In our morning read
love across ashy skies.
Read contentment in our
small clinging and sighs.

In our body speaks
a language so new,
no, not new, read
forgotten. Read
lost and found within
the confines of lust
and its way
of blinding us.

A voice burned
into our silence asks
only for light, for one day
to pour through the thin parts
of our hearts as we breathe
in and out, in
and out.

That chewy rumble and chunk
blues guitar heartbeat
that questions the note
between the chord between
the gallop hum of electrical sulphur reactions.
You question the truth hidden in matches,
the heroism of every background
character crisscrossing the periphery.

The first rule of the open door
is someone must walk through it.
Someone has to slide off that bench
and find a new seat, lean their head
against the cool glass and sleep
across time zones and hillsides,
rows of corn running alongside.

I dreamt of that place, I shouldn't
say again because I don't count myself
a liar. But the table was set, wine poured
and that dog wouldn't hunt.

The sidewalks ran with the moonlight
of one thousand doorknobs, teeth
of hungry doorways calling to be filled,
to be necessary. All the orange flowers
covered my grave that night. Branches
shuddered with the blackness of one
hundred crows, the moon just slivers
of leftover cheesecake crumbling down
into the spines of hotel bibels and ******
veins of the orchard's nectarines.
And the clouds beat their knuckles
against the coming night until their passion
bled out onto the bleached white sheets
on their chests, all purple and red and blue
and bruised.

A colossal stillness hushed its way
across the swaying seashore.

I was born in a story you wouldn't believe.
I was born in the back of a minivan
sitting on the rails of a one track mind.
I was born out of a need for gluttony.
My father couldn't handle my beauty
and committed himself to 50 years of tilting
shining self destruction. I was born atop a mountain
that was once a molehill. No one could see
the rising sun for all the jutting inconsistencies
of the heaving throne beneath me.
I was born in and out of a wave violently
caressing the coast of a chiming belltower,
tulip and rose blooms ripped from their stems.

At six in the morning when the inches
of snow are still holding the sunshine
off with their vacant swelling hills
and troughs, I hear the passing traffic
a block east. Will the traffic stop?

When I say traffic, I mean the rumble of coal
cars two miles distant. I mean garbage
trucks full of yawning men I don't know
and garbage I've known for a week.
I mean the women leaving hospitals
bound for sunbathed sleep habits
and more long days of night. When I say
traffic, I mean the adolescent fox foraging
through the Baptist churchyard. I mean
the line of metal carriages trailing
from checkout line 10. I mean the blood
racing to my arm after we spent the night
holding each other.

When I say blood racing I mean the multiplying
and dividing of cells, beats in a symphony built
up, crumbling down by an ancient arithmetic
pulling us in, broken gravity we fight by holding
onto it, clutching it to our hearts as we step into
the earth.

When I say blood racing, I mean the tiny
blind lives bustling under flesh overpasses,
blood cells commuting perpetually even after
years of smoking cigarettes, lungs an oil spill
butterfly resting in the chest. When I say
six in the morning, I mean the dark hour,
my second wind, when I rise to clear our
tables and stack the dishes in the sink.

I mean the hour you finally went to bed
after we fell asleep on the couch, again.
I mean the hour I crept into the hall
to take out the trash, tight hand-rolled cigarette
patient on my lip.

When I say six in the morning, I mean the time
between the milk man and the sunrise, I mean
the minutes falling around the decaying beauty
of gold and scarlet leaves prostrate on cold
sidewalks.


When I say decaying beauty, I mean the wizened
grey tree, standing naked, no, stooping
over the fence by your road.

When I say stooping, I mean the man draped
in a scarlet vest and goldenrod button-down
wincing himself upright on the stool, unconcerned
with the dark pub behind him or the faces bent
through his glass in the dim refractions of the Open sign,
faces bent over mostly empty glasses, empty faces.

Today was thick and warm, swelling like a marshmallow
held over our summer campfire.
We slipped down the narrow, curving creek,
a run-on sentence near the page's waist
in the book you left lying open, face down,
on the night table.

The banks yawned up over our heads,
and sunflowers lined the cusp of the ridge
watching us, a silent yellow audience of earth
bound stars.
The paddle breaking the surface of the water
was the only sound, amplified by the miniature
valley we were conversing with.