the zombie has opinions about nutrition
but lives off of tasty urban debris

the zombie is standing on the beach
whipped by grey
watching the waves roll in high

the zombie is on the computer again--
where nobody knows he's a zombie

the zombie seems to be listening but is looking at his phone

the zombie is not a joiner, so don't be uncool and ask
though he might join and then drop out, which just proves
joining was pointless in the first place

oh definitely the zombie likes to go down

the zombie bites the hand that feeds him

the zombie does not mind poison if it means saving money

the zombie is against bad things.

the zombie is not a sheep.

the zombie is dying of loneliness but can't ever seem to connect.

the zombie is spreading deserts
and drowning deltas.

the zombie is standing up for what's right, on facebook.

the zombie knows that *** is safer than alcohol
and it makes him safer

the zombie feels guilty sometimes but ultimately
not personally responsible.

the zombie is tired--not enough sleep, not enough brains.

the zombie doesn't need you,
he just wants you,
when he sees you.

ahem: the zombie wants you for your mind.

the zombie is free.

the zombie embodies Csikszentmihalyi's state of "Flow."

the zombie may have made you one of his kind,

you will never know because
zombies don't know they're
zombies.

If only you were for me and I were for you
we would break this shell of misery and take
over the sun and the moon.
Instead we're strangers, listening to each
other's thoughts, pressed together in a
polite intimacy.
I would give you what you want
if I had it.

Teacup,
Ornament,
Galaxy.
Do not scorn me in your sagacity.
Do not be too nice either way--
you confuse me.
Bell,
Card,
Bird on the wing.
You must suffer to be beautiful.
Not alone--
suffer for me.

If you disinfect it they will come,
awash with hope
and stung with bees and swollen and lush and false.

Fat as love we lie prone on the soil,
ready to be ****** by the universe, grand sun and all
elements so revered

And then, oh, it fails us
that universe and all its myths
its stories turn out to be tissue,
so many spindly webs and we
scatter surprised like August spiders hungry and full and
all we wanted to do was weave and wait
but the winds of fate are passing through
and it doesn't like the clinging
touch of our well constructed
reality
no matter how well it caught
our next bellyful
and our continuing survival.

Eventually we'll mourn, drunk and tearless
scabs dried up and scars set.
That's it.

Whatever it was
it wasn't for me.

You're for me,
your invisible clothes
are the most important thing
in this whole universe
and if they cling and if fate doesn't like them and if I agree
well we know what I can do with myself
and this god-awful poetry.

The daddy long legs dandy
has a mad hatter laugh.

the fever sits on my face
like an owl on my nose
brooding

strangely, i live in a world of equanimity
even though I am not equanimious.

quite the opposite: I can even loathe good things
and crave terrible things
and everything in between.

when i am at peace with my longing for it, i come out the other side:
the absurdity of it all is no longer new,
and the sense of possibility
torments me so much less.

long ago, i betrayed any manifesto
i could possibly write.
i am one of the absurdities.
i am not what i am.

good and bad are the boots we need to walk.
one step, two step.
we need more than boots to travel;
and, indeed, you can stay still;
in a sense you could fly instead;
or run, barefoot, calloused, and wild;
either way, the land-sky is,
walk or not, move or stay, see or forget,
it is.

it stretches on, so terribly samely, round.

that is why i am lost
because there is nowhere to go
only to move

and i am alone because
the land-sky is with me, in me, is me, not me.

a place is not really a place
a thing is not really a thing,
nor is it
its opposite
really.

late at night
when you want to sleep
and you can't
bear to surrender
press the strange button
disguised in your remote control
and your little television will flicker
with an odd and greyish picture
and you can hear my voice
and see another moment for a world--
pearls of wood tinkling
a wild woman hacking through a jungle of words
uncovering swirls
of teacups and curls
and tiny grey horses
sprouting antlers of moss
and dancers and jokers
and portraits of loss
each one of these threaded
through the path of destruction
she's hacking her way through
your television
while murmering
oh so quietly

then turn off the image
and lie down and rest
reassured by the knowledge
that out there in the world
there's something just as deranged
as you feel in your chest
and it's there as a gift of
tiny horses in teacups
for you if
you can find it.

