A barbaric thing, winter’s price
The crude symphony of blood and ice
Through cataract windshields
Behold barren fields
In the grip of evening’s womb
Listen for the hangman’s loom
Forever weaving, weaving
But do not speak of leaving
Towards a melancholy freedom
Liberty to and liberty from
Run towards the sea,
Away from land’s fee—
And know that winter follows
Felt deep in the hollows
Of lung and bone
And in the silent moan
Between each leafless tree
Only winter alone is free

Underneath the burning building in my gut
So much is preserved safely
In the memory where you are smiling
I find peace
I want to be lonely in private
But there is no space for that

Under the rubble
Compound fracture of bitter jawline
That same smile a photo
Warping in fire

I want to preserve you
Like a wasp in amber

But we are not as slow as that
Not as gentle

The theory is
Two objects fall at the same speed
Regardless of mass
Except for people
We do not fall for each other at the same pace

I felt like the man with the rescue dog
That heard your heartbeat
After the cement settled
And the wood grew cold
White ash
Black cinderblock paperweights
Your body preserved under
Layers of broken building
But you felt safe
Because you set the fire

And I was the man that found you
Some secrets can’t stay buried

We were cave people
Found and revived

I’m not new to this
Just rusty
Just dusty
There are burn marks on our bodies
And I have almost forgotten how mine got there

There were things you thought you should go back for
Things you wanted to leave behind
But in the saving you took what you could carry
There was baggage in your desperation
To save what you thought was important

When you burnt yourself to the ground
You forgot that fire is a funny thing
It lives too
And you can’t control it

There were some houses
Left standing
Whole acres unlit for no reason

Not everything gets burned

And there is a photo of you
Cigarette hole dimples
A smile that brings me peace

And you brought with you
Bits of burning ribcage
And smoke filled lung
To hide your heart minimally

I brought nothing
Mine is slightly weather calloused now
But it works just fine
It’s just rusty
Just dusty

So take this
What is left of my burning breast plate
Carved message on the inside
like an oversized locket
Underneath the black and white negative of your film strip

“Thank you for trying”

In this house
Where the walls exhale softly
And the bed does my sleeping
Like the door does my leaving
Where the rain is my beating heart
And the roof does my weeping
I am little more than a fixture-
Collecting dust, a glass figurine
In this house

Eliminating madness
Would be to lose my essence
A barbed wire snake sitting pretty
In my belly, his presence
Is what puts that shine in my bright
wet eyes, the look that makes you
want to run and stay and fight
It is the molten gold you feel
In the hollows of my hips, or
Why I go weeks without a meal
and sleep four nights out of seven
Madness-the tinge of darkness
Within the heart of heaven

Part 1
My third car broke down
All that metal
It will outlive me

I’ve been jogging to work
Taking the back ways of a neighborhood
I barely know

Yesterday morning
I took pictures
A modern day romantic

A pack of camels followed by
A pack of Marlboro silvers
The cellophane glittered with dew
It will outlive me

A sunset behind a church
Sunsets will outlive me

A shopping cart next to the church sign
The grocery store is very far from here
I imagine it belonged to a homeless man
He found this spot and was saved
The art of being saved will outlive me

Broken glass
I want to touch it
Leave my blood upon it
I want to glue each piece
To form a ball
And hang it from a nearby tree
So that it may own the morning sunlight
Reflect it like small miracles
Some parts red
That glass will outlive me

A dead rabbit
Mostly bone now
That rabbit did not outlive me
I feel good about that

There was also a woman walking her dog
We passed by a tree at the same time
She and the dog were old
She would not let me take her picture
So I took one of the tree
She and the dog will not outlive me
I don’t feel good about that
Part2
This facebook status will outlive me
And I feel like a caveman
Scrawling poetry on cave walls
In an attempt to be remembered forever

I want to place my hand upon your belly
And bite my lips
So I can spit blood
Like a human can of spraypaint
The outline
So you cannot forget what my own touch looked like

You
May not outlive me
And I may not outlive you
All we have is now

All we have is now

We lived in an abattoir
On the edge of our abandoned world
Come darkness we would draw
Into cages made of pearl

We swam in blood of beasts
And of each other we ate
Each night, a divine feast
Your heart upon my plate

Though we lived in death
Our appetite would claw
For the other's fervid breath
Within the abattoir

We sipped boulder rock from refrigerators doors
and watched the heavens hand out food stamps with IBM logos.
“ode to Mehmet” we sang, and licked the Mossberg—
fixating on the blue collar philosophy that lived in our empty wallets.

Trash cans filled with water bottles stared at us to find our essence—
the one we had lost while being fed quintessential American idioms
in state-of-the-art classrooms sponsored by slaves and Popol Vuh blood.

Six million years of human existence trivialized down to a single sentence—
* Man loved God, man wrote, man conquered God, and now man loves science* —
scribbled on SmartBoards afforded by fire burning from Prometheus’ female liver.

Trees sing with oxygen no more for the sake of making paper,
and eyes soak in the words on paper for the sake of making paper.
Trees make the avenue but the future holds an Avenue of no trees—
… for in the land of the free, anything but freedom ain’t free.

The unorthodox are the true prophets
for their ways are those of the future,
so in the now, most kings get their head cut off.

But as death is the greatest prophet,
for it never fails to come true,
their martyrdom proves their ways truer than the footsteps of their fathers,
so in the face of adversities;
never be afraid to be a lonely Jesus on the Cross.