I wonder still
if you remember me as I was.

So obsessed with fixing
amending
undoing
setting things right.
Never content repeating the moments
already achieved
because to change them
even in the slightest
would collapse like tobacco embers
in a thriftstore coffee mug.

An attic hiding
entire generations
of days never not
filled with ghosts
hanging dusty over
your sleeping head.
Specific
incidental
pain over
and over and
over

Sometimes I think of those days
and hope the sun
still pops out
wherever you are.

For William and Meredith


For treatment of panic and anxiety disorders,
short-acting anxiolytics are generally recommended
to provide temporary bursts of clarity
but should be reassessed periodically for
usefulness and concerns regarding tolerance,
dependence,
and abuse.

Xanax releases dopamine into the brain
to function as a neurotransmitter to send signals
between nerve cells
including reward motivated behavior
and pathways known to reinforce addictive neuronal activity

Perhaps to build her,
you had to break yourself
amongst the glass of that summer day.
Leave her waiting for your hair to peek
around a weathered edge
toward a forgotten living room corner

You are still her Patron Saint.
A long shadow cast across a small ghost.

She still screams at the sky to stop raining
beats her fists down the path
to the house of death
unceasing, and changeless.
Prodding a dull,
familiar
wound.
One that leaves its mark,
with pain felt more
from memory
than from anything else.


Withdrawal and rebound symptoms commonly occur and
necessitate a gradual reduction
to minimize the effects of discontinuation.
Not all withdrawal effects are evidence
of true dependence or withdrawal.

Recurrence may suggest no more
than the drug having the expected effect
and that,
in the absence of the drug,
the symptom has returned to pretreatment levels.

“Certain breeds of chicken exhibit a behavior known as brooding.
When no Rooster is present they will diligently incubate eggs incapable of hatching,
forgoing food and water
despite the impossibility of newborn chicks.”

It seemed like you had been waiting for quite some time
like collapsed steam on cold coffee surface.

I watched you there
torn apart in the light
shadow fragments packing your edges
away like foreclosed tenants with an immaculately well maintained yard.

By turns violent and mundane,
open mouth smelling of monsoons
and hot morning skin. On the pillowcase
your fingertips bloomed like incandescent daffodils.

Nights posing as days stray forth
and return, with a casual politeness commonly reserved
for political debate spectatorship
and cocktail mixers.

Not quite grim.
Not fully present.
Standing alone in a gleaming room
begging for a sliver of crawling blackness
to tempt the curve of your hip back into my hand.

If there was time left,
I could have figured it out.

“I understand that you are sad and I am sorry.
I told you this would happen. I am
not having this conversation right now,
so I am sorry for that too.”

Too many nights wasted at coffee shops
burnt hands pulling shots,
across ***** Formica counters.

Talking to boys about their discount tattoos,
and bands that will never be relevant.

They tell me how they’ll change the world,
bring the females along with them
to smash the every glass ceiling.

Within the hour I’ll be rug burned in a dimly lit room
Nicotine tongue telling me it doesn’t normally do this,
but I’ve already come this far.
Fight, or give in,
you’ll still be a dozen miles from home.

A blue eyed story with a faded face,
and a name they never seem to ask for.

“If you ever make your way
I would love to be your guide.”
“Something will land soon
so maybe we can,
thanks for still knowing me.”
“Thank you for still knowing me.
It still shocks me that you’ve managed
to stick around with me
being how I am.”

“I’ve been thinking.”
"About?”
“Why you care. But
don’t go into it.”

“I don’t suppose
I ever had
a choice in the matter”

“This was the time you hated me. still could be.”
“I just need to stop talking”

“What caused it?”
“Living where I do
this dismal place
I hate where I’m at now”

“Last night,
I figured I should do it
Tell you I’m sorry for what made you leave
I hope you stay this time.”

“Want to know what I think about when I’m stressed at work?”
“What’s that?”
“When I came back
and you knocked on the door.
And I felt safe.”

“Seeing your name makes me smile.”
“I really have missed you.”
“I didn’t think you’d come back,
“You have no idea how scared I was.”
“You are always good to me. I’m the one who is bad.”
“I don’t like it when you say mean things toward yourself.”
“Well in this case it’s true.”
“I really hope we can see each other”
“I like spending my birthday with you.”

“I never wanted to leave, I just felt I should.”
“Why?
It’s got to be more than just the logistics of distance.”
“I went to a dark place.
I haven’t been actually happy here in a long time.”
“You’ve always got a happy place to return to.”

“I’d have liked to talk in person
but on the chance
I don’t wake up some day, I just wanted to say that I love you.”
“I love you and miss you too. I always will.”
“I hope so.”
“You exist and I somehow met you.
I’ll be forever thankful.”

“I’m really really thankful
I didn’t have to bury you.”
“I need to thank you for
helping me through it.”

“Please outlive me.”
“I can’t promise you that.”
“Then promise to never forget me.”
“I couldn’t do that even if I wanted to.”

“What happened? I’m ready to hear.”
“I got depressed
isolated
started getting attention locally, I went with it because
you didn’t deserve it.”

“Why didn’t
we
talk.”