I'd write a poem for the drunk and insane.
The bitter and banged up.
If only I had something helpful to say.
Day comes some days as an enormous searchlight.
Exposing everything and showing nothing.
We'd like to think there's connection in pain
but mainly within it some wither and others assault.
So we just carry on under the glare.
Keeping an appropriate distance.
And carry the memory of night's emptiness to protect us.

The new growth on my apple trees is covered in aphids;
the leaves curl and darken under the crawling green foam of their bodies.
My roses broke out in black, dropping yellow leaves,
bearing thick sickly flowers of hope on bare spindly stems.
Now even old hollyhocks have scales, those innocent seeming bumps
multiplying and spreading. And the aphids will go everywhere when they
**** the apple trees dry, they are already migrating
to poppy buds and young tomatoes.

I go to the nursery, resisting the urge to wring and brush off my hands.
She uncovers the facts--my garden got no fertilizer, and water may be insufficient.
So I will try to give my garden what it needs--the nutritious powder, the thorough watering,
the ladybugs in cheesecloth cages, the beneficial microbes, and where I must I will hack the plants away.

My self, meanwhile,
crawls too.

I slather vice on the wound, but the sting always returns.

The world expects me to be stronger than I am. The world is set up
for strong people, and it provides for them.

Once again I am like the short, shy child standing by the counter, overlooked.
But I cannot expect to grow into strength. And the world will only protect me
once I no longer need protection.

At times I sit in a stream of presence. I slather virtue on the wound,
but the sting always returns.

I straddle need and lack,
a gaping wound between my feet. I could sink down that hole,
but it too hurts, it hurts.

I am in the wild--no gardener comes to tend to my hunger or thirst,
or my illness after harsh conditions. Well, one comes--
a harsh gardener comes.

I wring and brush off my hands. I brush off each little invasion,
but there are always more.

Here is a box of
cocktails. Enjoy each
one fluttering
and composed of
ORIGINAL
ingredients--
yes, REAL!
So real you can even
taste
it. Let me cry
for you that
you never tasted
anything
else.

And there we'll all be
crying, the chorus
oh God, not that again
and people paid
to tear their heart out
(or hair, whatever)
and rend garments
while cameras
click

That wasn't me,
because I'm nothing
you just got a lot of
bows around a box of
nothing--

Ha!

Thinking of you,
but the things I’m thinking are really too complicated to be worth sharing,
and anyway the more I think the more I keep ending up back where I started,
and while I’d like to share something with you every time I try writing it down it seems kind of pointless,
so here’s a card to say that I’m thinking of you
which is sort of ambiguous if you think about it
but the picture on the cover helps with that.

Some of us have the luxury of vulnerability,
sweet, but ripe
for invasion and colonization, or simply
a day of pillaging here and there.

Others are hard and dry, knowing, already been there before,
already having tried.

Others are keen-eyed, looming over,
tasting it already on their tongues in anticipation,
the fragments of words rippling over the edge,
watching your eyes and your squirms and your sighs,
seeking the entrance to groans and writhing--
or the hall of sorrows, well-locked ossuaries, or sky gardens of private joys.

Some of us know what's what, this goes here and that goes there,
like it or not, know when to stop, now, early, soon,
the knife cuts
here,
in the fruit,
to pierce the skin and separate the skin and the flesh and the pit,
nevermind what it was, now it is something else,
more purposeful in the mouth,
and while once it was the seed of a tree to climb in the sky,
now it is something new and so we will grasp it, display it
and eat it.

I fell in love with a shadow on the wall.
I fell in love with the light.
I fell in love in dissolving, parting,
stepping in sing song.
I fell into never falling,
spreading into every direction,
feeling and being felt everywhere, within and without,
feeling familiar and utterly new.
I fell in love with nobody.
I fell in love with nothing.
Nothing was there--I could see it
in the shadow on the wall,
in the light.
I could not see it, and I was in rapture at the not sight of it,
a face that was not there,
a thousand times a thousand times greater than love.

