15 years ago today
I was ten
And kids were getting pulled from class
Taken home by worried parents
And all the kids were watching the TV sets
In their classrooms
Except for my class
We were not allowed
The teacher
mrs. coyer
Said
"You all see soon enough. It'll be everywhere."
And I hated her for not allowing us to know
But when I got home
And I did know,
I understood
She was trying to protect us
From the image and the terror
Of death.

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.

You will lay yourself into me like so much brickwork,
building and sealing each hard-fired thought and feeling,
stapling old wounds shut with smiles and glittering eyes,
your lips stealing into mine, welcome thieves.
I would like to resist you,
to turn my shoulder and laugh; not cruelly,
but with self-assurance that this is all just play.
But when you place your hand against my face and pull me close,
and I feel the warmth of you against the warmth of me,
the truth of it all spills across my soul,
leaving bright stains of gold that shimmer in the new day's dawn.
Yes, all things new. Yes, all things old.
Yes, all things you and I.

I'm sitting on the carpet of my rented room
Swatting neurotically at gnats and fleas that may
Or may not
Actually be there,
On my arms and on my face.
The only proof are the little red bites,
Up my left arm and across the bottom of my chin, where they stop.
As if my blood boils while I sleep, leaving little red marks to show that I need to
Chill out
Calm down
De-stress
But I'm
in distress,
Destroyed.
I need a higher up.
I need a voice that speaks with more experience,
With firm understanding,
With the knowledge of everything.
And I can't seem to find it in Bibles, Torahs, Quarans, or other holy scriptures.
I only hear it whisper from old history textbooks,
I hear it only
Chiming softly like drowned out cymbals from the radio talk
I only see it peripherally in my rear view mirror,
Can only taste it as an after taste of many drinks.
It is ribonucleic acid,
It is thymine, guanine, adenine, and cytosine.
It is the carpet of my rented room.

Seven serpents all in their own wicker baskets
Slithering, sleeping, curling and seeking
And a withered old man with skin
Red with ochre and brown with sun
Sits cross-legged on the dark earth floor of his hut
And waits.

Each serpent has a name, from left to right they are
Andromeda, Cyrus, Diochenes, Libratti, Nigellus, Fordham and Justus.
Whichever found their way out first would be able to tell the old man something
About the world waiting ahead.

So,
As the late afternoon sun baked the sparse shrubbery around his canvas tent,
Dyed orange and yellow and red by the clay and dirt and wind and rain and sun,
He waited and watched the seven wicker baskets.
Some shook occasionally, others stayed still the entire duration of the waiting.

But just as the bottom of the sun hit the edge of the horizon,
Fordham slipped his sleek, scaled face from the basket, flicked his tongue twice, and sailed smoothly between the two errant ***** of tent which held the entrance taut.

The old man released the souls of the other six from the bodies of the snakes
And gathered his travelling things;
A hat, a walking stick, and an old tanned sheep's bladder filled with spring water.
The hat spread out wide over his head,
And pooled in a large circular shadow far from his feet.
The sun was nearly set.
He began a thick, slow burning fire, and took his trail to the beach,
Thinking that it might be his last
Time ever seeing the ocean,
Listening to it speak.

My canvas is the same as yours
Just white, solid surface
Made to fill with shapes and patterns
Of varying sizes.

The only difference is that
You use more colors
To paint your truth
And I use more words
To paint mine.

Some of us got lucky
And found what makes us
Work
Some of us still wonder

But life is art
And we paint it with our tongues
And with our eyes and hands.