“I don’t know.”
“Did you forget me?“
"I didn’t forget.
Not once.”

“I was thinking about myself.”
“It’s hard to believe you loved me.”
“But I did love you. I still do.”

“I make problems for myself,
when it gets too real I run.
I know
that doesn’t give
answers and I’m so sorry.
I’m not like you.
If you need me to stay away just tell me.”

“No. Even in my darkest hell, I never stopped loving you.”
“I don’t care how bad
it seems. I never stopped
loving you either.”

“I wish I could make food for you.”
“I’d cook for you too babe. I make a mean fajita. I miss you a lot.”
“ARE YOU SAYING YOU’RE GOING TO COOK MY CAT?!”
“I would never do such a thing! That’s out of context!”
“Haha, But really I’d love to cook for you or have you cook for me. I miss you too. So much.”
“Come home.”
“I will. I promise babe.”

Driving home
I swerved to avoid a dead cat
lying in the road.

It was raining,
but my speed was low
and no other cars were around.

While it did not change the outcome,
it was the right thing to do.

Once, after money had changed hands
and guarantees were given,
I found myself in a high desert gulch
choking a dog to death
with a leash pulled through a fence.

Gasping and afraid,
still full of love.

Having never before
hurt something beautiful,
screaming apologies
at an empty backseat kennel
was new to me.

If it were human,
mail would still arrive at the doorstep
while he laid among the river
rocks and cactus.

But I can't go to the better place
everyone says we go.
Drag it back home
make things right again.

Perhaps this is why,
years later
I finally found peace
the moment hands wrapped my throat

Somewhere
a kitchen light still glows
on an immense orange cat
waiting to scour both dog bowls
for leftovers
that have yet to appear
after even a single meal.
Twilight throwing
lavender shadows
across the cramped
polaroid drenched kitchen
where you slow danced
to something acoustic
before saying your first goodbye
on a bare concrete balcony
studded with cigarette ash
and stars.

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.

People are beautifully statuesque
parodies and tragedies
of one another.
A great democracy of limbic creatures blinking
out of awareness and back,
pretending to sleep
while the world totters ever onward.

Creased post cards,
miniature elephant figurines
thrift store rings
and dried grocery store flowers.
A beautiful whirling loop
of meaningless
meaningless keepsakes
to soften the imposing sorrow
like warm breath
on a sleeping face.

Each night without fail
their city centers hum a concrete anthem
for a future which will never come.
A constant distant song
louder on the coast somehow
where the cold billows
amongst the barbwire
and bootprints.

Growing up on a steady diet
of physical fear
and old Country songs
coalesces a taught wire
of rage and wallowing
forever lashed to a survival fetish
no one ever asked to be upheld.

Ubiquitous anger is just sorrow
aspiring to a loftier identity.
It hides amidst the panic
of what the wielder might do. Pushes away
when craving empathy
we don’t feel will be delivered,
If no one is ever
given a chance to show up,
it’s because
they’d have never done so anyhow.

So we start wars intending to die
but keep coming back
like the pain of teenage nihilism once you realize
everything you ever thought
was true
came to fruition.

There's a certain point, where
your hardships and pain
belong to no one else.
While you were busy locking your feet in place and
manipulating the same wet rag
wrapped around your heart,
living still needed to get done.

However we can still find that darkness
blocking the way down the hall
and hold it’s hand intensely.
Not placating to buy time,
but the real kind of empathy. The blistering high lonesome sound
of bones cracking with a smile
under the weight you were never
asked to shoulder.

When a dying man asks
if he’s going to be ok,
never say yes,
but be absolutely certain
to never tell the truth.

The thing about the word unhealthy is that it can only exist
in comparison to other, more appealing options.
In the absence of vegetables,
a diet consisting of processed sugars, caffeine,
and American Spirits raises no red flags.
Broken individuals seem to shine brightest
when they cannot be referenced against those possessing more admirable qualities.

You are the dent in a beautiful spine,
telomerase granting immortality to the cancer.

She is dive bar songs for everyone,
for her,
for this half-drunk moment,
but secretly for you, really.
Dusted in neon smoke your body can’t breathe
but still delicately pack into the corners of each lung,
knowing it can never be exhaled.

For someone so self-professed anxious,
She says lots of words that are not “yeah”.

She is a kiss that tastes like mornings spent reading The Bell Jar.
Long legs twisted into thick comforters, bare skin
close with the desperation of two people who have everything to lose.
Morning hair spread wide and thick. On your backs,
not wanting to move, wondering how
much time you have left. Doing
the math together.
The wrinkle following you through an empty apartment.

Here is proof, evidence.
A human alive; a body in operation.

When She crashes her smile into what’s left of your teeth
it feels like a jaw being broken by sunlight.
Closer to her than anyone,
without knowing a thing about the ashes in the corners of each eye.
Rings with an unsubtle sway from striped dress,
to the edge of your timid fingers.
I know how little a man can do with two hands.

Abandoned toys and worn out shoes have a past
, like the people who used them.

Don’t tell people the reason you have to leave parties early without saying goodbye,
why you stay so close to the exits, ready
to push away any innocent bystander who might be able to help you.
Don’t tell them She’s the voice mumbling
beyond the edge of your lamplight.  
Wondering what Hope means,
if the other end of the text message knows
and what it means to find out.

