You,
you cried
it hurts
to write
that tears
they fell
from leaving eyes
waving once
twice
more tears
on stairs
that creaked,
"Goodnight."

Your word
a sword
my throat
my legs
went out
fell down
and you
were gone
you left
me there
with darkened stares
that night
no more
would stars
streak skies.

Lines of light
form our forms,
as shapes glance shyly
at spot-dotted stars.
They shape you, you know?
Framing your eyes
with lashes so dark,
petals,
against a backdrop of lime
clear, wide, citrus,
for me, the slicing sting
in open wound screams.
But for you?
My arms wide
to gaily catch green gaze
whole.

My gaze,
a lens sans focus,
light bends and blurs
to bokeh.
It’s lost.
It returns.
The sudden impact
of complete regression,
dynamically hastened exhales
in symphonies of near silence.

Faith in finding
new seedlings buried
below cold spring surface,
or, if-luck-might-root-hold,
flowering perennials
of Love without Lust
claw up through dirt.
Worn out and in,
like rugged denim blue,
spanning one lifetime,
two,
yours and mine.
Endless desire,
for wear,
for comfort without fear,
each year, new tears,
again.

Again, again,
sun me with your stare.

Lines of coal take form, again and again, on this coldbound evening
as blackened fingers and wear reveal prints typically unseen.
Beautiful and unique and hurricane lightning tattooed yellowed paper.
It was untouched, like the charcoal, for ages as it sat in the corner
underneath the easel gathering dust and cobwebs.
It seems that the spiders have had a plentiful harvest this autumn,
what a shame to rid them of their feast this month.
It'll be winter soon and they're going to need it.
What creation is permissible by destruction? Any?
None?

Can I make up for it, I promise:
I'll draw them a web and weave you into it.
You and I and They: we'll all feast.
We on Art and they on flesh.
They'll never miss those material pleasures ever again.
They'll never need to build or wait or **** or eat.
We'll never need to either, not after this,
this momentous occasion of focus and dedication
when my arms and lamplit desk burn from satisfaction
and our faces grimace at the completion
of something so wonderful, on paper.

Have you ever noticed
that tail lights reflect
off tire-worn roads
when sun and all
have gone asleep?
A pair of red glow
just seems to float
through space
like a reverse halo
behind and below vehicle
on its 2am way elsewhere.
And how about the fact
that windshield wiper and turn signal
never truly-precisely-
exactly-rhythmically sync?
One clicks and blinks,
the other dryly whaps,
on that first swipe,
of course,
just when light mist
begins to stick
and the exit approaches
at a slick
sixty-five-miles-an-hour.
Turn down the volume now,
it's time to pay attention.

Candle wax doesn't always
melt directly inward.
Sometimes it does dome
perfectly,
which makes it
all the more fun
to push further.
Other times it just bows out,
as if to say,
"There'll be no addition
to the amount of light
I'll be giving you tonight.
You'll just have to bend me in
and pray for a split-less base,"
as hours, seeming like minutes,
in minutiae,
are spent burning our tobacco
and circling our teacups
and laughing effortlessly,
indenting pillows and rugs
and us keeping so, so quiet
as not to awaken ourselves.

Waxing is always
a chance worth risking
because, worst case,
we can inflame another dancer
while we chat
and hope that,
just this once,
God help us,
we realize
our stars align.

When the winds die down
and the light through the trees
throws ghosts against the walls
of your cul-de-sac room,
if you could, please conjure
an absent smiling me.

My cherry-chewed gums
from salted taffy sweets
will swiftly scuttle back
beneath your bed sheets
to nibble at your coming
and splayed, white teeth.

And the bees will continue
burrowing their hives
in my rotting flower box
late into the fall
because they can't let go.

There was a Truth
in murk-settled water.
I'll sit at the surface
and remember past wrongs.

Stirred lake was below us,
the eels and a catfish,
but towered above
the sun shone down warm.

A dead masquerade,
you kicked for the surface.
Your body, it rippled
a silhouetted sky.

