I am the backs of everything,
bring me out
only in your holiest
of holy moments.

Consistent like middle eastern conflict.
The corner of the pantry holding the infinite consumer
The pound of the waterfall
slow, slow.

This grace is sick like
bringing some dark of disease to
every place God gave me
to escape to.
The Midas of somber sad
begs them all not to come any closer.
Curled up to process, process, its such.
Each cry stops the tracks flat
everyone please remember to remember that you’re forgetting.

and remember too
when you’ve read enough to put the gun in your mouth,
to stop reading.

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

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

he pressed any farther and I might explode
bleed with internal bruising
or go home
or sit in my car in the rain and cry
drive out each street in the smooth electric dark

I would have closed myself
in a padded box
ran heavy into the fog
sank deep into wide open black pupils
out of reach

to be impossible to touch
but feel every single thing
like a white burn
or a long knife

to
stare at you and not say a word
not say a word all day
i’m in the middle of an ocean of reaction
and it is perfectly still on the surface over mile long depths
and you’re pounding on the windows of an empty house
slamming your fists into the three inch thick ice of a frozen lake
screaming and roaring as you sit there quietly nervous
I hear you
and you hate me a little bit because you love me too much

but there were swift and silent teeth
sharp as noon
ripping through our paper trails
through my skin and my veins
to my bone

I'm being taken by tremors.

pour your burning coals onto my head
spit into my evil eye
me
Judas
knowing God as guilt and
spilling over with guilt

I drove out every street in the middle of the night
I was coronated by the rain
glistening
with shoulders hanging from the sky
I spun around and around in my head
the trees danced and pulled at each other and at me

and I entered cathedrals
wandered into hallways alone again
with softest footfall
kneeled to cruel earth,
and slowly washed away with the runoff

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.

A smile fading into your face
Mirrors the stars fading into the sky.
Moving MOVING at an easy pace
Well hello, (hello!) GOOD bye!

We have nowhere to be and nothing to do
As I’m whispering secrets into your sleeve.
You may feel something like (I love you),
Or your skin might hear ‘please don’t ever leave.’

As hours and days of nearing bliss
Paint the color of morning onto our cheeks,
Just close your eyes and picture this
I’ve been lucidly asleep for weeks.

You left a gap in your words
expanding between your teeth.
In the lapse of your pretension, I saw your weakness.
I saw it.

You've got a lot of black hair on the top of your head
that drips down your neck
shining rivulets
makes pools in your collar bone
ready face ready eyes like
I'm looking straight at you Mr
You've got weird skin that you pick at with white teeth
a smile that spreads across your body like an infection
You say sorry with a downward glance
pausing a stare that presses into my lungs
A voice that sounds like the taste of a peach
lips that taste like the sound of turning pages
If anyone could taste them. Ha
Clothes wrinkle in lumps draped on your angled frame
awkward and embarrassed out of place they seem to try to slink off
They don't like you for the lacking length of you finger nails or the way

You sit in the doctors office

Askew           where the **** do I put my feet and my elbows?
hoping for something grim to come falling past
yellow teeth and purple line lips
parchment skin cracking a purse
(dribble drabble shibble shabble,
your face does something funny
phonetically
when it spews
truly inspira
ired bravo) my god be quiet
Mr dr sir
hoping for something To match the electricity in your head
Sit down for this Stella this is it is,
this could be it
I'm sorry
but
you know it's time to go
Cause they don't like you here not even love you
I don't think; I don't either and no one here
You don't either
And that's okay   you know   it's ok
It's time
It's okay

Stop talking to yourself
*****.

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.”

in a thousand directions at once, and at three thousand degrees
rushed breaking shattering gray veil after gray veil - parting them all like a sea
with mere energy of joy. Held back, shaking pulling at the gate for too long.
39.244667,-121.052524
like a bell ringing from a church steeple
like the first time you felt it too
like mountain incline
like contact
like getting up again after a blow to the face
like the sight of the sky straight above

light with a new wavelength,
split fast into the dark
oak leaves falling and spreading in frigid air blacker than night
and rich and alive and rushing toward me like sound
I held on, screaming my lungs to death! bathed reveled in the confusion.
I was there with my eyes wide open, my heart beat so fast over your nightmares.

