girl…. you and I always knew the edge was close
we always teetered
gasping our breath at every breeze
this was no common **** story
frayed fragmented fear found us frothing
for this entangled mass
of passion and sweat
driving ourselves deeper with each
stroke of this swollen brush
reaching into the drip wet nights
and afternoons
living and dying all in one hard driving ******
of an existential existence
thus laying fertile the fodders of
of beauty and its pain

for how could one grasp so much
as their own
the vastness would beg to differ
as to our meager needs
of love
perhaps…. she said
it is simply getting ******
that is real
for our love
betrays everything the soul
hungers for

except……(the moon softly whispered)
for the one deeply harbored truth….
you see…. the constituent element of the soul is
love

The rain has washed us
And it has taken some of us
It has traded us furnishings for mud
And the bridge at San Fernando
Is heading out to sea

Would a touch
Release
The heart to roam with the soul
Would a touch, a word, a tasted tear
Release
The heart to roam with another
Heart

What was wrong
I for dreaming
Then believing
or
Is it love that is wrong
What failed what….

The nights darker and colder
The shadows of my world
Closing away the light
Pitiful creatures we become
Not loved

I don’t crawl back to that night anymore
That night under that grand old tree
When the stars reached down with their smiles
And loved us
And the breezes sang the most beautiful song
For us
When my soul reached into hers
And I felt her embrace
As a truth
That justified all my desires to love
I tasted her tears
To let her know
That every fiber…
was there with her

naked to touch
blue draws the deepest
pulsed words
in common refrain
she bites her lip
“falling is flying”
trace the outlines of desire
on something blue
make it naked
it is more honest that way
she is a river tonight
“who defines up”
a gesture of indifference
“who defines down”
the hint of a smile
“falling is flying away”

in a flash she came back to me
that day
gray with heavy dark clouds
the scent of fallen rain
separated from time

the explorer child
balancing on high
drawing in the view
carving off pieces of his new world
alone and brave

when his foot lost its ability
the fall
descending back to earth
but head met earth transformed
hardened steel hidden in the grass

then I died
my body floated back into sky
I remember passing through layers
of my ephebic existence
still alone and brave

I felt nothing but saturated calm
laying on brilliant blue pedestal
in a dark void
I started to become peace
then..... a voice

her arms gathered me up
placing her hand on my head
she spoke firmly
“you do not belong here”
“you must go back”

instantly I knew it was all wrong
and somehow I chose to return
pulling myself off the ground
I ran to the adults
but the child could not articulate

Intense pulse
Heart flooded
With
(it is more than blood)

Gathering the fibers
Of her desire
In my mouth
I find her....

She said
“We’re never more alive
than when our flesh
touches this fire”
She has such beautiful contemplative desires....

What fodder am I
grist for some God’s wrath
or
pleasure
some quantum reaction
held and,
not held
in
the false forces of life
This stage of perception
something must fill the senses
something must need growth a purpose
What fodder am I....

The tempest raged back then
I was still trying to ****
the pain of her

Dylan was singing
Blind Willie Mctell
in a sullen and lonely room
where
the vein could not hold enough
to sway the darkness
from comforting in me

I was just trying to find a way
to forgive myself
for being that much alive….

so the poet walked
for years
through a thousand shades
of light and hunger

driven empty
he laid his head upon the ***** of humanity
and so
the soul
fell upon the crest
of beauty and its pain
the forgiveness was tenuous
but alive

It has been raining for hours now
It comes as the waves do on the shore
The crescendos and lulls
Unpredictable the rhythm
Of this symphony
The conductor is Gaia’s will

I stare out the kitchen window
A pause watching the drops hitting the earth
Infinity dances and reigns
More than a hundred million gallons
For every square mile so far

I sense the rivers swelling
Will Saul’s house be ok?
My driveway is too slick to climb
I cannot leave
To help lift his refrigerator up into the loft
He will smile when he tells me about it later

We are driven into our own makings
I love this force of nature
Yet I fear this force of nature
Making us nothing against her will
The metal roof reverberates
Her mantra

We hunker
Watching the show
Even the cats surrender
Two on the fridge
One in the basket on microwave
I sip my coffee....

