Sallow lights irradiate the snow as it caresses the windshield.
The heart pumps faster as the car is pushed
to the speed limit,
the speedometer hovering
before sliding across the line.

An inquiry is posed by the silence of the speakers,
as flickers of red still wash down from the rear view mirror.

My dog has me trained
I know it as I scratch away
Her little breaths
Carry appreciative dogsay.

I imagine her heart beating seven times to my one.

Closer now
Her
I
carefully fold
the air mattress
where I slept restless

this morning
revealed hands touch
unexpected
yet hoped

and now alone
together
crouched knees kiss
and air
escapes
we sink towards
the ground

which now
seems inevitable
that momentary cushion
would give
and my expectations
exposed for fools
laid out
on the bare
cold
flat.

I can not touch you.
You grip my arm, my hand
Lies dormant across your bruised thighs
aware of the heat that threatens to engulf
all words with its existential
certainty.

I can not see you, my fingers
Trace the curves of your face and neck,
Eyes meet in volatile chemistry,
Lips chapped and retreating.

I can not feel you, as the tears
Flood onto my fingertips.

My legs are sagging
loose against his table
sitting in the living-room,
The clock chimes in five times
we complain in echoes
that reverberate throughout the old house
the striated oak stretches against
the wind as the clock stops
its banter.

The kitchen light creeps across the entryway
placing itself on the window
and I see a ghost,
flotsam carried on waves of light
and neuroplasticity of course
that is taken in
this sober-minded leap
a way away from this haunting.

My attention is caught
by and by I have been
out of mind he has found me.

Is my creativity forced?

Do I drive daggers into my skull,
letting the discharge
run down my limbs
and onto a page.

Or is this fantasy?

There is a cement path
Cutting the belly of the suburban grotto
Burning pine smell
My friend toils
A girl sits feeding
Into the fire
Small sticks from her
Hands as his voice
Reaches the deck

With me
Head in phone
Alone in my mind
Breaking orbit
I struggle against gravitational
Moments of self doubt
Red memories incarnate
In the subtle awkwardness
That brands my madness.

An expansive downward world
Folds into the distance
Color and rhythm
A sense of endless coast
I think about the impression
I leave in the shifting, hot
Earth that my body is at once
Sculptor and product of
I sit at the point
Where the flowing states
Are a friend of perception

I thought she was in the room with me
it is now clear she is somewhere
across a stretch of rushing thought
like a river that pulls those who dare to float
down onto breaking rocks.

My meaning seems to drown
swept away
and I make hasty calculations
on ****** expressions
trying to determine the safe passage
for my words.

What I would give
to be able to unshackle me from my body
climb into her head
and be done with guessing.

I sit
with discomfort and rue
old friends
met in a bar serving
fried intentions
and partially baked
thoughts.

I question
how our relationship
has morphed
or perhaps I no longer
have the receptors
no taste
for their brand
of humor.

Laugh now
too big
for the small joke
a reflex learned
to keep the eyes away
from the tunnel
that leads to my true heart.

I continue
to subject
myself to ethical
jump-rope.

For the sake of shared history
I stumble past
moments of awkward being.

Like a Christmas cookie in February,
I feel moldy and forgotten.

Winter melts all around me,
yet I stay frozen.

Stuck on the same chord,
I spin around letting the needle
carve new scars,
my face wrought in dark humor.

New songs will come,
the deep night will fail,
so I hope for warmth,
my art begotten.

No reason to quit
No reason to go on.

Except,
Accept.

There is thunder on the light wind,
And I wonder if she hears me
Across a glass table eyes
Cling to her delicate movements.

Her hand tips the frosty glass
As the other hovers in suspense of a stray drop,
Like she could catch everything
That might spill onto the cold pavement
where we sit.

The rain begins to drop from the clouds.
As she sits on the passenger seat
A car sailing down worn roads hidden from sight.
I sit on the edge
Of the umbrella, my face slick already,
Eyes avoiding the place
where she sat.

Going out of my way
To make it known
That my feelings
Are not overblown.

I called you once
You did not answer
I felt my doubt
Spread like a cancer.

Testing my breath
Fighting the urge
To lay down in despair
Where my fears converge.

I regain control
The spiral slows
I hear your vibration
And I'm back in throes.

The Lost Chance Girl
returns from higher altitudes.

I have slipped on her icy passes
in the night
I often sit in lover-wonder,
ever,
to her many voices,
I am vigilant.