Yet here I am, miserable, a fool.
With no great gift of strength, or if I had one I squandered it.
A snarl on my lips and my face in the mud,
cringing all around my heart,
withdrawing my hands ever away,
dragging a great sack of rocks.

You say: Your power is effortless.
Your effort is confusion.
Be still and remember what is inside you.
It is a fire that burns sorrow clean.
It is a river that washes your heart new.
All you have to do
is stop trying to be you, or safer, stronger, or better. That is not you.
Don't keep grabbing--let go. Say "Not that, not that."
All those grey, thorny treasures are worthless.
Return to what is eternal: nothing.
A great, shining, smiling, flowing, blossoming, nothing.

Say no, say yes.

In case you haven't noticed, I am dull, dull
though tempting still
to men who follow close behind their pointy bits

Yes, I, glory and glamour, unattractive isolated child,
great adventurer, efficient traveler, queen of my enameled laundry *** and tiny oar,
fearless reader of uncomfortable old books about Africa and paperbacks,
seer of mirrors for the first time, knower of a few obscure things,

have been diminished, trapped
in a cage of my own making
hardly gilded
$775 a month with torn floors and bruises, still a good deal,
rent gradually rising

I could strip my skin away to the milk inside

or I could build a great, if dubious ship
and float along the river of fate, unguided now, see how far I get,
bailing myself out for as long as I can

You are my race forward and backward,
and my truth and my lie.

You are sorrow and joy in one cup--
and a sobering high.

You are my wild ally, or I am yours,
and this is the celebration
of our uneasy truce.

x

I give you my heart, as I might give it, tied in a little sack, to a stranger passing on the road--
yet the bird is a heart that flies where it wills, and renders all ******* into illusion,

so you can not keep it,
any more than I could have kept it
in its safe cage.

What use do you have for a wild bird, anyway?

It's spring and I mainly feel morbid,
dark, in my bitter little room.

Watch, the blossoms are falling from the trees again.
The year cycles through another series of imperfect moments.

Outside open mike night clubs, each evening, the young mustachioed hobos
hobnob in their fine tight pants.

I stride past them and wish that I wanted to know.

I pretend there's some kind of north star
and I have pasted an invisible face
on it,

but you won't go along with my play pretend.

I could be sitting in the center of a web,
with a long cigarette and my lips dark red,

but there's no devouring mouth at the end of my promise--
I just want them to want to know.

I visit the black cup but rarely
so I find it only soft and slow.
Drunk in the corner of the living room
the rabid dogs forget you.
They slumber, sore and fretful,
until grey peace invades their brains again.
We have all confused enlightenment with something...
a bottomless cup of love,
an oblivious fog.

Most of these are just an ache.
Writing's fine, but there's got to be another way.
I'm battling my better instincts--sleep and strength,
for two--and it's got to stop.
Acceptance is always bittersweet--mainly bitter.
Yet it's the only peace, so why does it
feel unnatural,
unfamiliar?

the kiss of death is sweet, swoon black river drowning
afterwards you are not the same, drained
light as a shade and heavy as a stone, or, later, chasm
the rest can see you when you're not there
and you find you fade from the day.
you seduced me by calling me a ghost--
so strange how we know before we know.

once death was both hidden and seen, a higher vision, a kind guide
but now he seems a cheap, deceptive *****... visiting everyone,
staying with no one, leaving behind nothing and less than nothing.

You climbed into a boat of light.
Then the night grew, until it devoured you.

You found your great soul.
And then, you lost it.
You know it is gone forever--
for it will never come to you in that way again,
willingly, and enormously.

This is
how it almost always is.

Once, you were gently surrounded
by endless, loving, non-discrete beings.

Now it is an infinite ache and confusion--
emptiness.

Your love is laid to agonizing rest
in the grave of your heart

and you wade through pathlessness
without any reference points.

O Mourner, remember.

Your love is also there, in despair.

