We are elaborate animals made of wood
earth, flowing like water into the veins
of the sky.

The sun being a fist of lava, and the night
being an enticing molar—we are
a succession of tides, being swallowed
by successions of day; and how beautifully
we wilt in the presence of joy.

The moon may be nothing
but a luminous
stone

and to eat the poetry of it
is how one chokes
on love

but the romance of morning
is that if by midnight
you are alive, that is joy.

-- when I have the tenderness of a writhing dragon,
he will paint flowers across my throat

as though to remind me that fires are indelicate,
and that I writhe in a prison made of open space.
-- this man will not smother me with his skin
when we sleep.
-- this man will unhinge the door of my mouth,
and kiss out the bullets stuck under my tongue.
                                                                ­               ---
whatever thousandth day I awaken beside this man,
realizing I have become the flowers he painted
across my throat, by braving my throat,

I will, unchaining myself from the draconic worry,
bring him his coffee in bed, with a smile.

meandering the chorus of his scent, i am lost
between the steeple of his belly
and his mouth

i wander. consuming his pleasure  with teeth,
softly, as though he were a baby bird.


i worship the sunrise in his neck. on all fours,
i pray that the sun sets between us
beautifully. maybe in another life, we

could be a temple of a shared two bodies,
twilight after twilight, upright, hand in hand.

but as it is, tonguing the canyons, the valleys
the napes, and the summits
       his mouth
becomes melody. singing without words
that he will encapsulate me. wholly

much like a tremendous hunter. but gently,
with purpose alight, we surrender. together,

shared steeples above our carnage, heaving.
the doorway to mutual softness   open

Heaving into the airless room of your heart
willingly, I sat on the bone-cold floor

subsisting on chaotic peeling inches of light
in the dimly lit corners of your diaphragm;

but I have grown old inside the succubus
stomach of these walls, and I am drowning

listening to you speak of your emptiness
as you bathe all around me
in the holy waters of narcissism
the cathedral of your sorrow eats

itself; I tethered a promise into the middle
of you, and I could yet spit at salvation



the lock on the door;
I could spit at salvation
but I have tethered a promise
deep as this imprisonment
masked as a woman.











into the middle of you

is where I am most alone.






my father is dying; of the many times
I chose to stay, this is not one

you have abandoned me within you for
the last time; I forgive

but you are not the god

Consumed and spit out many times
through the unlocked door of salvation,

the cathedral of your sorrow eats
what of myself I have cloistered there

not so I could be a sacrifice on your altar;
you are not the god of my promise to fill you

but my father is dying, and you are a prison
and heartbreak can funnel no love.





but a prison has become you.









I appreciated the slowly peeling inches
of dim light in your many hard corners,

growing old in the succubus of these walls,
drowning on the inside
listening to you speak of emptiness.







as you speak of empty




and I appreciated the peeling walls,
respecting
the dim light in the many hard corners;

but I have been growing old in this bitter love
where you say, and I listen of your empty

where I am prostrate, drowning in walls
so as to lessen the sting of your sequester

but I could fall through this door
you have opened; I could sink
without a struggle to our grave

where the cathedral of your emptiness
would truly become a skeleton

see, the sinew of it is not in self religion
but that love is the heartbeat.








too.












where I will no longer be stifled
in the asphyxiation of your self religion

breaks my hoard











but the anti-gift lies in my cloister,
and the world moves as I am misappreciated



and I listened to you tell me how empty
you are, and how you invite, but how
no-one comes

and I bathe in the bitterness, as well as
the love, because this is something which I
have promised

but I am drowning in a room,
a room that talks to me of walls
and of ceilings, and of floors

and of itself; but never of what is given
by not walking through the unlocked door

into a place where the cathedral
of your emptiness
may preach, aware, that the sinew
of love
is the soft aorta if you are the skeleton.










but the cathedral of you I will worship
even as I sever the love

this is not my life. we are fighting, as though
we are happy, but.my dad is
dying. i love him. as though i am a child.
as though i were a sapling at his root.
as though i were a construct of his being
as i am
i am
happy. as though i am a child. i am giving
as i will not take what i cannot give him
in his grave. he is wilting, as i realize i am
alive, and i will give him every inch of every
root that i am, constructed on the skeleton
he has given me. with life. within himself
as he is
he is
happy. as though he were a child forever.
as though he were a mighty spread tree.
as though we could love each other
beyond the end.

words are dying
painfully
in a hairy storm
of electric eruptions

beckoning winter’s
deathly tempest
rampart
like an iceberg fist—

—My fires have been talking
far too closely with my waters

of how our love
could be a rock elephant—
a temple, whole, or magnificent
like an incantation
on a balanced leg;
but you, scissor-cat
of forget-me-nots;
but you—favorite
flower eating our paper mouse:
pining affection is thin
and imbalanced inertia
in love is a bolted door.

loneliness sits like an island of cold feet;
loneliness stirs like a maelstrom
of hot knives;
when I am touched
either gently,
or forcefully,
all of my ‘heart’
flees the blanket of intimacy.

