The woods were all shafts
of late afternoon light,
slipshodding through canopies and across singing marshes
of toads and crickets,
dripping as warm honey drips,
Collecting in angular golden pools,
Much like how delicate gold chains might fold over and into themselves in order to
Reflect,
We reflected that the day was nearly done,
And we held hands as we walked back home,
And you told me things that made my heart expand,
And now you are gone
And it rests
With an ache that is wholly
Unfamiliar.
I'm just a pile of thin chain, made brass by neglect.
No,
I haven't stopped thinking about you
Yet.

Here it is again.
That murderer of smiles.
The truth of my feelings
going and making you feel sad again.
I keep apologizing, and I can feel that it only makes you want to
push me away, as far away as possible.
And I keep wondering
why do I do this?
You're not the first friend I've lost to ***,
or lack thereof.
You won't be the last.
Should I spend my life alone
in order to forego the risk of hurting
the ones who would spend time with me?
The ritual of befriended and abandoned
has left me feeling like
there is no one like me,
not in the whole world.
When I spend my day with you
I love you
even if I never **** your ****.
When I buy you beer you like
I love you,
even if you never show me off to your family.
Is my love any less
because it comes from my spirit
and not my body?
This world is a scary place.
Yes it is.

I feel like ten thousand thunderstorms
On mute
Just a series of verbs and vibrations
I wonder what my words really say
What they really mean
But the lightning show gets in the way
Makes you gasp and forget
The conversation we were having
And the last words
Unspoken
Are Nivana in a shot glass

Here it is,
The end.

I give up,
I give up,
I give up.

It has been ages,
Whole geologic stratos of time arrayed by color and not by year,
Since I have breathed deeply and loved warmly and felt that a fire was burning for me in someone's bedroom window.

But I feel the moment approaching,
And though scared and unsure I may be,
I ache in wait for the inconsolable events about to hit,
Knowing that there is new life during and after it has come.

The Great One strolled in,
Pleased as a fat slice of birthday cake,
In the mid afternoon heat and sweat
Of Low Georgia summer.
He kicked off his muddy boots
With the gusto of an aroused lumberjack
And took to the staircase as
A marathon runner takes to his first couple
Kilometers.

When he reached the hallway at the top
He hollered, "You've got ten seconds to be
****-*** naked, 'cause here I come!"
And he stripped himself of his plaid
And blue jeans,
Mud-hemmed socks and underwear,
And all his garments
descended half-way down the staircase
Before folding on top of one another neatly
As if gently placed there,
Rather than being flung at the zig
zagging carpet.
"It was the clothes' way of rebelling,"
No one, nobody said.
But most true things are left
Unsaid.

The Great One traipsed,
Yes, traipsed,
Down the short, blue-wallpapered hallway
And spun the shiny brass ****
Of his bedroom door, and pushed
Until It swung open,
And he said,
"Are you ready?"
And stared into the unlit bedroom,
The two north-facing windows open,
Short, floral pattern curtain his wife had
Sewn, flapping stupidly in a breeze that hadn't
Been breezing when he was outside,
Just fifteen minutes ago,
And the Great One saw that the bed was made,
Just a slab of gray polyester/cotton blend,
And his wife was not naked on that bed.
And the TV was off.
And the TV was always never off.

And the Great One stood very still
And felt the silence, and the stillness
Of the house around him,
How it seemed like a strange thing,
Against the rolling gray clouds and
Snapping wind.

He reached his right hand
To his right back pocket
And typed the four-digit alakazam
To get into his phone
and saw nothing new.
He rang his wife
But was transitioned to voicemail.
He sat on the edge of the bed.

Well.

the curtains flapped harder
Against themselves as he watched
The storm roll in.
And thought to himself,
A guilty child in an old body
prone to superstition,
"Shoulda cleaned my boots off,
'Fore I came in.
Shoulda cleaned 'em off.
She would have given me
Hell."

He let the rain come into the room,
It spattered against the soft yellow painted wall
And
The curtains simply shuddered,
Sodden as they were.

Well.

She sure had a knack of giving him hell.
The Great One changed his title back to David,
And stared out of the bedroom windows for a long time.
He woke up, without remembering falling asleep.

