I fear that a woman so queer
Brought to bed in sin my only kin;
To shame, Lorraine,
For my lover lies cold beneath cobble and stones
with my Rose only a bud, never to bloom past her gravel tomb,
and you.
Mercy a third to join your gravel grave,
I gave your husband his own far from your stones
and buried him in my thoughts, buried him alone.
A lifetime plus decades have since passed and I inhabit an empty home,
collecting dust on my bones.

My mouth is dry with the taste of the smoke and yearning,
Incense sticks lit on my tongue with a lick of whiskey lighter fuel.
Burning down to each moment where the ashes of you
Would fall off my tongue,
Until there was nothing but ashes by the end of the night.

(from 2012)*


A chance reveals itself before me,
Happenstance too good to pass-
I take this to the street, I’m changing how I see.

My heart races, my heartbeat fast begins to flee
My world becomes vast
In a waterless sea

I see the movement in every tree
As I float on a greener grass
Compelled by my knees to take me where I see

I follow the calling, only a body
A nail guided by magnets moving as mass
I’m no longer confined by reality

A world crafted by an artisan in geometry,
To think every star that meets my eye greets me from the past
And we are living trapped and pointlessly.

The sun peers over the horizon at me,
Light warms my world fast
But warmer are my thoughts, the chance that found me
Moved my world and set it free.

When I was younger I wrote of cops and robbers
Killers, chases, drugs and thrillers
One specific story that was my favorite chiller-
Hitting big money houses in a quiet town,
What a young burglar grabbed was something he'd better off not found
A suitcase full of treasures not
What he thought was heavy with cash, commodities
Was weighted with remains of bodies.
Can't risk jail, no, he can't pay his bail
So when the killer came looking
The only thing to do was to cover up his trail.

I never finished the story, writing it was kind of boring.
I was busy drinking and exploring when
One night I met a man, and he was telling me this story
How he was almost caught robbing this old man's home
And of the couple things he gathered, a suitcase was one.
No- it wasn't full of literal bodies
Maybe this time, some actual commodities.
But he sold them soon after, to get money for his drugs and whatever else he revered.
That he introduced to his friends that he turned to cold bodies with his endeavors.
So my story plays out in metaphors and its true that rich old men can be killers too
Like the one in my town with the corpses in the walls
I wondered, if plundered, would the killer turn the burglar into another number
And finish my story for me.

Make me green again.
Like pine, emerald, envy
Paint me my color

A few nights ago I dreamt of the memories I have with you,
They were all dusted in snow and I was trying
to find the footsteps pressed within them that I could trace back to where we were.
I stayed lost in the land of the past until the sun began to rise
and melted each memory away
and lit the road back home.

So they flee; once beautiful narratives detached from me and took off running.
For my own sake, I eventually follow and take off hunting.

Crossing the bridge to the ocean, finding no words above or beneath their pillars or the sun-setting shades on the water in motion.

Maybe I'll find the words perched on the bridge as a little black bird, who mirrored me in a way that resonated with my soul but whose tune sang not one melodic word.

I go to the ocean, and heavy waves collapsing onto beds of sand sighed no release for me, and I leave.

Home, I paint a picture and coaxed a thousand  empty words out of it, that rang like broken records and sang to me deep into the night.

I awake to a blizzard, beautiful white.
A cold I felt I'd brewed with my mind
So I try and dive into a novel only to find my mind's waters shallow, and the pages became no more than ink printed paper.
I think myself incapable;

I look to the bottle, mostly white,
It sat on my nightstand by white papers that so longed for me to write.
I kick my head back and let the words pour from the bottle and back into me, loosening my grip, they could finally flow free.

I could only look at you as another crack in the dam of my morality
A wave of feelings meant to untangle and unwind my heart and make it feel something sweet
It wasn’t your fault you didn’t know it was soaked and flooded with sin
I go home plenty nights with my clothes soaked in beer and my teeth in nicotine
The teeth that keep cracking in my dreams of insecurity
Cracking and falling fences keeping me in falling
Through a ******* blowing wind
And in this scene
all I see are the silhouettes of my regret
In every life-giving breath provided by a cigarette
I could walk for days away from you
I would walk straight into a fire, flood, or plague
Rather than feel what I did again
Madness is a sea of caring for someone like you
I can’t be bothered to be eclipsed by care again

I change faces like I change shoes
Trying people on for size to temporarily fill the glass of emptiness that is my heart
Its been dropped and chipped and put back together but why would you choose mine over a fresh, clean new glass
I don’t blame you
I know you see the turmoil I would cause you right on my face
And I feel bad for the others who haven’t been able to see it so clearly
I don’t mean to hurt anyone but maybe I do

A thief thrives in the winter
When the cold anxious months make the body go thinner
While room grows for layers on layers of
Secrets and treasures stacked like neglected papers,  eventually a novel,
Hard-covered by a coat.
Held against the body, and shoved inside a bag,
Commodities come free when the weather has you bad and
making hand gloves out of tags.
When thoughts become a wind chill, bring you
feeling below freezing-
Selfish starving hands can be warmed pretty easily.

A resurgence of emotion, you are an ocean.
Wrath of the sea proves powerful over me,
And spits my seashell fragments ashore,
broken and soft.


Your force will hold no boat aloft,
Unforgiving waves push them away and I have nothing to say.
A thousand times you’ve crashed down on me, a thousand little pieces
have created this beach.

But like when the moon waxes and wanes
Or the storms roll in and it rains-
Your surge is anticipated, your receding so late
Leaves my sand fragments so jaded
I regret to say every tide I’ve awaited.

Your diamond pattern repeats infinitely, or, perhaps,
Just as far as I can see.
Every day you’re quite the same to me-
Only slightly hindering visibility
With metal woven consistency

And weather takes its toll,
Storms and rust and wind pressed gusts weakened your steel hold.
You were able to contain me for the years when I was small,
But time has made me tall
I can see the other side,
Not a blade of grass or leaf concealed, not a pebble can hide.

Illusion for peace of mind pretends to be a
Silver knight
Who protects against the wrong ones and holds in tightly the right
You may stand your ground, and
By each diamond trait in which you are bound
is a place for my heel to lift me up and around
and to leave your sacred space without a sound.

Prologue: I'm wasted in my car, outside of his party, waiting until I'm sober enough to leave, and only a single streetlight illuminates my car enough to scribble down my thoughts as I watch him wonder out into the coming storm, perhaps looking for me, as I wallow in the dark,
feeding myself cigarettes.*


Shaker

Cliche but
These feelings are still in my palm, clenching seashells and breaking into bitter
brittle little bones to crack like the thunder outside my window.
White strikes against the dashboard
Sitting in my car,
Wondering how far I'll fall beneath you and
how long these clouds of rain will take to reach you.
But like I've said every time you never listened,
You'll walk right through them, right to them, never for a second ever needing to lead you to them.
Still you give me too much credit.
As much as you make me uneasy,
You make my job easy.
Flickering street lights, its dark, its early in the night.
I wish it was quiet.
But its never been silent here
The town shakes still, all night long, so tiring
The night shakes out still a car, cricket, or siren.


I stop here, its time to leave

Soft-spoken with the loudest presence in the room
A March wind that caresses through
Petals of daffodils in bloom
A salted sea
Stinging fresh faces under the moon

Eyes blue like the world under cloud-covered dusk
Eyes like the clouds and everything beneath them, his dusk
He returns to his place by the sea
The new moon brings new clarity