I walk down the pier,
All sea-salt dreams and hand-spun darkness
The buildings are bent from the wind
As are the people inside them
But it is voluntary,
So they still appear strong.
A man sits on a corner
Wearing only his clothes and half-moon smile
I think he must have been born
Before the flood took Kwakwaka’s voice
And thunderbirds were more than midnight cries
Of feathered laughter on the Chinook
I think he must know that for which I search
He calls me over to his barnacle throne
And says in a black-bear voice
“If its fish you want,
Be here before the rain
That comes on the heels of daybreak
And buy from the man with the golden tooth,
His fish are good
And his hands honest.”
That night I dream of lighthouses
And the way the stairs wind like a promise
Out of the toss and turn of the night
And the way they hold boats and the men inside them
All those tangled strings
In a fist of yellow light
And the way that light becomes a phoenix
To those who choose to give the land a second chance
Or a third, when the sea proves more fickle a friend
Than the women who have given up hope
Of being more a lover and less a lion
Than the blue-dress lady with a red-dress song.
At daybreak there is a black bear at a fish stand
His arms are laden with bodies like silver coins
I know he does not fish for wealth
Besides that of the wisdom brought
By knowing your home and purpose.
I think he must know that for which I search
He calls me over
And says in an old-man voice,
“If its love you want,
Be here before the sun
That comes on the heels of the breaking tide
And watch the one true glory of the earth
Give birth once again to forgiveness.”
I believed what he said because I could still see
The sunrise reflected in his eyes
Like a prayer.
At dawn there are two figures on the horizon,
Hand in hand,
Brothers maybe,
They jump into the breathing chaos
Of the still-dark waves
And become the fish that beat in their mother’s chest
Become her heart and her blood,
Her veins and
Her children

I.  Father
A folded spiral delicately assembled, nestled in modernity feigning a place in nature. Round and round her made and found ingredients turn, creating a circle whose beginning and ending sit so close that they almost touch. Her circle extends far beyond the nest she is building, extends without shifting into her mother’s laden cycle. Bird, earth, man; at the extremities of their existences they are separated no longer. The old man’s limbs sit heavy, their frailty relieving them of the weight of gravity that had, in their youth, banished the wind. Quietly he sways, lost in the rhythm of terrestrial orbit that seems to beat louder with each passing day. I see the thoughts move about his stoic face, like midwinter ice-skaters whose tracks become his wrinkles and whose unraveled scarves are caught in the same current that graces his cheeks like a kiss. I think he must have found the answer for which I am still seeking the question. I think he must know that the feathered ***** of native energy that speed like backyard bottle rockets through the air and pull worms like loose threads from the fabric of our mother’s coat will see morning’s glory blossom, and drink of its sweet nectar, and that he will become those flowers and breathe their roots up from  humid soil. I do not know where he goes when his eyes close like the wooden shutters that will soon be taken from the old brick house’s covered windows to close over a more somber cradle. I know when I mimic his tacit gesture I am in the singing robin’s nest at which he so tranquilly gazes, crying to the universe from the raw cords in my fragile neck for nourishment, for some magical substance, some divinely instructive stardust that would explain to me why the leaves shake just so and why, when our brilliant star hides his smoldering stare behind curved lids, I follow suit. I am new and unrefined and awake, and I can count the days of my existence like my still-wet and vital feathers that are too young yet to catch the wind. In this place God is a burgeoning emotion in my chest that speaks to the earth’s fertility, an abundance fed by the bodies of her fallen children. I am all of this and I know that in truth the old man thinks of nothing but the glowing atmosphere that fluctuates in both temperature and hostility, but is, at this moment, swaddling his broken form like the arms of a mother he will soon reclaim. The still branches of night are so laden with stars that they threaten to snap and come crashing down on the planet that sees them only as the ripened fruit of cosmic energy. Out of the night the emancipating wings of my consciousness flourish and are carried on stronger tides to see human expiration as the agent of enduring rebirth. Flight of body and soul bridge the gap between what was and what will be, closing the circle and guiding my solemn realization to fruition. The old man sleeps amidst a shower of home and sweet ****** bird-song. The wind that fails to wake his aged form smells like beginnings.