Her body is a patient maze of understanding
Devine calypso music inside broken hip bones which chatter as ice in warm glasses of tropical **** do
It is useless to call out her name
Someone once told me
If evening comes tomorrow then this day is over yesterday
Never knew anything I couldn't read first
Someone said
You got to let her go
And we all laughed because the rooms are empty and the streets are flooded and no one comes down
This way anymore
Because of the way the moon howls at every thing crossing north and screams red at the south things
And the stars all rush to meet us

Love is a quiet whisper
In a small, cold tent
On the side of a vast forest
As the sun breaks over the tops of the trees
And spills itself in pools between
Open-armed branches.

Love is a joyous shout
From the top of a tall peak
At the edge of the eternal, hungry ocean
As the sun falls below the water's edge
And the sky is all purples and velvety blues
Slowly punctured by the gold-green light of
Summer stars.

Love is hands held in the backseat of the bus
Or against the hard, uncomforting metal and plastic of this worn hospital chair.
Love is whatever love chooses to be.
And as they salty, cold tears slide down my face,
Rough and excema-ridden in this weather,
I am glad that I still know
What love is.

Poetry is
extremes.
You never read a poem
filled with middleness.
Even a poem about a
ham sandwich
is either passionately for
or against.

I called the shots until I realized
I was shooting all my friends.

I think I have a strange heart,
One that warbles in my chest,
Like a fat red cardinal trembling
As it decides to turn back around
On a thin twig of a tree branch,
Whose leaves jitter and shake in time
With long red feathers on wings.

I think my heart is strange,
But it seems to know you very well.
What will come of this, you think?
Only time can tell.

Much to do,
and
no way to do it.
nodding your head
you say,

I

like the way you
only sing
very
early in the morning.

you
only sing when I'm
up.

The space and time between who I am and who I was
Isn't really real, says quantum theory
It's all happening at once
Just a cacophony of every everything that ever was
Exploding simultaneously into and out of existence, just
Bubbles squeezed into one another, growing larger with each input,
And our brains can only receive the signal of this three-dimensional, one-way version of things,
Can only translate it's movements into the illusion of straight time
Can only hopelessly trouble itself with relatively unimportant matters
Like the physical, emotional, ridiculous distance between myself
And you, my sweetest, loveliest darling,
Who are so perfect and so fluid
You might as well be the only matter
That ever mattered.

Except that maybe distance is what makes my heart yearn for you, maybe it's
Not some romantic magic formed in the dust of ancient stars,
Which whirled and grasped in the post-nova, until sinking this way and that, forming bonds and making plans,
Just like any other college graduate,
Never expecting to end up as part of a human being billions of years later.
But then, when do we ever live the life our educations prepared us for?
Hardly ever.
Right on down to the particulars.

Wouldn't it be nice,
I thought today.
Wouldn't it be nice
to shelve my worries,
In the manner of shelving bad books;
Poor prose, hackneyed hooks,
sold to Rome but the Romans won't look,
Yeah, that's a good metaphor for what I think about,
You,
Me,
my dearest Society.

And then I saw that I could stop
And let my observations drop
To sit and drain into the earth
So that I have nothing to rehearse.
On the day or the days that I
Find love not written in the sky
But singing in the bubble-pop
Of brief awareness, before all's lost,
I think

Yes.
This is how eternity feels.

But eternity ends before it begins
For a soul reused, recycled, made
Bare by mechanical-biological sins.

And your soul must be like mine,
I think with the fire of a desperate, jealous lover
How could it not be? I can tell by
The way that you smother,
And your mother,
Who sent me messages in my dreams,
Still tells you
No
When you drink to me.
So here here,
Is a toast,
To the open, balding sea,
May it swallow up you
And may it swallow up me.

The sea is milk
And I am soap
White wash it all
And paint new pictures

It is not difficult to know how to fly,
I think,
afterall!
our very atoms have flown aeons to reach and reassemble themselves here,
in this way.

Every mammal knows how to fly.
Some bacteria remember how too,
but they are a wily bunch and untrustworthy as sailors on a mid morning slop across an unwritten and unpronounceable port.

The trouble isn't KNOWING.
The trouble is GROWING.

Can't grow wings or thin, light, air-filled bones.
Can't drift upwards on the airstreams.
But you can grow upwards,
and you can fly.

