The trees breakthrough the sidewalk;
and why shouldn't they?
Send the cars careening into one another.
Overtake the city-
until there is naught but a grove where this place once was.
I could use a grove right now instead of a shopping center named after one.

I'm taking a bath.
Scrubbing it off of me, if you wanted to know.
The dirt you left there.
The crevices crust-laden with guilt
and all that good stuff.

Steel-wooling it away from me.
To cleanse the deeper parts of me.
To scrape off every layer of dirt
you've encased me in.

'Til I see skin again.
The pinky swollen skin of mine,
that I lost when you buried me in soot and ash.
When you tarred and feathered me.
When you doused me in gasoline and set me ablaze.
When you mocked me by pouring flour over my head.

Once I've stopped scalding myself to sting away your leftovers.
Once I've ridden myself of every speck of you.
Then we can discuss-
if I 'had a good time'.

For me, beauty comes from things that are loosely held.

Looking at them too long alters them,

Sitting with them too long ruins them,

Better to show the rough stuff of life than to crush a dream by the weight of my closed fist.

Better to miss a comma or semicolon than a true feeling.

Better to mix metaphors than to lose them entirely.

When I was young, I caught what I thought were butterflies, probably moths, in the schoolyard.

I was told that if their dust rubbed off they would die.

So I held them in my sweating palm as gently as I could, feeling the flapping thing struggle against the walls of my fingers.

They all died anyway.

The pill bugs would die too.

Everything died, regardless of how gingerly I handled them because they had simply stayed in my hands too long

But before they died, I had accomplished something and it was beautiful.

If I could just let go, they could thrive, but I spent too long with them.

I've spent too long with my own thoughts and they're dying.

He stood quite still on the sidewalk.
Stood there for hours, actually.
Stared into another place that wasn't here,
wasn't there,
just sort of muddied in the two feet in front of the glass he looked through.
Static went crackling in the depths of his mind.
Sometimes a spark would jump from one edge of the gap to other-
and a flash of recognition would pass like a tankard barreling past a bus-stop.
Violent but brief.
He doesn't speak.
He doesn't move.
He doesn't anything.
It's as if existence put on pause in the self-contained universe that was his body.
Then, he walked away.

In starting off, let me just say:
I don't love you because you are a beauty I can hardly touch with my finger tips.
I don't feel the urge to contain your body by caressing those perfect molded edges.
I love you because you are greater than the flesh that contains you.
You have this ability to transcend the constraints placed on by matter.
You are almost terrifyingly free from those chains.
I cannot measure you.
I cannot contain you.
And you of your own accord kiss my lips and accept that I am merely that of flesh.
Finite and calculable.
Flawed and visible to the naked eye.

The Dumbarton Bridge begins with fetid life and ends in Zuckerburg's hollowed-out castle--
the sharp lines and primary colors of a tantrum.
The San Mateo Bridge begins with a ramp into the heavens,
welcoming all motor vehicles to the same celestial kingdom,
then proceeds to descend into the bay, leaving passengers eye-level with the sea birds collecting on floating lampposts--
funneling traffic through the waves back to the baffled freeway.
On the weekends we followed the road from our apartment until it stopped-- dead-ended at a nature reserve.
The salt marshes were littered with the worn posts of wooden structures,
caked in white,
offered with penance to the birds whose long beaks needled the shoreline...
The remains of pools in candy-colored reds and pinks,
the rust-colored scrub that looked like coral springing from the corners of the pathways
that lined cracking beds of arid, once-was, soupy water.

The world pours in.
I wake to my morning coffee.
The cream of that idle Tuesday,
The wakefulness of regret.
Flashbacks to appointments I would have missed,
had it not been for this stupor.
Mulling over what activity to engage in,
the clock strikes never-mind.
So I fall back into my sheets,
stomach churning from hunger I can't quail
and work I can't get.

I learned he'd died through a friend of a long distance friend.
I heard he had snuffed it.
Kicked the bucket instead of the usual rock into a gutter.
'Give me another', he'd say until his eyes went glassy and his face went numb.
Until the hands dropped from the weight of his fingers.
No one lingers to watch.
No one ogles the brilliant light of dawn over this collapsed stranger.
New and old to the neighborhood, we all stood where he once stood.
We all walked away from that place.
His mouth agape but no words can escape the blue lips of a fading memory.
He is dead and his time died with him.

In my dreams, I drive right off the St. Thomas Bridge into the ocean
All the twinkly lights tell me I shouldn't have
Oh how I 'shouldn't have'
and a song plays in my head that says "Oh how you've grown."

Pour me another one of these.
I'm going home with death tonight.
I love the way the strobe light dances off of open bone,
I don't want to be alone anymore.

Make peace with never knowing,
make peace with never going,
to the places, you pledged your life to.

A safe dog doesn't run the fence.
She wouldn't break the good leash to leave you.

We have something that works.
It's such a small thing,
but like a tiny music box that still plays a tune you can recognize,
It's just my palm pressing into yours.
I'll keep doing it as long as it cranks out those same notes.

Your bullets mean nothing but void.
Void where matter should be.
Absence where substance once was.
Darkness where light should be housed.
All of this for nothing.

I have never seen vultures before, until now. There they were, seven of them. One low circling and the other six huddled around a raccoon on the side of the off-ramp. It was just like a cartoon, I thought.

Vultures aren't really dangerous, I told myself as I weaved the car around the gang. Technically, they are nature's garbagemen.

Still, there is something unsettling about them all the same. Their turkey necks. Their large bodies. The pulling of sinew from carrion.

But most of all the concept that they lie in wait for death, inevitable, with terrifying patience.