Dead hum underwater
our eyelids were liquid.
My jellyfish back
absorbed the tanned rays.

Ingest your diffraction,
a hunger astray.
A dry-land discov'ry:
it was my legs aflame.

The murk was in you.
The murk was in you.
Dear God, I was clean.
Dear God, I was clean.

A seat at the table
to pray for the lake.
But what does it matter?
Wash my hands to eat.

The walls drip yellow.
My teacup is ridden
with thoughts driven
from buzzing and Queens.
They claim glory.

A skyscraper tastier
than dew from street sewer
with gray, AM haze
as people jut sides
to climb, slip snidely
atop, cut voices in lies,
rushed by without flicker,
a thought for
ever-blackened drop
of dark roasted, cig-toasted
coffee drowned by a cup.

So, taste it now,
your lips of grounds
in café chair
on dirtied walk
is unaware
of rays in sky
and earth below
and earth below
the pounding thump
that make World go.

Grabbed honey-stuck tips
from a table of glass
and sweet, sutured lips
from ignorance.

What is my voice
but a flowing river.
Through boulder and stone
and fall after fall, it goes.
Afloat on its surface,
a piece of thorny bramble-
a smoke-seized throat,
brushed up against an overhanging trunk
at a narrow crossing.

Maybe it's caught there,
a blackened ball of death,
a soft lump that cannot be dissected
by even the most astute surgeon.
My voice gives me character,
is a character,
is my character.

My voice runs through hills like a raging river.

A cliff of weathered stone and moss
with tamped dirt approaching edge
smiles down on cool sea below.

Sun rising on the eastern coast
wears shoes for diving,
a gainer off into the light breeze.

She stands with arms through her coat sleeves
watching with one open hand inviting Fate.
Photography is the death of living the moment.

Sun nimbly on the trapeze,
lose trust and surely
she will be thrown.

Dance, my Sun,
bliss will come
to those who run.

Embrace her fate
or likely it
will dissipate.

My dreams haunt me,
that is to say,
they aren't dreams anymore.
They're wishes
whispered into thin air
for no one to hear
but me
for only I have ears for
them,
these ghouls,
sailboats off to sea
without ports
to return to.

My dreams whisper back
just before my eyes
dive into daylight,
"Are you there?" they ask,
"I miss you," they say.
The voice will forever haunt me
and my voice
won't stop speaking
to someone without ears,
always awakening
to tears,
and longing again
desperately,
desperately,
for dreams.

Bubbling liquid in my veins
boiled to temperature my temples can no longer bear,
so the skin splits and flesh lays bare.
It destroys itself, what a clever defense mechanism.
What a putrid smell.
The world around me is smear-splattered in paint,
orange and incision crimson, the two blended so coarsely
that I groan and moan as I writhe on the floor,
cackling echoes down dead metal hallways,
smoothly polished so as not to rip hair off the scalp
of a man who decided, no, it's of necessity,
to press his skull onto the beam to cool himself,
to press his forehead so hard, in,
that his eyeballs begin to bloodshot
and ooze bulge tears out of the sockets,
forcing his desperate, drastic inhale to catch a grain
of stray sand that his teeth grind down on,
back and forth, hard, producing more pain,
imagined into reality as fire and red-hot coal
burn in his mind,
sparked by thought of the life force that flows
through him, and how it kills him to
never escape it. Dependent on something.
Let it die.

I feel for him, that man surrounded
by inescapable, bloodthirsty anger.
He festers. A blanket cradling
a damp patch of moss
left soaking in the corner of the garage,
left to be cleaned another day.
On that day a world is washed away,
and even he burns infernos.

Daylight to look out a window
and midnight to see into one.
Say some name three times
at a candlelit face, a flashback
to fear at such a young age.
These were stories that were told
to us by older brothers and sisters
during our weekend sleepovers.
We're mirror images of them
no matter how old we grow.
Children playing in the snow
in the coldest of northern winters,
making a snowman, giving a name,
topping him with a black-ribboned hat
and an added lit cigarette to allow
easy passing of a lampless evening
faced an overbearing, light-speckled sky.