and I loved you.
I loved you I loved you I loved you

in the middle of everything you are to me
you are a tight grip I’ll never have
a fist clenched
on a weak arm
my foreign  hand, always ready to turn over
to goodbye

someone told me live dangerously
and so I smoked cigarettes,
you and I
by the ocean in foggy aches
and I got on the back of your bike

so I edged in and out of your bed
at starlight’s hours
a sink full of your sadness
because I didn’t want you to feel alone

so I thought of being a tree
and if you needed me, you could have my leaves
and my branches and if you were tired
I'd be a stump you could sit on

but because of that whisper dusk in the sand by your sister’s house
when you told me you and I told you me
and the air gleamed in a reflection
I opened my eyes and there was you
placed carefully in front of me

and with both sides of the edge visible,
ephemeral graces gave me their secret

and when you asked me to kiss you,
one thousand voices of providence,
silver threaded stitches
sank my soul to touch on you

bruised by the impact of a human being

and it was nothing to you
but it mattered to me

with my heart
and when it broke, my soul
and with time,  sacred and ethereal, that too
bent beneath you

then it was with only with might
that I was able to hold your head to my chest
as you cried and as

in passing,
you overcame that too

impossible: still I loved you still I loved you *still I loved you

It is with the simplicity of a single sheet of paper that these words are coming out of me.

None at all.  

Struggling, aching with potential.
Clouding the emptiness, growing heavier.
Getting so heavy.
Bursting forth, victoriously impulsive and unprepared.
Leaping!

Falling from the lips, and dying, too fragile to endure
the critical gaze of the beautiful.

The senten ces be gin to break apart into syllab les
and then in
to
lett
ers

the     substance of
m   y
int       er actions wi th
oth    ers

dying


in

t
h


e


**mud.

sometimes you come back,
like the peculiar awareness of finitude
soft footed
after we’d been in that small room together
cold
pouring out in white light
leaning over and smiling gently
with a surety of falling snow winter outside
and you described seattle and kurt cobain
and showed me your jars of sand and jars of honey
and I smiled gently and loved you.
and we went out in the cold and you smoked a cigarette
and everything around us was hushed wet in dark gray
you were something that made me ache
honest human, dark and earnest
opened ahead of me
wise and naive
I felt like I’d known you somewhere before
I held you in my vision but didn’t speak

as you told me what men had done to you
I picked up something that was shining on the ground
and thought about what men had done to me

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.

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.

At corner of midnight
I'm an ache in your bones
stepping out to say good morning
to morning,
there's dark streaks on the street
(what is it?)
flashing into my face like
the blood pouring from your shoulders and your elbows
and it's real
(stab my ribs stab my skin I wince at the sight and these things I can’t get away from my head falling to the ground in the street, to my knees on the streaks in the street
close my eyes)
I can't say morning now that it is night
these are things I cannot allow to leave me
because they’re (somebody has to remember, someone, no    )
twisting my veins into dying matches
(a, its killing me, though it is)
making me remember
And I remember the urgent black hushes and
trees
drawn towards heaven like the hands of martyrs
in a word november         air of desperation
black lines
flashing across me cold like
the ashes that
ate you up but couldn't steal
your face from me
I wish they could
as there's bits of glass on the kitchen floor
I can't move them with my head
or my heart
A glittering array of threats to scream into my ears
(smashed lines o my hands my face my ears o what have I done o the blood
on me is yours the blood pouring from my
hands I am a murderer)
this glass gives flashes of light they reflect your silent moments
bitter and tearstained tumbling knuckles
(these walls won't be pierced)
, you're whispering and I choose not to hear your voice
I choose through fear and that moment alone
is enough to die
but there is this too,

You were someone who breathed
and looked into mirrors
(they shatter now to meet me)
A little boy who sat outside and watched the traffic
outside of that house in the city he misses the one with the garden his mother tended
(she's gone and left him now she's gone and killed
died)
A boy without a coat in the snow saying to us that his hands are blue
but he has no need
A man who woke up and had to shave
to be presentable to himself
who stood by a church yard waiting for the bus
imagining a muddy new grave in a life passed
(one with my name on it. how
long? how beautifully short
no matter how beautifully short)
in a church yard by a spot where the bus stops
A boy drinking wine
drunk to shame the halls of mind of diligence of strain
***** on the carpet
You were a man smiling walking between the river and the
lawns which you are not ever to walk upon
smiling at a scrap of paper clutched strangled by broken knuckles
dreaming of Russia
A man who would leave and not say goodbye
no not goodbye no
N    o            good
night.

