"The problem with love these days is that society has taught the human to stare at people with their eyes rather than their souls."
                       -Christopher Poindexter*

See, that's where you are wrong.
I dove right into
that pacific of a soul and knew it had to be.
He let me sail on the deepest, darkest
seas of his mind, as I to him.
I love him, I always will,
but as time moves forward water goes still.

It is later than late,
the simmered down darkness
of the jukebox hour.

The hour of drunkenness
and cigarettes.
The fools hour.

In my dreams,
I still smoke, cigarette after cigarette.
It's okay, I'm dreaming.
In dreams, smoking can't **** me.

It's warm outside.
I have every window open.
There's no such thing as danger,
only the dangerous face of beauty.

I am hanging at my window
like a houseplant.
I am smoking a cigarette.
I am having a drink.

The pale, blue moon is shining.
The savage stars appear.
Every fool that passes by
smiles up at me.

I drip ashes on them.

There is music playing from somewhere.
A thready, salt-sweet tune I don't know
any of the words to.
There's a gentle breeze making
hopscotch with my hair.

This is the wet blanket air of midnight.
This is the incremental hour.
This is the plastic placemat of time
between reality and make-believe.
This is tabletop dream time.

She said she collects pieces of sky,
cuts holes out of it with silver scissors,
bits of heaven she calls them.
Every day a bevy of birds flies rings
around her fingers, my chorus of wives,
she calls them. Every day she reads poetry
from dusty books she borrows from the library,
sitting in the park, she smiles at passing strangers,
yet can not seem to shake her own sad feelings.
She said that night reminds her of a cool hand
placed gently across her fevered brow, said
she likes to fall asleep beneath the stars,
that their streaks of light make her believe
that she too is going somewhere. Infinity,
she whispers as she closes her eyes,
descending into thin air, where no arms
outstretch to catch her.

Born woman. Go on.
It's farther than it seems,
but okay.

Credit card's been stolen.
Go on.

Above all, remember,
whenever you cry,
husbands roll their eyes,

and children worry.

Go on.

The father that was yours
gets killed by a lung disease.

He loved you, at least you think so.
Go on.

Drink, smoke, do drugs.

Go on.

Drag your crippled bones
to work. Hate your boss
behind her back. Smile

to her face. Go on.

Eat. Don't eat. Get fat.
Get skinny. Go on.

Time fragments.
Space fractures.
Lives intersect.
Wombs bloom

with new life. Go on.
Wait.

Hold on.

~for Jackson C. Frank
It seems almost too far fetched really,
too difficult to believe.
This unassuming moon shining like a copper plate.
These milkcrate blues.
This soft trellis of sound
wobbling through the wind
as if pouring out from the window
of some lonely house on the hill.
How beautiful it is,
the ghost of your voice,
haunting this empty valley.

Do not stand at my grave and weep..
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain,
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awake in the morning's hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft star-shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry..
I am not there. I did not die.

At one end of the couch
you sit, mute as a pillow
tossed onto the upholstery.

I watch you sometimes
when you don't know I'm watching
and I see you. Who you are.

You are a self made man.
Hard suffering. You are grey
stone and damp earth.
A long scar on a pale sky.

The television is tuned to CNN.
The world's tragedies flicker
across your face like some
foreign film.

You are expressionless.
Your usual gestures ground to salt.

How do you explain yourself
to people that do not know you?
How do you explain to them,
this is me; that is not me.

However many words you choose
in whatever context with
whichever adjectives you use
could not compare.

Even you describing you
would not be you.
Not totally.

Your hands are folded
together, resting in your lap.
I study those hands until
every groove becomes familiar.

Like a favorite hat,
you wear your silence
comfortably.

I sometimes can not help
but wonder what we will
talk about if we ever
run out of things to say.

You are the curve
I burrow into. The strength
I borrow. You are the red sun
rising over the mountain.
You are the mountain.

after, when you are driving
75 miles one way just to get to her
and her wind-touched hair,
bleached white by the September
sun, the gray sky coughing up clouds,
that is when the doubts surface,
hard as stones.

it is late afternoon by the time you arrive,
the storm has already been through here.
you are not in your own element.
you are a runaway.

but, then she is there, standing right in front
of you, wet with rain, slender as a branch.
you watch as she makes her way over
and your heart gardens, rupturing red.

Pale scrapings of people
with lipstick ringed glasses
and cigarettes burning,
and laughter trickling up and down
their knotty throats.
What is this,
a gathering of henhouse critics?

My father's voice in the back of my head,
saying, forget that I'm dead and if you
can not do that than pretend.

I am standing
just outside the gallery
beneath the shadowy bough of a birch.
The moon is floating in the sky's dark lap.
Faraway I can hear the ocean sigh.

Now father, I am asking,
what smile are you wearing?
What color are your eyes again?
How many teeth have you lost?

Don't you think I want a kiss.
Perhaps I don't. Perhaps I don't
want to stand and pretend you
not dead while the wet, champagne
mouths of the living tell me how wonderful
your paintings are.

As they crook their fingers and strain their necks,
lose their vocabulary inside the artwork's depths
and colors.

Father, I want your reputation to outlive the pursuits
of others with their iron-on reviews after an hour's
worth of browsing at a lifetime of your work.

Father, are you crying?
Stop that sound.