The image passes away in the day,
everything melted to bring spring
anew to the streets and city pools.
Clean them out, remove their stories
from the past year for the new ones
to come. Crop your face to bring light
back in and to tabula rasa our crevices.
Spiderwebs and crows feet.
Let your frame pass into the attic
to lean on your dusty, keylocked journals
and that 19th century armoire
that has no place in your place anymore.
Tell me those stories, tell me your stories.
Tell me your stories, and I'll tell you mine.

A fine mixture of smoke and breath escapes my lungs
as this letter flows from my pen this evening.
"This evening:" What does that even mean?
A moment in darkness, shadowed is the life-giver
high above us,
well,
me.
Strawberry tobacco smothers my face from hookah pipe,
eyes fixed on the lines before me,
and I have nothing to say.
We have nothing to speak, I assume.
I am wordless but maybe in the moment,
this evening, you have a tongue of prose
and no pen to mouth emotion back,
no way of knowing that your time is time is now,
and it's my turn to listen.
Wait, no no, not emotion.
Just "being,"
ways of being, strewn out like a fortune teller's
knucklebones. A lie, the truth, the way that
your eyes wander to the door as you lie
on the pinstriped couch across living room
from me.
I see you glancing, I feel your yearning
for skies where wings can spread against
a star-sun-lit moon and clouds of pink and red,
a longing to dive toward god-given green earth,
near to here, but so so far.
Needing clouds to dream-slumber in, as beads of water
mask your body in my mind, mixed with
thoughts of pure love and pining for your growth,
as dew drops form around my long blond-brown-blue eyelashes.

It's all I see, I've seen,
that's all I write to you this evening.

These two things I remember:
the lights dimmed slowly
and then went dark,
and my mouth was filled
over the teeth, to the lips,
with dirt-ripened maggots.

Those little mongrels had grown inside me,
my saliva was their nourishment,
my cheeks, their protection.
They nestled so deeply into my gums,
in the crevices where cavities were to grow
on the walls of their ebony buildings.
We were beautiful
but none would call it symbiotic.

Illumination ran away,
far off, bounded for the infinite fields.
The light lightness left me.
I don't know who was in charge
of sending the charge
through my electric chair.
I grew to embrace the seat,
that splintered piece of wood,
the pain in my sweating palms,
and the metal clasps which restricted my arms.
It gave security to impending doom,
the promise of finite end.
The wooden back
gave rest to my love-ridden bones
so I tongued my friends
straggling about my chops
in comfort and pleasure.
That chair, those lights,
they were empty vessels.
Built for, but never meant to,
fulfill their purposes.

That is,
until a bulge-eyed, masked man
connected the current.
The lights went out
and maggots filled my mouth.

I've never worn a peacoat in July,
until today. Today will be the first time
I've ever gotten goosebumps from
open subway windows on a
lightning blue underground.

I'll need a hat too,
anxiety and age has
removed what was left
of my skull cap and if
I don't tend to my head
I'll catch a chill.

Stale summer smell
still lingers in the kitchen air.
From the balcony I see many men,
men walking alongside my
building below in shorts
and tank tops,
pretending they can still feel
fingertip rays from the sun.

But they know it's gone.
For today, maybe the week,
the heat has gone off in search
of a more deserving city
for the time being.

Pretending won't make these men
feel it, but hope keeps
their leg hair raised on point,
similar to the hackles of the runt of the litter
when he snarls for the last piece
of meat in a *****, metal bowl.

There will be
no scheme, no rhyme, and no reason.

There will be
no rules to abide by
during the production of the artwork
intended to be presented
on the Calling Day,
when all and every
who are to proceed with the ceremony
have guns pointed at their backs
and saber-long thorns dropped,
point-first,
on the tips of their toes.

There will be
no way to tell the difference
between the lines stenciled on the walls,
which wrap from corner-to-ceiling
in spiraled diagonals,
and the blood on the carpet
sprayed out from bullet holes in the flora
that knelt below the windowsill.