One purple flower blooming for every day someone should have said
I love you                                   /iloveyou
for every time I smiled while you cried
every time I smile now
For every night that passed by
the sad man
who fell asleep wrapped in imaginary arms around
a still cold body (to dreams that sicken waking hours)
for (every night I can remember./o the things I should have said, I the murderer) his nights that went un illuminated by one phrase, two words to a soul,
(an open sky
to the earth and
the length of time                                /two last words spoken noiseless to bleeding ears laid against the floor
to the distance between this heartbeat and your next,
to your last)
two words reached into (stretched strain to broken light)    
infinity

goodnight, starlight

my faces are the
about faces, my little breaths
are little deaths
I am like your cry at night

my time of day is seconds before dark
when suicide is a life-long contemplation;
a standard deviation from the sidewalk,
and the sunset is a reason

my day is the day when
suddenly,
your addiction makes you sad instead of happy
so why don't you stop

my breaks are all the breaks and
window sill stair fire escapes
used for smoking under-age
I've got it figured out early

my ocean beats against the rock of ages
I'll raise my fist and ***** on my own defiance.
I'm aching over my forgiveness, begging,
is Jesus still in pain?

well

Hating, biting, kicking, beating
punching, ripping, eating, cutting
crushing, gnawing, pinching, slapping

Taking revenge for love's sake.

Laughing, jeering, talking, shushing
moaning, sighing, calling, *******
Yelling, screaming, slamming, crying

Somewhere amidst this I said "I don't know you but I'm sorry,"
and then I joined in.

It is her warmth in a cup of tea
her whispers that rattle the window screen
her eyes that open as mine close.
Her shoulder that holds my head
when I fall asleep
on a pillow.

She colors everything.
She brings exquisite language to my lips
she sighs,
before she speaks a different language that
I understand.
(the a’s sound like raindrops)
that leave trails along
the windshield.

When once I belonged to
a life as delicate as lies and grapefruit knives
I read her
brief and clear
on her own face.
accidentally bare,
precious.

Life saved in the turn of a head,
at the sight of a name, a familiar name, more than
a name. in
a hand on my knee
in little things.
I took to the street to the city and the bridge to pass as a cliche
I thought of everything about her wrong
remembered that I forgot to say goodnight
before I turned around.

We talk in the way words fall
off and away,
as the melody subsumes the lyric’s soul
the sweetest notes of digression
waste the abundance.
Reduced to the center and I am less
all that I need and
nothing more
hanging from my shoulders;
skin that is white
in evening light
when she touches me
she makes me, I look at
the world, is small
sitting in the palm of my hand.
and I can see clearly from one end to the other
this is why I love you.

I am the brick and she is the window
when I kiss her cheek.
In the words good morning
I press my lips to the shape
of her eyes and feel her hovering shadow
spreading cool over my skin.

When I say no
I reach my warmest corners
round her body
over her shoulders
and pull her into the late night
held against my bones,
I have no intention of relinquishing.

She is angles and degrees
walls and windows
the words written in book folds
histories and the aspirations of ages
tiny brash movements and sight,
all.
To armies and invasions, I lay down infinite surrender
in between our silence.

For,
a thousand words
and I could never tell her
what I've needed to say by
arms and legs pressed with heat wrapped
round her waist.
Theres no explaining the way a heart aches.
What I’d tell say is                     (quiet [skin & heart{beat}] friction)
somewhere between this line,
and the next.
Let's talk about something else
Or our heads will float away
----------------------------------

love is the way my body leans
Can you see the way my body leans towards the east?
your words weigh light, their trails are long
through me, I say
love is that

in the morning, softly
I can feel her
still
against each point of my body
And my aching arms

whisper three words
and,
back again
to the beginning.

the only way I could love
uncertainly.
Hideously open, like a cave-in
and over and over
unbearable compression and devastating release, emptiness
muddy and ****** and thin
thin as our sheets are.
Toast and cracked dishes in the morning
the morning
as it came once more
hollow. Invading the spaces in the skyline
and my eyes.
So we got up and sat, down, if you can call it that
down at our table.
I thought it was something like a reflection, the cracked saucers in your eyes
spilling tears all over your shirt
because you were alive through another night of torment
in a shattered mind
and we sipped tea.

