Beyond the shadow you settle for,
there is a miracle illuminated.
Brutally elegant,
nestled in communal catastrophe.
A dark star
of rapt silence and intimacy.
The kind that can quiet a room.

Every word is an edge.
Textures, traits, shapes,
gestures left smoldering in the air.
An incandescent slice of fat
hanging on a glint of enamel
after breaking up a fight
between stray dogs.

I don’t miss it.
it lives on my nightstand
with the other pieces
I’ll never be ready to let go.
After all, very little
can mean a lot
to the right people.

It’s not superstition if it works.
Maybe I’ll never understand.
Maybe I don’t need to.
Because right now you’re looking up at me
like you’re remembering who I am.

For the tirelessly articulate
a loss for words
is the greatest freedom of all.

You’re going to wake up before your alarm most mornings,
and sit in the quiet
looking at the mess of dark hair beside you
feeling the same way every World War II pet owner did
standing in line for culling.

Cling to the skin whose name you know best,
breathing intertwined in the same area code for a moment.
Heavy and spare
like an ear bound to the melody of a song
you never got a chance to share.

There was never enough time
to learn
what to feel
seeing all those records
dusted down and illuminated.
Each in their own space
amongst the butterflies and jazz.

You know you’re weary. Nothing more.
Maybe that’s why you still shave against the grain
despite long ago having learned better,
and wonder if anyone else in the coffee line
can tell you’re suffering an unstoppable
irreversible fear.

Everything is always an amalgamation
unbound by chronological order.
The moments of light so real your brain starts seeing
raw symbolism in every breath.
Those are the parts worth keeping.
The things that never quite make it to past tense.

But right now your ears sound like the ocean,
roaring with blood. There’s an apocalypse outside
and you’re the first to hear it.
But you’re not dead yet,
because there’s no afterlife where she’d be here
or you there.

Stay awake.
Feel the air rushing out of the world,
peeling back time itself
to it’s barest final slice of silence.

Your parachute never opened.
You’re hanging like ribbons
in the trees.
Staring at her face
still framed by starshine,
and high desert green.

Generally speaking,
one should avoid transparent containers
when attempting to starve a fire.

If not adequately covered each night
they’ll start to remember,
it’s the dark which should fear them.

They’ll keep right on glowing.
Melt straight through their enclosure
and flee through the nearest open window,
to nestle amongst decamped cigarette embers
and hubcap shards.

Or rush East.
Shine bright in an oxygen flood,
resting just a moment
before collapsing into morning.

No one ever goes searching anyhow.
Once it’s tasted wild air
a spark knows it has no business hiding
or obeying.
It just goes right on burning,

After all, our blood is mostly heat.
A pulsing canter of something primal.
Craving variance in structure,
the unspoiled viscera
it can hear cowering
just beyond the muscle and sinew.

An empathetic sanguine resolve
who without temperance
would course hot enough
to petrify marrow
reclaiming it’s rightful domain.
in a grand gesture shaped
and honed from spurts of desolation.

A constant flux of beautiful half memories
almost touching a better place.

You are in danger.
There are no stars.
Only a wild sky shocked red
by a beauty found only in the blood of the enemy.
Everything else lost never to return.

Honor, integrity, and hope all drowning in the blood I’ve spilled.
An ancient menace. Narrow, powerful, and sharp.
Even after your eyes are plucked,
you will never forget what you’ve seen.

Close your heart to their suffering.
Do not allow yourself to feel for them.
Close your heart to their desperation.
They will not feel for you.

Find your way home, for no longer does such a place call to me
Not screaming any more, but I can still hear them.
Death happened here.

Know this now,
you will never walk in sun again.
Erase the light.

I hear singing,
wait not singing,
so much as vibration
coming from this place.
Strange as whales in the deep.

Somber and embarrassing.
Like looking down the street
just after walking out on the person
who meant the most to you.

Or letting a parent’s final call
lapse to voicemail
in defiance of the end
long ago built into every beginning.

Nothing driven by nostalgia
will ever truly satisfy us.

So we cling to what we know.
Shaving against the grain of our own salvation
with the heartbreaking clarity of
a raw summer night.

As if the unreasonable silence
of each footstep
lets the world become a little more itself.

I thought of you today,
and felt a burst of energy like a wound.

From the kitchen window
I watched a broken tailed pigeon
hopping uneasily from shade patch to shade patch in my backyard.
The mundanity of irreversible pain.

The dogs stood perplexed at the door
since it wasn't fleeing,
or exhibiting any self-preservation for that matter,
as the others typically did.

He was rather plump,
suggesting some manner of avian royalty,
as the desert doesn’t typically afford strong nutrient sources
for most species.

Water was unnecessary.
But to not provide
even a small dish, seemed
a taciturn snuffing of a long stale flame.

There was no further assistance to offer
beyond keeping the dogs at a wide berth
while I finished wiping down
the peeling linoleum.

When I returned for the dish,
he was entirely gone.
Without so much
as a tuft of flight feather left behind.

Last night the specter that stands in the dim light
by the loose fence post
woke me,
and pointed East to Split Rock Lake.

My yellowed headlights peeled through the fog,
outlines of building frames collapsing until
that old shed next to boat launch
was the last thing standing.

There are no stars in the sky here.
There is no sky.
Only mossy air so thick it blurs every outline,
just enough
for dreams to fill in all the wrong details.

As my door opened, the dome light caught on
a bramble of soaked tulle floating
out under the moon,
framing your head the way boxer fractures build
mountain ranges in the backs of wind-dried hands.

But you were smiling in all that dark blue.
Staring through a teetering past
ruined present
and all the moments in between.

For a moment you looked like real hope.
Carved from sinew, metal, and glass.
A muted Whippoorwill warbling just before the horizon
goes wild and red.

Or the rushed ******* in a bathroom
because shaving your head
was the only thing that made sense anymore.

But you weren’t drowning as far as I could tell. At least not until your lungs remembered to breathe.

Some days are good.
Most are screamed into a strip-mall parking lot spilling over with Midwest rain.

But right now,
your feet are furrowed in cattails and algae
living the life left hanging for you
on the edge of a tall Southward wind.