II. Son
The man is an ocean. He is reaching out to distant shores, spreading himself so thin at the edges that people can’t see where he ends and his country begins. The boy is a buoy, caught in a tide that never stops to wonder about the things it is moving. Buoys trust the ocean because they have to, they never had a choice. The two stand soul in soul at the crossways station of anticipation. The boy is silent. “He must know the way”, he thinks. “We’ve fought this war before. It was in a dream I had. I wrapped your arms around me like a cape and gravity couldn’t tell us what to do anymore. It was raining, I thought. Now I think those might just have been your tears coming back down on me. When gravity returned that was the first thing it took. It was so easy to cry when we could pretend the distance was only physical.” In this hub of passing voices and trans-Atlantic potential fear is a wide-eyed monster pretending to be a saint, wishing to be a child.   boy leaves Siddhartha’s white and glowing temple. The temple is surrounded with iron birds like transformers let loose from the pages of his comic book, rolled and folded like a hammer in his fist. His mind is an iron kettle whistling in the dark. His changing voice walks miles with words like his father’s back pocket bullets, shouting “I loved something once. Its name was a feeling. Its hands were the way the wind feels when you’re far from home. Its loneliness was a stone tower that I’m still trying to climb.” He sings an ode to a modern ocean, oily verses of pollution and corruption sinking morals like ships to be consumed and reborn to a better earth. He calls it a lullaby. I did not hear the last note played. His father forgot to sing it before his heels turned towards the old continent.

III. Spirit
Broken colors, reassembling, slow as the breeze that wanders and mocks the stationary world. I’m caught in a metamorphosis of mind, dancing a waltz of confession towards reality. Faces have faded, have bloomed from myth to speak in mortal voices, though their tongues be made of steel. Clouds of dust, caught in stray rays of northern sun, hang low over the aquatic murk, the impenetrable field of elemental strangers, and through them appear two figures. The first, his shoulders a bit too hunched and his gait a bit to staggered to be of this last generation, traces the perimeter of the pond with a studied poise; the latter figure comes into focus as he approaches the shore. I hear him calling, asking. I know he is asking even if the language he speaks is a foreign one. He pulls from under the surface a log, bent and creased like the aged arm that reaches out to assist. I am a ghost. I observe but rest immobile as if I am alive only in essence, existing for a moment in the corpse of the past. A fly on the wall whose chiseled stones tower over this piece of eternity. There is so much of forever piled within these walls, and in a desperate search for meaning I am left to drift away on waves that crash miles above this fortress of sand and early-summer expectance. The two continue, the boy taking two steps for every one of his grandfather’s. The possibility is never brought forth that they will reach me; I am not a part of the scene unfolding, I do not hold a piece in this game. Still… the wind coaxes the breath out of my silent lips, left powerless by the immensity of the incommunicable. I’ve forgotten the boy, forgotten his red jacket and his boots that slap the mud and his legs that propel his body up and down just to hear the sound the earth makes when he lands. He is beside me. I know this like I know the location of my own two feet, currently sunk into the shaded conglomeration of dirt and fallen leaves that makes up the bottom of the inky pond. I turn and for a moment wonder if he can see me, for I am but a ghost in most modern senses of the term. But he doesn’t know that- he has yet to see death or destitution. He knows nothing of ghosts, and therefore sees me clear as the blue eyes through which he looks in wonder. Those eyes! How could I forget their inquisitive stare, whose innocent gaze stole from my image all that it could not accept, all of the melancholy reflection and grief of which it knew not. Long and long he stayed unblinking, tugging on loose threads of my being, ever unaware of their significance. Somewhere by the path-side, under trees that bow and sway his grandfather calls- his voice is heavy with a familiar tone that I am unable to identify, like the call of a bird whose name you remember only when you are asked to recall it. Old and young part, hands intertwined in their forever-dance of humanity, playing games with age and expiration, laughing at the distance as if it were only there to make the known road less hospitable. The world is still. I am a spirit, no longer a ghost, rid of darkness, at least for the time it takes to refill my lungs with the gold-spun fabric of the universe, all bluebells and stardust at this moment and forever, and exhale away.

