do your hair up all pretty like
for those of us that are sure the world
can see our fly-aways, just fly away
our cuticles aren't healed enough
from nights spent jamming our
hands in between the rough *****
and city junctions, telephone wires
hooked to our skin because we're
just fish to greater demons

but

when you hear your old selves
discuss their polarities and crack
the mirror with spiritual hits it's
best to talk them off the ledge
that faint precipice in the distance
where they linger and stare too
long at the other sides, the other wheres
otherwhys and othertheres
see the green grass in other hells
but you tell them that
there's no place like
the here and
now

the here
and now.

there's a dale as you're entering
El Paso County where my fingers
feel heavy and my arms take on a
distant memory, a spirit dug into
the highway that radiates the way
the land does in Mailuu-Suu or Sellafield
because in this valley the rocks are coquelicot
and the trees gasp from snowy outcrops
in a tender, pleading kind of way--
so much so that I want to reach out
and thread through their weeds--a
demand so visceral that I feel the
pine brush on my palms and the
bark scrape skin from my forearms
but
then

the valley opens with it's shaved hills
and pulls back in the rear view mirrors
where its memories don't reach.

When I read about the brachial plexus,
a spaghetti junction of nerves webbed
behind the clavicle, I am d  i  s  t  a  n  t
half awake and dreaming about lovers
caught up in the mystics of medulla,
gingerly pinching the tendons and
sinewy muscle--

I consider the thick arteries (perhaps not
so thick) (not like other trunks, cords and
red threads) and how easily I could die,
how swollen 'tunnels' and blocked interstate
highways seem not so far fetched according to
medical terminology and the number of things
that could go wrong ( will ) as Murphy warned.

yet here I am, alive and well, a celestial giant
housing stars and all a manner of great, lumbering
structures, pith, and blood.

he says he's an open
book but

why bother with
a heartbeat I can
hardly hear

ode to the flower next to belladonna
the trees on south-facing mountain slopes
silently musing into the nights and not
the avalanche's daughter whom the hills
sing praises and woes

her soul's a quiet unison, meno mosso
a choir and composer spun through
***** pipes, doors cracked and never
fully closed, (there's light beneath the
lids...) she'd like to think of herself as
the wind but she's content as still air
between prayer beads--

and if not the star dust--then who? why else
do we call pauses rests? Why then is there
beauty in fermattas? In crescendos that vibrate
the material of the immaterial--if such things
happened to be true for the unwild and untangled
the perpetually pianissimo, the leading and kerning--
because she would much rather be an empty vessel
or a plate without food, a seed or a grape on a vine
because neither go without lords or masters and

she is not her own.

Where is the emotion I could only ever bare
when you were here beside me every day and everywhere
I seem to be avoiding all the simple things I knew
instead commit to stupor coming out of me and you
Whatever hasn't happened I expect at any time
receiving with the darkness every shadow in my mind
It's good to be alone and I have come to much prefer
the solitude of sameness as the days become a blur
I'm learning to admit that what is perfect will not break
and daily seek the patience to accept it when I wake
Today has been forever and forever's moving still
a death that has no fear because it goes against our will