white
I wait at the window and I watch her sitting out there in the air, empty and open to the early morning.
 
I am motionless and I wonder if I went out there and stood looking at her if she would feel in that moment that life and death themselves were the simplest things anyone would ever know and that questions were more fulfilling than the answers. That our brokenness was our only claim to existence.
We would be aware, but untouched. One second would trip on the next and we would surface and the roar would fill our heads again.
 
She blinks and focuses, she sees me. She looks at me with an apology on her face, waiting for something readable on mine.
 
Well, I guess I always thought it would feel different in the moment when someone saved my life. I thought I would feel more than this, but all I feel is white.
 
 
red
a touch to skin
a fingerprint on blush
on memory
 
anxious anticipation, the space between my blood and yours
crossed with all that I know to the only thing I have ever felt
in an inch of movement
 
the press of your life against mine
white, adored
soft, the subtly of a sunrise
rushing into splendorous day,
your lips hot on my neck
burning that fills my hands and my legs and everything
twisting and tortured
an explosion in the dark
one star joining the night sky, falling to pieces
and melting into whispers
 
the pause of time locked in the space
where my skin pours into your skin becomes
our skin becomes glimmering
light
 
 
blue
We are
up late in the static dark, and we are
together
laying in your bed perfectly still,
our limbs filled with movement
Pressed down onto the floor with the weight of imperfections in the air.
Hands and face
filled with blue blood
a silent grin.
 
can’t sleep
 
So
we go
our laughter stumbles out into the dark
pulls us out, as we follow currents of sound.
The wail of atmospheric jet planes, lonely crickets,
the boom of empty 3am freeways
a chorus of ***** angels
brings us to stillness.
 
Laying in the dirt
stars arch overhead from the bottom of my chin to the back of my neck
emptiness like falling
and if you close one eye
 
you whisper
against
my skin
 
you can reach out and touch them
so I try it
it feels like nothing
 
And with a glance
time shifts
the earth tilts
your silent face
open to mine.
 
 
yellow
August motionless
like a deep sleep.
One long deep breath that we took together
exhaled with images of green and blue,
sunlight dancing heavy on a water’s surface above my head.
The sound of slow heartbeats in a warm room filled with open air and drifting light.
 
Your voice,
whispering aloud to me the words of your favorite authors,
the weakest wind pulls the curtains into the room like phantom arms reaching out for us
from the wild expanse
that spreads away from us outside, just outside.
 
Expansion to be consumed, to be found out
to find the sun and let it fill us
before it falls away from the earth
before we shut the windows at night
before we wake up.
 
Walking up away
through green forest away from our nothing
to that lake laying there in the rocks staring at the sun
with an empty face
shattered into a billion silent sparks.
 
The heaviest moments of September
glittering in your blue eyes
as they slide
and sink
into cold depths of memory.
 
 
Orange 
if I were there,
In the beginning, God
at the birth
watching the spore become airborne
, acquired perhaps in the
grocery store you worked in you called lucky
 
singing* lucky in my orange vest
my little bird
 
(like life, death too, grows
the damp mold of anxiety)
 
if I had watched the shift and seen
your eyes too
wide open start to fill too fast
with life
 
with such as
 
when fashion passed from runway to retail to thrift store and finally became silly enough to repeat
when getting older started to make sense
(laughing at your first gray hair, we were still children)
When the second law of thermodynamics practiced itself
and energy passed from warm to colder; normalized, equalized
and things fell off shelves and the attic windows broke and we
let it be
 
eyes wide open when your childhood home dilapidated
and Alzheimer’s consumed your grandfather's stories
sitting by (him) the window on the day after new years
(melting snow shed from tired trees) waiting to leave
holidays are when you love your family
then you go home
 
when hope became the eternal sacrifice to the only god they taught us in school
the only god that could be confined to our reason,
survival
yet quoting the bible to put the weight of god into our words
 
bottles breaking and re-breaking on the shoulders of a new highway
a new monument to mankind's ancient gloriously hideous innovation
to continuance
to getting up
and trying again
And getting up and
Trying again
And words
 
if I were there standing
in the rye field
                                                  my little dove
could I have caught you?
 
 
 
 
 
black
I was right outside
when she pulled the trigger
 
and I remember
 

crashing sound, in my head
my knees, my shoulder blades. A turbulent din
heart beating like a cave collapsing
air desperate to escape from my lungs
 
and silence.
 
Light falling away,
slowly like snowflakes
with the weight of dusk
and me standing
staring at the holes that were in everything.