It is much easier
being alone.
It gets much harder
most every day;

but today
a stranger
with a face like an alabaster rose
walked past me, smiling coyly,

and I wept,

unraveled

to be ravaged,
to be loved.

A mountain hemorrhages cliffs of
sunlight just outside my dark front door;
it is the fifth wonder of my universe,
a morning marvel
framed by coffee
and cigarette smoke; it is
love, with hair of lush pine needles,
and a chest like an arm of dirt:

in your too-old two old
river-bed shoes,
in your dry desert clothing,
why does the fog beat you
like an immovable heart?

How can something so old
be dying; is the sky an
unforgiving wrinkle

more canyon than harbor,
or ship without captain

are we all
all we are
at the end, or is there more?

He smiles with the graces of crumbling eyebrows,
with wit, megalithic in the cavern behind
his unformed eyes; i lowered mine, seeking
elsewhere—that here as i sleep, he is formed
from half memory.

The better part of me
remembers him in increments, steadily handed

our orchard, our healthy fruit. His arms overladen
with fibrous molten undulating movement,
a cacophonous cocoon for my madness’

half love. The truer part of me
remembers him as mountainous, thunderous,
a storm eating into the distances. arms
kneading throughout time, becoming. stone.

In the black spheres of another’s cavernous
eyes I lost myself amidst the seep of my own
light patterned into strange foreign orbs

drinking heavily of I
am borne on the winds of imagined hands
sculpting me awake. where I can dream-in
the voids between lust, where the nothing
seems happy, the night is my friend

in the convex meniscus of another’s iris
perhaps I can dream of rebirth in the titrating
wound in the womb of lust

makes my eyes search the ether. In the
womb of my lust there is wind in my wings.
In the womb of my lust there is more

to be found. to be woken into equilibrium
perhaps I must abandon the forked tongue
of independence, so that fanged loneliness

can die of happiness. the snake becomes
a docile bird when fed. the castle of self
becomes a womb in the kingdom
of entwined, sleeping hands. we are born

many.

I will retaliate with his mouth,
and you will become what you have made
me.
-- you leave me to stagnate;
talking myself in and out of love, I
forget the curvature, and allure of your body,
and the parts of me that fit in it
starve.

-- call it neutrality, abandonment,
or an "inability to live within" yourself -
call it your serotonin's-seppuku, or
the fact you are inconsiderate;

call it out, like you did in your sleep: "I love
you;"
I do not.

Overcome by this inverted lightning, i storm
into an abbreviated tomorrow, where i flood
into the dreamscape of today, eyes raining

down and inward. i sleep forth into the world
of waking, overcome by the temperament
of this mummified mouth. clawing the dragon
now hungry for my golden intimate currency

our love hides at the ends of my fingertips.
Fire nibbles the soles of my feet through
to my own heart, crumbling me clouded

where i go blind. i am sorry, marooned
on this island, where the corals reach down
from the sky. where stalactites rip the sails
of all incoming boats, the dragon survives

in an ephemeral artery, or in some capillary
where his teeth reign over whatever empire

smothering into, he becomes my face

to she that saves me. i have learned to love,
in that love has shown me it is beyond me;

where
the dragon follows my fingertips to your hair,
you walk beside me. where i am given i,
but awakened, beneath a golden sky

the dragon suckles everywhere

that i am saved. by the weapon of giving,

we carry an honest love
between our outspread palms

richer in treasure is
the continental freedom of having
washed ashore together.

Love will grow in me sideways, a supine pine
sapling, shoveling mountainous glaciers of stone

embedded into my boiling erosions, melting
the anaerobic hot mud into a calmer froth.

We may kiss at the precipice of the abyss
our love has inevitably chewed through itself.  

And I will likely palm our weathers
into a river-swallowing sea

and you will hate me; desert of a future
companion’s ship—can I

swallow my dominance; that devotion
could bloom from this love’s wilderness,

foresting in perennial fullness,
prospering in the shared bed
rock we have carved into orchids.  

