Cold white layers pile over the grey concrete
I did not expect the storm but I
Needed to face the journey
Someday
We knew it could not last forever

And in that moment
An accident in my vision,
Maybe the music screaming into my ear
Distracted me from the obvious truth that lie
Just through the windowpane
Leading to a collision straight into reality

Your words, the concrete divider
That hit hard enough to take deep damage
Yet not hard enough to stop me from moving forward
The unexpected truth that came at the least expected moment
My ignorance overlooked the obvious signs
That i could not stay safe forever
Not at the speed we drove..

My skin hugged my knuckles tightly
Enough to match the descending snow
As I knew from the first swerve
Your first word
That inevitable fate
I surely faced
Death loomed close in my mind

But I drove on
Grabbed the wheel and forced my way through
The place where I felt nearest to the grave
Until I reached a safe enough space to see for myself
Just how much damage I endured

And, like my car,
I am totaled
Broken into pieces that cannot be reframed
Some lost at the point of collision
Others gradually passing over time
And some still holding on

In the eyes of an astonished mechanic
The car shouldn't even start
And according to everyone else
I should be dead
But I'm not

And though neither the car
Or my own life will ever fully
return to their original condition
We still drive on
Moving forward on the unpredictable
Icy
Deadly
Highway of life

Hildegard of Bingen
the most musical abbess
of the year 1097 a.d.
met with Jung the unconscious detective
and Ginsberg the howling poet
for lattes at some Starbucks
in a vibrating city
on a shimmering afternoon.

Angelic minuets keep flowing,
effervescing through my chakras
like tonal champagne . . .
the glowing femme declared.
Beams of ethereal light infuse me,
tsumanis of energy tempt me
to dance right out of my habit.

Ignoring the possibility
of seeing a naked nun drink coffee in public,
Alan mused behind his hornrims . . .
I get what you mean
like I have felt the same perfusion of joy
watching cans of peas and ayahuasca
dance with talking bananas
at the A&P; Market near my pad in Brooklyn,
can you dig it?

Still suffering from his Freudian hangover,
Carl reframed them both . . .
Any conclusions or convictions
drawn from such experiences
may not self-verify because
your introspective identifications
attempt in vain
to concretize the amorphicity
of decentralized psychic sensations
which reach conscious awareness
only at the expense of extension.

What did he just say?
Hildegard asked Alan.
I have absolutely no idea,
the portly poet answered
as he doodled an intricate mandala
on his hemp napkin.

We sat in the snow and cracked schemes to soften our mortality, like if when we died the soil grew up and over our bodies to pull them back to her instead of leaving them like shells to fall where the living had dug uninvited into the darkness.
And You
You were just some
sidesteppin passerby

Who took two steps off the sidewalk and one into me

Took a knife to the inside of my skull

Wrote down a life I forgot wasn’t mine

I’ll admit now it had been a long time.
I’d been throwin baseballs of the back porch of my soul

Since the day the monster under my bed grew teeth

Hoping for someone to catch up catch them and catch me too

I’d been running since the day I met God on the banks of a backwards river 

Spinning this world like a record played one too many times

Sk-sk-skipping across all the riffs over which
We used to drift like it wasn’t a sin
Before we slipped into a chemical mist
And the trembling of our fists
Became mixed with the hum of the night
And left us listless
The fog it curled its fingers like a gauze round our bones
it was a soft fear.
It was a soft fear.
Imagine we became all the words we breathed

Out of fairytale pages turned cigarette papers the night you became a constellation

Us, riding a magic carpet woven from strings

Stolen from Fate when she wasn’t looking

I ain’t never been one for shoplifting

But that night we made off like barefoot bandits riding a broken hymn

I, the night dancer and you, the day singer

And we two seeing both sides of the moon

Sing me the song that day sung the first time she realized

That the night was more than a coat her dad told her to wear

Because it was raining

The universe ringing with the words of convenience store philosophers

Things people are too scared to write anywhere but on the walls

Of public bathroom stalls
That night, I realized something.
Our love was an easy veil to wear.
Till forced perspective tugged at the seams of our sobriety
I was never brave enough to break.  
My memory is a womb.
My memory is a womb.
Let it be known that my physical transition fails to interrupt my meditation

Putting your life into revision never called into question my salvation
I’ve never known a dream that did anything but embroider the ether 

The air between us quit smelling like a cinderblock romance

Your hands a kinetic ignition to my saltwater synapses 

Connecting in double-time to the electric current running from your heart to mine

Lift me like a lost key
Triumphant like used furniture
I see you now your hair is long.
Your hair is long
In your left hand is a brick.
In your right, a summer morning I have yet to wake up in.