It was an atmosphere
It was an oxygen mixed with southern fog
Southpaw gloves tied in sailor knots
Waves of golden grains in ocean wind
The rolling hills behind property lines

It was the question you asked
not with words but in the way you breathed against the window glass
as I leaned against your Corolla
And we sang under the overpass

It was graffiti
It was graffiti
It was the cavernous concrete cats with purple hair and acid wash jean jackets
melting the light of their city's street lamps into the obsidian void of moistened pavement

It was the way the reverb spread the major seventh across the sky with burnt orange cascading into the violet of the minor ninth
which reminds me of crickets and summer nights (and violins and cellos and midwestern jazz bars)
and how bar chords are a guitarists way of flipping off a crowd-
surfing the web for an answer to why I'm still single-
handedly the handsomest man in my car currently.

It's the cloth in my empty passenger seat
soaking up the air of my A/C heat
and the scent of the soil spilt from the succulent I was given at a wedding last fall
and now I don't know if my trunk will ever smell clean at all

But I'll let this night be interstellar
I'll take a bath in the Big Dipper and write you a letter about Orion's Belt
or how I miss the stars sparkling in your eyes making contact with the E.T. in me.

Phone me home, darling.
I'm lost at sea.

-W.J. Thompson

The valley holds on, to ******
of moon, behind the trees.
It is dark and clouds are meditating.

You think of a perfect horror
and a poisoned arrow flies straight
into heart of a blissful sun.

It is red, splattered on the wounded sky,
scrorched by shrill cries of crows.
It is dawn.

You feel intense ******* of separateness,
from the beauty of a drop,
reflecting the wholeness of an ocean.

The stress starts breaking you.
Can you take me to my home, into abeyance?
My wakefulness, reaching by silence?

After the sunset,
the moon comes out whitewashed.
An extremist flies a hawk.

The bird's meet was
disbanded. There was no
mandate to decide the fate
of eggs.

I cannot think. After the
arrest of an anarchist the cauldron
was left to boil.
The bones start melting.

Step out from the dark.
The blind men were protesting
in the street against the sun.

It is a small world.
You meet me again and again.

I believe, I had not arrived
when you were arbitrating
between naked steel and the truth.
Violence were you. I was watching
the burning pyres in a row. Small hands
were collecting the ashes,
casting glances on the falcons.

Why reincarnation of the reaper again and again
arching the helpless life in terror?
Half-filled cups of tears are spilled
on the marbled smoke.
We made the truce with slaughter
in moonlight pitying the survivors in sun.
The face watching from the window disappears.

An auburn dawn wakes with swollen eyes.
I might find a lost child of the empty womb –
wandering in wilderness of three dimensional sorrow.
O mother! somewhere the roots are waiting!

At ***** ****'s and Sloppy Joe's
We drank our liquor straight,
Some went upstairs with Margery,
And some, alas, with Kate;
And two by two like cat and mouse
The homeless played at keeping house.

There Wealthy Meg, the Sailor's Friend,
And Marion, cow-eyed,
Opened their arms to me but I
Refused to step inside;
I was not looking for a cage
In which to mope my old age.

The nightingales are sobbing in
The orchards of our mothers,
And hearts that we broke long ago
Have long been breaking others;
Tears are round, the sea is deep:
Roll them overboard and sleep.

Sometimes I will interplay
the secrets:
faded rose in a book,
a distant star spelling out
your name.

When I go, will you come
to my home?
Hold my eyes wide open
and become my iris?
I wanted to see the innocence of a sin.

Black stone on a white belly
petrifies the womb.
Maniacs were dancing on the petals
of marigolds.
A mauve revenge

Petit mal holds the sanity
of defeat.
Pheromones will decide the gender
of a flat chested angel.
Each thorn was crying.

You are not me.
It was not gentle,
it was not sweet.
It was fire in the glass.

One yellow rose was opening up
in a very bright night.
I was shivering
under the leafless shade of hawthorn.

One surrogate mother
picks up the wormholes.
One tendril oscillates
to entwine the lover.

Stealthily, the sad moon slides
into the big ***** of clouds.
My eyes now search,
the bared, Venus fly-trap.

Furious, I shook my fist at God
and said,
How could you allow this!

With an eyebrow raised,
God answered:
*I could ask you the same question.

Small things were
witness to genes
of freak mutation.
Tooth in eye
becoming boat in blindness.

Witch hazel
fails to stop leakage.
Thumb with beads of lymph
stung high in stillness,
wants to peel off
the concept of injury.

A brace
stops the smile.
Blue-chips have nothing to offer.
A king had hemophilia.
Timbers drip the blood
from heartwood
dropp by drop.

have you heard the wind
the trees rustle
the wings fly by
the sea roar
watched the mountain
and wonder
sink down
on your knees
knowing this is life
the end the beginning
we are no more
than a bird a mountain a tree a leaf
a wave crash on the shore
a shell
maybe a sunrise
or a moon on the horizon
but nothing more