sadness has always been here
hiding somewhere down under
rooted deep within my ribcage
which cracked from all the thunder  

i felt it there when i was small
but didnt know what it meant
i never guessed
it'd turn into something
I'd so much resent

once the bones were broken
there was no holding back
the sadness came right through me
and waited to attack

it'd linger here
and linger there
always messing with my brain;
it made me anxious
made me scared
this sharp
conclusive pain

it told me this was the end
and there was nothing i could do
it fought my once so bright ambition
and turned it
shades
of blue

i.
there is a cold, against which
i have no defenses
an early-morning, black
night, kind of cold when
the air is so still, as if the
wind itself was too cold
to blow, ice crystals
float suspended in the air
brightly reflecting my car's
headlight beams, twin
seekers of the way ahead

ii.
you slipped out of bed
trying not to wake me
i lay wondering if you
acted from courtesy or
embarrassment

iii.
i sit in the coffee bar
in town watching you
work, maybe the way
you see without looking
attracted me to you in
the first place, maybe
you just make a good
cup of coffee, but, could
be that i have always
had a thing for
     hippie chicks

iv.
as i leave, you walk to the
kitchen without saying
goodbye, guess i will
have to find a new place
     to write

v.
i walk back out into
the still cold morning
perhaps the cold is not
the predator from whom
i require a defense
     after all

my love
seems a creature of the night
the moon seeks her
     as she sleeps
to wake and write her verse
     for me

     my love
would be a child of the lake
a sweet water
     pirate
having stolen my heart
to bury as her
     treasure

my teacher tells me

the sage is not attached.          so i cut off all my hair and quit my job and buy records despite my lacking bank account.

i don't know **** about wisdom but i know how to make myself

weightlessly
indulgently

                         happy.

This is a conversation I had with God.
In which I told the silence of my room
that surrealism is the only ism in which God makes total sense.

I could see the chalk whites of his teeth trying to bite down on his words
but before they could be derailed his tongue caught wind and his words assailed
as he said, "I hate surrealism."

As if his words would never be caught dead in an urn
sometimes his mouth looked more like a jail in an Old Western
and his thoughts fought like criminals desperate to break out
until they finally found a way to use his tongue as an escape route.

"No, I don't hate surrealism," he says
"I just hate surrealism as a movement."

Upon hearing this my spine coils like a wine-corker-spiral-staircase
upward; where my brain plugs my cranium like a cork
and my eyes drip like blank canvas,
I am one hollow statue decaying in a melting structure
with wax in my ears I feed landscapes to winged insects
as I drown in pools of water/color.

Behind me is a sky so burlesque it actually looks like the clouds are crying.
Under me is a ground so vast it has nine horizons wrapped in a double helix.
Reconstructed beside me is a tree so old it could be the same wood as The Crucifix.
Nested inside me where my spine should be is a coat rack made crooked by the weight of all-nighters.
The texture of my skin makes it look like god paints with typewriters.

"No, no," he says, his voice turning melancholy, atomic, uranic, idyll,
"I don't hate surrealism as a movement,
because hate's such a strong word. Oh god, I guess I just don't get it."

Now I'm overcome with a sincere desire to light an entire herd of giraffes on fire
and sip wine beneath the light as if it were dinner by candlelight,

"Seriously?" I say. "Under giraffes, in this light
I can't tell if you're Lincoln or Jesus.
In fact, we all look like swans with elephant reflections.
Your trunk is a trumpet.
Don't even get me started on where we derive our visions of god
from where I stand everything casts a shadow in the shape of where it's heading
and the sky, vast and pale and open, the sky is the only all-seer
and the truth is far less surreal:
if your demons are ants then your god is an anteater."

I can see the chalk whites of his teeth stall door,
squeaky hinge, his mouth-
occupied with a realization he can't pronounce.
A pause as pregnant as a desert landscape,
ornamented with butterflies.

His head is an empty room with an evaporating skylight,
his ears, hang like clocks on a half-wall, melting.
The escalator to his brain is a spiral staircase moving in reverse.
His eyelids peel back like the last page of a two-dimensional book.
I can see with my Spellbound eyes, we are finally on the same page.

When his tongue curls back into his saloon jaw
like a bee sting rifle shot back into the mouth of a lunging tiger,
swallowed deep into the wells of a fish belly.

"I'm sorry" he says, "that's not what I meant."

People still ask me about you as if you were a standard operating procedure.

People still don't get it.
People still say; it's better to have loved and lost
than to have--

What people don't seem to understand is that I don't dig epilogues,
I don't speak with punctuation, I don't end with period. and I don't capitalize.

Because tonight
I'll sleep with a pillow softer than your self-consciousness

and even though I don't speak in redundancies, allow me to repeat myself
'cause I know you're not takin' notes
'cause you're the type of person who likes to hang on a moment
and own it
but do me just one favor
in this minute minute, please
realize
that you've got too many easels
and not enough paint
and self-expression is moot if the canvas is blank.

Tonight!
I'll sleep on my good side

so that tomorrow when people ask me about you as if I have a degree in your ology
at least i'll look well-rested when I tell them
that I used to cry when i wrote you letters
and how I used to write for you
and how in my head I STILL paint renaissance paintings of you
and how they hang in this cranium like a sixteenth century mausoleum

because genius is driven by affection

and affection knows
that we were born with more voices than our mouths could house
and so some of them got swallowed.

But genius -- genius knows nothing.
Genius knows that we do things with our mouths sometimes,
like when we kiss or cough or collaborate.

Thus genius is driven by affection
and affection made you my muse.

So please listen to the words of a man who knows where his voice has been;

if you were made of construction paper
and a few shades red-er
I'd glue love to you
l-o-v-e, spelled out in pasta pieces,
sprinkled in the glitter of hugs and kisses,
I'd hold you lovingly in my hands and give you--

to somebody else.



xoxo