At the place where I will bury my bones
in the murderous entrancement of another,

taiga could storm from the soft ring of fire
between twenty interlocked evergreen fingers.

my brain is a clenched fist
and five acres of jungle
have burned
as you've read this;

humanity, spitting in the face of peace is
wholly miraculous, but a blind eye of mud;

your planet is a cosmic apple
what is god
sustains the creature.
---

the Thylacine, otherwise known
as the Tasmanian tiger,
was one of only two marsupials
in which both sexes harbored a pouch;
an equal home without genetic
misogyny; by 1936, the Thylacine,
the harbinger of the unlocked jaw,
the carrier of equal protection
had been hunted to extinction

---
with capillaries like ingrown flowers,

careless, hapless human fingers
tore a genome into garbage
piles as you have read this;

harvesters are celebrated
all, together germinated
with minuscule ignorant hands

we nurture ourselves into dust
with concrete, reinforced eyes

thinking the world a zoo
and that we are separate

but wolves can change the course of rivers,
think of freeway infrastructure

think of cows knee deep in ****
in former verdant land

this abomination with teeth
is a blue light in an ocean of darkness

and if we mine the root for the fruit
the tree will fall out of the sky.

-- mapping the world,
freckle by freckle
with my tongue,
I have found there are four of them
at various points across your belly, and

have I not allowed them entry
into this angry constellation
of teeth, and raw degradation
that has become my mouth

in the absence of you

I have digested them wholly,
never speaking of their beauty, for I
can not possess what I can not crawl into.

-- understanding the stipulation that what is
temporarily borrowed is not freely given,

again, it is you who are
so good at burning for me
what affection can imitate.

a dimple of great sadness yawns wide,
a timid fawn, eyes and ears small pearls

and it exists only in my body, mourning
lethargy. morning becomes lethargy,
a heavy predator. without commander
or command, it commences. flowering
into living sleep, i obey, when it beckons

primordially. the sky’s cerulean fingers
all sag. backwardly, blossoming
into muteness, all color
is fed to the inescapable

darkness. hand-fed inwardly, it is a gaping
thirst in the sea of unquenchable
hunger. i do not love it; it mimics

moonlight. the limpid doe,
a crystalline annihilator,

havocs the flower
to furlough the meadow
into the silence,
and into the black.

poetry does not sleep in my hand
and kindness is something I value as
half true almost as often as people
mistake what I am now
for what I will be when I
am neither magnanimous
nor synchronized
with what I was before
in the circular continuum
where I am flailing on all
edges and slopes of your sea
like a valley; on all fours,
all aspects of me
are all aspects of me
and I am whole
where I am gentle
where I am cruel
and where I, a pacifist
ignite these wars between us
I am digging these moats to embody
and receive all we drink in
each other that is chaos and peace
will always be there to refill the cup
of your heart as my purpose in life.

A pocketful of doom is flourishing
ceiling to wall in my cranium,

and though I tend to the tantrum of it
with fatherly, nurturing discipline

it acts as a nebulous cumulonimbus
fog seething with diffusion of void,
breaking through every window of warm

out to the inside I tend to become

an accidental abuser, flailing teeth
into over-ripened words, knocking
unripened fruit from the bough between us.

With nerves like coiled snakes in an apple,
prismatic minds are dulled to a fractal
of their former spectral rainbow
when expunged into the shadow.

Thorough rage—event horizon
clawing sides of deep depressions,
cusping manic at the fervor—

when the cliff becomes the shackle
of the neurosis-fed darkness jackal

open demise toward the mouth of the sun
and perhaps tongue at infinite light.

being disharmonious
with the whisper of death,
my father sentiently orchestrates
his final moments.

the cancer enfolds, unbending;
inverting throughout him like a small womb
unfolding the fabric of his universe.
his torso ebbs with these insatiable flowers.
he is born again into death knowing love,
dreaming his journey into being. his children
shedding symphonies of his laughter
are woven into silence; as he dies
a fully spread bouquet—beautiful
in the face of surreptitious sabotage.
it must be cumbersome for him. to grow
backwardly. still, though—outwardly,
he hefts it peacefully. dying a mountain—
symphonic—and in bloom.

I often wish I were a gentler man,
pruning flowers from thorns
in the garden of words;

but what a small nuisance
as clouds eat the days
undulating cathedral
of red and blue sky

I devour my life to the bone,
is enough to not covet
much more than the dawn child of sunset.

something is wrong with the pendulum
above; my chest has been carved
into new designs;
I am awake with a claw in my head;
I am asleep with nutrient-rich vision;

last night I dreamt
that gnats clouded out from my mouth
as though they were seeding the earth

and I was stupefied; when I awoke,
cold sweat in both hands, I recognized

that apocalyptic mornings
with magma-like light
dripping new over dew,
and the cold stone of night

are a separate entity
from the splinter inside of me

give me that space between
hunter and hunted
where even in mastic war
one can chew stillness.