Some stories end with four shoes on a subway platform,
not caring if you’re stepping into the right train.
Others end in the fields
as the ants clean the bones.

Day 1:
“Oh hey what’s up man, how’s your day been today?”

“Pretty solid, I was weirdly productive at work so that was nice. Just gonna get some rest now.”

“Wouldn’t you rather think about that time in 3rd grade when you beat up your classmate Patrick for no reason and told him to keep quiet while your teacher walked the line?”

“What? No. Why on Earth would I want that?”

“Just thought I’d ask. It’s been back here awhile.”

Day 2:
“Sup dude?”

“Kinda busy right now. Working a new deadlift PR. Can this wait?”

“Can you carry on a relationship that doesn’t end with a woman crying and your fists breaking your furniture?”

Day 3:
“Hey…”

“What are you gaining from this?”

“Me? Nothing, I’m just making sure you don’t forget.”

“What’s the point in remembering?”

“Everyone else has to. What makes you so special?”

Day 4:
“…….”

“I can hear your breathing.”

“……………”

“Just say whatever you want.”

“She’s been active on her social media accounts today.”

“I know.”

Day 5:
“Man, you’re lucky you’ve at least got a dog to hang out with you.”

“Yeah man, she keeps me going.”

“Did you lock the door?”

“Yeah I always do why?”

“Well her collar’s off at night so if she got out no one would ever find her.”

“She’s fine I promise you.”

“Well she’s small and has dark fur so hopefully car headlights are as confident as you are.”

Day 6:
“Good morning.”

“No. I’m dead serious. Today is not the day.”

“Whoa now, why the hostility?”

“You really want to know?”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m here for.”

“I saw a camo energy drink this morning and broke down sobbing at 7 am in the middle of a crowded gas station because I could physically feel her going on with her day no matter how hard I try to hold on.  I missed the way her hair tastes like sullen acoustic guitar songs and how she walks around in the mornings wearing only a bra as she gets ready for work. Modestly brazen. I can’t stop thinking about how my skin felt like it belonged to me for the first time the moment her body pressed against mine and she let the curve of her smile crash against my crooked face. Can’t stop missing the way she spun on her toes when she had a secret she wanted to share so what, what the **** could you possibly have to tell me? Let’s hear it big shot.”

“For a moment a self-inflicted gunshot wound looks like a halo in full bloom.”

Day 7:
“Please. I’m begging you. I can’t handle anymore right now. I need a break from this just for an hour.”

“Remember how she lotions her entire body after a shower with her wet hair ******* and you couldn’t stop being amazed at the fact that you’ve never seen anyone lotion their *** before?”

“Yeah, we both know I remember that.”

“Why couldn’t you just stop?”

“I don’t know. I tried to explain to her that my soul felt like whiskey smells every time I yelled at her and I hated myself for it. I was sick then and am getting the help I need, but the silence is more powerful than therapy.”

“I see the tip of the iceberg, and I worry about you.”

People,
they’re made up of all the things they’ve done.
Like an early love letter resurfaced
during an ugly custody battle.
The only true takeaway
is how much has been lost.

What we refer to as present
exists only in the context of futures
which never arrived.
Often containing just enough time
for a single dream.
Not the kind where we learn a single thing
approaching profundity, but the kind spent
sweating, waiting
for the sun to tell us it’s finally over.

Lives are only ever lived parallel.
Adjacent neighbors in the same drafty apartment. Walls thin
enough to hear someone hitting their children, but without
the clarity to sort out
which door they’re cowering behind.
So we wait it out, and apologize
to a tiny corpse
until nothing is left but bone.

In my spine I can feel the season
about to change.
We should step outside and look at the sidewalk flowers
while we still can.

After the storm
I found a mummified bird
stuck deep in a fallen nest,
a flare of color punching through layers of grey.
His fight had been long done.
Lost a thousand years ago,
laid to rest right here
since time’s beginning.

His future, as with all others
teaches you to be alone
The present to be afraid and cold.
At no point will there be an option for after-the-war.
No serotonin jackpot
lying in secret like an amputated limb in the sand.

Only hour upon hour
of conversations
that feel like silence
stumbling over one another
to cover the chasm remaining
from the beautiful realization
you’ll never escape such a boundlessly
ugly place.

But you,
you looked like you came out of the sun.
All I could see was your silhouette
staring right into me
without squinting.
Scratched skin warm to the touch.
A reflexive half-remembered sentence
providing respite
amidst a world
softening to vapor.

Spinning
slowly
tussled and wild
like black yarn
in absolute silence.
Four simple words
proving I wasn't insane.
I can see it.

In repose,
your short
night-time breathing
quarter-turned on the edge of the couch
until you faced my chest
and drifted peacefully.

Finding the right orientation
in coordinance to my prone form
took time, is all.
Fourth person in your family
to come around to the idea
of having an extra pair of legs
to walk y(our) dog
and tidy up
once you turn from my chest to face day.

Perhaps this is why,
my body locks itself away in the bathroom.
Subconsciously buying a little more time,
until your rotation finishes,
lands facing mine.

