Crouching slick faced in the depths of the pines,
Drums are echoing in me like dead men.
The forest always knows how it will end,
The thick autumn painted crimson with blood.
The deer murmurs as I slowly take sight
And ran for miles after his mortal wound.

Through ravines and thorns I carefully wound:
His corpse was still beating among the pines.
Cone-needle bed is his funeral site.
Death has become the tooth-scarce grin of men.
My hands are on the shoulders of my blood:
A burden he must carry through the end.

Not long after this the deer filled the end
Of our truck and the ragged red-brown wound
Pained my eyes, hissing at me as the blood
Fled from it like a warrior who pines
For home. We cut him apart with old men
And the winter made our breath turn to sight.

Two months later my kin’s ribs are the sight
That tell me it is all about to end.
Where once stood muscle now lay paper men
Leaking memories, ready to be wound
In the splint’ring rigidity of pine
And finally make good their debt of blood

We are starving without the nature-blood
And the black smoke pollutes the holy site
Where killing became living in the pines.
Now there are machines living at the end
Of my fence, chewing on the trees, wounding
My mother with the oiled claws of un-men.

I meandered slowly towards the dead men
Now laid enshrouded deep within the blood
Of the forest. I am the living wound
Among the trees. Wooden markers show sights
Of a generation shortly ended.
There is no life among the wretched pines.

Now coming are the haunted men who pine
for the forest of their blood, but the end
has come and earth-wounds are their only sight.

amusement park rides are safe
the sheer force keeps you from falling out
roller coasters tilting you side to side
not quite upsidedown
but almost

I'm trying ******* a playground swing
to go over the top
but just keep falling back to earth
******* gravity

in between the trip and the crash
is the fall
That's when I think of you
when my hands are outreached
My feet are skidding
I'm trying not to eat ****
but there's no guarantee
because clumsy people fall a lot

Maybe I haven't landed in love
but I sure am falling

Your body is always warm
Your hands are always rough
The words that left your mouth melted into one long, faint whisper
Unmatched to the power of your dull blue eyes

LOOK AT ME WHEN YOU SPEAK
I hate when you don't look at me
I want to feel your thoughts,
Not hear them...
S h o w  m e  y o u  m e a n  i t

After that moment, your eyes were permanently glued to mine
Nobody has ever looked at me like that
Constant peering at the remnants of my soul,
and my heart,
and whatever else is inside there that
H u r t s  s o  b a d

STOP LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT
I don't want you to see me like this...
Sad, angry, sad again
I'm doing you a favor, I swear
Just stop looking at me like that

I want to give you every piece of me that is left
But the fear of you not liking what you get
Rattles my bones so loud when I'm with you
And even louder when you're gone

It hurts, baby
I t  j u s t  ******* i n g  h u r t s

Is this what love feels like?

I wasn't ever made of anything,
anyways.

If I was, maybe I wouldn't be a crack
in the sidewalk,
maybe I would not be a puff of smoke.

I ate a lot of things in this life
to become nothing.

I ate a lot of power, for one thing.
Through my eyes like a fish.
And a lot of lesser bodies -
the mass is hard to work out
given a photon has none
and they've been passing through my skin
this whole time.

An old man used to show me the canals
and his hands were something.

A lot of grease I've never licked away.
A lot of moments I've never watched the water rise up.
I'm going to watch a lot of people go:
and so did he.

Someone is welcoming them all back
to the bottom of a drawer
with an old war photo
and biscuits and gravy
and all the ice cream they ever gave away.

Buzzed, I meander
to the front porch, waiting
for my ride
to pick me up.
My mother, coming in
from gardening, hands me
a freshly picked
bundle of lilacs.
"Here," she laughs,
friendly,
"I bet these smell better
than cigarette smoke."

Laughing, I take them
and agree,
not wanting her
to hang around
and smell more
than cigarettes.

My ride comes quickly.

And when I return,
a half hour later,
the lilac buds are closed,
wilted in the absence
of a bush to grow on
or a vase to dwell in.

Who knew flowers
could die
so quickly.

I wanted to put them
in water.

my childhood was removed from me
inside of a blue mustang
and what remained after that
I tried to barter off the highest bidder
but I grew,
not up,
but forward
further away
slowly releasing
hands of defiance
fists chock full of hopeless words
like anger, the flavor that aches the bone,
the cold kind,
more barren than the green of Christmas lights
glimmering off the icy veneer of a white picket fence
overeager, in the apathy of theatrics,
to strip off the remainder
because the empty feeling that followed
might one day
make a decent poem