 
Suddenly, everything was a mountain.
 
and I remember it
 
------------------------------------------------------------­---
 
I sit here and watch as if I couldn’t reach out and touch it
Can I?
The decay is not in your heart or your mind, it is in your soul.
Its coming out on your face. Gray stains forming around your eyes.
How do you get rid of that?
Your playful (terrified, i’m so scared, i’m scared) voice.
 
In 3am empty
sitting on the floor by the window gasping for air.
How can I reach out and touch that?
I watch the nights wash you pale with insomnia.
Strings of black hair. White face. Cold morning light.
How can I reach out and touch that?
 
I sit here across from you at the table, watching your eyes look through me.
Words are coming out of you that I don’t understand.
Words that don’t fall on deaf ears
but on deaf hands
making me suffer like I was paralyzed.
Your lips barely move as you speak.
 

There’s a sharp edge to this
its cutting the line between consciousness and sleep
you’re saying
The days have been good to me
you’re saying
I am just going to get older.
 

I can feel it in me
death is in me,
and I cannot
get it out

 
For a moment it is quiet. You sit there, like something meant to be on its own \
and I sit here, like an empty chair.
How could I reach out and touch that?
My mouth opens
Be okay.
I’m saying
 
Please be okay.
 
-------------------------------------------------------­--------------
 
its gradual , the darkness is invading me
filling the back of my eyes
the depths of my ears
the pores of my skin
until I die.
 
I take another dragging breath.
feel my bones bend the wrong way
too far
 
These days feel so old
this sky is so heavy
this wet air tastes so much how it did
last winter sinks in.
 
and I remember it so well
 
---------------------------------------
 
today, a new offense
I could not believe it
the sun pulled itself up out of the ground
without you
 
january sun
light without bright
day without warmth,
burning as dull as a nightmare remembered
following a shallow line that is far from equinoctial
 
time passes like strangers faces on the street
 
already, fall falling falling
a falling scattered hush
night, again
 
 
gray
It hurts worst when I'm sitting in a cafe and a song I know comes on the radio. By instinct I turn to the chair next to me. I turn to your empty chair. Dismayed, I look around for someone to share it with. But nobody there knows the song. To them it's just the gray background. And I drop my eyes wishing I could make it exist.
 
Or worst when I'm walking through an empty parking lot at midnight and yellow light is dripping out of the street lamps and washing all over the pavement. The sound of it is deafening. I can't hear it but I can feel it. The weight of it pulls my shoulders down towards my own starving black shadow and makes me think of how the white glow of your skin pulled me down into your arms and made my eyes shine.
 
Or worst when I'm on the street corner waiting to cross and the rain is pouring over the skyscrapers and down into the canyons of the city. Cars pass like phantoms floating through the fog, their headlights flashing on the wet pavement. The sound of harsh laughter and flooded gutters invaded by creaking busses reaches me as if from the past, and for a second I can hear your voice, humming a song about the rain. And I cross, begging out loud underneath the roar of raindrops for the cars to hit me.
 
These are the loneliest days and the longest nights. These are the moments when I can feel my lungs caving in every time I exhale. The seconds where a tiny black line dancing to the pulse of time is the only movement in my cold apartment, replacing the warm rise and fall of your chest.
 
night is coming and I'm sitting at my window watching the sunset die and I don't want to give up  I don't want to and it's getting dark again
 
 
green
it is nothing I could begin to say to you
for it came to be without words
without sound
but not quiet
 
it was with the sound of something as you look upon it
The hum of tiny waves
shadow   not shadow   and the space beneath, that is to say,
between
 
life without a need to be
without purpose,
failure and not failure so close together because (finally I saw) they are not separate
 
it was steps that unfolded to infinity around the block
and around again (sic transit gloria mundi)
it was arms swinging like pendulums past ribcage clock faces
waving away the concept of time
In this small corner of the world
it was saying thank you for handing me over to solitude and meaning it
dying in order to let me heal you
it was following the jet trails with fingertips touching them like you taught me to
it was letting the poetry come in and pass through and move off
not holding it in, anymore
When I learned for the first time, to write.
it was when I heard something behind me
it was       I am.
it was when I drove on the freeway and the cloud broke and we passed out into the sunlight at 67 miles per hour, even though I was alone
when I was disturbed with the thought
today (dei gratia) I am happy to be alive.
 