Because the trouble,
it seems,
is we (you and I)
have never said a thing,
we didn't mean.

Some days all I do
is stand quiet in my kitchen,
staring blankly
while I burn.

Truth be told
I could stand to burn hot bright blue
sweat out some sickness,
lose just a little more of me.

Our hatchet got buried
in too shallow of ground
and I’ve worn out the linoleum pacing,
waiting for you to realize
there’s nothing new of me left to find.

But when you remember the shape of my name
nature courses wild
through your burnished sawtooth voice
and makes me forget the flames are real.

So I’ll keep singing you stories from my wire cotton throat,
about buried bouquets
sewn tight under the hot sun’s blade
praying for rain.
Hollow jaw beating time like a tambourine.

Until all that’s left
from the days I’ve scraped along
is a stubborn bridge back to past tense truths.
Hope it falls,
hope it can’t withstand a breeze.

Time still may come creeping
like a middle aged man
who can’t remember
the day his last son died,
but knows there’s not a single word
he didn’t mean to say.

Back when conversations
now short,
were once not quite,
so short.

I bake this cake when I want to **** myself.

In a way I started honing the recipe
so long ago I can no longer
even find a beginning or end.
I've just been standing here
in the same kitchen
measuring the same piles of
powder over
and over.
Slowing time
with balanced
machine wizardry.

Each drop of egg yolk
and dash of almond,
another passing thought
filling spaces between
each tentative sunrise.
Powdered sugar landing with such
precise inflection
it’s focused sweetness
echoes through the body like a sharp gasp

The gentle vulnerability
of domestic banality
reminding the nervous system
that humanity
has and will forever
be a collaborative effort.

A warm,
living document
on what mattered most.
What’s still flickering in the night
at the dark edge of everything.

My plan was to **** myself once I ran out of money
but now I don’t want to
and I’m so scared.
It’s 3 am again and I’m in the backstage
part of this world
between awake and dreaming
and want nothing more
than to live every minute of sunlight.

I know it’s a mess
and that’s scary,
but a little fear is natural in this ritual
as with all the others.
Now salve your hands
and move your wrists like mine.

Statistically speaking,
most of us don’t get to say goodbye.
In either direction.
So as a mitigating factor we sacrifice
experience, push away
maintain
an odd pathology
of loneliness.

Or we humanize things
as a coping mechanism for The End.
You’ll tell yourself with full certainty
how much your cat must miss you,
in order to avoid
the primal,
animalistic understanding
that we will all one day
go suddenly
and without warning.

Along the way
a few things
will slip into your consciousness.
Much like how your uncle brought back
shivers from the war,
but left the rest
at the Front.

You'll visit the same smoke shop
every other day.
greet the same counter girl,
joke how the energy drinks you buy
will do more damage to your body
than anything else in the store.
Notice her new piercings
and tattooed freckles,
walk out promising you’ll see them tomorrow with smirk.
Then one day you'll move away
and never think to say farewell.

Or find the shop closed up
after spending a week out of town.
Nothing left save for a few garbage cans
and empty boxes
on the other side of the open sign.

The more you look at them,
the more they start taking on
a human form, an identity
like they’d been
kicked shoved punched
in the gut
cast aside until a city worker calls to have them disposed of
by the department
who handles such things.

In the daylight
far from where people were
she pulls a feather from the sand
brushes it clean.
The same way she did as a child,
collecting feathers —
the way a clump of dust
collects more dust
by static electricity.
Rushing home at the end of each day
to spread them wide across the kitchen table
and listen to their incantations
writhing in the air.

A damp matchbook rests on top of the sand.
She flips it open without looking,
runs her thumb down the cardboard,
and finds one match still intact.
She stares ahead,
wonders if the texture on her fingertip will flake it apart,
leave her hands smelling
and feeling
like fire for the rest of the night,
or if the cold ocean water has already
washed away that part of the match —
the part that smells
and feels like
fire.

A photograph,
washed up on the same beach,
is too faded to interpret.
Two blurred forms stand very
very close in the foreground.
The background is dim,
but not dark.
Maybe it's evening.
It's not night.
Or it might be night,
but in a well-lit place,
like a city or a gas station.
I suppose it matters little
as it’s still a beautiful photograph.

Beautiful like the way
a quiet walk with the dog
is only broken by the occasional mumble
or hum.
It doesn't matter
if you speak clearly.
The dog's only listening to your tone
and your hand behind it’s ear,
and it’s memory of all your time together.
and thinking about how all people need
is enough to pretend
we're home.

I bring myself,
to your altar
open and ambiguous
focused softly with an underpainting
of dark teal blue.

Staggering in a self-conversation
neither entirely conscious
nor fully verbal.
For a moment
it quiets me just to be there.

Every person
even if only once,
should take a moment
to lay out every
memory they’ve ever accrued,
each thing they’ve ever known
on the bare floor of a storage room
and bask a few moments
in their snap jazz hum.

Hot tea summer walks,
waterfalls to swim below,
singing to pets
in a window pane flat voice,
and home cooked meals
beneath dusted desert moons.

