no, i saw you stand when you felt
compelled by some substantial guilt
to flee the concrete stoop and spout
an equally unwieldy bout

that all was like your box  of bricks
subject to your picking and mixed
in such a way that the unknown
nature of your constructions grow

but no i say, you are opposed
in everything you say and know
for half is master of control
a thief, unlike romantic souls

that take things in pace as they are
swooned by  soldiers of every war
and consequently fated to
be affected, but always lose



this is how i bear with the glare
that flashes in those ever rare
moments where i see your muscles
twitch a smile at the puzzle

and yes, I cold be wrong.

no, i saw you stand when you felt
compelled by some substantial guilt
to flee the concrete stoop and spout
an equally unwieldy bout

that all was like your box  of bricks
subject to your picking and mixed
in such a way that the unknown
nature of your constructions grow

but no i say, you are opposed
in everything you say and know
for half is master of control
a thief, unlike romantic souls

that take things in pace as they are
swooned by  soldiers of every war
and consequently fated to
be affected, but always lose



this is how i bear with the glare
that flashes in those ever rare
moments where i see your muscles
twitch a smile at the puzzle

and yes, I cold be wrong.

i think i’ve killed it
i can see it deflating in the skull’s corner
all of it

no matter the think thought
speak it enough
and all perspectives
are complementary mirrors
circling the magician
and no matter where you stand
you can see the rabbit come out the sleeve

i think i’ve killed it
all of it

you know the sides of the die
you know odds and chances
you know the faces in the deck
you know no matter what is thrown
you don’t even have to catch it

because i can do that for you
but i is not stitched to you
and when you see i pulling
card tricks and rabbits from his hat
you look into the mirrors
and  you laugh at all the laughs

and if i fails, then you might see
the wretch retreat to the back scenes
and as his friend you may sit beside him
but you does not have empathy
because you can know me

me, i think i’ve killed it
and seen the magic dead
and even killed the magician
just to bring him back again
because i can do that
i can be affected by all
i can  bleed from wounds
and pore with pride
and find beauty in it all

while you just sits there smirking
at i, a twitching infant
over stimulated and babbling
and feeling every minute

and now you’ve gone and thought too much
and even this pretty martyrdom
just seems another trick
to keep baby i entertained

listen, its like this:

say you live in a cold house
you have a fireplace
when the closeness of the air
starts to crystallize your capillaries
you can go out in the yard
fetch some firewood
and providing you have sulfur flint or friction
burn the fuel for warmth


whenever you may feel
that to ward off slowing blood
you'd like to light a fire
then the fireplaces remains
an outlet for your blaze

and i will be the fuel
when i am plentiful




but here you are kneeling
twisting match heads by the wood
contemplating flame
when you turn to the pine and complain
how come you never get cold?

i have a cut on the bottom of my foot
how, i don’t know
when, i don’t know
it merely appeared one morning
i was drowning in cold sweat
i was choking in all that sunshine
and in my transparent
chimeric dream state
birds’ song and memory
became intertwined

i think i lit a fire the night before
i think i found a begging hand
and slammed it in the door
i think i still was guilty
and ridden with malaise
i think i hung my coat in smoke
beside my crafted blaze
to cover up the stench
of my last few days

so i awoke
with this cut, as i said
barely stitched together
by eager hands of fibroblasts
coagulation had amassed
futility in its efforts
for on discovering this cut
and the soreness that enveloped it
i crushed the meat
between my fingers
until the milk of infection
and blood of my veins
flooded in release of pain
broke the binding scabbing chain
and the fleshy chasm still remained

that day i spent repenting
or correcting, i should say
for as the morning trudged along
i found the casualties of my ways:
an opportunity slaughtered
that a coward wouldn’t save
a friend beneath a boulder
in the belly of a cave
and a innocent life
in that drowsy night
found my tires
as its grave

but with all the mistakes i’m sure i’ve made
with all the morals my moves degrade
with all the arrogance i parade
and all the faces of my charade
i know a hole of regret
where my heart should be put