But oh, broken doll, clouded sunrise,
moldy walls, ***** water
crumbling seaside
cliff
how ashamed the white world is of you
how you shame the world
in your aching
terrible
glory.

beastly
you promised
to break me in
like a rich mans house
promised you were right
and liked to slide me under your shoe
and bring it down hard

thought I belonged
to the cracks I created
one second thought you won
you didn't expect me

beasty best
layered like mahogany
cobra dangerous
with the same weight as the sky
pounding canyons into skin
beat of the earth blood
glistened eyes threaten pray
subtle as thunder
black leopard sleek

my stare undoes you
I take you away in pieces

Limping aimless down the sidewalk
You shattered gait
Smelling awfully of smoke and drugs
You shaved head
Grasping a cigarette in both hands
You oversized ugly shoes

No one likes you
Turn the corner and you're gone and I never saw your face

My heart rests on my lungs all the time
settles into my lung.

Laying on my side thinking
left side brain thoughts
until I turn over and find you.
And then there you’re curled up nestled in the right side

I remember a feeling from a dream I had. I swell a little bit.
Turn onto my stomach and it all moves, a white wave to the frontal lobe.
Then there I’m wading through you, putting my fingers into dopamine tide pools,
widest eyes in clandestine memories.

Watching you laugh with the biggest part of the sky caught in the curve of your mouth
lurching when the world froze that way forever for a second.
Wanting you to stay as long as I’m there.

Conjuring you and your little evening glow,
because
I need company.

I have you head in my head
spilling out like coffee light
one morning when we were in a cafe
after court
a green day
time was sewn up like like a rip in reverse

I felt myself tip toward you like
the western hemisphere toward the sun in summer
drawn in
you were the moon
I was the shore

your skin was warm
the river pulled at us
you were so warm
you held me up

one night you smiled at me that way
and turned around again and I kept watching you
the chilly night air and streams of smoke made it obvious
that they belonged to us

I felt a good thing then
when I was there with you

Something in the way shapes take tonight
The lilt of cello bones
tastes of far reaching

I think the trees moved
reaching into the road
light pools
to put things into my head

I want to lay each sentence into lines
in the way that heart beats
thick and heavy
only to pick them up into my lungs
little devil hands little devils hands

to
lead me off the road

your eyes and
the night that I forgot to drive on the wrong side of the road
drifted slowly to meet the mud bank
anyway
gaze intent at my hands in the half light
Wrapped around roots like a farewell embrace
that moment of elongated suspension

like the last time they spoke

pause and breath
pulled in and pushed out
and
lift
For the first time since I was five
The rush falls away
there sits the world

goodb

--
*ye

It hurts worst when I'm sitting in a cafe and a song I know comes on the radio. By insinct 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 backround. 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 lonliest 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

the sky speaks to me
jet trails
say: its going to be
ok

the small wisp clouds say: what a
terrible
waste
of a mind

the heavy ones say: set your feet
lean towards lake shores

the overcast says: where is my head,
when I cannot sleep

the rain says: come here
the snow says: lay down
the sun says: hang your shoulders from your neck and
laugh with the enemies of your lovers

sunset pulls at ivory, the moon hums
picking up every piece to put it back in the box
chides: you might as well have said so
each star whispers the name of each day
I have lived
its own name is the period at the end of the line

the deep hue says: hello
bending along the line of infinity to
meet the light hue
an exposition of uneven symmetry
it writes on me
a hand gentle on the head of a child:
where are you looking for
it says:
I am not as transparent as I seem when
I am pushed down into the earth by the night
it says: no,
here am I again, born again, in the dew
inhaled once more into heaven

to prove the boast,
sunrise spills out in a violin voice
climbing through a thousand different beginnings
extending from tree tops,
pulling civilization upright
with a breath of wind
it clears its voice

and speaks to me

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

I could speak in the tongues of men or angels
but do not have love
so I’ve a voice unfrequent,
low and lacking form, the colder undercurrents
particles diffused unrecognized into dark
syllable vibrations fallen dead in the air
dark things in black waves with sadness in their hands
their weight too much, their form too great, too awful
to leave the vast, the silence
to be understood

couldn’t say, couldn’t tell
I turned, you were not at my side
turned, I was alone

quiet quiet
twisted tortured by a dark thing anguish
midnight in an empty lay, colder than the ground and felled
smoke between my dragon lips I suffocate
the earth’s last forrest burns to the ground inside my chest,
I beg, at last
I break

god
can you hear me?
have my ears turned inside out
did my voice get lost
change into oblivion?
was my whole soul small change
I threw into a perpetually emptying jar?
I wear down each map I'm given
drown in the pulls of eternal tides
to come back to you

and every turn fades into another
until the years are all lost
today I woke to
the north star falling from the sky

so god
I go into the black
bind stones to my body
go down to the river to pray
down to the bottom of the dark
I break the broken pieces
and break again
again

I lay down on the pyre
wood wet with weeping
the whole of me a sacrifice
crying out for the flames
o god
can you hear me

wind rushed about to
antagonize the branches and the branches groaned

I am a tree and I am a pacifist and I never

hurt anybody. Quiet now and glass smooth glare in my eyes I’ll step
into the shadow and look out from here.
are these cigarettes a sign that i'm losing?

