I want to see you sleeping after
tick-tocking like a wind-up clock all day,
falling like a taut of rope to the bottom of
a canyon to thud down into a pensive pile,
spreading your energy out as a silent spirit
across the dry river bed, the wind of you
whipping up sediments in the vast valleys beneath.

I want to bear witness to you catching my eye
from across the room cautiously,
covering the communion in cadmium lemonade tape,
tasty and afraid of being caught at the crime scene.
I'll throw you a line and you can come up gasping,
glorious and shining in the adolescent sun,
pulling in air where water should come.

I want to watch you write that paper you're working on.

I want to spot you screaming into oblivion,
washing over wonder with waxy fingers,
grabbing at the truth like five year olds ****** fireflies
out of a fleshy, dusk-dipped night
with mothers calling out "Come inside!" in loving, eager fright.

I want your eyes to glimmer something back at me,
meeting me in the cosmos to make the moon,
Mercury slinging stardust over his shoulder,
flirting with Venus and fighting her smolder,
meteorites crashing into each other,
creating solar systems in their wake.

I want to contemplate you on a flat plane,
feeling a frenzy of agitated hands
and fluctuating heart rate,
fault lines moving crazy,
crashing through geologic time
to make earthquakes feel human.

I want to stare at you saying things
that would color me crimson in broad daylight
as we breathe out heavy to the ancient incantations
of an early umber evening.

I want to see you
without a pocket mirror attached to my wrist,
cutting into my skin,
blood purple like lavender iced tea in the summer
and veins an undulating blue.

reduce the minutia and move to the future
tune into to truth and tune out of the rumors
neuter the tumors that give birth to intruders
refuse to be abused by maneuvers of rulers

we need to rise and strike up the fires
the time has arrived to slide with the vipers
biting like spiders with wiser desires
driving our fangs into the spines of the liars

I wonder what I would have looked like to myself- exhaling- like parting seas, like ancient catacombs creaking open, awakening the dead, like I hadn’t spoken in weeks. It was all rubble…piled over me in the front seat so that I could barely see on the drive home. I tried to hold it together, tried to breathe as deeply as possible, harness the moment, the space between us, let it cohere, let him see the skulls opened, pouring into one another, let him see my lips and skin, naked and timeless, ten- fifteen years from now- he is wearing a beard and soft green- but she, she is beautiful and lovely and far more appealing, and him and I, we sit on opposing sides of the room ten years from now when the walls come crumbling beneath us, and I struggle through the heart of the rubble pile, exiting from the space that used to be a door, quickening my stride and throwing up my hands, strutting now like some swaggering *****, bellowing, “take me universe! I am yours to command, yours to call, I am yours only and yours forever,” with a voice like an inevitable whipping. "I surrender. I give in."

standing in the october rain
one last time to hold her hand
she has the softest touch of pain
but this pain was never planned

raindrops fall to the beating of hearts
i'm soaked in my regrets
a final ending, two new starts
i am still glad we met

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it's hard to stay upbeat
when you're getting beat up
you don't worry about upkeep
when you can't keep up

I need something i can stand under
something I can understand
it's enough to put a man under
and i'm feeling under-manned

Arrival time now
at the self-medication station
where I sit behind the counter
and fill my own prescriptions
to feed the yearning for a funny joke
or a crystal vision.
Pointing with precision
at the problem then
painting pictures all around it,
the mother-me is thinking of
grounding the other-me
until I learn to keep my bathroom clean
and stop to relish in the heaven or hell
of the living daydream instead of
screaming "Escape!" and attempting to make a run for it.
I suffer because I know that
I know better, but
I'm still standing outside in the snow
without shoes on, singing the blues
in fusion with hues of deep purple and lackluster green.
I mean really, baby,
can't we just get a move on and make it past two?
The eternal toddler trapped
only by an always increasing sense of
potential mishaps and wondering if she can sit back and forfeit
a society whose headphones are in and cranked
while walking through a heavily trafficked intersection
without looking both ways.
Call me crazy, but
I hear the melodies, distant
across mountains calling.
I'd rather be a river running than
part of the system, humming.

To which ports of our
pasts do we
find ourselves tethered?

Towards what unreachable
futures do our
hands slide with pleasure?