yet i only wish i was not beset
by this cut upon my foot

fire is the cyclin
of my sleeping cells
i confide that the sirens
could shake me out of hell
outside my window
they whip lights in a pinwheel
like the spin of a circus tent
the watch of a hypnotist
blaze, then extinguish
red white, red white
as if your neighbor's home in flames
wasn't annoying enough

you are absolutely necessary and utterly unimportant.
you are not important because
everything is important and important means
you are better than the mud
you are not

i can say this because
i want to be content. and to be so
i think i must owe myself to everything. because every little piece makes the puzzle, every tiny drop of paint changes the color, whether
you or
i can see it. down to the atom, every rock that
i step on, every bird in my ear, every bearable sting of guilt felt from swatting a fly, they have worked in perfect proportion, each paint drops precisely suffused to the present shade of my experience. and if
i am to be at peace, my life should not be measured but
i must be accepting of
everything as it comes.
i find this possible in realizing that the stretch in my smile and the tears on my cheek are all just as needed in shading me. no single experience makes the man.  and to be accepting of the summation
i must accept that every single experience in my collective past was utterly necessary. every single experience, and each minor detail of each experience, and how they  scatter on the surface like little melting beads, and how they eventually sink and mix; all single molecules of paint diffusing in the only proportion to make the present shade of my life, none more important than the other, down to the atom, ultimately equal.
not in quantity, but in quality
everything equal. what it means is that
i love you. but
i love the sweat greased ball bearings of dirt in my boot
i love the percussion of infection drenched nerves in my foot
i love the salt stick of your skin and staunch of your cough as you beat through the barreling wind. and
i love the invisible river of shivering brush waving like cilia down the valley. into the bioluminescence of our L.A. colony.
i love you if you love me and
i love you if
you hate me.  because even your hate will drop like paint into me and change the shade to something
i have not yet seen.
i know we have different eyes but
i think this works for mine.
i will love you in equivalence to every molecule
i breathe.
utterly unimportant and absolutely necessary.

There’s no sense in trying to describe the present
it always runs like dye;
diffused and confused by constant currents
in the river of my mind.

Memory is the ferryman
who laughs beneath his breath
each time I seek him, begging
to take me there and back again.

He smiles like an old adviser
subject to a child king
and picks up his oars, still dripping
from the last time I came knocking.

He never ties his boat
I know why, but he won’t say.
he hopes one day I’ll turn the world
and let the dingy fall away

Like a tired tutor ready
to let his pupil fail
he swings a gaze that navy father
would save for son before setting sail

Do you find the silence clearer?
He pulls us from the pier.
Because I won’t bring back
every cricket to your ear?

Or does the laughter seem prevailing
when I don’t give you the chance
to collect in such detail
each abundant downward glance?

My finger starts to tap and
I anchor eyes on opposite shore
and clench a fist into the dye
that hurricanes about the oars

The bank beyond this river
is salt white washed and dry
and shows off only footprints
I dragged out from tides

Its only touched by water
where I choose to tread
and only on these paths
does the river dye it red

I slip into a grin
and Memory sees me smiling
he lets words fall again
with the clatter of iron filings

And how about the nights?
The inky drinks of smoke?
Don’t you see they make my job
No more than ******* joke?

The less that I can give you
the more you fabricate.
You sedate your days awaking
to make that other shore ornate.

Every day you come to find me
and we cross this boiling stream
to bring you back the torso
of some amputated dreams.

I can’t fill in their limbs
so you take them to your cell
and flesh out puppet wings
to play heaven with your hell.

You coward of a tyrant
I wish you would realize
the bliss that you remember
is just your best told lie.

Now he leans in close and stops his row
to watch my face unwrap
we drift a muted madman’s pace
till he curls his words into a trap

Before he even spoke
I feared the question mark
Why do you find the weight
So much lighter in the dark?