There is a place where the birds go
When the air grows heavy
And it is not South


It is here that I will find you
When the dust has settled


You say you want to sing my bones electric
You want to whistle from the rafters of rainclouds
Become the weight of the rain
The kind that only comes
After the locusts have gone
And we are all waiting for something new
To keep us inside


This century was the moment
In your late-night lunch break
When you got so close to the end of your cigarette
That you wish you’d left the filter on


We are one race with seven billion shotguns signaling GO


Still we spin
Like tornadoes in plastic bottles
Cursing hands and the landfills we all fall into
Eventually
We might stumble into sanity
And mistake it for a honeybee sting


Resurrection
Is breaking past the parasitic anchors
In your skin
Propaganda over-fishing
Sinking 5th dimension realities
Into yesterday’s tomorrow


I will dig you out of this town until my fingernails are black from trying to touch every color at once


Hold me steady like September
The birds do not need compasses
But I do


You asked to leave the lights on
That night on the forest floor
The canopy rising and falling in the rhythmic breath of night
Tracing a circuit on the inside of my spine
The curve that proves that
We do not belong in boxes
With straight edges


Learning to breathe does not become easier the second time around


Catch my breath in a butterfly net
Send it back priority


In some other city
You spend the night with my footsteps
I spend the night folding swans out of your conscience
Jimeny-cricket style


There is a place where the birds go
When the air grows heavy
And it is not South


It is here that I will find you
When restlessness tempts you to fade


See you in my sleep
See you breathlessly awake
And shaking at the pearly gates
Because excuses were the birds
That flew from your chest
when you put regret to rest

Going home is a rubber band snap
Knee-deep in a mind swamp
And the only way to avoid the snakes is to befriend them.


White picket fences spell adopted ideals
And horses are reminders that you’re not going anywhere anytime soon

The elk mounted above an unused fireplace says
I have killed what the desert could not


This town is like quicksand,
Consuming you slowly under a promise of rapid escape


The desert seems unkind until you realize that mercy
Is not pumping blood into anything to which you don’t give a shot at survival
Even if that means thorns and a bad reputation


Some creatures are strung out and inseparable like prayer beads around the wrinkled neck of the wasteland
Others have been deemed worthy of solitude
I do not know which category I fall into
If I did, perhaps I would not need a blacksmith and an armory in my morning shower


Having access to water in a place like this makes me feel like a snake charmer
Here in the valley, time is ground down into a fine powder
As if it is trying to become the thing that marks its passing
If we could bottle time, I think the universe would have enough of a sense of humor
To make the bottle an hourglass


Climbing tall things makes you powerful
Here, they blame it on the Vortexes
The local translation of guide-book enticement is gruff and solid and spat out like the chewing tobacco it is shot through
This valley’ll either **** ya in’r spit ya out, but one thing’s fer certain, it won’t do it gentle


When the rain comes in its flooding frustration
I would like to tell it that the ground does not accept what it is not accustomed to
I would like to tell myself the same thing
And would, if I could be swept away as easily


The roads are strong
Still they crumble away at the edges to blend in with the dirt
So do the people
People you know
become people you knew
When your conversations grow punctuation marks


Whoever made this desert knew that some people like leftovers
And mystery meatloaf Mondays
They knew how to sell minimalism in a junkyard
Extending ten fingers beyond old motels and rocking chair cigars
To nudge the shoulder of the Lord with a whisper
Hold me like Shiva and sweet release


I will be the one spat out by this desert
I will arrive spinning like a waterslide cannonball
Into two-sided evolutionary discussions and
Yes, please, make that latte soy
No pamphlets at my doorstep
And a population who is okay with naked mountains and empty skies
Like I am


Maybe that means I’m irrational,
Condemned to questions without answers
But **** it, being lost is preferable
To being found by everyone but yourself

