you do not need to be quiet.
you do not need to expose your heart
to this brutal world to feed its ugly desire.
you only need to walk into the wilderness of your soul
and breathe, succumb to the silence in your heart;
rebel and provoke, then embrace the soft despair
of your broken body and heal; in the miles
of broken road between your heart and mine, repent;
cry a little and scream, for the valley will echo
in redemption and uplift you into the timberline
and up again to the highest point above the valley floor
until the sun whips its fingers across your face and you stagger,
kneel, then pray in your enlightened state;

you will smile when you come home
to the craggy rocks and dusty rivers
and the tender patches of moss along the boulders;
you will tease the tall grasses and the buttercups
and the sunflowers with your fingers
and push deep through the mud with your toes;
here, silence is forgiving.

I want to watch your lips turn blue,
paint elegies in your flesh with the
purple pumping of your native mind and
crystalline blue depths of your shattered sight.

I want to feel my love constrict your heart,
see the way my words dance beneath your skin
and the morse messages of ardor, true, displayed
in rigid bumps and sunken eyes.

I want to hear your raspy breaths go short,
constrict your airways with my flames and
steal your oxygen, slowly, how lovely, your
cries sound when you can't sigh my name.

I need to touch your icy soul with my
reaching grasp of molten hate, burn love notes
on your ribs of hollow promises and captive
thoughts I'd held so slightly, tightly, won't let go.

Art painted, art confined, art denied,
The skin of the canvas cages and congeals the art,
Colours more plumbed than the peacock of paradise,
Yet trapped and tossed about in stormy framed emotions.

In the end it all bleeds away,
The paint dries, decays, and dies,
Faint leaky lines leave behind faded memories,
Life’s canvas rusts on the ground in solemn silence.

Hark now! Unhinge your ears!

Hear now music flowing from elegant veins,
Listen to how the strings pulse and weave the notes,
Watch how the music flies free and completely unconfined,
Those butterfly melodies entwine and in the air flutter and swirl.

Their dance is the ecstasy of a nightingale’s song,
They sprinkle and circle round and round, up and down,
The music of the cello is love’s supple spine, smooth and sensual,
Hear it, inhale it, caress it, sway with it, and be at ease and free with it.

it’s like the fires that have ravaged this breathless land,
refusing to relent, and the parched clouds that fall
against the rolling adobe hills. it’s like the fire
of red and orange ombré spilling into the abiquiu,
a halo of lush greenery rushing toward the water.
like yesterday’s wind, my breathing is shallow and dry,
choking on the depth of your hazy breath that curls
from the corner of your lips. i drove on heat waves
for miles as i watched fires crawl into the mountains,
down into the skeletal rivers that are nothing but stony
memories. the earth is bony, long fingers of dead streams
crushed in the grasp of 115 degrees. this morning, i lay
gasping in your arms, remembering the temptation
of your breath as we sat in the moon’s silent ebb. the fires,
they will burn more until there is nothing left but the naked
and raw land, and then the rains will come again and wash
the ash and the mud away. but with you, i will never call
for a raindance, knowing the only way i will burn is when you
are filling me with fire.

so is my front porch for your burnt cigarettes,
remnants of sunday nights and heart to hearts
and moments of desperate uncertainty. every
inhale brings another reason to react, to question
and comment and bicker and fester in all the lost
insecurities that you ponder. when tomorrow comes,
and next week, you will still be smoking the royals
in my car, the turks invading your lungs in some fiery
defiance of reality. i will continue bearing the teas
and the coffees and the insensitivities that crush us
continually, and then build it all up again so i can promise
you that it will all be alright. because in the end,
nothing is the same and nothing is real. while everything
is expanding and disappearing into the distant horizon
of spacial expectations, we are building walls to capture
everything we hope to be, to touch the remaining fragments
of what we strive to never become.

surely i awaken in a sea of sheets,
filled with broken memories,
cascades flow in between the mountain regions of
my heart and
my love,
viewing all of us through a kaleidoscope,
broken we are never pieced together correctly,
drowning in the memories of the last kiss,
saved by angels calling,
you are my siren,
luring me in with lust,
and destroying me with passion,
surely i die in a sea of your selfishness,
bound by the peninsula of my heart,
your love,
and these hopes,
vastly we fall in love,
forget how to breath solely,
forget how to sleep with the lonely,
until we have to do it all again,
sailing the seas once again waiting to hear the voice
of the siren who once had me mystified,
drowning in her love.

-S.J

The man of life upright, whose guiltless heart is free
From all dishonest deeds and thoughts of vanity:
The man whose silent days in harmless joys are spent,
Whom hopes cannot delude, nor fortune discontent;
That man needs neither towers nor armor for defense,
Nor secret vaults to fly from thunder's violence:
He only can behold with unaffrighted eyes
The horrors of the deep and terrors of the skies;
Thus scorning all the care that fate or fortune brings,
He makes the heaven his book, his wisdom heavenly things;
Good thoughts his only friends, his wealth a well-spent age,
The earth his sober inn and quiet pilgrimage.