You've lost everything of beauty, strength, and safety;
yet you have gained the only thing of value.

You cannot truly love
until his beautiful mask is stripped from your sight.

The darkness which surrounds you
is not your enemy.

It is the greater aspect of your friend.

Be merciful towards it, even though
it causes you pain.

Remember that emptiness is love unmasked.

(When emptiness presses from within and without,
against what does it press?)

When you are also empty,
then you will be full.

Hide your despair from God.
Bury it deep in your heart.

Do not think of kisses,
or hands touching skin.
Do not think of meeting with relief.

Forget the blankness of
this room in the dark.
Forget the empty,
scooped out sadness,
no longer pungent.

Only when you forget your desire
can God see it
in its truth.

Cover it in a cloud of forgetting
and turn your thoughts to the simple joy
of unencumbered being.

There you are a little god,
enough to answer your own prayer.

Here you are a demon,
swathing yourself in torment.

Hide your despair from God.
Bury it deep in your heart.

I co
me
in li
ke
a
se
rpent:
clos
ed
tight
and
long,
writh
ing
imp
er
cep
tib
ly
wi
th
in
my
se
l
f

As I lie past midnight
I watch fireflies signal urgently
green-white in the night
"I am here
have *** with me."

And think
of human courtship cries.
On Craigslist,
tentative men want to cuddle
and yuppies want to dine
(and much else besides).
At the milonga,
passion turns to counting steps
for some
(vice versa for others).
In parties, humor reigns.
Not always well.
Coquetry is a competition
and need is a sin...
except when it isn't.
(Someone somewhere's writing a poem
to keep hidden, yet irrationally
hoping to convince.)

I don't have a point.
Only that in our most simple instinct
we are so complicated.
And that despite our disenchantment, still,
it never ends.

You are a wisp of a thing, cradled in my arms, suckling in vain, a ghost in my shirt. No one knows you are there.

They forgot you in a paper bag, withered, and you were taken out with the trash.

You come for me with your absence, you comfort me with it: I protected you by making sure you are not here.

I am here. I am a wisp of a thing, and no one knows it (yet they all do) because I carry you in my shirt, the way some carry stains. You can't seem to live.

I don't know why any more. I acknowledge that I have been bested. I carry on, knowing that--my defeat resounds, year after year. I cannot spin it and myself again. But I manage to shield you still.

I do carry on--I will enjoy this life until I sink down and am taken out and finish my withering, as you have.

We are only a little more insignificant than everyone else for dying this way, early.

some stories are too small to tell
but for the finest eyes to observe
and the widest mouths to recount.

some journeys are too small to take
but for the most patient
and the most determined.

where were you
when the world unrolled itself before me,
all teeth and tongue

where were you
when the promise that silence would end
never fulfilled itself

where were you,
where were you?

always a one, always a two,
two sides in the mirror, one black, one white,
draped off the other.

two was enough to make one and one was enough, enough.

so I found myself a friend to limp along--with

and we limp along we limp along

one of us is unreal and occasionally we argue as to which one it is

but I think it’s me, I think it’s me,
that teeth and tongue
for two was always found in one
it opens wide and reaches round and—

schwoomp.

what does the river say,
her eyes and mouths and fingers
blinking and glimmering in the light
forming an endless flickering web
traveling up my legs and skin, never quite

what does the river say,
running fast through trees on stones
rippling and pulling

what does the river say,
carrying the lonely barge that floats
into darkness, his long face
looking forward into obscurity from high above
what does he know
(where does he go)

what does the river say,
her body arced and wide
and waiting, never quite

Let’s make one thing clear:
I am not here.
I will be nothing to you,
whether you decide or do I.
And no matter what hints and whirls in my brain
I have nothing to say,
just gestures that begin to extend then fizzle and fail.
And I am a reminder only
of what I once almost was,
this body suggestive
only, not actually meaning, offering,
or capable.
Mind and body both.
So don’t even think.
Don’t think it or anything else
to do with me.
You can just go away
if you’re even here.
I’m not.
And I won’t.
You can take that to the bank.
Laughing.
He who laughs first laughs lasts.