I stay up because its okay then.
nothing ever happened at 3am.

go to sleep with the moon with a face dead like
an ocean shore line the morning after a storm
there I walk like dreams

I took to drink
like I never had
when the old crystal inside of me
cracked
that night you said love
next to "you"
in a past tense

it all comes to some rusted gates
to a road going out
like water over falls
and suddenly my tongues undone
and through my mind flies
there are still things to say!
...
yes! a thousand wretched ****** of prose
and still not enough
I believed it all for rot
this *****'s surely stone

Do something you’re afraid of
[fall]

Like the night I lay my head on your shoulder,
I needed you to stay alive,
I needed you in order to stay alive.
The night we saved each other’s lives.

It was everything,
and your heart kept beating (against my ear)
and the tv talked to itself.
We went to sleep afraid that it was nothing.



Like that night you told me you were in love with me.
It was nowhere special.
It was the couch in your room.
And thats what made it real.

I said nothing back
and the trees tapped against the window
and eyes around the world were closing.
I did not speak, but I kissed you.



Like the night you drove me home
after the world broke our hearts.
It was 1am
We were two, two was one, and one was alone.

I wanted to stop moving
and the floating snow brought silence in through the open windows
and the street lights made moving shadows on your skin.
The earth moved as black pavement rushed beneath us.



Like tonight as the weight of moments that were years is breaking our necks.
I’ll pick up my eyes and look at you
waiting for me in the openness of the street
brighter than a star.

Standing there like an open door
and the wind is blowing through your hair
and when every breath is a leap of faith,
I will never stop falling.

motionless pull up and drag
sick leans on my bones and up through them,
I look at something else and see death

sitting plainly
not even twenty feet away
quietly seeing back at me,
seeing only black and feeling only what I feel

you’re next to me and a minute later you see it too
and as with you, you see it as something else
you get up, “let me show you that.”
stride, as you do, to its side and as if it were truly a thing,
pick it up
stride back to me and turn it over and over in your hands
and I am shuddering in your affections
my clear reproaching eyes
are adoring you

oh, solemn and before I can think again
I am moving away and seeing in reverse the things I saw when
I was about to see you
the sky is opening up for me
I am flying with the sun
but you’re fading out,
sleeping radio static
becoming still
and I am finding it difficult to remain in motion

he’s going to falter fold out like a staircase
in the face of
cambrian ice and you’ll hold yourself out like
you could have been absolution itself



you’ll be thinking about the ones that look like they’re comfortable
in their own skin and poked out light
and upward facing rays and upturned faces
and scattered papers



you’ll be versed in angel’s tongues
but paralyzed by syntactic blindness
silenced by the dome and everything thats happening
without you

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.

prelude
wake up into crystalline air
can feel
the swaying trees pull up the body
waiting for dreams to run
wash
off

no one can imagine what the waker has seen
the glow of love through a pure heart like light lost in honey

-

I'm sorry for interrupting. I just have
Too much to
Say:

I know

You understand the way salt tastes on my tongue
I understand the way you sit in the middle of the universe
Right next to me
Poking holes into my skin
with which
to fill with words
Painting pictures like drawing bridges
Over these mile high canyons
Standing at every side

these* these words spread like openings into the ice
pride as you asked to see a face I had never before shown

Towers of words and I say
See things simpler
To myself
but already I see them as they are
Like the moon behind the cloud three nights ago
pulling at the edge of the sea

I moved to your gait
To gravitate towards feeling
Like moths
shimmering
The incoming tide
reaching for humanity




your silence takes a shape into mine
How could something so much like light be possessed?
How could you clasp to your bones, a wave that pulls eternally at the shore?
you make me think, I was thinking

I think he would have said
don't you see it has to be this way?

one         small         point                in the dark

How would it be,
otherwise.
Those angel’s hands shaped perfectly (as always they were)
on your neck

and you would have said you’re saying
pointing into the dark,
your weapon words stand so small next to your mortality
and
I love you with nothing

