All defined, labeled, identified.
like quiet children who stand aside,
                                                    Silent as a dusty book,
Captivated by their own shoes,
must be pardoned, must be excused.
Those who mumble and avoid your eyes,
them do not mind, they’re just shy.

Imagine if everything still and reserved
Were undermined by such a word.
What would we say of those calm characters
mountains, towers, poetry, flowers?
If perchance one afternoon we met the horizon or the moon,
Are we to say that because often they stand away,
Afar in photos, landscapes, scenery,
off center, silent, beyond the sea,
That these defining features of the sky
Should be cast off and labeled shy?

Those amongst us, who silently
Live largely in their reverie,
Hiding behind their books and journals,
Heard not, but for the scratch of their pencils,
Will name you someday;
They'll have something undeniably brilliant to say.
Should you disagree, consider and think,
Violent, boisterous thunder is the voice of silent-seeming lightning.

Inward anger inhibits.
You keep pushing, knocking,
finally yielding determination to disinterest,
to frustration. Foreign concepts
like undeveloped film.
Until, barely latching onto the fabric,
you happen upon it
at some odd hour, the light
adjusts and your perception,
and you may grasp it,
knocking through rotten wood,
collapsing into understanding,
and free within hollow enlightenment
to finally progress.

When the darkness comes
the light of day is painful
the most brilliant hue of blue
makes you want to close your eyes and never open them again.
And when you do, you cannot close them.
Even the hollowing aura of sleep does not drown you the way the dullness does.
When you're disgusted by sincerity
and you run from happy eyes because they haunt you.
They seem empty, unreal, too alive.
The pulse in your veins makes you squirm,
makes you feel like the living dead because you know this isn't life.
This is the shadow of death when the sun is behind him and he is walking backward so that he grows on you and stays with you as long as you will have it.
Until you awaken from sleepless nights
and decide to breathe again.

He moved into the dead rose
red paint that peeled
into dust under our squeaking rubber soles,
framed by white lines, dictators, rules.
End lines like yellow tape,
Do Not Cross over.
One step past my scramble;
one foot, hark on its toes,
grows from the red; two
white leather flower pots
for his pulsing hairy legs.
He had paused with a purpose,
it seems, he teased,
then bounced rubber rock on rock
before he looked back at me.
Hovered by his shadow and
the hoop that crowned his head,
I lunged to take a risk.
In the name of all those 5 foot 4,
I threw my hand through
the shape his elbow formed,
cutting edge with cutting edge,
with swift. I’d managed to learn
the burn of rubber escaping
my fingertips. I’d touched
what was his, this giant hoop tyrant,
but would soon claim what was mine.
My chest sunk back into my frame
deflated of hope and pride,
only to be filled instead with shame,
while his song –grunt, swish, clap, YES –played,
and belittled by his High Five.

She ate at a table for two,
coffee, bagel, solitude.
She brought her mouth to the spoon,
not once looking down at her food.

She searched the current instead,
a flying flock of quick steps.
Her face is blurry at this distance.
Ahead she sat, in her brown sweater,
buried into the brick wall behind her.

Her unsettled eyes stand out, shifting.
A fingertip drummer skips a beat, finger nail high hat
–enter green shirt, large, red, back pack –
and then a solo.
A low, bass heart lifts in crescendo.

She stands, hello, she sits,
a white daisy field of smiles.
He curtains the show.
Now I look down to watch
her shadow.

Sometimes I awaken at the edge of dawn
as the world is just turning
over in bed; so early that I forget the existence of people.
I forget their ways and patterns, as if I am not of them.
I forget what I might hear in place of the silence
and I follow no path
because they've all been erased by fresh snow over night,
still falling randomly from branches and other high places.
Directionless, I trod just within the gutter, through the puddles of
snow melting under the new warmth of morning.
I don't walk in the road
I don't want to forget completely,
but just for a little while, I walk alone
to see what it might be like to be the only one.

To ponder your existence,
to over-think.
To experience emotions, growth, life, critically;
and find another word for everything.
A word that better describes how you feel, what you see, and what you think,
So that some validating other may understand.
So that you are not alone with your echoing thoughts,
with your conscious.

Even worse about being intangibly alive and being alone in living
is finding yourself
in the only place where no other may ever reach you.
An ever-changing place, ever chained to your state.
Uncontrolled and deep.
Unsafe and terrifying.
Somewhere you may reach and travel without even moving.
A place that knows you better than you know yourself.
When you're asleep you understand it all,
no further sorrowful questions.
It's all sensible and clear,
when it is all absurd.
In your subconscious, you may be lost but not curious,
because you know all the answers, you just forget them in the morning.
Part of being human
is longing the things we have lost.
There's little we want more than to remember what we forgot.

