This morning you looked down
and your coffee cup was a cave.

Last night I looked up--
everywhere, masks of owls.

It was beneath a bath of cold stars
that you told me about doom.

You said,

It feels like a pit.

Jacob hated the film.

He found it oddly depressing,
like a slideshow at a funeral.

The film gave the history of the valley.

It laid out the last hundred years of the land like dominoes.

The director had obviously tried to paint
death as something

inevitable and beautiful.

You know, like a life cycle.

The video was a gravestone.

But the worst part, really, was the narrator,

the way her sad soothing voice smoothed the whole thing out,

again and again, every fifteen minutes,

as if everything, everywhere, were okay.

Bags are everywhere
snagged in the fingers of dead trees
signs of last nights weather--
strong winds,

high water.

And so it is with life.

The breeze picks up

and we soar (the
thing about veins and roots is)

until we snag.

Flap like a husk
gutted

on a fencepost.

Its the cold time--

February, so we make
a holiday

for “love”.

It snows everywhere
but here.

The cat sleeps all day.

Which is sad,
because he should be humming.

For me,

flying is a bit like faith,

a willful suspension of disbelief.

I’m not afraid, but as I arch over the continent,

thirty thousand feet up, traveling at five hundred miles per hour,

encased in two hundred tons of metal,  I know that what I’m doing is impossible

Check the details.

Next time you see a tree
look only at the edges

of the leaves.

I never was good
at those magic eye pictures,

you know,

you’re supposed to unfocus
your eyes,

whatever that means,

and then bam, dolphins,
floating in the air,

inches from your face.

Anyways,

this Devil thing,

it’s a lot like that.

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper*
                                                   -T.S. Eliot

October
The sun stuck--
hung in the pines all night.
It turned out--
forever was a field at dusk, frozen golden--
and the end is endless evening--
final fall.

November
Snow fell too soon.

The edges of  life grew round,
golden, padded in ice.

December
The children hummed,
sat in circles, stacked the bones
of birds like sticks.

Their fathers built fires,
sat in circles, screamed
at the faces in the flames.

January
The ones with wild eyes slid
from their bodies, flared into foxes,
flickered like rubies  in the ferns.

Only then did we notice
the shadows---

Long blue ghosts

slanting off our bodies
at angles,
                  angels

                            pul­ling us Eastward.

When you die
you walk on, shoeless,

your only light a nightlight,

and beneath your feet,
the carpet--

it’s so soft, it feels
like heaven.

Wild eyed, dark faced boys.

The kind of children not born,
but pressed from murmurs.

Every morning
on the way to school

I saw them,

just beyond the play yard,
in the woods, smearing

in and out of trees,

slowly, loyally,
collecting the sap

of desire.

What did your face look like
before your parents were  born?*
-zen koan

When I was a seven I wore a mask for the first time,
the head of a lion, hand-painted,

whiskered and grinning.

That night I prowled my childhood  
neighborhood, clawed at doors,

took candy from strangers.

The world was small then, my face
encased in cardboard, thin slits for eyes,

and still I remember, even at seven,
sailing inwards, watching the dance of a candle

flickering in the belly of a gourd.

I watched it shift shape, twitch
to reinvent itself again and again,

capable in that green dim night
of blooming into anything--

cliff birds rising on warm
volcanic swells,

a fox in the forest, cackling
on its back in the ferns.

I grew light,
knew that I too was ember,

flickering mystery,

neither boy nor lion.

This is the Southern Range.

Roads up here,
they want you thrown.

They coil, uncoil,

black snakes
hugging the rock.

There are signs of course,
always are,

crude symbols, bee colored,
lining the road.

Their message is plain:

Up here, so near
heaven,

danger falls.

Cars get crushed.

And in the morning
there's steam, it's everywhere,

rising like crazy.

The white mist is miserable,
low hung, slumped in the fields.

Dark arrives
like a tide from the forest.

The sound of the whole
world dripping--

It's incredible.

I look up, and your there.

A red beast, mud-made,
a devil for sure.

You're shaking.
I pretend not to notice.

Instead, I dwell
on the story.

It seeps from my hands,
pours from thorn ******.

Water and Wine.
Water and Wine.

Scrolls of it.