Sometime before we fell
from the river’s mouth to sea
I chewed a knot within my jaw
And squeezed between my teeth

a defeated growl of malice
*Just keep rowing

The medals from Vietnam only saw light
when it fanned beneath the bed
so that when you removed them
the black velvet had grown forty years
of grey moss

it wasn’t that you wanted to forget them
but that they couldn’t stack up against
the black and white time lines
the photographs of your children
my mother, aunt and uncle
that grew into color by the top of the stairs

it wasn’t a matter of forgetting
it was a matter of choice
and the shark teeth and crab jackets
that all the cousins pulled out of the Chesapeake
stayed on the shelf because
that was what you were fighting for

the only relic you decided
to keep in plain view
laid right next to the crab jackets
a little vial wrapped around
a little metal tooth

because when the mortar flashed like a stroke
inches from your head
your thoughts went to home
and that fragment of near death
you keep in the glass vial
looking out over the living room
to tease it, to torture it, to say
Not even you could make me forget

Last time I saw you was a year ago
and you were dying
bruises bubbled anywhere a corner touched your flesh
and oily scales peeled from the shell of skin
stretched over your forehead

last year you told us everything about your medals
they were all just throwaways
though your wife and daughter pried,
you knew that remembering them was a waste of dying time

now two more strokes since that mortar flash
have left you in the ward
people have stopped visiting
because visitors like to be recognized
and when Marmee sits and watches football with you
she hates football
she asks you what teams are playing
you sob
*I used to know.

i didn’t come here to smell like roses.
the stain in my shirt; blue paint crystalized in cotton
and greased in sawdusty sweat,
goes unwashed as waterfowl feathers-
an oil skin to shed the lake.

i didn’t come here to build an empire.
the lumber walls and archways go unbowed on the stage
measured to the bone of fingers,  polished by blades
made to be perfect and immortal for a day,
then razed and unchained
and quicker than a sandcastle-
laid back into the bay.

i didn’t come here learn a trade
every skill is the same; do as instructed,
think for yourself, know when to push the bit into biting the wood
and when to put your drill back on to the shelf,
when to re-cut what doesn’t feel right
and when to trust the math
over your own sight.

i didn’t come here for the photograph
or your theater arts career path
or to sing through the saw screams
even though i do

i came here, where we know
the characters are in costume
the creations will be forgotten
where the applause wont reach my ego
and feed the ghost of self
that wants to captain without crew

i came here to work, where only work is true.

I walked down for my daily meal,
probably spinach salad
and yesterdays pork in a soup
and flesh on the brain stopped me
dead in my pace
when I saw this striated sack of bones

a greyhound, kept thin as ribs
by the genes she was bred to express
collapsed on the end of chain, tail-tucked
dead weight where once was thoroughbred speed

built for speed, life on the fast-track
chasing a mechanical sheep
a lure she’ll never catch
kept hungry
for the good chance she’d run faster

winning some beer-belly’s bets
but at least she was given a wage—
a crate, and all the food she’d need
to stay thin.  when genes turned her
speed to the slip and sag of age
one ******* was human enough

instead of a quick slug pulling out her brain
through a new hole and pinning it to the dirt
behind the trailers, Beer-bellied *******
let her retire to an old-dog’s  crate
plastic walls and one gate

Isn’t she beautiful??
I raise my gaze from the hound’s caramel eye
and find the thing clutching the chain,
grinning like hooks pulling cheeks
far too wide, with too much skin on her thighs,
a squat pile of woman bred on fatty beef and pecan pies

We rescued her, she’s our mascot!
and she hands me a flyer:
EDUCATION INTERNSHIPS
PUT YOUR LIFE ON THE *FAST-TRACK!!

I raised a brow at the mountain
how it decided to subside
to a crater, and envelop some massive alien craft;
a forest carved into a god-bird

From my cot and window I
saw the aftermath of the crash
the quilted wings in wreckage of red
and green flipping in the wind
like the blankets of some great tribe

tangled in the mountainside
pinned with splintered rock and splintered pines
and flags of feathers surrendering
the woodworked flying machine
to the mountain
and to me.

