In a dream
My brothers old lover couldn't
Recognize me
Though we laughed
Though we chattered
Though we spilled like glass
Six or so years ago

She laughed and called me names
As if my brain had boils
Ugly, afraid of mirrors
And lights

Opened my eyes and felt a longing
For the company of a near stranger
Faultless and unimportant

You put a little glass box on the table
Said here's mine now show me yours
So I took out a piece of paper
And drew something like a shoestring
Now this is all I've got you see
I don't have very much at all
But this is down way deep inside me
So deep you would die from the fall

I wish I grew up with this face
That my beard were my hometown
Where all those awful memories grow and grow and grow
Long enough to hide the scars they made
Where all those first kiss memories
Show and show and show
When I remember just how sweet
Life can be

Midnight has passed and the fan won't stop spinning
My brother is asleep already after a long night of stories and drinking
Cheap beer without glasses, cans and hands locked in each other's grasps
A rattle from a car passes the bench we sit upon with a homeless man
Black and temporarily homeless. A
Year out of prison with experience in law writing documents and saving lives and smoking grass in the seventies
We went to the same beaches growing up as chance would have it, but with thirty years between the ventures.
Midnight has passed and the fan won't stop spinning
My brother is asleep and I can hear his snores in the room and I can hear the tv through the wall
A show about cops and robbers plays like we did when we were kids
Locked underneath my porch in the dark we kissed
Or at least I thought about kissing you and
That's half the same

The oar reflects and 

Casts a shadow on the thick red

Swelling lake, 

Thick with time gone and

Nights past. 

Thick with my hands 

Loose and deft; stained now 

With a momentary solution

To a mountain of problems.
Mountains are formed when

Two great stones collide 

And push in against each other

Reaching up and up and 

Up until the clouds are daggered 

And snow falls asleep towards the peak.
My hand makes waves and

In it’s rippling wake 
I feel myself die

I feel myself wince

I feel my bed beneath my feet

Rich with sulfur and stone 

Straightening out my back

It’s good for my back because

I’m always aching from the weight

Of two stones slowly colliding

In my thick stupid skull 

Always full of rippling red lakes.