The fragments of the deep
That which is tucked away
In the recesses of your being
Still have wings

For they can lift above you
And the tethers that bind
Draw you into the light
Bathing fragments
In life
And their voices are heard again
Crying out
Yes....we are alive

maybe he noticed me
when my eyes were reaching
out across the hills
trying to find the edges of the world
maybe he did look inside me
and saw what was once himself

I was most often quiet
a juxtaposition to the rage
I was always trying to sew back together
the hearts
and push the tears back into
their eyes
(his too)

I spent almost every waking moment
with a man
who both loved and hated me
knowing those ragged edges
was a gift
because the world is a broken place
and I am alive in it....

my heart pours out like water
I am frozen in the time we had
and shattered by what we no longer have
my heart is melted
by the tears in your voice
I gave birth to your pain
Nothing I am…. can heal
I am the dust that the winds are blowing from your life

goodbye

The shovel pierces the ground
The sweat drips from my face
Darkness is closing in
The prying away, the lifting
I dig in silence
The grave deepens
Strange ritual
Why don’t we build pyres
for cats....

I am drenched in sweat
The dirt under my nails irks me
My knees are caked
I lay in my hammock
And message my friend
“Bob is in a better place now”
We say this in a few different ways
Until she goes silent

She is three thousand miles away
Receiving cancer treatments
And her cat Bob just died
I cannot fix this world
I can only dig graves

Crushing weight combines
Product races to blue dot
Sun caresses leaf

The jungle quiets
Eyes of the sky looking down
Her tears start to fall

The sway, the breeze, the knots
Suspended above the earth
The rhythmic stretching  of the hammock

Leaves bold against Sol
Breezes wander through softly
Head rests against bark

World swaying in time
Breezes push and pull the cool
Hammock set adrift

Synapse finds it’s path
The page pulls words from the pen
The poet hungers

as skies open up
they stretch their hands to the sun
verdant life returns

Porch light casts false day on flora
Insects locked in entropic flights
I breath in the cool evening air

Afternoon light dims
Pregnant clouds cover
Raindrops chatter in my dreams

Outside train window
World rushes by
The endless movie of life

Sunlight reaches  
Empty rocking chair rocks
A cat stretches

The house was her tomb
Afternoons with the sun trying
To pierce the shroud
My mother clutching
  Rosary beads
And her heart

I could not be a child
Self derision in such wants
Laying in deaths’ bed
I can still smell the blankets
Musty clean with the scent
Of freshly fallen tears

The clock could not find
Its next beat
The house could not sleep
We wandered with her through the halls
Looking for a God
Who would love us

“Hail Mary full of grace
The Lord be with thee
Blessed art thou amongst women
And blessed is the fruit
Of thy womb Jesus
Holy Mary mother of God
Pray for us sinners,
now
And at the hour of her death....”

the edges quiver
as surfeit suffices the small
and the bitter sing dances
that barren body and soul
am I the child of a poor god
the mouth
the hand
and I

Harbors

blast furnace wind rolling off the prairie
the kind of wind that makes you realize
we were all born alone
I hugged the river hoping to find
some untouched ****** breath of cool
but ****** the **** for indifference he is
offered nothing
I headed up Hawthorne
wading through the souls
of the beautiful desperate
and the wicked surfeit

looking up I caught her eyes
hanging out her window
stretched out between
where love lives
and love dies
she looked down
peeling away the layers of her soul
offering a shade
that harbors the most twisted and distorted
remnants of love

later
on the outskirts
we watched Orion’s futility
our hearts gasped
as we touched
which was the hunter
and which was the prey
trembling
we fell into love
as the wind softened to a cool breeze

blast furnace wind rolling off the prairie
the kind of wind that makes you realize
we were all born alone
I hugged the river hoping to find
some untouched ****** breath of cool
but ****** the **** for indifference he is
offered nothing
I headed up Hawthorne
wading through the souls
of the beautiful desperate
and the wicked surfeit

looking up I caught her eyes
hanging out her window
stretched out between
where love lives
and love dies
she looked down
peeling away the layers of her soul
offering a shade
that harbors the most twisted and distorted
remanents of love

later
on the outskirts
we watched Orion’s futility
our hearts gasped
as we touched
(which was the hunter
and which was the prey)
trembling
we fell into love
as the wind softened to a cool breeze

Heart full of rags
And a pocket full of lies
He said there’s not enough here
To save all those lives