I climbed to meet the behemoth
And felt that underneath
there was something to be grieved
there was something to be seen

but circles of the people,
who I call friends by obligation
came with quarrels as flat as spades
and were already building up molehills
on top the wooden bones

And soon then I was told
if it fell out of the sky
it was never meant to fly.

and soon the scraps were salvaged
and cut into furniture for the TV

out in the mountains,
when my feet are pressed and purpled
from pushing the world to roll her callused breast,
then each breath, deservingly,
funnels the friction into fire.

but here our milk flesh thumbs
flick the ridges of the flint
and through trees we **** a Bic
just to exhale flame again.

oh-two deprived at altitude
or getting high with all the dudes
you’d count them as two trails that lead to the same place

but that’s just what the map says.
neurotransmitter math has
sold, by weight, the dopamine
wrapped like gods great gift
in threads of nervous lace

and you forget that different paths
never summit the same
if steep, or shallow, the peak can be
epiphany pleasure or just good ****

in green pill bottles, they trap the trees
and plastic cages hang on me
when the weight of our minds
bends our necks towards the asbestos sky
where porous plains of ceiling tile
have us counting holes in the light

so you see my disappointment,
when you were too ****** or drunk or cold
and said it would be better
if we just went inside

as we circled up the stairwell
you stepped easily on plaster pieces
of white ceiling that had fallen to concrete

perhaps it is from fear
that some can find a comfort
having heavens built so brittle
that they crumble within reach

Vultures would aim at the passage of children
they’d  dive beneath garments and masks and myths
like you, they want truth, in its distant quarry
cut from loose disguise and weak belief

Yet, you are not content in the mind of a miner
to dig like a spear for warmth behind the armor
And when you have found some soft place of pleasure
You cant help but feel you’ve crawled back to the womb

so you won’t swoop down and peck the eyes of new life
for fear that in assuaging your hunger
you’re somehow giving in to the binds
of something unbirthed, primitive, weaker

I just laugh when you ask why
you’re eating scraps that are no more
then what clumsy vultures have dropped in flight
gristle that even the ants ignore

if you find one happiness
like the barrel on your head
loaded with a pocket of air for you to breathe

then you know that if you sink
to atmospheric tides
you must find fresher barrels
when the novelty declines
and the oxygen gives way
to the oceanic brine

for the last moments of time
you’re chin-up on a water bed
the water cradles your esophagus
and then you find you surely must
find some fresher air to breathe

but to search is to be dissatisfied
to question once is to imply
that everything can be replied
with answers and with truth

that bucket on your head
running out of salty air
to stay is to slip into death
like listening to the ocean in a seashell
till slow blood flows in too few waves

but could you not also swim?
abandon the comfortable end
for the off chance that some underwater shelter
will serve you shots of oxygen?

the funny thing you find
when you let dying pleasure go
and you’re suspended, all alone
the gas trapped beneath
was too stale for you to breathe
but enough to buoy the unburdened barrel
into swiftly surfacing

Somewhere near the turn of the century, the walk was hot enough to burn your feet.
Sometime after that I was born in Phoenix.
My sister and I threw paint over a cardboard box in the garage and called it a spaceship.
My grandfather was too tall to be an astronaut, but now plastic tubes in his lungs keep him tied to earth while he waits for sixty years of smoke to catch up to him.
When we were younger, he drove us to the beach on the Chesapeake where we’d look for shark teeth.
Before that, A German Shepherd ripped a hole in my cheek.
Sometimes I feel the rough little scar inside my mouth.
But more often I see round little scar on my hand
When I was nine, my father taught me how to climb rocks.
The trick is you don’t worry about the flesh left on the granite.
Then a lake broke my mother’s back after she jumped in from the same height as I did.
We decide to hike from Yosemite to Mt. Whitney, and I walk most of the trail ahead, by myself.
But at night we all play harmonica and yell because we are the only ears around.
On the stage, we yell because our ears are tired of being lonely.
Then we’d stumble drunk and put out cigarettes on each other’s hands.
And later I would pull my brother out of pool of his own *****.
And later I would pull my brother out of pool of his own blood.
And later I would let a lover sink into her own mind.
Now my sister sees me through a screen, a brother is all foggy in Seattle, and my mother and father miss the way I’d play music all the time.
The trick is you don’t worry about the flesh you left behind.

should I lay claim to the towers around me?
to programmed ghosts in the machine?
should I reap the gifts and ease of another man’s dreams?

is it not a paradox
to eat what flesh still has not
surrendered just to me?