The secret lies in knowing all your own reasons as to why
you want to fly.

I am
25 years old
Looking into the eyes of a man
Who might already know me better
Than anyone I know.
And my heart knows the way
But my mind is clouded with questions
And as he kisses me
I wonder
Who I am now.
Who I am now.

If every body rolls down the hill
And never seeks to climb again
These body becomes part of the ground
And lessens the hill on one side.

Essentially, if everyone fails to get back up
There is no hill to roll down anymore.

My nights become endless days
When you are absent from the waking moments of my morning,
My afternoon,
My evening.
They stumble on themselves in waiting for your visage,
Ambling evermore until your touch,
Your voice,
Your stories are here with me,
Travelling light as hydrogen in my heart,
Warm as summer waters against my skin,
Strange bright thing in the field of endless color and variation,
I don't know if I love you
But I know I am enchanted,

It is my dear desire to see you,
Not just once more,
But always.

Provide me with the magic mirror
So that I may finally sleep sound,
With the crackling warmth of your dry laughter still churning in my ears.

So,
I'm usually pretty good at deflecting those gray-sky feelings,
But today I reflected them, and they really left me reeling
Because there ain't no party like a pity party,
And a pity party don't stop.
It just fades,
Unlike these feelings I have, feelings
For a man who makes my pulse quicken
But my heart ache,
And before I go on about heartbreak,
Remember;
Pity party don't stop.
It just whispers,
Strange and terrible little things,
Or long and loud screams of dissent,
It'll never be about you. It'll never be about me.

I watched a guy I like walk out with a girl who walks out with everyone.
I watched the ***** of trash sink into the rot of garbage in my mother's living room.
I watched a truely wonderful woman cry because of a young woman's undue scorn.
I watched a good friend cough until his face was red, and his legs were wobbly. I watched him retch.
I watched the food in my fridge slowly rot, untouched.

Don't stop.

Sweat pours from the places where my bones meet
My eyes shut against the glare of oil on asphalt
The wind carries whispers of rain, makes the leaves dance and fall
My skin radiates and tightens as I walk
Cars trundle past and around me, I hear them make their way
And I think about my mom, and about food, and about showering when I get home
This isn't a poem, is it
It's just me

It is time for me to go now
I've done all that I can
I wished for more from this place, I thought
But I really wished for more from me
Which is why it is time to go home
And sleep the five year nightmare of my loneliness
Away

Instant relief in a world of instant everything
It seemed impossible but now seems obvious,
As everything does in hindsight.
Of course, of course,
I must retain my walls,
Boundaries high and low, far reaching
As Hadrian's conquest,
Probably an echo in my blood,
Brought down through generations,
Only to be changed now
In a world too full of information,
Scattered like bags of ashes across the face of global communications and user friendly internet.


Ancestry battles now
Mutation maybe
And the cry goes out,
To remedy instant electronic relief.
And not have frescos devoted to iPads
When our civilization becomes dust.

She sighed and tossed the hair out of her eyes
He sipped loudly from a nearly dry Coke can
"This *****," she said. "I'm going home."
A jazzy song started to play over the outside speakers
A couple ambled past, walking their minituare schnauzer
"Ok." He said, shaking the Coke can irritably.

They sat on a yellow couch,
That smelled strongly of moth *****,
And that had thick, dull brass buttons
In rows of eight and nine across the seating.
And the birthday party continued on
In the living room mostly,
But also in the kitchen and out on
The back porch.

The little yellow couch sat
In a small, awkward hallway
Between the dining room and kitchen,
And it took three minutes for any party goers
To interrupt them.

Her name was Alice then.
When she turned thirty-eight she changed it
To Alma.
His name was and is Robert.
He wore brown shorts that day.

Her hair was curled, for the occasion.
He asked her if she liked strawberry cake.
She said she didn't.
He laughed and said he'd eat her slice.
She said she wouldn't mind.
She reached out and held his hand.
He let her.
Until the girl walked through.
And they ooed and awwed at Alice and Robert.
And then they giggled themselves into the living room.
And Robert, almost twelve, looked at Alice
And thought, "She is beautiful".
And he said, "See you around," and walked into the kitchen.

And Alice thought,
"Maybe I will try strawberry cake."