On the corner stands that old man
Selling off your dreams
When you look to the future
Just how does she seem

Well we all got something
Something inside
Yeah we all got a reason
To be alive

Of Lies and a man
And his reckless din
As he stands there screaming
At the coming wind

And what he squandered
Is what we lose
As he stands there screaming
Screaming at the truth

Well we all got something
Something inside
Yeah we all got a reason
To be alive

Shriveled up heart
Shriveled up soul
The king has spoken
The words so cold

And the minions that follow
Well they’re digging our graves
It helps not to care
What more can you say

Well we all got something
Something inside
Yeah we all got a reason
To stay alive

What tempest lays here
within these hearts
rising up to crash down upon
the separations
of justice from justice
of sustenance from mouth
of shelter from skin
of truth from knowledge
of
I from you....

the heat seeps in
through the skin,
pumped by blood throughout
it drips deep
soul bathed
trodding through inundated ecstasy
pounding deeper and deeper
until
I surrender
my
existence

we knew we were both broken….
as we staggered out of souls
and into an embrace that allowed
only us
dreaming that the edges
could somehow be sewn together
and made into something beautiful

—-

I thought I saw her walking one day
an obscure soul turning an obscure corner
an undefined moment in an undefined universe
if there were pieces of me trailing behind her
I could not see
but by then I had sculpted my soul
into a shape that allowed my survival
of her and I…

halfway to existence
someone says
here you go….

they said he never wore gloves
even on the coldest days of winter
that he worked the reins of his team
in sub below weather
back and forth with loads of grain
they swore that it was true

they said that he always won the competition
of carrying grain sacks up a set of stairs
and that afterwards everyone wanted to fight him
he would drink for days
leaving my father to sleep under the wagon
they said he never lost a fight

they said he never trusted banks
and he kept his money hidden in his mattress
and when the banks failed
he had the cash to buy up all the homesteads
that had become broken dreams

they said he was a tough old Frenchman
who harnessed the hills
and built a small empire
he fathered thirteen children
and built a modern home in town
when he could no longer bend the land
to his will

I just know that he cut deep wounds
into my father’s heart
and my father in turn
cut them in me

perhaps it is why I never had children

the social skills of indifference
are difficult
self generated algorithms
tend to fail
if one is be true to thy owns self
it does not take away from the beauty of these poets
and this site
however….

I fragment thee….less a cloud than the rain
the portions we partition ourselves from
remain un-sketched
we are merely grasping the edges of an existence
we struggle to know
but in dreams the murals are painted vast
and there
we are whole
I fragment thee….less a cloud than the rain

Stating the day
A broken once starved
Soul
Walking now
The joy from the sun and earth
the strength
Wisdom walking now
To cast off the imperfections
That human
****** upon you.....

I tug at the edges of my reality
Just to make sure I am alive
Braking apart all the constituent elements
Of what it is to be human
That core mix
Of passion and reason
That yields and taxes
That starves and surfeits
What is more the soul
Than the flesh

Blackened skies yield truths
The way the winds drive your heart
In every direction
A poets vein hungers
For the needle of perception
That paints the picture
That may someday cure
The poet from being the poet

I’d spread myself across your canvas
If there was a certain amount
Of indifference agreed upon
At the outset
To start from zero
Releases us from the assuagement of resolve
Does anything need be more than zero

And I would open up all of I
If it were not for
That it has gotten old
And knowledge knows no religion
And I have no god
So the colors would run
The canvas more used than used
It would become faded and forgotten
Hung in repose
In the halls of a gallery that only admits
The sightless

But I would fall from grace here
Espousing such false and grandiose reflections
Silence begets silence
Words beget that…. resolve
For
It is the poets job is to kick indifference in the head
Until it bleeds some semblance of compassion

And so
As to not to end up praying to some small statue of myself
I will drip what I am across your canvas
Letting the colors bleed into the fabric of what we are
And if hung in repose
Then hung in that fragment of time
Where the poet grabs at some infinitesimal aspect of life
And breathes something
And breathes something
Into this…..

to make oneself the king
of all us lesser gods
I cast the shadow of my soul
on your indifference
the thin razor edge of your words
drip from edges eroded by these eons
of ignorance