I can pluck a cherry from a bush
for my life until I find
a small stone I can wield
as a weapon; as a knife
if the rock does not decay
and my aim be born with truth
and arm as strong as it should be
uncrushed by blanket blue
then I should eat what comes to me
what I can take by force
what in my lone punctuality
I can chase without a horse

if I can build a stone axe
then I can start a war
If I can gut a fish
I’m as rich as caviar
but here and now all diamonds
are brought up from the earth
and my coal-free pores are too un-mined
to understand such worth

can I lay claim to the towers around me?
If I can build them all
and if I am no god
then I’ll have no Taj Mahal

With a curse, some wicked witch
drew and flicked her tongue
to **** the damsel to a fate
of  slumber till true love comes.

But ****, that damsel laughed
threw her arm around the witch
and poked a little gaff
at the self-assured ol’ *****,

I can think myself out of love
or in it, for that matter.
Do what you’ll do
but no love is true.
You could give the princes a ladder

and still I would sleep here forever,
which might pain me if I were younger,
but I like my dreams
and sleeping  seems
better than life and its hunger.

So she skipped up to the tower
two steps at a time
high-fived the dragon guard
and spit one last jab behind

*The more I think of it
there’s no bad way this can end!
I either wake up to great ***
or dream it till I’m dead!

I stalked into the brothel with
a cinnamon tongue
hot and ready to pierce.

The room tasted like child’s play
smooth banisters and
bunk beds and
upstairs, the double doors
locked where mom and dad slept.

Its not a love you feel
for the lump beneath the quilt
you just arrange it with your soles
kick it into place
until it no longer aches
or impedes your peaceful dream
until it no longer aches
or impedes your selfish, peaceful dream

assuaged and self-contained
without faces
without names
you can learn to share yourself
like a cactus shares its spines
you can stare right into cries for help
and tell yourself
you’re not powerful enough to do harm

And **** to hell the belle
that comes above the lace
looking as beautiful as she felt
but this time, with a face

eyes like submarine lights
uncovering this corner of deep id-rich sea
without which, otherwise,
I might be perfectly happy
To follow my hunger and
the little bright star
of some angler fish’s mottled lure
hungry like the man
into the monster’s
hungrier jaws

But empathy’s enough
a knowing glance
to give any monster pause
and to keep me from leaving there
without her on my arms.

I took this quilt lump
this time with a face
and told her in due time
I could learn to speak her name.

She clawed not to be stolen,
she had been once before
but in these rank and sweaty halls
between these ***** sheets
she knew what end she could expect
a luxury she would not have with me

Those double doors lay dormant
but soon they would erupt
and fury would fly out to find
like some low cattle thief
I had run off with a head of his herd

We slipped like stench out of the brothel, new gods within ourselves
picked a furnace of a day to hide and run
the sun was a lantern
to young old tourist moths
whose dead dust wings flipped like flora
into the Spanish fountains

we moved,
we found a hill that  stood alone
crowned with plastic turrets, that
someday would be sails in a landfill
but now they stood like great vats
for the mass to leave the masses
uncover their bare *****
and hide the fact that every
human tube takes the world
the living beauty
and turns it into truth

“Waste Not, Want Not”
“Waste None, Live None”


   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .    .   .   .   .


Resting on this hill of waste
under the gorgeous sun
the brothel coughed out another face
this one with a gun

I knew him for the fear
that he put into my prize’s eyes
and the goat’s head grimace
the same that once convinced
my hot and cinnamon tongue
now flicking to pierce
the back of my teeth

And he chased after me

I know the love was true for it came second to self-preservation
When violence came upon me
I let the ***** go free
I did not see her as we ran
hunter and prey
through Mission walls
and old stone alleys

I couldn’t wish for better aim
not a bullet found my feet
nor did fatigue, but I turned to met him
in some lone canyon of a city
some conquistador’s old drag

And there was no exchange of eyes
No quick game of words
No businessman charade
No Humanity deserved