Don't argue with me anymore
About whose paintings
Are
Better.

in a house full of

                                  nothing

the camera
l
u
r
k
s
like a ******,

silently

                                                     watches

the floor weep into it's
--------------------------------------FOUNDATION----------------­----------------------------

and the knock!
                 knock!
                   knock!

coming from the                                                              ­  
                                                                                                         closet door

echos
  chos
   hos
    os

and we sit
and stare
at
heart-winning photographs;
the children we used to
be

                                                       we  silently

seep in the remembrance;

narcissus
was
   not
     in
       love
with himself

he was
  in
    love
       with
         h-h i-i s-s   s-s h-h a-a d-d o-o w-w,
the perceived


                                                        nothin­g


Just a trick
of  -   -   -   light
f
a
  l
    l
     i
      n
        g

out of books
like
l
e
  a
   v
    e
     s

of emotion,
like

F

       A

                 T

                              H

                             ­             O

                                                 ­         M

                                                     ­                      S

                                                   of suffering

                                                /  T / O / R / N /
from your
l  i  p  s

like black tar on your
s   k   i   n  

camouflage
for
the



                    A              B                 Y                      S                       S

I know your heart,
Only if it is like mine.
And if it is I know your hurt.
I know you hurt for others.
I know you hurt for things untouchable
But that can be felt by all.
You yearn for betterness.
Know of its existence by the dance inside your bones
And the song inside your soul.
And this world is a bad world
For the ones that feel
And think the way we do.
But it isn't time for hatred,
Because hatred has no room for goodness.
Remain vigilant not only in thought
But in action
Love is not the act of ignoring violence,
Bigotry, sexism, war
Love is the act of overcoming.
We shall overcome.

Her smoke moves like Spanish moss,
Blue-gray tendrils intertwining
Around the shining plastic beads slung low on her wrist,
As she takes another liberal sip from her Budweiser bottle
and does her best to ignore the man she came here with tonight,
he's telling the barmaid about how he got the scar on his right cheek,
And I know parts of their story,
But the thing that troubles me most
Is that I'll never know how it ends.

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.

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

She asked if I could I said "yes but
I won't."
She asked why not, laughing all the same,
And I said "because I
Prefer not to."
Then she got really serious,
Her eyebrows scrunched down hard toward her nose
And she said "you're on
Borrowed time."
I asked her what she expected me to do about that
And she said "live more."

my stomach is an empty pit
hard and well-lined with the stories
of a thousand nights of hunger games
where you play to eat and sleep
you lose and die, shuddering as your organs
fail
one by one by two by two

I'm just wishing for the turkey dinner
the crackers and cheese
the milk and water and juice
that sits untouched on grocery store shelves
too expensive for me to take
and fill my body up

Relax past participle in order to
Accelerate mass particles
And innervate long dead articles
Of thought once thought tried and untrue.

she sinks to her knees like the setting sun
all reds and golds and streaks of purple-blue
and weeps for the things and the places she has lost
just a child, steeply barefooting around gnarled upturned roots
afraid that if it rains again
she might never be able to find her way back.

To the man with the sword
to the man with the plough
to the man with the wife
with whom he must row,

everyone sleeps
from the same pool of eternity
and walks closer each day
to it's shores.

From the woman with the rings
to the woman who wears rags,
from the lady who sings
and makes puppydogs wag,

everyone eats
from the same grainy earth
and toils in the soils until death
from birth.

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.

If I cut you from my life
Like an image from a family photograph
Your absence would still exist
But it would lose your features
Make you into empty space

As nameless and yet as true as the heart
Which beats wildly inside me
As I imagine a new, strange lover's eyes
Meeting mine for the first time

And how
as we share our first drinks,
He'll ask me about you
And I won't remember the words I once said
To describe you
Because how do you explain something
That isn't there

the car wash plays music over two tiny, square speakers, one mounted to either side of the vending machines.
It usually plays modern pop music hits and misses,
But today it's playing Elvis.
Today it's playing Suspicious Minds.
Today the sun is shining and the sky is blue.
All the washing stalls are occupied.
Silver, blue, and two black cars are getting clean today.
And I sit across the lot, waiting to work the rest of my shift,
Watching the day turn,
As House of The Rising Sun begins it's turn on the car wash loudspeakers.

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.