Hey you
You on the corner of space and slow time,
With the Wednesday smile that looks like you stole it from a prankster
Are you for real?
Or are you that 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
Cause sometimes I’ll admit I can’t tell the difference
I’ve 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’ve 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 we used to glide over like it wasn’t a sin
He and his pals foolin us for the fun of it
Burnin a driftwood fire just to watch the colors change
I traded in my bibles for a pawn shop prayer
Cause everyone knows that bookstores are just pawn shops
For ideas that people were too drowned to keep on drinking
To keep on keeping


Hey you
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’d never been one for shoplifting
But that night we made off like barefoot bandits riding on a broken hymn
With nothing but chains of laughter round our ankles
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 so far from the city that
Blackberry picking still involves thorns
I wished I was an ant so that I could carry
Things that were bigger than me without breaking
So that my biggest worry would be microscope lightning
It wouldn’t matter if you only wore your turban on nights so cloudy you thought God couldn’t see you
Cause when’s the last time somebody judged an ant on their headwear?


Hey you
Sometimes when I’m with you I mistake myself for a queen
And right now I’m ruling these words shamelessly
My subjects whose only job is to grow fields of sunflowers in December just for you
Let it sink in
Let it be known that my physical transition fails to interrupt my meditation
That 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
That connect in double-time to the electric current runnin from your heart to mine
If you’re just some sidesteppin passerby that took two steps off the sidewalk and one into me
It’s too late cause I’m dreaming of you like pumpkins in spring
I already burned down my fortress of forget-me-nots
When I tried to write your name with a side-split matchstick
I can still see you amidst a mountain of ceiling tiles and plywood floors
Closed doors that I knocked down because they wouldn’t open
You are a brick
I have no shovel
I have hands
Will you take them?

The window was open in the dream
In the house I built from all the perfect sentences
The things more worthy to worship
Than clothesline windstorms and
Curtain-rod jousts between
Closet clowns and the nights they hid from.
These stolen wings are an easy veil to wear.
Would you believe me if I told you I had seen a unicorn?


I left a prayer in the south of France
In a church I called upon to swallow a sinner
I went back for it
The day when forgiveness meant
Switching the soles of my boots and body
the room was filled with every person I ever wanted to meet
I pulled a snake out of my throat and let it slither down the aisle
This was never a confession


My father was a carpenter
He built pews for a chapel he could not enter
I can count the fingers on his right hand
With the fingers on my left
The aurora borealis in my leftover love said
“You were Marcel Ayme the day we decided
That he was better at beginnings than at endings”


Rachel took a rosary to her wrist
I caught her blood because my heart couldn’t pump fast enough
To satisfy the ones asking
We cannot be tied to this desert
I’m getting slow motion sickness on the speed train to someday
Somewhere along the way we stopped shoveling coal into these engines
Started using the bodies people left along the tracks
“it’s okay,” they say,
“We’re recycling.”


A Panamanian child born on neither side of the canal
Wants this holiday hate crime
To be something other than a compass rose riddle
I need a weather balloon catapult to launch my words into orbit
So they can work weightlessness to their advantage
There were never enough chairs.
Every person at the table sat alone.

This forced perspective spills arrows from my coronet
All the things meant to ornament justified distaste
Is the sky any more magnificent when you have a God to shove inside it?
Is the sea any more deep?
Is this body any more powerful if I believe it was made in the image of someone greater?
I can see so much more with my eyes open
My hands are open on every rooftop
I can catch every raindrop


This story is a work in progress
Someday this patchwork of scattered significance
Will become subject to the needle of retrospect
But for the moment I can but introspect
On a night that belongs to the words I cannot say
And to the person I cannot say them to.
I never again thought I would breathe golden.
Teach me to make blue of enslaved fortune.