I flew upon him like a coyote
and danced with tooth and claw
and pulled out little threads of red from
his eyes and nose and jaw

till finally the apple bruised
a little flattened spot
just pushed upon his brain enough

and then I saw his face
as if it had been laid
at the bottom of a box
where some red soaked marbles
were thrown in and
shook and rolled across
like finger paints from little hands
if I could push mine into his skull
I’d bet his brain
his thoughts and plans
would feel just like Play-Doh

Then I called the elected gods of judgment
and told them that in the historic district
some boy lay dead at my hands

As I walked to my awaking
I saw her once again
blank with the eyes of a beaten retriever
back into the brothel
where she decides to stay
inside, where no one dies in plain sight

I want to impregnate an Amazon
and father a great tree
that all can lean upon
as few can lean on me.

I want to fertilize a mermaid
who can birth the open sea
that will flow into the world
as little flows from me.

I want to have a hand
in building up a land
that will fight itself into great ranges
great mountains and great changes
without me.

my bed is just a velvet patch of comfort in this world
every night I curl into the earth
lay into the soft flesh of her lips and
lay unstirred until rising
like a breath

but what kind of lover is confined to a kiss?
should not I run a hand down the alleys of her throat?
press my ear to the heaving sidewalk
and hear arrhythmia in her heart?

go out behind the lot
of Greenleaf Woman’s Health--
the cheap abortion clinic
sink a tongue into the sewer
bathe in the spray of recycled water
and be purer by surrender
of barrier between veins

lay with this world in every ***** place
sleep with one side to a chain-link
the other to her tunnel
corrugated aluminum
and street run-off canals

and the run-out chaparral
where wind and sagebrush sweep
dry air across my tongue
to grow snail-trails on my teeth

to call this world a lover
I must know more than her face
and claw into the bitter brine
of every permeable place
so when they roll me over
I might reek of all her tastes
fermenting with her beauty
wrapped in sweat of her disgrace

at the corner I hit both crosswalk buttons
and wait, eyes closed, to see if I can follow
the walk sign chirps like the blind men

I choose the first street that whistles to me
and walk to the opposite corner
the way the lights rotate, you would walk circles
if you followed the signs
eventually you must choose some arbitrary avenue
and either wait for it to welcome you
or test your luck in traffic

I choose left

then look up, hoping
to invent some new constellation
but the big parking lot halogens
bleed like blue inked milk into the sky
and the stars are specks, painted over

maybe for the better, I know too well
that I would see those galaxies spiraling
and dig dig dig into big big big questions
hitting all the major points
time and space and self and purpose,
purpose

and the mental ******* would be
a million endless tangents like a million little bits of magnesium
flashing in a firework, brighter than those parking lot halogens
but like every independence day
they flash and fizzle and then the sky is just smoky

and I start to feel small
so I walk into Big Lots to calm down

rummaging through the shelves,
not a single pad of paper outside of monthly planners
not a single blank sheet, not a single open page
not a single ******* one

no one wants to buy anything unless they know it has a purpose first

otherwise, it’ll end up in their desk,
blank and staring every time the drawer gets cracked open

and no one will have an answer for it

the first thing I notice is the jetty
the waves littered with little feet and bouncing foam and
bobbing buoys of women, two of which
call me to remove my boots
and let water lick clean
old clammy toes

but I walk out on the jetty
past the rock where scuttling children fear their mothers will forget them
past the crop of young fishermen, smiling between tides of beer and
counting the fish they have yet to catch by the worms they have
in their new tackle boxes

past an empty can of Budweiser

past an old bucket of bait that even the gulls wont touch

deeper into the bird **** that paints this rock thumb
pock marked with bowls of orange soup-
carapace and minnow bones

denying a smoke in favor of the ocean’s oyster breath

trading the cooling molten gold of a California beach
for something I was sure would only be found
where this putrid jetty purged into the sea

and I was close

even as you drove me home
I couldn’t forgive you for following me there

her voice shakes like a mud wall
in an earthquake, slurry and moistened
with beer, struggling to stand
in my ear, each fall of my boot chokes
further up the hillside neck,
her left behind cry cakes into my footsteps

then bleats SEAN! I’m gonna fall
my legs hurt, I’m worried the poison
of fear will melt her to sand
but I trust she doesn’t need assured looks
or words, just strength in her back,
her spine’s solid as mine, but she forgets