Mark each and every one
with a fresh scrawl
on a blank surface.
Capture their energy
just before it evaporates
from our plane.
In this way you can build anew with masonry
no longer hewn from pain,
exchanging old omens
for uneasy knock-kneed hope.

From this moment onward,
your world will no longer have space
for anything
less than a miracle,
no matter how small.
Moments so bereft of logic
that no other explanation is left
beyond them being
inherently
magic.

Focus so ferociously on the color of the leaves
each spring
and the wet uneven bumps in the corner of
your dog’s crescent nostrils
that you lose track
of all the reasons you never liked to spend time
at home in the first place.

Lose sleep if you must.
Stare at a person
in raw barren awe
at the fact any universe,
nonetheless our
universe,
could ever
create them.

Craft
hone
divine
a shred of hope
on which to cling
until there are no stars left above.
Backfilling gaps left by grey days
with good intentions
and proving to your corner of existence
that forever
can
and will never
fall silent.

Assure people they aren’t alone
and are deserving
of being loved
harder than they know how to accept,
until gravity
seems to shift,
grant them freedom in flight
to soar backwards through
all their dark winters
and bring back something sacred,
flickering in folded beauty
like glass taffy
drawn from moving water.

Beside a dying fire
it’s easy to love the place
you’ve always been leaving.
Utopia built in the isolation
of dense high elevation slumber.

Cry proudly
among embers accenting a darkness
newly invited.
You’ll know it’s working
when everything feels wrong.

Instead of slowly building a tonal
palette across months
years even
spend your minutes hours days
gathering the main threads and loose ends
of a life’s oeuvre
into a tapestry brilliantly feral
and unknowable.

Tack it by the roadside
where the asphalt leads back
to lost dreams so beautiful.
Where those you cherish most
are already looking back from a future
where nothing quite worked
but some unexpected air
still managed to find it’s way
into the digital chatter claustrophobia.

Learn not to worry
and hold close the absurd mystery
of your hands hands
never quite forgetting to
search for a familiar shape
in every darkened room
beyond the space set aside
for dreaming.


Never forget to repeat yourself endlessly,
endlessly
endlessly
endlessly
when the subject
is love.

Perhaps there are 100,000 forms of darkness,
100,000 forms
of what they call depression.
I know one
or two of them.
There is no suffering scale, no way to compare
the suffering of one
human being,
or one illness
to another.

So we hold candlelight vigils
build totems to gather the universe and pull
back clarity around one another’s edges
But I can't burn sage inside me.
It may attract the bad you hide from. Or
is it the good that scares you?

The world beyond the bond
of hearts is a town
without pity.
A dull inhumanity of systems failing the people
we don’t look at.
In this way the brittle tethers of association are tested.

Hand in hand greeting the blackening sky, bearing
down like the face of a missing child’s parents,
staring at one another
knuckles clasp tight.
Your smile the remaining mirror at the end of the world.

If you were here, or I there
I’d be home right now. On the inside
we’re both waiting for one
another still.
Because I’m the same,
but not.

I am ruthlessly forgetful.
Names, birthdays, work schedules.
But I know the way your hair looks in motion.
The way your face looks
refracted through a cigarette ember.
How when your mood shifts,
the church in your eyes
becomes torn, battered, and bare.

If we could just give
another go-round.
It would be different,

Remember,
your best.
Where you are, might
be, may go.
When it used to feel so good.

Most of our time is spent dead,
or not yet born.
An endless nothing heaped
atop more nothing.
Like being the first person
in the history of the world
on the timeline God abandoned.

Until one day you
feel someone approaching
glance a smile so small
it’s almost not there,
and the whole universe bulges and cracks.

A warm needle
plunged through an aging ghost,
shuddering breathless
in a crumbling foundation
of foxglove and mid-morning traffic.

Moving ever forward
occasionally
I took note of brief glimpses
of beauty
burning magenta bright
in the damp corners of my mind
back behind where the cattails
grow.

No words were said
but I heard them in your way
felt them in the clear
cold wind
lurching west behind the sun,
mottled leaves holding hands
with tatters of perspective scattering
like boxelder maple
across the slowing water.

While you worried on
making a choice of how to best
spend your next
day thinking
about
your next
day,
the message had already unfolded
like the key to a home
not yet built.

You've been given time
somewhere in the sky.
She wears your colors
draped delicate
as a rough sung song
learning to stagger
into a gallop
in air further
than you've ever breathed.

The moon whines.
Your vision blooms.

When isolated,
the imagination expands to fill space
until contact with reality
has been removed entirely.
It’s about faith in a way.
A man lost in the imprisonment
of false moments to the point
even in fevered visions
no supporting characters are particularly
scared or surprised.

In his mind he’s not lying,
for in his head it happened.
A dog chasing it’s own tail.
going faster and faster in an obsessive
and personal way
too primal to be defined.
In this way all things are ordained.
A superhero whose only
power is being able to see 40 seconds into the future,
unable to change a thing.

Notwithstanding,
he can still feel passion.
Genuine
and fierce as
any normal person would feel.
Toxic.
Delusional.
Choosing love
over people
rather than seeing love
in people.

An innate understanding
of what people want and
how to divert attention
from the possibility anything
could ever be wrong with his worldview,
simply because he’s fettered so tightly to
love as heavy work,
he truly believes a theoretical tomorrow
outweighs the trauma of today.