A man without a heart is
a gentle threat
A man without a heart
Lacks only what you hold in your hands

A slip into abstraction
How young we were how young
Yet how young were we?

afterword
stutters stilettos
sick skin sick
beautiful
letters
left this morning
while you were away in
mourning
silhouettes
cigarette shadows straining
shadow eyes
in this dim light
old
grammar
makes me ache
in between every line and I wish
you were more human I wish you were
less

numb shaking fingers
limbs curled tight into fragile ribs
on a sheeted bed without a blanket
blue icy diamonds closing one last time
from the world
and an exhale
wet watered cheeks
a little shudder
a peaceful                    sigh
                      terrified

this is how I imagine you dying
alone
way too far away from me

life flashes of electric blue glancing out from every strand
you soared in a circle around my head
little wide angled hands reached for you
alight on my brow allow me to
cut angles into your wings
cut angels into your wings
I don’t know when I’ll raise you once again over my head
to push you away from the earth for only I and
the sky,
can bear your lightness
every dull
cold spinning remnant of of a vast fury of fire,
circling into itself to fit into the shape of infinity,
long since gone, the last bits of you form
a raw shape of my being, draw my soul into substance
fall away, dissipate, and unlike everything else
you join nothing
do not begin again.
and so much more
you take it all with you and
I have no words to tell that
no one can hold onto the last of anything,
you are no more

You never looked at me when we were driving.
I got so tired of it that I said your name out loud (just so you would look at me)
Oh god, the way that it smashed the silence,
I squinted my eyes and blinked

You picked up your eyes
turned your head
and looked at me, confusion pouring out of your open mouth
“What?”

Later as we walked down the middle of the street I reached for you and you said
“something’s come between us”
with a smile stretching over your mouth.
It was the soap in the palm of your hand

Right when you were looking down, I looked up
[                                              ]
when you kiss me, let it be
*let it be once

I would have laid out the universe

As you laid there, as though invisible.
sending strands of color over you
through me, venous
I watched and listened
your messengers to me
tilted my head
rolled around pushed water out of my lungs
touched you, glanced you barely,
on the knee. nodded slowly, with my eyes open. adored you for an instant

pulled
all things in waves.
pushed

your breath on my neck
hit and left me
a horse feels the water at its ears
and struggles not to drown.

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?

insatiable entropy
cracks metastasizing  
where do I belong? sternum bends, crushed
a black hole, in the center of my eye
takes light to a different universe
one that already came to the end of eternity
was too weary to keep expanding,

and stopped

now rips at the center of my being
teeth of a wild dog on a rotting carcass,
ever starved by its own blackness.

my agape dusted lungs can’t fill my panicked heart

chained to all these stones
where can I go? to drown out this demon
how long with this weight
frantic dragging to soft-mud bottom darkness
struggling ****** in crocodile jaws

will I go still?

The recognition was incomprehensible and I thought of my face in the mirror
the look and the sight of the white line cigarette pinched narrow and thoughtfully between his very first finger and his thumb. It was the pose of vocabulary. An expression of the understanding of words and the pauses that build them. A sigh for the sighs that frame them. He was an only. You don't look and forget.

I lean over throw my shoulders right in front of you towards the far corner of the room. A deep breath and my skin fills my dress. This is the physical of release, and the fabric falls. You fall into the light laid out on the floor your face follows up to me while it turns into a question. Adhere to vertices and hide the lift of your lash.

You want to know which way I'm going you mean by that which line of verse enunciates me next. I understand but you don't. In tiny things we find enough to let go. To demolish wholes, flood systems, blink. In tiny things we are commanded to go on. You’d known, but I - I had not yet walked home of solitude since we had spoken to each other without interrupting with another.

Open your Bible to show the empty room static that with more knowledge comes more sorrow you are very sad. You’re on the cross of tired and hungry because man does not live on bread alone and can we ever be sure of what God meant by that - especially when he conceived of distance. When you read the red letters give your eyes to the sky and keep a hand on either side of my face.

Deep underneath my eyes I think of you (I think you see me thinking you) and see you trying to write into crossing paths with poetry itself, specifically, the ****** embodiment when your words expand beyond yourself and with a turn envelop to evoke another. I open my mouth slightly, shut it and lift a hand to you to say: it walks in with it's own grace, beyond force. wait, love Everything, you try to create into it is only taking - only sit and wait. Until you stop taking, nothing. but you had known, the wait, I had not yet not known

the pause was helpless but the silence was becoming. There was no choice, we kept going