There will be
no murmurs of triumph on the Calling Day,
just thoughts escaping the stratosphere
from those who will witness
the living unconsciousness.

Prayers will be
seen scattered
upon the surfaces of stars.
Our lives burnt outward
though our overcast skies,
projected up and up and up,
imprinted as shades
on that day,
the Calling Day.

Black and White
create no boundaries,
just blurs of grey, of fighting,
of shade aspiring to color, well,
aspiring to be it,
enveloped in the folds
of canvases without brush
or artist,
and hands
stiff-stuck glued to table.
Constricted
within so much space
are snakes as serpents,
not vice-versa,
pulling prey apart
vilely, peacefully.

Yes, they do that, no?
I swear they do.
I’d bet my life on it.

Lamb and sheep
lay side by side
and goes
the earth below.

Awake at rise
of sun and skies
because
they do not know.

That men do fight
and **** and thrive
on blood
of other men.

Of food and life,
of grief and strive,
no yield
nor without bend.

Through hills and lakes
the nocturnes sound
and still
knowledge eludes.

Or do they lie,
not with their mouths,
because
they know the Truth.

For they will live,
and we will die;
Cattle,
their keep alive.

And so they sleep,
stories they tell
themselves
in bleat and baa.

They do not speak
of what they can’t,
how true
can sophists be.

For with the sheep
and lamb we lie,
we lie
to keep alive.

A man poses at a dimly lit table,
a light hangs directly overhead
with a cobweb ribbon-wrapped around
the steel wire escaping the ceiling.
An inverted roulette table,
a man betting against the house:
It is always this way.
Light flickers, flipped on,
and off, and on,
without a switch
with which to assert control.
He is alone in the squeaking chair,
sipping tea and dipping his crumb-covered
hands into the napkin-covered basket
of water crackers and salted peanuts.

Sitting, he poses for practice, but for now,
he practices for no one.
The house is empty.
In the back of his mind, there is no worry
of what one will find upon entering
the kitchen: A scarecrow at a table,
full of straw and teeth dulled down
from night grinding,
sitting in, what could be mistaken
as, a pensive position.

The scavenger hand makes him look wanting.
It's partner is propped on chin,
accompanied by his half-sculpted smile
and the dark-light contrast of his hair and eyes
with yellow shining off of his two front teeth.
The color is not the fault of stumbling home
too late to care for the mouth, but of the old
incandescent staring him down
and the obsessively clean, marble surface
at which he puckers his face.

A tapping in the hall stirs his bones
and his body darts up.
A crow, it seems, with small grey beak
has wandered in from the overgrown fields,
the fields that haven't been tended to
since this boy began taking himself too seriously.
The both of them with stilts for legs
and no breeze of running feet
from scream to sway the pair of pairs.
Their eyes connect and neither moves.
Who should place the first bet,
black or red,
and who will set the ball in motion?

The light goes off.
Denoument is a bad time
for a bulb to die.
As calm as a hand
with razorblade against skin,
the scarecrow sits down once again
and poses.
The bird observes his motion,
calls, and waits,
but the man moves no more,
overjoyed with an invisible audience,
a full stomach.

Worded arrowheads
are fastened to shafts.
They rain down on
our Love-fed ears.

Bowstring at ready
pulled back high-sky,
They strike down all
who lived this earth.

My soul, infringed,
asked, "How can this be,
with heart shut tight
from melancholy?"

Closed cold, a shield,
I thought could withstand
the force of a blow
guided not by your hand.

The force of a blow
guided not by your hand.
In time the sands
will salt our land.

Your words will crop
my sagging skin
and feed the ground
with hollow chest.

Death for the young
never-held as best,
but for this earth
a heart at rest.

But for this earth,
put Death to rest.
The price of youth,
pays for the best.