When our lips touched
what needles must have been hidden?

tipped with poisonous promise
they left me choking
on the words unsaid.

I the spiritless animal in a cold urban forest,
snow-treading through for the horn-throwing
knuckle-shaving
glass-blowing
light-showing of a place
in a town of a city in a country of a world in a stretch of stars they call milk
then pain, tears, stretch marks and wrinkles, alcoholism, guilt, moderation within annihilation, coming out now for the big scenes, the big show of it all.

The cloud swallows the steel spires
jagged teeth into nowhere
structure and form digested
my morning takes hold
as I drive
these concrete byways
steady in lane
my imagination is bound
to follow the patterns set in
rock yet
I feel like mist.

Lids break over dusty lenses,
My heart pummels the walls until it bleeds,
ribcage rattling like a broken furnace.

This moment extends past the cage of sensibility,
onto a new horizon where darkness
and light
are not merely consorts lying,
pinky fingers playfully intertwined
as a stray hair closes the distance between
their bodies yearning,
all of law is subject
to their complete breath burning.

I, myself, crumpled on my desk
amongst strokes ambiguously
strewn across the inky darkness
(finding parchment)

thoughts never
make it to impulse
I seek to write
yet I find
I am a character being read
by the faceless observer.

The oil evaporates
sludge taste
inhabits my inner-world,

The scene assumes
a character of brilliance
as my eyes are weighted
with blood and wonder.

older
less hope
take self less seriously
win internet unlikely too many cats
will sleep tonight?
will wake, laments for dry eyes and perennial wounds
swear lightly and drink
coffee "could be worse",
on second thought
always hated that qualification.

The inveterate stump splits
sere flakes of tree-bark
falling upon the frigid grass
wet from rainclouds
settling in the yard.

A wedge placed in a foible
metal rusted from years of use
a crack running
down weathered outer layers
to a hollow center
filled with refuse.

I am handed the axe
I feel its weight
suitable for the work
the old man has begun
whose grey hands
can no longer complete.

We pick up the pieces, his back groans and clicks
rain continues to pelt my hood
I mention Thoreau
He just stares
with indifference to the gloom
my boots are soaked with the mud of the day
I put the tools in the shed for another time.

This loneliness is killing me
Just as much as everything
Else, I suppose
I will know who I am
Eventually
But probably not.

Am I ever being me
I am not so certain
Every reaction feels so shallow
I am not committed to the self
that gets pasted onto the minds
Of those people
Who talk small
and stretch their faces
And ask my name,
my opinion
What do I do,
What I have done.

Too many questions that just mean
Nothing. Maybe
That is who I am.

I'm going
Underground

rattle metal
cages, stern
faces glare youth

turn pages
Running faster
through the dark

the damp winds
carry voices far

Skeletons on
the tracks.

The stars look down,
upon the irradiated land
this old car
sunbeams recycled through copper veins
painting the concrete fields orange and blue.

We find our patch of earth.
You grab my hand,
Threading your fingers deep

Our bodies clouds
Floating upon the sinking calm
of late summer.

The car swerves gently
coasting down the main drag of our street with a cigarette in hand
I close my eyes,
She drives, why, she asks me
About my prospects and I see that she has no vision for what is ahead

I am filled with empty words
Letting them loose with false weight, watching them fall like feathers
From a bird caught in a snare,
Trying not to look-over but over-looking everything
That used to make her passions ignite,
Now just a pile of tinder thrown down
For a little warmth during the long winter.

It is the next year
That I claimed would be mine
Yet I sit upon the precipice
Without a design

Inaction breeds uncertainty
I might have thought better
To trod this path in youth
When my well was much wetter.

Age old songs
They seek to remind me
Yet I say of my anguish
It lies in relativity.

Release your words.
Let them spring urgently like orange flares
into the night air an uproar

flowers down in the dusk, bird
flapping, fleeing energies
all pooling now in the volcano-heart
of the future.

I want to wake tomorrow
Really wake
As a different person
More creative
More loving
More vibrant through all
My feeling
A rocketing, plummeting, vaporizing
Expanse of thought that I take
To be, me

with
days now past
for the doses, I would not sleep
incantations keeping dark horses
at bay, crowding
the edge of sensation
with a tension
that kept me buoyant
yet moored.

draw
all fast fumbling thoughts
heartaches flooding into veins
discord between passion
and intellect
as my head drowns
needing now
too much sleep
as if to
find the rest
of my dreams.