Green was your favorite color.

what kind of movement was it?
that brought the head to the knees
a curled spiraling whimper
unhitched to the winds round the room?
what kind of act,
blue through and through
could topple such bonds that were deeper?

what were the thoughts
that built up like bricks
due each meiotic mutation?
what brute could so brash
dried out heavy headed
to full careless crush
the gentlest swath
her two hands ?

where went the time
day by day through each slot
like coins I collected
each morning each night,
pearl afternoons

the glint off your brow,
the stoop of your chest the
scoop of your back-blades,
more leaves of memory
now slipped out by the breeze through my mind with a cry,
theived hollow,
out the window and gone

where now is the murmur of glow
with thunder softened out through the trees
electrons spinning the push of your atoms to mine
where now the wordlessness,
you with me?

Not that it was beautiful,
but that, in the end, there was
a certain sense of order there;
something worth learning
in that narrow diary of my mind,
in the commonplaces of the asylum
where the cracked mirror
or my own selfish death
outstared me . . .
I tapped my own head;
it was glass, an inverted bowl.
It's small thing
to rage inside your own bowl.
At first it was private.
Then it was more than myself.

the bravest of all
was knowing each day
would only break her open
and rip with teeth
knowing this was not a night that would ever bring a dawn
hearing through bruised bones the low low tremors cracking deep within the tender threads connecting
stone blue souls,
but still, with all her fractured grace
putting the two saddest feet we'd seen
onto to the ground each day
to begin

sick in the mornings one thousand times more at night
cells tightening at
the God sized electric pain
coming quick through me like
those five forced breaths
I took them out one two three and on
when you looked out for you, & left me
left my
lungs forced open to contract the corners of
sharp colossal wide open night
left me alone in the middle of the road
when it was coldest in the end of december,

the two yellow dividing lines following you out into the dark
stabs of iced oxygen pricking deep where my fingers could
not pry

like that
this pain comes all of it at once
bright black vision of in-utterable clarity
each wave counted out by the swell
the judgement wrath of Chaos
black and silent breaking unbearable down onto my head
but somehow, becomes even more, even higher and still darker
breaking through the very form of the vast!

the rest is more than I can speak
what it was
drifted from the glimmer
pale and in form unlike the forms we’d seen before or conceived
approached where I lay bleeding into the ground,
barely more than a pile of wasted light against little shadows

“go on,
it will get darker yet
do not falter now.
go back to the earth
burn out until you are nothing left
but the bones of your bones,
and can no longer weep.
know beyond the horror and the wonder and the nothing
what you are
only whispered beloved

know it through to the end, where the dark softly turns into something else
further still, to an autumn of final ending, there
throw off your clothes, go as you came
go out into the water
drift from there, away and lost now always
look up blessed through the last evening
do not stop until you are truly gone.”

he steps through the door frame
looks back for a moment
a shadow of the way I looked behind us
up the creek’s darkening canyon walls
when I asked him if he was afraid
and over and over
each time he said no
and waited for me
lovely

he turns again, inside out
and now the door is locked
now his eyes rise
look up and wide
far down the road past the car waiting
with everything except the ones
he’s leaving behind and the trees and the water and the light
in the home that has loved him very much
that he has loved, too

little breeze through the leaves
oak whispered quiet thoughts to me
in that winter
he was brave and bare open
child-like, the way Jesus said
and laid forgiveness down around him
lost all his leaves to the ground
to be soft
when I came back to him broken

in that dark, he was the only thing
he let me press his bruises and hurt his bones
when I wrapped his hands too tight
to keep from falling into space forever

sunday morning I sit and burn into the quiet
he’s left now and the suns gone too
farther and farther
consumed by a tunnel of hungered trees
now, only time will know
what is to become of us?

oak stretches forward stronger limbs
from the center of being
this new-born courage
is still like a hillside wildflower
so I walk careful with heavy footed words
study thoughts as a lesson,
and do not touch the soft

love through silence deepening
this time, he must stay free

the wine turns my single eye inside
and there, past bits of dark colored chaos
it finds a sad ache
one winter night
a fine silver strand ran from
where I was laying
only little inches
to you

some tattered well-worn part of me
rises from the thought
I would be there and follow the line
to where you were and pull you to me

you.

lay my head on your shoulder and hold you
hold on
until we go
we go
together into the quiet fear
to find the resolve to go on
to find the knowing and the pain and the break!
the breaking apart
but in the sweeping darkness
purest joy
a silver strand
still holding onto your hand

cause i've been thinking bout forever