I'm not sure what's next,
Something about a stone?

Anyways, I'm sorry.

I shouldn't have made you
do it.

                                                            ­                  -km

Skeleton kids scurry over rocks,

keys bounce behind them, tinkling,
twine-tied to their ankles.

The sound they make, small
metal on stone, it reminds
me of a room service cart

passing in the hallway at night.

Inside its patter,
I hear words:

Tiny, Timeworn, Shackles

This is the desert.
Out here, sins don't hide.

They burn.

Summer night, heavy with humming:
static hisses from tree hollows,
crickets tick in the garden.
A still life:
bone crunch, tree crack, macaw

Static hisses from tree hollows,
black sap clots the soil.
bone crunch, tree crack, macaw.
Bullfrogs bellow, the scuttle of thunder.

Black sap boils then clots
the rim of a fire, aroma of rosemary.
Thunder shatters the shutters.
A still life:
pea snap, wind murmur, husks

The fire smolders, damp halo of ash.
Hoot owls call to the moon,
ask their question.

bone crunch, tree crack, macaw.
pea snap, wind murmur, dawn.

                                                                                 -km

The sun stuck--
hung in the pines all night.

It turned out--
forever was a field at dusk, frozen golden,
and the end is endless evening--
final fall.

It was Autumn. Leaves grew gold--
glittered, crumbled
like rust.

Snow fell too soon.
A blanket of water.

Only then did we notice
the shadows.

Long blue ghosts,

slanting off our bodies
at angles,

pulling us Eastward.


                                                     ­              -km

One morning you will wake,
find the mirror and discover
that your body is a gourd.

It's as I told you yesterday--

We live in the hollow of life,
within the skin,
in a husk of a home.

You dream of nests, caves,
clefts in the cliff, us kissing
on the floor of a kiva.

So tonight, when you lie beside me,
hidden in the dim, you will drift,

find us in the fold, pressed
against the breast of the valley, the lips
of the stream.

So you must trust me tomorrow
when I tell you--

I love you, but the flood will come.

The moon will mean more.
You'll see.

Tides are everything.

And my voice will sound round
when I say it:

This is the dark place
where you hid as a girl

Curled,

in the belly of the sink.

                                                     -km

Flame is a light thing
until pressed, forced into fire,
forge and inferno.

There's desire enough in this world
without metal. Weight--
It's everywhere.

It's what holds us down.


                                            K.D. Mann

I fold inward by the window all morning,
curled over the conch
I hold pressed to my chest like a child.

It is mine in the dark--
This Pale Sea. It whispers to me.
It says: a shell, a shell, a shell....

Then the shipwreck--
The Mist.
Oars rattle like bones.

Pink smooth ghost,
I am in love.

But our ship has sunk.

I am already a slug,
a salt, a crustacean.

                                                
                                        K.D. Mann

It's November again.

Old men mount bicycles,
wobble down cobblestone,
shift weight
as they pass the churchyard.

Early evening. Cold rain.
The trees are stripped  of their pages.
In the morning:
the scurrying of confetti.

The mailman smiles--
smells old smells.

The children sit in a circle,
mill dead leaves, build a mound
of tree dust between them.

It's November again.

Small boys mount bicycles,
wobble down cobblestone,
shift weight
as they pass the schoolyard.


                                                          K.D. Mann

I.

I wish to be birthed
in reverse.

To recede in slow
motion

back into black
water,

to slide backwards
in a basket

towards the sea.

II.

To be blessed is to slip
without sense,

without sins,

away from this light,
this hum,

this holy hymn
so often sung, a song

that speaks of a new star,
bright born, that burns

with the pressure of sleep.

III.

I see shipwrecks.

Send me home.

Let my basket leak.

It is so very dark in the ark.
Forgive me Lord for I am afraid.
This lack of light has begun to burn
and I am suffocating, crushed

between pineapples and pigs.

Forty days and the flasks are all empty,
I drank every last drop of your blood.
Forgive me, for I was hungry and afraid.

Your Word was no longer enough.

Such stench and sway.
Such darkness, water and sick.
You promised me rainbows, white doves
and a rose bush when I die.

