I read the poem I wrote about you on the radio yesterday.
I wonder if the waves hit you, wherever you were.
If somewhere under your skin you felt my words
About you.
I'm sure you didn't hear them.
I'd have heard if you had.
Or maybe you did,
And you listened with disgust
Or with that feeling when your heart sinks but it's with fearful hope.
I don't know what you'd think if you heard my voice on the radio,
Saying I cried the night you kissed me.
Maybe you'd be ashamed,
Or maybe you'd call me a goon, like you do when you don't know what to say.
Amanda used to call me silly,
Or kiddo,
The same way-
To make it clear (to herself) that I was not threateningly in love with her
And that she was not perilously fascinated with me.
I really honestly have no idea what you'd do
If you heard
But I think I'd know about it, whatever it was.
I think you didn't hear.
Maybe a friend of yours did,
Maybe one that thought for a moment on the description
And was startled to think of you,
And then dismissed it as ridiculous.
Maybe nobody heard it, who knew you.
But I know people heard it.
And they heard how I loved you that moment when I first truly met you,
And they heard how it broke me to see you walk away
Even though back then you were promising to come back.
They heard what I think you want to forget happened.
And that's why
I read the poem I wrote about you on the radio yesterday.

a butterfly-garden on a hill
behind the wall
of
your par-need




who fills the tank
                                 and pays the bills?
                                                          ­         it's not ur car..

who rots away in a meeting
                                  while trailing mind-tunnels out
                                                             ­           doodles to escape tedium..

who feels despair on the shoulder
                                  and tries to **** it up
                                                              ­         while hearing the ocean's call..

who sees the stark-brilliance
                                      right before unbelievably blind-eyes
                                                      ­                  casting pearls before swine..


hey..
*******, man!




we see only what we want to see
why can nobody see
the rare butterflies
right here
in our midst?*


S T - 10 octagon 2013

since i decided that the chain was too short
and the anchor i had attached myself to
was pulling me under

it's been Three Months since I've sharply inhaled and
let go of the rope
and stood slack-jawed
and in awe
at the calm with which you watched it suddenly go limp in your relaxed palms,
and then shrugged,
and retreated.

Three Months since I've turned my head toward the horizon
and rubbed the tension of staring at a backward-moving object
from my weary neck.

Three Months of my infatuation worming its way back into more isolated parts of my mind,
and festering in my body,
becoming quiet--
like the absence of a laugh track
while the film keeps playing.

And I feel like I am still holding my breath.
It's different now because I finally see the pattern.
Breathe easily,
       breathe excitedly,
gasp,
hold your breath,
                  feel it abruptly leave your body as you deflate
find your breath again,
                  have it stolen from you once more

The question is: what will lure my lungs back into blissful submission again? And how much time am I left with to enjoy my returned sanity?

And if you came back,
I think it would feel like a falling dream.
I think I am in the falling dream.
I am grasping and flailing and fearing the crash,
everything becoming a quickening blur of
irrational analysis and false epiphanies,
an asymptote approaching demise...
until
i wake up
(and realize that I never really was falling).

Only to have the ground snatched from under my feet once again
but instead of down, I will go up.
(and then down again)
I wish I wasn't familiar with this pattern.

I don't know why people read my poems.
I really don't.
And I am disinclined to believe the numbers that come up,
"600 people have read [insert poem name here] since 4 o'clock".
It seems absurd that people would devour something created by me.
But,
See,
It makes a bit more sense when I think of it the way I always end up thinking of it:
They're not reading me. They're reading you.
It's really terribly true, you know-
Never let an artist fall in love with you.
Everything they do will be you, for heaven knows how long.
(They don't even know.)
In fact, I've yet to find a piece of art of mine that isn't everyone I've ever loved, just a little.
They leave shockwaves in my life, and it comes out through my poetry and my art.
These people by the hundreds,
They're not here to appreciate me.
They're here to appreciate you, my love.
It's all about you, and so they are drawn to it.
Not because I am so horribly wonderful at writing, but because
I have stumbled upon a way to explain,
In small little parts called poems,
What you are to me.
It's not explainable, not fully, but people love the trying.

I'm trying to build something, see.

A good poem,
About a feeling that cannot be expressed in words,
Does not try to name that feeling- after all, there are no words for it.
No, a good poem names everything but.
It talks around the feeling, so precisely and with such excruciating detail that by the end,
There is a hole in the middle of the words, and, reading them, people stumble across it,
And fall into the feeling uninhibited.
Because it has not been said, it has not been limited.
A good poem leads the reader to an impossible word, and makes them feel it.

You are an impossible word. But you don't fit in a poem.
That's why I'm writing so many.
I'm building something.
Something like a poem, made of poems the way a poem is made of words.
I'm trying to build it, so that when they read these poems,
(Whoever "they" are)
They stumble across the hole in the middle, the space shaped just like you and what your soul looks like behind those blue eyes,
And they fall hard, just like I did,
And they understand what it means to have met you, even though they never have.
That's why I can believe that people read my poems: They aren't reading me.
I'm only the words. The placeholder that bends around the real point of all of it.
You?
You are the impossible word. The impossible feeling. The impossible person.
And these people
Their love
*Is yours.