Fix me up a fine web to die in.
If you don't mind.
If it's not too much trouble.
Can you just hit me upside of the head a few times
until I forget where I am or what I was doing?
Shoot me in the face if you like.
If you find it prudent to do so,
dump me in an alleyway and leave me for dead.
Because I can't stand being stared at and waiting.

If soldiers ride under the flag of someone else's dawn
what choice do we have but to march right on?
So he says, "Just like god I never meant to be,
and just like time you'll never know the end of me"

"Your answers lay in the middle of an enclosed glen
I wonder if you dared to step right in"
He says, "Just like god I never meant to be,
and just like time you'll never know the end of me"

Oh, she says, I’m going to wash you away.

I’m going to wash you so far down stream,

Out to the sea.

I will dilute you in the infinity of the ocean.

The rains will come and off you’ll go.

So far, so far away from me.

I will wash you down with what’s in front of me.

Goodbye to the rain, goodbye to the streams, the sea, the oceans and you.

Welcome yourself into a brand new world,
rife with neologisms,
teeming with abject complacency.
where all the shiny cars get off on your exit,
assigned parking spaces before them and all the gifts of heaven behind.
My fellow, he lives in a pea-coat some 3,000 miles from here.
He smokes Cuban and knows a great deal of city streets I know not a suit of.
We've yet to meet,
but he says great things about you through the mail.
feverish as those fingers may be,
chasing wildly after some long legged bottle.
The girls become mirages,
and the ground becomes the cold hands of a dead friend.
mountaineering mole-hill after mole-hill until,
dry mouthed and beaten,
he makes his way in this-away direction.
all broken and ill-willed as fate intended,
Twinkle Town's got places for even the most dejected of us.

When she drinks,
she tip toes right through that
line;
into a different state altogether.
A train barreling towards her
comes to a squealing focus.
There is danger everywhere
in the silence.
Someone poked a hole in her bubbly head
but everything was going so well.
So well.
Oh, well on the rocks it is.

What would happen if everything just suddenly stopped.
Like the world literally did stop turning.
At the speed were going we'd all fling off in one swift defining motion.
all the CEOs
all the kindergartners
all the bus boys.
Flung off like a towel
In one passionate revealing motion.
Then I suppose the world would be naked again,
Like the day it was born.

But that's just morbid so I digress.

Sometimes I wonder why you love me.
I used to think it was my own selfishness begging the question forward.
But today I wonder because when I get on a roll
(and I do, often)
I can start seeing the impatience develop in the corners of your eye.
I don't know if it's always been,
or if just now it's become obvious to me,
but I can see it beginning to irritate you.
All my highfalutin recitations of my latest reading.
All of my internal cross-examination.
All of the stones I turn over and over in my hand - at you.
It's getting a bit much.

But you see I'm just too chock-full of existence
and you are the only vessel to pour it into.
I crave novelty and I can see that you,
instead,
crave peace.
You've watched the world worry over itself for long enough and you want to rest.
I never let you rest.

So then comes the questions again,
why is it you love me?
I am so restless and so curious and so mean.

Ah, transactions.
Collect your free tote bag when you buy three
From our new spastic collection
Smell them,
Taste them,
Free samples for all
I bought three just the other week
Fantastic value really
A fair decent bang for your buck

Making new frames out of broken china,
the walls came crumbling down.
Out of new frames I make the greatest picture the world has ever found.
Of all the licks of orange,
the fabric torn,
the world and all it's sounds;
it would be you,
you and a box of matches to burn the whole thing down.
The whole thing down.

I'm starting to dream in color
swimming in Silvia red night gowns
and dancing into silhouettes of purple and crimson.
psychedelic actually,
if you take the time to think within that perspective.
it's like a toned-down rave set in slow motion by overdose.
and where are you?
are you passed out on the lawn in front of some closed down swapmeet?
did the flicker of insomnia turn you off like a light switch you hadn't paid the bill for?
who now, will answer your phone or pay homage to your quips
or late night phone calls to God?
I wish I could say that I relayed the message
but my nerves never were enough.
I wonder if the angels ever picked up on the twisted games you played on their names.
Many people never bothered to decipher it all.
But on occasion I did.
When the time was convenient,
when the moments were dull.
I delved into it.
I tried anyhow.
Forgive me for never letting you pass.
For standing arms and legs wide apart to halt the inevitable.
I wish for so many seconds
that I was there to do something,
to show something,
some inkling of understanding through sarcastic grimaces.
To you, who will read this and play dead for flair,
may you call upon me from the imaginary casket when you get this.
Fore I do see that you could never leave like that.

Everyone wants to get into those pants of yours;
get into those jeans.
They'd all say a lot of things
to get in between.
Keep in mind the bottom line
is beneath those clothes you cling to.
So strip yourself clean string-bean.
Let them play tambourine on your heart strings.
Let them lye next to you,
tell you sweet lies that mean nothing
till you take it off.
Take it all off.
Do a little dance
make a little something to be remembered for in the morning,
when they leave.

Oh here I am in the back room while you sing my praises
cohort with the neighborhoods and their dogs.
They spin around you and you laugh a hearty laugh.
An honest laugh.
The laugh of an honest man who does good for good's sake.
I torture myself in the back room and listen to the conversation over some desperate woman and a guitar
as I write about my mother.
How did we meet and why?
I don't think there is an honest answer to it.
I just love you, simply and purely.
The way you are with everyone else.

For once I'm letting myself entertain the concept.
I'm mulling it over.
Because, I'm the glass-half-empty type.
It's not that I don't want a refill,
it is simply that I cannot get the attention of my server.
In the meantime,
the soda goes flat and the ice melts into it.
But unlike most, I have realized that drinking it leaves you with less.
I can be glass-half-empty, knowing that there is still some lukewarm liquid souping in the glass.
The problem is that I simply refuse to experience even the watered-down aspects of life,
for fear that that **** waiter never does show up.