When I was thirteen, I had a running coach.
He was short, lean, and muscular.
An Italian man
with a whistle hanging around his neck,
farmer's tan, and below his black widow's peak
sat silver aviators, propped upon his shiny beak.
I ran miles and miles a day, but,
no matter how much I'd run
he never followed. He always trusted me to
stride my roads and lift my knees high
during the kick at the end of the races
against myself.

"If you want to run
you gotta drop that baggage," he'd laugh
between sips from his water bottle
as he towered over little me,
panting and red. We both stood
tall under the blazing sun.
I couldn't comprehend exactly what he meant,
I mean, I told him,
"I have ultra-light, top-of-the-line shoes,
compression shorts and athletic toes,
a hairless chest for maximum speed,
sweat running rivers down my spine,
legs that never exhaust, and,
above all, Coach,
a spirit that can move mountains." His response,
silence and a smirk.
Who was he to teach me about running?

"You're weighing yourself down boy,
you gotta drop that baggage."
It was his motto for me
every time my time would increase,
because, you see, when running,
increase is bad. Except for hills.
I can still hear his voice in my head,
"Uphill, increase exertion."
He never ran with me, he just told me to go.
He showed me the route and I did as expected,
six days a week, sometimes three miles, sometimes ten,
day after day, again and again,
shoulders hunched and me out of breath,
"runners high," they called it.

I hated running, I hated my coach,
I didn't understand why
anyone would want run to anywhere.
Not now. Now, I love it.
It has become my hobby, a specialty
for when one grows up,
your body is built for it, and your mind
has been ready to run since junior high.
It starts as a seedling, when you're barely able to walk,
and by the time your cardiovascular system
has been assaulted by packs of tobacco
and rolled marijuana, it blooms green.
That's when you realize:
Running is easy.

And coaching?
Don't even get me started on how easy that is.

I don’t wish to be strong.
Falling, wind gust knock me over
nothing more honorable
humble
than that of grass
bending, adapting
enduring season after season
never-ceasing browns, yellows, brilliant greens
stones lie upon it
but,
weaving the way
through solid center,
breaking it so
using thoughts of water,
thought.
Never lost,
reaching for sun, for life.
How can something
so lowly,
so plain,
so overlooked,
be something
so beautiful?

It seems to me
everything is strong.
My arms, branches, branching,
reaching for that same sun.
Please.
Please,
just don’t let me be stone.

Stranger, I'm sorry.
I haven't met
You yet,
but when I do,
I'm afraid that all I'll feel
is warm limbs
and dusted lips.

Again, I'm sorry,
but not wholeheartedly.
Too much at stake.
I've too much time
that cannot be spared.
And these flames,
they won't dissipate.

I can't have it happen
because when it does
these feet will be doused
and my heart will explode
from not running about.

You'll become them,
my passions,
and, needless to say,
they're jealous of me.
They cannot share.
I am so loved.
I am so loved.

I'll shut it out,
You, for now, because
I'm afraid it may come too soon.
I pray you know that
I can't amble yet.
I've still too much to do.

A dirtless ditch,
you tongue the plains
and stretch numb arms
in sleeves of ink.

Eroding stone
and carmine vines  
claw into shoulders
and dry eyes.

Please heed my words
escape artist.
I would not lie
on withered leaves.

With rope and wall
you cannot climb
so high to fall
and deaden nerves.

Hands tingle now,
needles alive
like clouds and slate
that built the skies.

Throat thresh and whine
at coal-charred mouth
while legs do shine
angelic fright.

Wolves prowl the grounds
to kiss the cheeks
of those they yearn
to eat but twice.

A need for none
is apex sin
that Love does not,
with ease, forgive.

Look up to sky
with smirk alight,
and stretch your arms
so wide.

A stray dog's brow
shows only strength.
There is much hope
for you.

I don't know why
my mind flies
through space and stars
to hit blinded satelites
in the hope of redirecting
itself to yours.

I don't know how
a homeless old man,
who only knows English,
picks up on the Arabic conversation
of ill will directed toward him
from across the crowded restaurant.
He begins to shake and scream and curse.

I don't know who is at fault for thinking of another
or if it matters at all.