under my sheets, groping
she is an octopus wearing lacy crystals
who has tasted a man's flesh
and collapsed in a slither
at the charred-out caves
in big, good America

after a hectic twenty minutes
she is honey-pale and
falling into empty light
shivering in my bed-boat
her hair slammed back
against the stern, the spray scything upwards

i've spent months like moths between poems
sacrificing gods for endless answers
but always losing the light or dying on a too-hot bulb
unable to comprehend infinity as a spiritual fly-swatter
but i'm learning how to surrender to silence
diminish into campfires
wash in busted fire hydrants
meditate inside the figurative dumpster of solitude
perhaps forever this time

but my attraction to her is raw
like the sun today at 3pm
burning away my anxiety and shadows
not fueled by selfish lust or vanity
but by surprising vacuum
she is frightening in her beauty
her mind filled with incandescent chaos
her voice a softly spoken flute singing in a canyon
her hair a delightfully suffocating gas
her belly, her smell, everything from
her nostrils to her feet marching
through my tingling limbs

she was from the far end of the universe
a dream of the temporal lobe
polluted by the spike-and-wave blips of computer music
halos around mouths chewing ecstasy pills
her mystic lips curled and eyes lightly fluttering
over a simmering can of cherry coke
my hands an unsteady inch away from
her heated and heaving rib-cage
my lips whispering breaths onto her ivory throat
after a 4am romp donald duck explains
childhood memories from a buzzing television box
the smell of man-musk and sandalwood
spilled whisky and patchouli thicken the air of the room
as weak dawn light streams in through philodendron stalks and fingered leaves arrested by the wind

I leaned
and asked
Lord Byron,
"This is poetry, right?"

you were crying at my window at dawn
& your hair was only adding to the flood
i hadn't gotten out of bed
remembering how our souls danced undressed
in lovely weather on the fringes of a fair
you looked like a red bird in the morning sun
i just lay there, stolen by your shining face

i've been a barbarian most of my life
stop me if you've heard this one before
my blind approach to the steep paths of the labyrinth
plunging hard & immediately untraceable
i am a rude ghost ******* to your friends
feigning imagined mystery like the
stage door of a circus tent
that day was beautiful and the sky clear
carrying mute birds with paper messages
but the rain is on it's way

but sometimes, most nights
i am a lamb upon your altar
when i recall how i asked you
where you want to be buried
i said i would search for it
with a hand grenade
& you asked me the name
of the town where i was born

& if i am an animal
i am one of the few that is self-destructive
i will bring the empire thundering down
i have chewed through my beautiful muscle
to get out of that southern state & into your door
with my face against the wet gold leaves
& my nose burned black from the snow & wind

last night
i slept on the ground
under my house
and used a vaccuum cleaner
as a pillow

i was wearing
roller skates

i am in an intelligent concrete room
while familiar silhouettes switch direction in the balmy wind
there is a dim stone portal spending a light
so still and small and dissolving into the sunless wall
under the scattered ruin of the sacred world
its gaunt mind studies beneath hieroglyphs
and into oblivion

it is later in the night and i am riding on an unsettling
crucifix doused in drugs and hammocks and the
blind face of eternity is wearing a headdress
filled with plumes of indecipherable intellect
and she has transcended my ego
with holy dreams

i am trapped in a neon arcade
where machines bump hum and hiss
i am a red-cheeked blond boy
with blue tiled streetlamps
i've been slapped by my aunt
and the burn of my flesh stinks and rises
to meet the acid gas hovering over the city
adrenalin runs into my armpits from my crying eyes
and i will be lost immobile and dumb unless
the longhaired angels descend from their albatross
and sing to me of kindness
i will rust under thriving tree roots and
be the forgotten target of armies
i will burn on the emerald horizon
floating silent over bright blue cloud-brains

"this is our new thing"
you sigh as we lie on your bed
fully clothed on top of each other
on top of your down blanket.
you stuck needles in my arm
and i stuck needles in your arm
"we both deserve this"
i whisper into your eyelid
with cigarette breath
underneath four months
of hibernation teeth.