I wait at the top, the dome
where all upward strides will always lead
an inverted pit for sinking stones
too stubborn to abide to gravity

there at the top,  the moon
pinwheels in time to deep and dizzy
breathing that yanks up my rooted bones
plants them in pieces outside of my body

her form summits at a crawl
but buries hurry in her voice and
comes near, commits a cold hand
SLAP
just begging to see my face broken
why would you run? you’re a ****
but my abandonment was a sign of respect

The harmonica is a brushed-steel magazine
a little chrome home for a loaded line of tones
like bullets begging to be drawn
through the barrel of a handgun
the cold friend I holster
hidden in my pocket
and some final night it will find me alone
where I can pull it to my teeth
and with a single squeeze
I can blow the silence straight from my skull.

To hell with maintaining a fire just so faces could be seen.
I danced on the embers extinguishing little stars and I scribbled in my notes and waited for that one girl to shut up about Twitter and Halloween costumes so I could hear—

the fog dragging its tongue up the valley.

Finally she began to realize the contest she was losing,
took the quiet advice of myself and the wind and went
to go tuck herself
into the tent,
into the safety of ceiling.

But,
you and I
opted to be
coyotes on the hillside.

I took the trail away from our sleeping counterparts,
and flayed you on the dirt where I stripped you of your fur,
howling to the fog and plowing valleys in your flesh,
your legs grew into roots, and wove length by longer length
‘round all the sturdy angles, the anchors of my hips
and you, oh you,
you would **** the marrow from my bone.

And when we lay out, raw and steaming
knees bleeding from the drainage ditch,
a gnawing fades out, falls to dreaming,
we, peeling off a well-known itch.
Then we play a game with satellites
Where bouncing mirrors reflect our minds
And laugh when the reflections never fit.

I gather up my skin, step one foot in and
stumble when the tightness traps my leg,
You pin up your *******, to please our sleeping guests
that wouldn’t take to anything irregular.

On the upward hike ten million lights, ten million lives
herded on the table of L.A.
A Serengeti of fire, a mass migration;
mammoths marching, tusks dipped in flame

Sitting around campfires once taught vocal apes to rhyme
but a million conversations
bleaches each the other white
and now a million electric campfires
bleaches L.A.’s lower sky.

And though I stomped out ours
the ash remains a scar
where we had nearly forgot
how to speak by choosing to not.

James and I just like sharpening our minds
iron on iron, and tonight we brag
we have evolved past the struggle for life

then tiny drops of red
shotgunned and glittered on the deck

silence, like a stalking cop
catches us off guard, saunters up the stairs
and points at the blood mist on the floor

then more, more sprays from our heaving friend
wrenched over a stolen desk
hacking at red roots in her throat
then drawing in her breath
through the gravel in her neck
sputters in a bubbling little choke

stillness is broken by her hand, batting,
at the sticky scarlet strings ******* on her chin

It’s just Redvines, guys
we hear it, unconvinced
eyes still stuck to a splatter of stained saliva
where something confident had been spit
but dribbled like a weakness from her lips

but after she had wiped clean
the candy bleeding from her teeth
we lit and toasted a smoke to long life and to health---

if on us it depends
*may it never come again.

Searching for bliss the mind is two
young men afoot in the desert.
Horses have long been beat to glue,
now feet, not hooves, are burnt on dirt.
Each hates the hunger in his gut
and fingers fit through whittled ribs.
Each shakes with thirst to stand straight up
like infants first displaced from cribs.
They find a leak from mountain vein,
one throws his knees in certain glee,
“I love this fount, here we can stay
and drink each time we feel thirsty.”
The other drinks then stands again
leaving, still weak, his tongue; wetter.
“I cannot stay, hunger remains.
Cannot there be someplace better?
If nothing more than death I find
‘what if?’ will not disturb my mind.”