New nature feeds off those words of temporal happiness,
Leaving behind the misery of poets
To lingering moments of waking in solitude.
Yet, they build in my pulse
Till I find I have been sitting in the shower
For a heavy hour
Disguising lonely deltas.

Eternal ancient mirrors reflect my body falling back
Into the man made rain
Letting droplets hit me on the fontanel
Unable to let them in.
Cause one day all this will only be a memory
And why would I want to add to this heavy pocket of lost history?

This morning my breath
Reached a moment of actuality.
I felt compelled to leave the rain
And start my day with the closest star.
There you go darling,
Rip Grecian suns from the garden of
My soul and let dead trees
Be stained with our love.

Oh god,
The motion has only begun.

I must know that love has privilege
In its pain. the only way to
Truly leave solitary water
Is to accept our flaws
As artistic talent.
Each stab of passion has given me
The tools to create
A portrait of our past attempt.

But I fight this epitome. Seeing your
Face brings anger to my
Persevering smile. I am made
Ashamed of my own inflicted violence,
Destroying my desire to hear your internal maps.
This only leads me back to
Rain and I am caught in
My contradictions.

So, I let my desert skin
Take in the water yet again.
But this time
I don't bend my knees
In prayer to our hope.

I swallow the liquid,
Tainted with the blood of city pipes,
And feel my pulse jump out
Toward the lucent droplets
Of some faithful future.

A sip of smoke finds a path,
Around the spirals of my fate.
The blur of individuality
Stops the painful memory
Of taking my fingertips,
My identity,
Into your soft lips.

What do you think now,
naive ancient eternal love?
Do you remember waking up
To find my hair crawling towards your teeth?
I slowly felt nocturnal curls pull me back to your tongue.
So I cut it all off,
And painted my visage with impulsive creativity.

Your incandescent presence
Drips with Parisian chords of street harps
Praying Hallelujah to the Sacre Coeur steps.

Please make this tremble of blood
Return to a mortal rhythm.

These disjointed bones of our past portrait
Gaze up from the grave we carelessly built.
Now, I return to see the selfish paint
I threw upon her face.
Those golden highlights sing alongside
the praise of starlight,
Beneath the temporal dust of our separation.

I can't bare to look at you,
So I mar my own past perfection,
With some new hope to understand
The graveyard you abandoned so long ago.

In South America, truck drivers are paid collossal amounts
of money, to deliver supplies between towns on
roads, no wider than the width of their trucks.

When you turned up on my doorstep that sunday in the rain,
your eyes told me before your lips did.

Sixty three hundred days is a long long time to wait for someone,
but I would do it all over again,
if it meant I could fall asleep in your arms one last time.

Next Autumn when the leaves turn rusty and fall from the trees,
I'll remember the afternoon we spent in Victoria park,
where you waded to the middle of the duckpond,
just because I said you wouldn't.

Your mother always told me when we stacked away the good china after Sunday lunch,
that your stubborness always got in the way of what was right.

You've been gone eight hours and still nobodies reminded me how difficult I can be at times.

Eight months later and everytime the phone rings I imagine your voice crackling down the line "come get me from the supermarket, I have sugar buns. "

Can we pretend for a bit,
                that every day is a bicycle waltz?

That every day is filled,
                filled with wine and whiskey love.

And skin feels like heaven,
               when no one is watching it touched.

That your body & my body,
               will never grow tired of the endlessness of each other's.

Everyday should be a bicycle waltz,
               With you my dear,
                                      *my immeasurable amount of intangible motion.

she never listened
to the sound of the waves

when you asked her if she could hear their beauty
she whispered

“no”

she was “listening to the sound of you breathing”
and regardless of whether anyone realized it

you never doubted her
even when she really, really wanted you to

you would play at night
your warmest notes soaking into the walls

but one day they grew frigid
chillin’ and killin’ your favorite villain

so now all she hears is the waves
and all you can hear is her whisper

“no”

It was the time of summer where every kid had silently realized that it was ending,
No longer halfway through, no longer half full
Leaking and spilling out,
like the gas in my twenty two year old car
We couldn’t stop it,
And the moments of high school summertime
The moments that supposedly turn into stories we tell forever
Hadn’t seemed to have happened.