Teach me how to cry in a world that will not feast upon my insecurity
I am learning to trust though I see only the shadow of the moon.
I am learning not to hate this inherited flesh
The unwoven threads that fail to shelter these shoulders
The guilt in my gait that I cannot seem to shake
The unwanted wit that tears at the seams of sobriety.
It’s amazing how many words you wrote in my genetic code that can carry just four letters.
I was never brave enough to break.
I have no merit for mercy

Time is a watery reflection of the universe
give it to me straight and drink with me
hold my hand and walk with me
into the steel-toed footsteps of society
my heart's supposed captor
the director of minds
the decider of dreams
and the definer of happiness
who lead your eyes to my soul's window
and allowed you to see so clearly
what I desire?
was it I myself
when i let slip
through trembling lips
all that was left of what I was
when the light threatened to expire
with words that shook the stones beneath our feet
with iron tones the empty street
with my word rings
and like the footsteps of ancient kings
can be heard for miles
echoed by the voices that dared to speak them again
my words find their rhythm
they don't need me
I'm part of a chain of speakers
as long as the hands of humanity
reach back
and longer still
as heavy as the rain that beats
growing stronger
i speak to that beat
the beat that breathes
the beat that lives
the beat that leaves
traces in our blood
like tracks on a road well-travelled
like a river after a flood
like poets of old I cling to the grass
and speculate on its origins
wishing for a moment to hear the voices
long silenced beneath its feathered stalks
I read immortal words
etched on paper as if on bone
they inspire words like the desert sun inspires thirst
no longer a passing interest
but a necessity
a sonic perscription
I watch those used phrases like clouds
forever morphing themselves into new shapes
born again to the imagination
the waters of diversity rise
bursting through the floodgates of human limitation
I put my stamp on an unsealed letter
and send it in desperation to the earth
I don't know you-
I don't know you.
but allow me to be for a moment
the page that catches your falling words
as you shed them to grow your soul anew
and i might know a piece of you
and take it as my own
I'll add my name to the list of people
who look at the night sky
and in uncertainty find themselves not alienated
but surrounded
and think their eyes too weak
or their souls too young
too see that which
in undue haste
to surpass the insurmountable
has gone to waste
and left us spinning
trying to shove meaning
into the hours during which we cannot see the sun.

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.

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.

The wanderer takes a bow at sunset as if it were his own creation,
The darkening wisps of light and color painted across the sky by the brush tucked behind his ear,
The paths twisting through the trees below him a manifesto wrought from his tired mind,
The nightingale’s twilight salute a symphony played to his ears alone.


Night comes, and he lets the hours slip through his fingers
as he searches for the secrets buried at the bottom of the bottle clutched so tightly between them.


He watches the moon travel across the sky,
Wishing he could travel at its speed,
God’s speed,
A speed that would set him apart from every other man with a pair of boots and a lonely heart.


His mind is a poem unspoken,
When he breathes he sees the wind as if it were filling the lungs of the earth,
Giving life where there was none,
Bringing words to the back of his throat where they shimmer and shake and disappear,
Leaving their watery reflection in eyes that dance with a youth lost to the tired lids that close over them.


He watches water crawl across stone
Boring holes in the sides of mountains
Yet his feet leave no trace behind him as he travels
Though he feels them burst with the power he wishes his heart contained


In a world measured in centuries he is the ghost of a moment passed,
The remnants of a smile still tattooed on his blistered cheeks.
He has long since buried his morals alive in the coffin of society,
Hammering in the nails like offerings to a dead king.


I met the wanderer once as my thoughts followed his well worn path to places neither of us would ever reach,
To the stars that gave birth to god in the hearts of men whose minds lied open like blank pages
waiting to be filled with words they were too frightened to call their own.


He walked into my mind as if into the arms of an old friend,
No more a stranger than I to the ebb and flow of my nocturnal being,
Nor to the stream of consciousness that runs like blood through its veins,
Twisting and turning and throwing itself into the night from which it came.


He stood on the lofty precipice of passion,
Searching for something to hold on to,
But the lantern that he held like a child in his arms cast shadow on that which he wished most to illuminate.


Morning came, and the wanderer took a bow at sunrise as if it were his own creation,
He turned his back,
Took with him the night,
(his sole companion),
And I, caught in the storm of his thundering wake, watched him go,
As he had come,
In silence.