When he speaks
half his face
cracks away in a strange smile
like cinders
peeling from a fuselage
while flying over nighttime water.

I thought for a moment
about lying
telling them you're doing great,
about all your adventures
and dreams manifested.
Raising goats somewhere near bright water
in a quiet ordinariness
marred only by the occasional bite mark
on a perennial
grown too close to the fence line.

But I told the truth.
I have no idea
and would prefer it remain that way.

Time as a concept
becomes especially troubling
once it makes itself known.
Now you’re against the clock.
All progress a single
stuttered step
from falling apart.
Brutalist landscapes
masquerading as a bioluminescent,
science-fiction sentient beings.

Unfortunately the clock,
is ticking.
Hours go by the past
increases the future
recedes. Possibilities
decreasing regrets
mounting.
Do you understand?

When it all burns,
as I assure you it will,
every empty office lobby
and husk of window looking down
from tender jagged tenement towers
will pour rivulets of ash across
broken bricked sidewalks
like crawling fingers of lace.

Only the mosquitos will remain unchanged.
Spilling deftly from the same canals as each
and every brood
to have ever come before.
Nipping the skin of those left behind,
to sing the names of the dead
into the corn seeds scattered hopefully
in cold air.

There’s something to be said
for the nostalgic banality
of fading industries,

standing in line to buy stamps,
request blank checks,
or updating vehicle registrations.

Reminders that we seldom truly know
what nothing feels like.

Thumbprints on the underside of reality
two steps left of the center line,
and if you look back, it disappears completely.

the same way sleeping through the night
became a chore after realizing
the most peculiar part about
you silhouetted in my doorway,
is that it’s
you.
Silhouetted in my doorway.

Across the cheap Ikea pine,
that comfortable laugh doomed me.

Like a worn-in afghan,
and the smell of wax papered spice cabinets.
It made me grateful beyond reason.

But still, the linoleum peels, and tube lights
flicker pop
back to dark.

So I savor the minute
spent lacing each eyelet of my faded hiking boots.
Making sure the door is locked twice before I leave,
trying not to wonder
where it is you go at night.

You want to go back, you
Want to go back, you want
To go back, why don’t you
Come back, what good are you
Here.
You’re wasting.

My mother had a Boise
Love affair,
The openness
Built to last. She owned the sediment specks
Tacked to soles, Steel
-belted radials. Teeth.

Arid weather crept inward
Across linoleum,
Densely woven carpet
Fibers, under doorways,
Over pads of her feet.
Drying each tiny hair within her nostrils.

Her second hand twin mattress
Clotted with too many blankets flanked
By stale nail holed sheet rock.
Paint bowed from damp wind
Trotting in from Spirit Lake
Once summer faded from the horizon.

Eventually she forced
All her wishes into dense brine,
Siphoning out sweetness
Preserving shadows to
Stave off dehydration
Until the wet season returned.

Come back, what good are you
Here. You want
To go back. Why don’t
You come back.

A unit of measurement is a definite magnitude of a quantity,
used as a standard for measurement of the same kind of quantity. Any other quantity of that kind
can be expressed
as a multiple of the unit of measurement.

Length,
for example,
is a physical quantity.

Any value of a physical quantity is expressed
as a comparison to a unit of that quantity.

For example, the value of a physical quantity Z is expressed as the product of a unit [Z] and a numerical factor:

Z = n x [Z] = n[Z] So if we were to let Z be “2 antique sofas” then Z = 2[Z] = 2 antique sofas.

Fifteen hundred miles or so,
converts to roughly 7920000 feet
and 48 hours of land
across approximately 29 counties spread through 5 states

However,
in order to measure more abstract concepts,
different units of measurement are often adapted,
or hybridized, to fulfill ad-hoc need.

Coping,
for example,
is an abstract quantity
represented by

American Spirits:
(farenheit, inches, exhaled smoke as measured in cubic feet.)

Tears cried as designated driver
for termination
of unplanned pregnancy:
(miles, cost of service in U.S. Dollar, speed, tear volume in milliliters)

Furniture thrown:
Forces relevant to stable flight include a balance of
Propulsive ******. Lift,
created by the reaction
to an airflow
Drag, created by
aerodynamic friction
Weight,
created by gravity
Buoyancy, for lighter
than air flight

Holes in drywall:
(Inches in diameter and depth, potential bruises to be explained if the wall is ever further away than the human form in a darkened bedroom)

Unfortunately,
some concepts are still devoid of applicable units of measurement.

Take for example, the concept of Waiting.

As it has no defined beginning,
or end, and is malleable based on
external factors such as perceived value
and level of psychosocial dependency,
there appears to be no observable limit
regarding absolute human capacity capabilities.

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.

When understanding the fact
there may no longer
be future days
it's the little things
which burn with the ugliest truth.

Like not knowing what cabinet
the olive oil
and peppercorns are in
or how much laundry detergent is left.