In my invisibility
I will enjoy it
defiantly
as if it was something that I wanted
which it wasn’t
but I’ll find it that way anyway.

And you can’t take my solace away from me
casually,
as if you were interested in what was underneath,
but then you weren’t,
anyway.

you are as beautiful as death
standing outside with your cigarette.

your eyes seeing further
than far away—
you can’t quit that one utterance
of nothing, or you would be left with everything
you have to say.

stand outside and forget that it hurts,
simply exhale and watch time’s tendrils blow away,
and let death make you feel alive
as it settles its tight cool peace on your mind.

you are beautiful as death,
standing outside with your cigarette,
******* impermanence in deep, deep, deep.

the end can’t come soon enough.

somehow you
still have a hand
on my heart,
though what part I
don't know--
you are
passionate yet
disinterested,
sudden and
deceptively
straightforward--
yet I
know you
somehow
past your
rigidity
and can't help
but want to
caress your
lonely
impulses.

a hand in the waterfall
the river sliding over my shoulders, down my sides
the memory of waves rising in my mind

closer than a thought
ghost standing inside me, looking the other way
a secret known to no one at all

If you give me your glittering pieces
I can make you whole
you speak from inside me

We're so busy.
We're so busy being tired.
We're so busy with our IV lines
of dull amusements
and distant passions.

We're so normal.
We're so tired of being normal.
Nobody's had a grand love affair
or great invention
while caught up in
all-absorbing boredom.
Not while we're all normal and tired
and tied to our IV lines.

My genius is as shriveled as a leech
clambering step by hungry step
down into the dark cellar
to wait forever in hopes of
a white soft dinner.
I hope yours is better.

It seems like we've forgotten what
we should be doing together.

This is not a night to immortalize in words, merely a quiet evening--and there is no great success or fall here. We are more ordinary than we expected to be, yet more odd; and these autumns of our lives are light in fruit.

I feel always like a bright shadow, standing aside--a tree in the garden's periphery, planted as a counterbalance for the side of the eye; paired with a contrasting element and yet waiting to be paired more directly, and to be seen more directly.

My desire has no grand meaning, I am neither deprived nor fulfilled. I am protected, and hurt by protection; for the most part left untended, yet not strong of will or wild.

We are the garden in winter, waiting to be entered and enjoyed; for without you, we are not quite empty, yet not quite full/real. Will spring make me soft/sweet/welcoming again? Will it come (to me)?

Being sleep deprived
is a lot like being drunk.
2. It's generally better
not to sleep with someone
who sells drugs.
3. If you don't want to have ***
say so early
and often.
4. It's vitally important
that his head is not too small.
5. Teeth too.
6. Frenzy and impatience are either fantastic
or not good at all.
7. Don't be too accepting and tolerant.
This will be mistaken as keen interest.
8. Some people are nice but not interesting.
They will not become interesting later.
9. If you're mainly looking for ***
have *** right away.
It's not going to make more sense
with time.
10. Some people have voracious, intriguing minds,
simply because they are enthusiastic about everything--
they enjoy but only endlessly consume.
11. I am not meant to play tennis.
12. Nor do I want to.
13. The long deprived are not looking for friends.
14. I am capable of incredible
self and shared delusion.
15. It's hard to say for sure what a messy home
represents, but it's not going to be anything good.
16. Don't be too accepting and tolerant.
I may mistake my own acceptance
for keen interest.
17. Don't overlook a multitude
of small dishonesties.
18. There is such a thing
as too much of a good thing...
and too little.
19. Don't encourage small feelings
if you would not want them
when, **** like, they have grown enormous
and tenaciously rooted
for little enough
reason.

There's a kind of love, calm, open, merciful,
a strong and tired and peaceful mother for the aching soul,
that brings more pain
then lets it go again
in waves.
As long as we remember to let a broken heart
be an open heart,
its waterfall from the tear
falling upon each gnawing thought
and giving everything
the open heart
can give.