Dear Stranger you've shown me the earth.
Not as I see it but as you do,
An ocular rebirth
You asked me if I'd like for a moment
To look through your spyglass
The one you hang on a chain above your heart
And see through tinted lenses
That refract tainted beams of time
The mountains you saw as a child
And thought holy.
Well, I do
I'd like to see that and more,
If you'd let me stay a minute longer
If you'd let me take shelter in your arms
Till nigh on the horizon looms the golden shore
Till the final notes are played
Of the song you heard as a child
The one that taught you how to smile
And quietly we'd keep awhile
As society's engines run wild
I'd wrap your head in flowers
To remind you of your existance
Your momentary brilliance
As the petals lose their form
And ease into sleep
Against your skin
We too would be freed from this world
Locked in our treehouse
A temple we built
To the gods alive in our bodies
A honeycomb house
Made of chambers
Identical to those in our hearts
We'd live there too.
I'd be a river
And you'd be my name
I'd carry promises
Like stones from the ocean
Downstream to be yours
We'd be the unlikely meeting
Of opposing poles
And we'd wear the smile
Of their newfound friendship
Like a coat
To protect us from the winds
In the eye of the storm
When all we can see
Is spinning too fast to hold
So we wouldn't try.
We'd sway to the push and pull
Of the wind
Like waves that wash away
The most magnificent of castles
Into millions of pieces
Waiting to be reassembled.
We'd whisper secrets like songs
And the first one would be
"yes"

I walked like water into this
Ready to be part of your cycle,
Rain and sleet and hail, and all we would need
Bountiful as light-
I slipped into your bathtub, silently
Caught in your current,
Thrown to the sea
Alone and unwilling to admit
I cannot swim and don’t want to
And all because I walked like water
And you mistook me for such.
Now, the drought has purged me of this,
Left senseless,
I’d have never taken this as the Mojave
Had I not given you my springs.
Now I walk like a continent into this,
I’ve got my own topography,
Don’t need your plains to carve into.
I walk like soil into this,
Now we mix tectonic into bliss,
Never was so beautiful a landslide,
No water, no tide
So you know I fall into this
I will not creep and crawl,
Seep through your rafters in the night
No, I’ll build you bedrooms,
Flowers in my mind,
Support,
Dependency,
Vulnerable
To your touch.

Blossomed darkness unfolding
breeding death like gold wings
melting
burning hours like candles
in abandon
this is not a note left waiting-
that paper's turned black and crumbled
commitment flushed and taken
five months I wrote upon it
carved into that fallen tree
till winter's arson took
warmth, breath, and weakness
howling desire to the wind
a broken carriage flying
still strong enough to carry
sound,
or silence maybe
whichever rings loudest
bells of steel and stone
charred remains
my naked bones
my surviving frame
serf to stagnant violence
left to regrow a body
that can walk the long road home

You are a warrior.
In the morning you put on your captain’s coat and lead an army of dreams into battle,
Your face set and sealed like the envelope folded in your back pocket,
A list of demands to your king.


You beat rhythms of war into concrete with your footsteps,
They echo off buildings and sneak though windows,
Impregnating the minds of peaceful men with visions of glory,
A gilded parasite.


You handle your weapon like an untamed beast,
You stroke its twisted lengths of steel as if to tame its roar,
Yet you feed it your unwanted sorrows,
And with dry eyes watch it cry your unshed tears.


Your enemy is made of fear and sits unflinching on the horizon.
He flies white flags but you see only ghosts,
His restless victims drifting in the breeze,
Waiting to reclaim what’s long been lost to false obligation.


I see you on the front lines of chaos,
Telling all that will listen tales of combat,
But you need not strain your voice.
For those who care to read them the lines etched across your furrowed brow tell a story older than your calloused hands.


At night you return to your lover,
Her crystal tongue as sharp and unforgiving as the grave she threatens to become.
In the darkness your fidelity goes unnoticed beneath a shroud of celestial flame,
Your promises like marbles falling to the ground, resounding cracks of thunder as they bounce off each other and are gone.


