We sat in the snow and cracked schemes to soften our mortality, like if when we died the soil grew up and over our bodies to pull them back to her instead of leaving them like shells to fall where the living had dug uninvited into the darkness.
And You
You were just some
sidesteppin passerby

Who took two steps off the sidewalk and one into me

Took a knife to the inside of my skull

Wrote down a life I forgot wasn’t mine

I’ll admit now it had been a long time.
I’d been throwin baseballs of the back porch of my soul

Since the day the monster under my bed grew teeth

Hoping for someone to catch up catch them and catch me too

I’d been running since the day I met God on the banks of a backwards river 

Spinning this world like a record played one too many times

Sk-sk-skipping across all the riffs over which
We used to drift like it wasn’t a sin
Before we slipped into a chemical mist
And the trembling of our fists
Became mixed with the hum of the night
And left us listless
The fog it curled its fingers like a gauze round our bones
it was a soft fear.
It was a soft fear.
Imagine we became all the words we breathed

Out of fairytale pages turned cigarette papers the night you became a constellation

Us, riding a magic carpet woven from strings

Stolen from Fate when she wasn’t looking

I ain’t never been one for shoplifting

But that night we made off like barefoot bandits riding a broken hymn

I, the night dancer and you, the day singer

And we two seeing both sides of the moon

Sing me the song that day sung the first time she realized

That the night was more than a coat her dad told her to wear

Because it was raining

The universe ringing with the words of convenience store philosophers

Things people are too scared to write anywhere but on the walls

Of public bathroom stalls
That night, I realized something.
Our love was an easy veil to wear.
Till forced perspective tugged at the seams of our sobriety
I was never brave enough to break.  
My memory is a womb.
My memory is a womb.
Let it be known that my physical transition fails to interrupt my meditation

Putting your life into revision never called into question my salvation
I’ve never known a dream that did anything but embroider the ether 

The air between us quit smelling like a cinderblock romance

Your hands a kinetic ignition to my saltwater synapses 

Connecting in double-time to the electric current running from your heart to mine

Lift me like a lost key
Triumphant like used furniture
I see you now your hair is long.
Your hair is long
In your left hand is a brick.
In your right, a summer morning I have yet to wake up in.

Sometimes the laughter rolls in waves up the spiral staircase, spilling through the cracks in the floorboards, the cracks in the doorframe, the cracks lining the edges of the ceiling. Someone once told me they imagined, as the years came and went through the house and each new tenant pasted and painted his nest in new shades of home, the rooms gradually getting smaller, closing in on their inhabitants. Sometimes I imagine the room getting smaller around me and sometimes it is my own body shrinking into the room, into the cloud of smoke that sometimes pools on my books and throws my mind back at me from their pages.

**** ‘em as you see ‘em, I don’t know whether to call it feminism or arrogance.
High-def skin rubbing up on love like sandpaper,
False starts to whittle you smooth.
Pause. Take the last drag. I need to get a little closer to death before I finish writing this.
*** is sometimes a mascot for feeling, dancing absurd in false clothing, replacing the mechanics of hard play with attention and the enthusiasm of mob admiration.

Were you the one who lifted that toilet paper from rehab?
That’s some fine industry, ain’t 2-ply
But that’s some fine *** 1-ply.
(You do what ye’d like, sir, I’m a-headin down to YOU-gene to get MEself a turkey DIN-ner!)
I’ll getcha a 40 if you lift one of them American Flags from the apartments over there.
Check it, Frat folks are a patriotic bunch.
What’re we gonna do with it when we get it?
Sew it round my hips, imma burn the edges up to my thigh,
I wanna look like *** tonight.
While you do that I’m gonna sew it into the toilet paper.
Patch it through here and there,
That’s some fine industry,
American-ply.
(It’s not such a bad way to *** around, so long as ye ain’t got a burden on the back, make the tire drag. Yissir, if ye can do without, ye can go just about anywhere.)
I’m gonna write Positive Liberal Slogans on it.
*******.

From across the park she’s looking in the window from the garden,
holding her child wrapped in cotton.
She hasn’t moved for a while now and I start to wonder
How something that looks so much like someone I want to love
Can be just a pile of sticks and nets and perspective.

Spelling out a new human inventory
Thinkin’, I’m glad there are still folks round like that.
Whether I am like that and whether you are like that
Don’t seem much to matter.
It also doesn’t matter what you fill balloons with,
So long as it’s lighter than air,
Or so long as you’re sitting somewhere good and high up.

He got up onstage lookin’ like somebody’d torn him out of a National Geographic special on the Amish, plunked ‘im down in Eugene for a decade where he quickly realized he didn’t have to change much to get along quite alright here.

this is a song ya know I played it here 23 years ago just right over there on that side of the room and ya know my partner and I played it here and I couldn’t write songs then and he could and I was a little bit down in the dumps about myself about it but then I moved on and ya know my partner left here not long after that got caught up in that hitchhiking business and then got tangled up with the mental hospital and now he’s forced to take antipsychotic drugs every day for a time he was known as the second most dangerous schizophrenic in the state of Oregon but ya know he was also probably the second most gentle person in the state of Oregon cause ya know opposites sometimes come together in that way and ya know his songs were gentle too like this one for example this one is real gentle

ya know he was really a gentle player and now he’s caught up on those antipsychotics and its all my fault cause I drank a bunch of *****

Hot Tub Jeff looked straight outta National Geographic but when he sat down he pulled out a phone and the screen glowed bright on his face bringing out all the creases that had been hidden in room’s putty atmosphere, cause ya know opposites sometimes come together in that way.

His hands belong to the hammer
And the hammer to the spikes.
Every day, ground is harnessed
From San Francisco to Vancouver.
Exhale, and the muscles in his shoulders
Kiss the dirt and the strain.
One foot buried deep, the other to hold him steady,
Smearing life thin between the tracks.

Now, every breath he stuck in the dirt
Can still be felt
Rushing into your skin
Head out the window
Of these cars, tethered to midnight.

This is the only life
Where progress and purpose
Paint themselves in the sutra of our eyes
And it is here that I wish I lived.