She ran a hot bath
so she could be alone.
Bubbles, like dead fish
on the surface were quiet.
She listened beneath,
the tap was a waterfall.
And she had become
Maelstrom.
A whirl pool in the center of some world,
in another universe,
where those fish were alive
and they could converse.
They loved her, they said,
but what did they know,
“stupid fish,”
she said, “liars leave me alone.”
They clung to her and stayed,
experts of exfoliation,
they cleansed her,
gave her new skin,
the wing of a fish,
her own tail,
something to move forward with.
But her eyes were closed.
The entire time her eyes were closed,
her face wet with the light in her bathroom
and the tears she could not shut in.
She drained the water that she could not move
that Sunday afternoon.

My love is asleep.
He says he does not dream,
but his supple lids tremble.
I study his face for expression.
Shifting, he grumbles and smiles,
his searching hands find me close,
pull me in, only then is he still.
I stroke his hair, kiss his shoulder,
tickled, he swipes at me.
I laugh. He is funny even at this distance.
Timeless at my side, he seems heavy.
I am a tiny planet, heavy too, and serious.
I love you in the language of the world:
silent gravity.

What demented creatures, this humanity,
Who praise the unseen and visit the dead,
who dread darkness, naming emotions, expressions,
Love, hate, catatonic depression. Obsessed,
counting each second in a steady breath.
Who wish upon eyelashes and stars,
Who hex and jinx, condemn and curse,
Cross our fingers when we lie,
Bless our food and pray to God
That before we wake, we do not die.
In the various words of noble voices, I’ve heard
the sole thing keeping us from death is breath.
Yet, our friend of old and dear
whom we keep so inseparably near,
is the one thing keeping us from life –fear.

I see myself headed to Nowhere, and fast.
I'll be ******* down South towards there real soon.
Forgetting all that I've known in the past,
to try something entirely new.
It's really very far from here, Nowhere,
near this high point where I've stood all my life.
Maybe I'll happen upon fortune and fame,
or spend the rest of my days in soul-stealing strife.
I don't know exactly the coordinates;
when I get there, I'll send you my address.
And I don't have a plan, a road, or a map,
but I feel in my heart exactly where it's at.
I know I'll find it, I'll send post cards along the way
as I wander hopefully towards
Nowhere in the US of A.

I used to dance.
But when you came here
The music stopped.
I no longer dance
To hold my reflection still
and perfect in your eyes.
When you came here
We would sleep all day,
Exhausted from gazing
at each other amazed.
And it was quiet
As a vacuum.
I only feel rhythm in you.
My heart dances to
the shy pulse in your neck,
But the music has stopped.
I just don't hear it.
I only hear you.
Your words tickle my ears,
Your voice melts honey in my soul,
and in this moment,
To hold my smile in bliss
and carelessness,
I want to dance with you.
I would move slowly to the silence
But you begin to hum.
When you started humming dear,
I'd hoped that the music was gone forever.
I would sway to your sound forever,
for all other sound has
Lost its fervor,
And for music,
My passion is gone.
I do not miss it. I shall not long for it.
All the breath in me is gone to sighs,
My energy, turned to heat.
The music is gone
but I will not long again.
As long as
you are here.

On a warm, sunny day,
The beach is loved.
The waves caress the shore,
The sun kissed sand will dance on the breeze,
And laughter is a song.

Children will bury the things they love
deep inside her pockets.
But the sun will move on to other sands.
The babes will dig up their things and go,
shaking out their pockets.

They will not dig their toes into her warmth
because they are asleep
clinging to his chest hair;
they won’t let go of daddy.
How they love their daddy.

At night no one loves the beach,
except the waves that beat her.
The grains harbor cold and everything hardens.
Now the moon, no longer the sun,
reigns the sky and enlightens

                                                    with a distant stare.
Your raging waves, your frigid moon, your children,
you are everything, everywhere.
But I am only one beach of many.
And when you are rough and harsh, I thicken.
I am a lover.
I am resistant.

At the height of the day’s heat,
my grains are dry and loose.
I still hide surprise sea shells inside your shoes.
I still smile when you kiss me,
When you breathe against my dunes.

But when night creeps on,
and that wind begins to bite,
a beach has no arms with strength
and no legs to walk away.
I am not crazy, I am a lover,
the beach is loved [only] on a sunny day.

I'd like to write poetry that fills the empty people,
the unfeeling, their limbs numb,
their eyes unblinking from glaring into the dark visions of their glazed expressions.
I'd like to awaken them, so they may realize they are sick with sadness
that turns good things into unattainable dreams,
placing them on shelves higher then we may ever be,
because this thing drags us down,
and there's no bottom. We just continue to fall
until there is nothing left to grip, no hand outstretched, and nothing lucky
onto which we may cling
disrupting the rough walls of an endless pit. Sick.
And it's contagious, yes, it latches onto those you love and devours them before you -helpless.
I'd like to step on this leech that festers on life, and share a smile
with this race of unfulfilled, undecided, empty faces, lost,
wading in still water, patiently awaiting
life to begin or happiness to return.