Bring pails and pliers, you said.
Gather corks, crayons, and screws.
Unwind the rhyme, you said.
Listen carefully: live.

But I am no sage.
I know nothing of verse,
even less of curses.

So I built it
and waited for wind.

You told me that I was your chosen.
That I was to carry the wine.
I believed you.

I should have eaten the pigs.
They're beginning to rot.

Let us fumble, scratch,
slash, claw
through endless Autumn fields

cut from hushed velvet,
hushed velvet and husks.

You say at night
my voice rounds, softens,
grows heavy.

Breeze rustles twigs,
lulls, a lullaby floats over
from the farmhouse.

Fields fill with dust,
bone homes, crackling
with seed ticks and mice.

I think of fruit, the toil
of warm flesh, how it bulged,
slumped off and rotted.

You ask how I could have forgotten
harvest, entered the slumber,
reaped nothing?

The Moon blooms, ripens the sky.

I stop, squat,
trace circles in the sand.

This year I just don't  have the heart.


                                                                -kevin mann

won't save Nine
because her seams have already split.

And anyways,
I saw Nine last week,

she whirled herself off the side of a cliff.

I watched her spin like a pink petal,
severed from bloom by breeze.

She hit the ground crying, a bit broken,
but alright.


Now, she sleeps at the base of a dark hill
tucked in the husk of a rusted sedan.

Nights, she stares at asterisms,
moons, smoke-sagged galaxies.

She thinks of dead light,
long journeys,

and how it is different to be a moon
than a star.

1.

At the first timid tinge of blush in the sky
he emerged, shirtless
from his shelter.
And seeing how the shadows
slipped down into the canyon
he searched, thirst-less,
for a cactus.

He sat at its feet
all morning, legs crossed
like a native. He prayed to the green
scarecrow, begged him to help.
He was worn, like an old stone,
weary from his war
with the sandpaper wind,
and ready to be born again
as pieces.

When the heat reached him,
broke the distant ridge,
he stared at the sun--
until he cried.
Blueberry eyes
bled and burnt black.
He turned away,
just before he went blind.
        
2.

In the white afternoon
when shadows dissolved,
he gazed downward
into the carcass of the creek.
He passed the red hours
by counting piles of bleached bones,
clumps of carbon
that sizzled in the sand.

He counted Seventy seven
fleshless creatures
sleeping beside the dream
of water.

3.

It was dusk when he descended
into the canyon.
He carried a pen light,
a shovel, and a map.
At the bottom he waded
through dust, ran his hands
through cold sand, touched
ripples born of the breeze.

4.

The moon bloomed.
Blue light flooded the canyon.
He smiled. Laid down.
Let the water wash over.

Waking up,
to the clearest head.

Morning thought:
At least, I'm not dead.

Sitting up,
on the edge of the bed.

I think of you,
things that we've said.

Waking up,
from the clearest head.

I walk to the couch.
I go back to bed.

I haven't seen the sun
since the summer you left me.

I've been sliding
through this cave for months.

August left--
cold scold, quick breath.

In September
the trees lost their pages.

November blew
and dumped buckets of tears

on a doorstep that I built
in a dream.

December knew
and darkened her sun

froze,

Waited for snow.

Two small boys stand in the forest,
huddled around the burning husk
of an old go-kart.

A mute snow falls,
sanding away the sharp shapes
of evening.

As the tired light fades
back into frayed rows of black pine,
the boys begin to silently sway.

And soon, they nestle
in nightshade, are bewitched
by the murmur of milk.

Their eyes reflect the Moon.
Not her blush. Her distance.

Transfixed by the twitch of fire,
the still of night, the boys stare
into the metal husk at their feet.

Their hands begin to flutter
as in a death dance, moth-like,
delicate as rice paper cranes.

Small dim creatures,
cliff birds, hollow with desire,
tangled in night drapes
and flame.

On nights like these, when I am pulled by the sky
and the mist drags in from the marsh,
I take to the glittering, empty streets
and glide silently outwards---
slipping on the polished innards
of mashed berries.

There are no people here,
now, on nights like these,
in a town like this.

Only one small boy, stupid,
beautiful, standing alone,
haloed in mustard light,
punching a stop sign in the face
again and again,
painting the pavement
with his fist-blood.