Gasping yourself awake
at the sound of barking dogs
still haunting edges of every doorjamb.

better. It never
gets better. It never gets
better. It never

2
Nothing begins
nothing in.

If no valley
is a multiplicity,

Pull nothing similar
away for a moment,

“moment” gives the shapelessness
of a scattering
of occupied beds

Or it’s elephants
in retreat from flesh.

1

You’re courageous
you aren’t afraid to hate
your father
while he still breathes

though you never –
who does “never” distort? –
didn’t detest him

So they’ll divide him right here?
You always renounce the vacancy’s lack of distinction.

But you don’t, he never arrives
from written surrenders.

‘‘I was always skating on wet glass.
Always had this anxiety.
Tension to never be able to relax,
Never knew from moment to
moment what was the rule.
I have been balancing
on a tightrope in this home.
Sure I wanted to take the reins.
End it myself.
But I couldn’t face the thought
that I would be spared,
but the little ones left behind.”

In intimate partner violence
the head,
neck,
and face.
Are the most commonly injured body parts
with most occurring
on the left side of the face
as 90% of the population
is right-handed.

Strangulation is of specific note,
as it induces behavioral and emotional reactions
which in turn facilitate coercive control
via fear, inability to effectively resist,
and prostrated trust.

Consciousness can be removed in seconds,
brain death administered in minutes.
Even weeks afterwards, the risk of
carotid artery dissection,
stroke,
and seizures
persists.

Even stable appearing survivors
free from obvious marks
are not free of morbidity
due to the abundance of internal injuries.

Oftentimes without
subsequent violence
an abusive partner can forever exert
and maintain control.

An unfiltered pretension and paranoia,
reeking like empty coffee pots
on hot burners,
smoldering in humiliation
of a night
that will never dawn.

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.

Most nights
I slowpace
the floor;
first foot behind
second
back once
two forwards
stop
turn.
Again.
Tumbling my
own name over
and over.
A rock polisher
turning gold
back to burnished stone.

Time loops beneath my ankles.
35 minutes of being ten minutes early
has become a less than desirable pattern as of late

From the sidewalk I saw a bird forced to walk
by one wing’s drooping.
Stumbling along the asphalt, feather tips cocked in broken salute
and was filled with sadness of an incredible immensity.

My counselor,
Terran,
she was like that.

She had cancer living in her neck.
The immensity of which was incredible

When the doctors came to take it,
to break her into something worth living for,
part of her face left too.
She took to wearing scarves, bunched high on the right side.

Once she let me place my hand beneath the scarf. Her eyes
fixed on the brown bookshelf by the door,
I marveled at the nothingness.

I’ve been running down
this snow covered road
For fourteen miles
with arrow heads
pierced through
the bridges of both feet.

Extremities turning blue to black
I can’t turn back now, face it.
Twelve inches overnight
they said,
We reap what we sew
they said.

A whisper ran beside me
Running off
the road - to the woods
I followed -
until our bootprints
reached the lake

Frozen almost to the center
I laid down. Made snow angels.
Looked up at old light
dancing behind the trees.


I hope the ice cracks reach me,
before the rest of them do.

Time exists all at once.
It compresses, bends
squeezes
sprawls lithe across
familiar rhythms
but inevitably
unstoppably
will always land upon us.

An infinite cache
of insignificant moments
where we share the same songs
over and over
with every new face
hoping they'll eventually mean
what nostalgia has convinced us
to be an indefatigable truth.

We're all supporting characters
supporting
supporting characters.
Holed together in a cabin belonging to everyone
and no one,
losing life left unused.

Sometimes all there ever was,
was a single day.

I wish I wrote nature poems
or ****** haikus
ballads of ex-love
ex-tenderness
and foolishly resurfacing loss.
A novel of breath and wind,
endlessly interrogating readers
as to how many times
they can meet a new person
in the same floorplan as
so many others.

Instead I go hunting for mysteries
to prove the impossible really exists.
Listen intently to flowers calling out
from across a landscape of endless barren daylight
both primordial
and futurist.

Always in a hurry to toss aside sensuality in favor
of more volatile forces
bubbling over from the intrinsic cosmic voyeurism
that only comes from staring too long
into one’s deepest self.

Take an entire Sunday afternoon
touch every object in my home
one by one
realizing they’re all I possess,
as they’ve always been,
but are no longer familiar enough to considered
anything approaching owned.

Pontificate on raw human impulsiveness
and inconsequentialism growing
more difficult to control with each repetition.
Dropping the same ring down
the same storm drain to be washed
over in the same downpour.

The Marlboro Man In The Mirror
and his oxycontin sweetheart
reflected in the bloodshot stars
bouncing off your wilting smile.

But mostly,
I do a whole lot of talking
without saying a thing at all.
Soon enough
a moment
is the best I’ll do,
but right now
I’m going to tear off pieces of my face
and dance for you
between the full moon slivers
of this humid August night.

She's standing on a platform
in the middle of
the middle of nowhere.
Watching trains crest the treeline,
the same way she stands in the shower
until just before the morning's heat runs out.

Human humility, gravelly
and low, suggests the balance
of power is blurrier
than established hierarchies.
So diffuse there's no longer distinction
between center and margin,
fore
ground and back
ground.
Sinuous instead of rigid,
****** instead of embalmed.
Skeletal tangles of our murky balladry
disintegrating to hellish echo
like birdsongs
wilting in the sunrise.