I hold a heart in my hands--
mine or yours, it hardly matters.
It's a cup of sweet pain--
sweet because it contains
a new world in each
potential swirling drop.
Sweet because we
can taste each world.
And the pain is just
a sharpening, in this moment,
of memories-- of our longing
for this new world-- for birth--
to take what is now real, but hidden,
and let it ripple and be unveiled--
this world hidden in our hearts,
too big, it aches because
it is ready, pressing against
its hidden containment--
we may not hold it in too long--

Life carries on with its own force,
seen or unseen, the new world emerges
in love from the old, warm and slowly scarred--
one new and ripe with life and will,
the other worn and wise, ready
to go quiet--where it will vanish,
covered and concealed, dissolved
then secretly congealed, gathering a secret pulse
and vibrant eye, to once again--for the first time
in all of time--emerge and be revealed--

Our hearts seem like vessels
but they are constantly transforming from old to new,
from hidden to emergent to present. We have
no one heart,
yours or mine, it hardly matters,
but a constant, murmuring emergence,
an ever exploring meaning.
Here in our heart
a spring rises from its endless roots
and meets the air of our awareness--
rippling, shining, silently singing.

Let our hands and eyes be midwives, then,
when needed.
We can ease these transformations
with a little understanding.
Let our eyes and hands
love the hidden heart
and guide its travels
for we are hearts and more,
wide minds, capable, some times,
of comprehending--peacefully--
the sometimes searing
duality
and finding in its balance
a way to, briefly,
crucially,
meet its blade
with peace--
to use the energy of dissolving
and the energy of emerging
simultaneously
to transform
one more
moment.

a few weeks after our love affair ended
my husband and I were walking through your neighborhood

and in front of a coffeeshop, holding on to the rail,
an old man had his pants down, ready to poo

and the customers looked on over their late night coffees through the large glass windows, expressionlessly

once out of earshot, he and I giggled wildly
as I asked "do you still think it would be glamorous to live downtown?"

I don't remember what he said,
I was thinking in passing of what the old man felt

soon the subway station where you drop off the women
you're sleeping with on their way home

will be awash in cherry blossoms and the scent of a food truck

my husband shakes his head at your seeming prowess,
but a bird in the hand beats two in the bush.

I dreamt you were a **** officer--you know, one of the relatively innocent ones--you aren't of course--even though you couldn't read my face--

I no longer feel you, yet you're frequently in my thoughts, usually on the bus, on your way to another one, talking to me,
and I go through my slim repertoire of ways to nicely say go away

compelling

along the spider's threads I climb
to find the one I'll claim as mine

even if he's just a bite
to get me through one night

afterwards I'll stay quite still
until the next small thrill

I have an incoherent proposal for you.
It is incoherent because I lack both the courage and clarity.

Anyway, as you know this world is riddled with
brailles and imaginary synaesthesic hints over all that seems
to be what it is.

Yes, all that *******.

So here I stand before you.

Punctured and drawn, pulpy and inelegant.
Wry, silly and dire. Cultivated and ridiculous.

It’s.

Scratch that.

In the mind

you have said emotions

we are

not lines.

nope.

Sky wire.

Erm

If

None of what I say is true.

Look past me and see what’s real.

And that.

I’m hoping you want that,

to touch the electric, liquid-ish paths

and vector strings.

If.

I’m a non-bundle of emotions
lately—not sleep though—

and it’s not you.

Just desperate for

not someone.

Just desperate to
get past selfhood
with somebody else
to keep it interesting

and it makes as much sense as anything

so I don’t want to talk ******* but
would you, as a complicated instrument,
like to get outside ourselves
and not play
but be wildly serious?

everything is littered around the living room
while it rains softly outside.

you walk around
while I sit tired.

all the objects in this room
wish for someone to care

as they lie, unable to move
to some place better;

instead they are where we dropped them
or where the cats last pushed them, in play.

and they all
wait.

wherever I go,
I never seem to be there.

only the things in the living room care.