Both of us on the swing lazily swung
Dizzily from side to side.
Climbing forward, falling in reverse
Our combined bodyweight shifting back and forth
Tanned legs kicking up in an attempt at unison on every backwards glide.
Gravity hung us there,
Pulling the swing toward the ground no matter the rotation.

I sat on top.
I wore bleached shorts and bleached hair.
I worried that gravity or more so my value to it
would crush him.


At the same time, I felt unbelievably small.


The air pressed in on me from all angles,
it touched my bare legs
it easily waffled my shirt.

“Mel, if you were squishing me, I would let you know”,
he assured with a cocky tone of his very own that somehow made me feel special.
I couldn’t help but think he was only trying to be tough
Attempting to let sheer willpower overweigh my well earned quads,
My six foot frame.
The awkward body I never quite grew into
Never knew how to masterfully control
Never knew how to fill.
Though I secretly (wanted to) truly believe him

On this humid night I felt like the ball was in my court,
Like I could do anything and everything.
That nothing could go wrong
That the boy that I was sitting on was genuine
And that I could simply drive off to wherever.

(I had a full tank of gas and enough money to get me to Alabama).

I felt small in this,
in this infinity of possibility all around me.
Like a weight was pushing into me
Putting on pressure that couldn’t be ignored
That shrunk me just enough.
I felt powerless to fate
Powerless to this planet
To this grand, glorified hunk of earth which was so much greater than me
(and surely my insignificant weight anxieties).

I felt like the gas was leaking out faster than I could use it.
I felt like my infinity was disappearing as I swung within it.


Just like that, I let the ball drop and the gas leak out.
We just kept swinging.
Laughing,
Wasting,
Talking,

Dying.

There is a small space
Existing between your fingers and your wrist.
It holds anthems and artistry,
Composed from a thousand decaying bones.

They sing you awake with the colors
Of those proud redwoods and high tides
Who grew from the souls in your palm.

Your mind takes the form
And sinks into currents of salt water and soil.
I can see you sing with the pleasure
At the sight of your success.
After all, I was the one who doubted
And that makes your transformation
Holy.

The light slides through
Small holes of cheap blinds.
Dawn descends upon your waking frame,
And I can distantly hear the moaning ivory.

Then time holds her steady breath
As I drink in your consciousness,
Always too strong for me to keep.

There is a small space
Between your love and your survival.
It holds black holes and new stars
Composed from all the elements of destruction.

waiting for a connection that never comes hard
you remember that sleep is just like forgetting
and not even the tenderest hearts keep hurting
once they stop their wide awake circles

morning won't dawn when it comes today
even light has regrets placid and useless
and morning always always comes
muted muting snow grey to abide

here, in this place, in this light,
in this laden love

What a work is man,
Forever building, lamenting,
Ruined temples in sand,
Foot stepping on the moon,
Sunning in tropical Cancún,
What stolid, myriad ways?
So many hands, numbing days,
Living ever fast, never heeding past,
Dressed to **** with a thirty round clip,
Formal, endangered, Penguins in the desert.

Ils ont vu les Pays-Bas, ils rentrent à Terre Haute;
Mais une nuit d’été, les voici à Ravenne,
A l’aise entre deux draps, chez deux centaines de punaises;
La sueur aestivale, et une forte odeur de chienne.
Ils restent sur le dos écartant les genoux
De quatre jambes molles tout gonflées de morsures.
On relève le drap pour mieux égratigner.
Moins d’une lieue d’ici est Saint Apollinaire
En Classe, basilique connue des amateurs
De chapitaux d’acanthe que tournoie le vent.

Ils vont prendre le train de huit heures
Prolonger leurs misères de Padoue à Milan
Où se trouvent la Cène, et un restaurant pas cher.
Lui pense aux pourboires, et rédige son bilan.
Ils auront vu la Suisse et traversé la France.
Et Saint Apollinaire, raide et ascétique,
Vieille usine désaffectée de Dieu, tient encore
Dans ses pierres écroulantes la forme précise de Byzance.