Heart is a risky fuel to burn,
but look how the flame holds tight
until the shadows chip away
just enough for her ungoverned
wilderness
to creep back quietly.

Finally seeing everything again,
like dark water through trees.
and falling in love with the idea of
never,
hardly even lasting forever.

I wanted
to stand in a rush hour turn lane
and kiss you until we both tasted enamel.
Air thick and sweet with the hot scent of living,
knowing we’re dying.

Unfortunately, that particular situation is an impossibility.
An impasse if you will.
My inherent fear of cars,
coupled with a distrust
of horses,
would prevent me from standing in any road
during any point
in the evolution of travel.

So I stay inside.
Listen to another night of the neighbors having ***.
Seeing if this week’s guest star will be
whiskey damp apologies
or just more broken glassware.

Maybe I’ll get naked and play with guns.
Wonder if
my palette is refined
enough to taste new
spit on your smile.

I don’t suppose I could.
There’s no frame of reference.

Lens spray in your glove box suggests he wears glasses,
but very little else.
A glasses delivery system sliding his cigarette stained
hand up your dress in the theater.

Was it because I didn’t care
how much weight you lost
or how many people had been inside you?
Didn’t mind how the backs of your ribs
jutted through your skin into
the lacework of your blouse?

whisper in my ear and tell me you hate me.

Let the day start quiet
in short morning stillness
hands grasping for one another
through the hanging scent
of unfolded laundry and varnish.

Run errands together
revel in mundanity’s sweetness.
Grocery runs,
helping choose a new end table,
taking inventory of the threads left suspending our weight
so what’s been haunting us in past lives
can’t quite reach our necks in this one.

Even in fluorescent silence,
the motel bulb tan of an elbow
gracing a shoulder while rolling
over to adjust the curtains
feels stoically safe as a death mask
cast in burnt plaster
and bone.

There’s a specific number
you’re worth to one another,
but it’s a sum
you’d rather not say.

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.

How do you measure the distance between satisfaction and settling?
At what speed does wishful thinking blur
beyond a second thought into clear,
emotional ink-work. Haunting, deceptive
, an individual burden laid bare to those loved past the point of return.

I am a novelist without a novel.
An insatiable bipedal need to place it all
on paper, before personal need begins to bend narrative
to match will.

Some days I try to explain myself but everything comes out wrong.
Her face just looks lost and sad.
She wants me to stop trying, but the smile glinting her eye just won’t let me do it.

I’m a coward and I should be shot.


I hate the sky. And I do
that which is parallel to the shrubwork
Bland. Alone on an armless bench.
“I love you” to a cold grey sky. No one has made me say it.
It means everything.

Names most worthy of rumination exist as gnawing, skittering things
scratching at the backside of our brows.
I don’t smile so much as express variations on a skeleton.
A parade of crushed faces in leaves grown auburn.

One morning our cat crawled beneath the porch to die. She
never liked to be touched much. No idea
she was full of tumors
until her sagging body was laid beneath the backyard sod.

It’s a terrible feeling really,
to bear witness to love’s presence.
Hear it. Feel it.
Hands lashed to the asphalt as the smiles rain upon your back.
On those days my spine sags past breaking,
I will beg for more weight.
Perhaps then I can begin to wear your wounds.

Through the coffee steam your eyes were so clear they almost broke me in half.
I took a long selfish look as I told the side of your head about my mother.
You holding your gaze on my windshield
watching the wet lights blur one mile at a time.
Through the curls of your hair I heard you whisper that you didn’t want to leave.
Didn’t want to add your shoe size
to the prints leading away from the kid who’d see the inside of a coffin
long before he ever saw his family again.

I pulled over to force your hand through my sternum, pierced
each finger with a ragged heart tendril
built in the image of winter trees seeded far from the water line.
In this way, information is filtered.
Even with a cup tied to another cup by taut string,
you still don’t get a clear sound.

I shook my head, thinking of reasons to say your name. A taste like dusty paperbacks
flecked in cane sugar.
You got the boring name because your parents birthed you full of splendor,
knew you would never need the extra flourish of a conversation starting nametag.
The kind of person who deserves someone that will die of malnourishment if your plane ever goes down.

You’ve gotten soft old man,
You are no conqueror.
Will never drown out the roar in her 5 a.m.  mind,
can do nothing to comfort the black eyes
and longneck bottles left wandering her past,
with your piecemeal shards of charm and wit.

Part of your winter still clings to my dashboard and frosts my knuckles
each time my eyes close driving home, dreaming about painting red flags green.
Even after I watched the last drag curl out of your lungs,
you never tasted like smoke,
so I filled my lacerations with your nicotine
to hide inside your numbness,
while our bare skin rolled across sheets
looking for new cold
knowing this is not true sacrifice,
but perhaps my final squander.

Leave yourself nothing on either side
of this moment.
Steeping until it’s strength builds
so wildly
you forget everything that isn’t standing
right here.

Every edge of you
turning,
turning,
like handfuls of wet hair wrung over the kitchen sink.

The sound made darker
the darkness made
louder.
existing everywhere
at the end of time.