If I ever seemed pretty
it was a matter of dust
and shadows.
Sleep will
grab me with
its fingers of trains
and buses and
roads that
lead to
somewhere more
nowhere than
before.
And there we'll
be murdered exquisitely
because what could be better
than to become pointless
in the puddles and the horse muck
torn down by feeble minded
gardeners and an immense sadness
that hungers, hungers, fangs and
horrible jaws and
tearing and
long past feeling
you've been
destroyed and
destroyed again
and again
and
again
and
long
past
feeling
you

still


are




desac-­
ra-

-ted

it's a second body sometimes,
a kind of chandelier of eczema,
tumbling from my shoulders
like a ragged royal robe,
white, shining, drifting scales

and this time I wear it
as a familiar dress,
put on me or
grown on me,
a lifeless moss,
scabs without passion,
drooping, dragging,
not reaching far,
not covering, not enobling

for in the deep sky where my soul lives
I've found an island to touch on,
an island filled with a swirling climbing hole
which is a road in time.

and I keep flying up to the surface,
surface of what I can hardly say,
to feel the wind (or what) buffet
and whip us back and forth
on the edge.

somehow you're there on the island too
yet you're not here, are you?
you don't know that you're there,
you don't know that it's there.
Only I've found its rocks,
that say "Yes" when touched,
the road that flows.

And so I wear this ragged dress,
not quite white,
showing and engrossing all,
and I can't help but stoop.
I slouch around my soul in prayer,
to stay close to it.
and if it hurts, it hurts.
I can bear it.

In my purse there's a connection
to the universe.
I use it to contact you.
Come back,
I ask.
And you'll come back,
a shadow of your
shadow's shadow.
And we'll dance
in the bath,
splashing and
sad.
And they'll laugh.
As well they should.
For I might not have anything to say
but it's funny
anyway.

Another night
swaddling stone.

In vain
I seek a face.

My chest aches
carrying the weight.

A siren wails.

I clutch the stone to me.
We are much alike.

A closed heart
can't be turned to light.

Your promise of joy
and release
means nothing to me.

If I set it down
my arms are empty.

Here in the tender grass
comes the eager step
of a fairy's foot.

The fairy's of the earth and air.
She can fly high
and she knows what's deep down.
But her favorite places
are the many paths--some known,
some unknown--on the earth's face
criss crossing with endless adventure.

Stand in the glade and wait
for the eager step
of a fairy's foot.

What a lovely walk I'm on
as long as I manage not to fall
down these pits and
cracks in the path.

And I, too, would give you the round
path of my love, without end,
but instead I can only offer that of time,
shattered and not endless,
though grand and
sweet just the same.

If my hand and my will were one and the same
I would reweave the strands of fate
and bring you to me in your sleep, in your light,
and here on a lazy day our minds would
play and delight and create.

My will however is only in my feet, so far,
with their certainty and their guesswork,
their endurance, their finding
and their leaving behind.

this moment is woven like an evil plan
I coursed around myself, tightening
until I was crowded out.

a nest of trophies, with nary a trophy within.

and my heart--or liver, whichever part
feels, is hung like a whole lot of oranges
in a string bag, getting banged around
so much that when you get them home and
see them you won't want them anymore.

and this poem fell out somewhere along the way,
unraveling long before it had even begun,
not quite an idea of an idea.

the nights are like bouncers, really.
impassive and large.
they stare at you, largely emotionless,
and you feel obliged to amuse them,
or impress them, or relieve what you imagine
must be their suffering.
You fixate on them, for that fixed time,
but really you don't matter and neither do I...
the night merely passes.

eventually you'll pass into the new day
and be subject to its messy laws,
woven around you in dark lines,
tightening and tightening--growing
into the next night, the nest of trophies
without trophies.

It's not so bad. Just don't let those oranges
get pierced by all the tight black lines
and dribble out until your legs are sticky
and your heart (or liver) is dry
and as long as you don't let that happen
you'll be fine.

Soft rain on
a cool summer night
quiets loud voices in gardens
revealing the contemplative hum
of the city in motion.

You sleep, still dressed
beside me
in your world always
slightly apart.