Yet your foe is in retreat,
Be it only for the time it takes for you to slip for a moment into a world where your soul is released from its wooden casket to breathe freedom,
A thought that slows the drum and softens the call,
And allows you at last to rest.

Love is a dress you wear in the morning to dance in when nobody can see you
It is a forgotten fable, the only true legend
Love is the ringing in your ears that persists hours after you’ve gone to rest
Love makes minstrels of men in cages
Praise taken for genius
Love is a double-exposed picture of superimposed desire
Cyanide gone straight to single souls
The loved speak a language untouched by most
We the free, the kinetic word breakers and blind sea-makers
Hold jealously the cards of our post and presumption
The circean appeal of fidelity
The pomegranate hung on wormwood bough
The household gods of tradition
Becoming the malefactor of the love we first wanted
The truth is that love is the lorn gift of circumstance
A mystery imposed on righteous fools
Love is nothing that I could write in such dark and fixed ink

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.

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.

I wanted to fly
So I drew wings on my shoes
I took your hand
And rode the wind to Olympus
We bathed in lightning
Like rain
There were no living gods
Just a mountain
An empty face of rock
Until we took a knife
And carved our lives into it
We took off our boots
And grew them like flowers
You became my wings
Unmeltable
In the moments before dusk
When the whole world aches
To hold on to its color
And your words wash over me
Like waves
Smoothing out the rough spots
Softening my skin
Leaving their salty taste
Long after the midnight winds
Have dried them
We wrote new myths
To heal the old
Stitching together the scraps
The forgotten pieces
With the thread of our existence
We burnt them on a pyre
So people would believe them
So our thoughts would bridge
The darkening distance
Between people who think
The heart is a muscle
And those who think it’s a prayer
We grew so big
That the Abyss stood
At the edge of our book
And jumped
To end its resistance
You became my wings
Unsinkable
We jumped too.

The rain has passed yet we are all still huddled beneath our dark umbrellas
Shielding ourselves for fear that when we look back
Things will not be as we left them
And if this is life let me face death as if it were a silver bullet,
So that I might watch it reflect the young rays of light
Onto my face,
And send me blind into the hands of tomorrow
Have you forgotten that your god speaks to you through your own sullied lips,
From his throne nestled deep in the folds of circumstance,
Built of love and undreamt dreams,
Or perhaps of flesh and blood
If one is not the other,
And that he is often called a soul?
Your children stand alone atop frozen cliffs,
They do not feel the ground crumbling beneath their feet,
And where there should be iron cages protecting their fragile hearts
There is but bone,
So easily broken
Crushed by shoulders holding up the world by its bootstraps,
Or what is left of them,
Little more than what is left after flame has reduced to ash
All but the smallest of creatures to start anew
And we beg them to start anew
We beg them to wash away the bodies,
The open mouths that once spoke,
And were considered wise.
I am tired of running around in the confines of my existance
Your words are spoken,
Speak them not again,
And give all that you have left to those who still believe in magic

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.

I missed you
until missing you
was the only thing that kept me
from loving you.

Your arms are strong but your words are not
You hide behind colors that stand for something,
But you stand for nothing.
These colors, you say
Took man to the moon
But if they did it was only to retrieve the dreams
They had sent there in their youth
To give them back to their children.
Bravery is not a uniform.
You cannot take it off at your leisure.
It is a gift from your father and his father
And from the monsters under his bed
No different from the monster under your own.
And though I, too
Tremble at the foot of eternity
I will not cower at your threats of equality
Or your promises of freedom.
You say your colors can feed empty mouths
And fill empty hands
But those hands are turned brown
From the land that they sow
And you cannot stain them with your colors of freedom.
And if it is the line between man and god
That you wish to blur
Let this be a prayer to Man-
Your colors are not those that pave the roads of heaven,
And if tonight your gun is left smoking,
Let it be because you've used it
To **** the demons in your soul.

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.