If the raging wind
calls a name
tossing aside a crumpled
weathered version of a child
then the bonds that meet heart
with its insufferable dreams
and the reach of the piercing stars
pretend a life
we lay bare and unbelievable

love torn from the arms of the heart
by the vicious rule of the ******
ripping voice from voice
ripping heart from heart
and set against the cruelest numbers
of ancient standards
touch becomes dust
and love lays choking in ash
pretending a life
we lay bare and unbelievable

watching the attrition
the insatiable hunger of life
that consumes
the beautiful ones you planted in your heart
the angels worn down by
loving too much
by being too much
and the ones taken
by split the second timing of fate
casting reason into a tattered realm
of emptiness
we pretend at life
that lays bare and unbelievable

and so
cutting deep into the soul
bleeding out the sum of yourself
grasping that cold cutting jagged edge of existence
lays something to rest
movement anywhere across the compass
is knowing a love for the pain
for it is the entirety
of
you

Across the canyons and rivers
Of your existence
Past the heartbeats suspended
The nights stretched out
Into insufferable dawns
The etchings that trace out the scars
Of what left you what you are
All those faces and hearts
That you were
Crossing those landscapes
Of love twisted into shapes
That bound your heart
Unable to breath
Or see

In cavernous darkness
The needle finds its way
Through the fibers stretched out from birth
Until
That falling crumbled moment
Pushing in a temporary evisceration of a reality
Arrogated by the coldness
Of what human does to human
Torn shreds of something as simple and pure
As love
But, as the needle withdraws
Its tennicles and barbs
Pull along with it
Your soul

Out of cavernous darkness
Gathering up self
Pushing back the days
Pulling in the light
The fragments lay across my landscape
Perhaps they were the sculptures tools
Shaping me as I am today
It matters not
It is only the light
That matters now....

if someone were to hold me open
to that last page
where I stood alone
on the precipice of
love and its pain
then a story could be told
or a poem could be written
if someone were to hold me open

the blood of his poems
lay desiccated and alone

the stars are the refuge
as futile as they are

the misanthrope laughs at something
he no longer cares for

another shot of ***
and another book of self told lies

still laughter is so cheap
so he turns his head to the stars

and laughs until he cries

Heartfelt indifference
The vagabonds search the skies
In the nexus no one speaks
Nostrums pushed into veins
Sledgehammer heartbeats
Taking a run at the thunder in the distance
If either were to quiver
The world would unravel itself
Back out into the cosmos

Truth is a lonely soul out here
She is devastated as the ravaged womb
That she is
All the little boys gathered around
And told all the lies that tore all the girls down
It was always the young girls on the street
That told the tale of humanity
In their eyes

There were round windows
On the doors of the funeral home
And the one in the back
That always swung shut
That’s where they kept
My little sister

Her casket was dull grey
With a complicated mechanism beneath
To wheel her about
Through the door with the round window
Where they kept
My little sister

I did not know
Why we didn’t just bring her home
It seemed so simple
Once she was home
The tears would stop falling
For my little sister

I’m not living for the obituary
I’m living for the life….

Some souls are looking for love
Some souls are looking for peace
Some souls are looking for nothingness
Some souls are looking for their gods
Perhaps there is a soul that is still looking for me….

As the tree sheds the leaf
The tree remains
As life sheds the lovers
Love remains

Heart drips it’s
sweat stained dream
on the parchments of desire
entreating a delusional self
braggart of a heart
selfish to own
what is never owned

mired in the slit trench
of this war of attrition
peeling away each layer
of what love isn’t
and never could be

she looked up with the eyes of her soul
pools with the depth of every broken dust riddled desire
her will stretched out
between where love lives
and where love dies

she softly uttered
if lust be the nucleus of all passion
then is not love the desiccant of the soul
do we not all fail
by
believing love to be a possession…..

the birds were all gone
cats and chemicals
the silence was lonely
in the mornings
the dirtworker
new to the streets
looked to the sky
only grey
no yellows or blues
and the hunkered
fought the cold and the damp
minute by minute

it was not the land
where thy unto thy self
lay within the womb
each day one could be born
the treaty between
the sky the dirt and you
was simple
each could only take so much
and only give so much
we were ancient out there

the patches of green
scattered amongst the cement
seemed too fragile
so he refused to tread
his breathing became shallow
less became more
watching himself fall
from his own grace
for
the souls were as vacant
as the poets had portrayed