The air is still, and the sky flooded
gray.
Green things reach up while black things decay.
Cars hum past, bothered by delay,
And fifty years ago today,
It was Easter Sunday,
And the sun was high and bright,
Golden in the sky,
And children screamed with delight,
As they found many-colored eggs
And devoured chocolate pies.
But then
Their shiny shoes got stuffed in closets, easter memory forever now,
The houses that were here remain,
But the families are all gone somehow.
The air is still. The sky flooded gray. It is a dreary, weary Easter Sunday.
But God wanted it all this way.

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.

When I see the people abandon their old American Dream,
I read about their travels, their hungers and their happinesses,
I wonder if it is
madness
or if it is
love
which has inspired their souls
to commit the ultimate treason-
the pursuit of freedom.

I see a monster
It is eating spaghetti
It is a good thing

I'm glad that it does
Not eat me or my brother
He likes spaghetti

We asked him his name
And he grumbled intensely,
"I'm Mr. Monster!"

He always came in
After a quarter past ten
And raided our fridge.

Frederiksburgville Town
Didn't usually have monsters
But they had pasta

And so the monster
Told the little children things
About from where it came

And it sang a song
That was very short and long
And it went like this:

Gobbledegook gobbledeedee
Fricasha bulungo tirimasu wings!

The children sat stunned
It was a horrible song
You can't sing along.

What speaks to you?
The tongue varies - but tastes,
Tastes, my dear,
They change slowly.

Is it the touch of warm skin?
The sashay of cascading hair
and the pleasant popping
Of undone buttons?
Mortal desires
Have mortal consequences,
My dear.

Is it assurance in your wealth?
Do you long to never worry
About the poverty that oppresses?
You can have much but never
Have it all,
My dear.

Would that these words
Could speak to you
And cause a shift
Deep within your soul
If such a thing exists,
My dear.

But my tongue is twisted.
So it goes,
My dear.

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.

The wretched sound
I mistook for tires squelching flat against pavement
Is actually the timely torrent of water
From a broken sprinkler head
Four houses down the street
First soft wet dribbles
Then increasing pressure
Until twenty or so seconds of geysering
Then nothing for ten seconds
Water pours loudly into the soaked mud
And everyone else sleeps.

When I can't take the silence anymore
I type my little message,
send it to your cellular device
"Goodnight, sleep well."
When I really want to say
"I love you, sweet dreams."
And a few minutes later you say,
"Oh yeah. Good dreams."
And I want to kiss you,
smile at you, eat frozen raspberry yogurt
with you,
and I can't so
I guess I'll go to sleep.

My guilt is a sad song that is catchier than Spanish influenza
I press it down and up, like levers on a strange machine
But the fluctuations are constant,
Always teeming high and sweeping low,
But never
Ever
Gone.

I guess it is conscience,
My moral discontent,
Which breeds this inner animosity,
But this is only data
And would be best used to implement a constant rotary of ways to help others
Rather than damning myself.

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.

If the world be ever changing,
Ever rotating on its wobbly axis,
Then I,
As constituent and citizen of the world,
Be ever changing too.

I was born hot, and wet, and loud, the last day of June.
And now I have grown,
And I have grown cold,
Because the hurt of learning
The pain of change, and the disappointment,
Has eaten to oxygen from the flame of joy
I was born holding
In my chest.

Were that I could find ignition within,
Some magic bit of unlockable truth,
rather than casting out my net of questions,
And attending to the ones who bite.

Asexuality?
Nah,
I am the Bartleby
Of ***.

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 rain fell with the night,
all groaning thunder and vociferous lavender lightning
the water staining all it touched like old black ink
streetlamps dissolving under and into darkness dripping wet
and I watched from the cold side of a second-floor bedroom window
breathing onto the panes and drawing smiley faces with my thumbs

When the rain had finally stopped,
I was still sat there,
still thinking about how wonderful it would be
if you were on the cold side of this second-floor bedroom window
with me.