she was not chained, but tangled
in the fur of his kisses or the stickyness of his glances
it turned her fingertips red and made her eyes squeeze
their world was a tropical snowglobe with a little boat that tumbled around their sky
and she lapped against the plastic like a tide
looking up at him with forgiving eyes.

at first when you take off
the world just looks small

a dollhouse, a miniature world
an amusing punchline to an old joke
a fantasy tinged with g-force and sprite in clear cups

but as the sky darkens and the plane lifts higher

the world seems to drown in blackness
an inky clarity of night not confused by clouds
and suddenly it is as if you are at the top on an ocean
looking at a far away ocean floor
crawling with foreign creatures with all of their bones lit up
over coral reefs of light and movement
parking lots like stationary jelly fish and highways like currents
of neon veins pumping lights and cars

all of the world's exoskeleton is illuminated
and it is beautiful and movable  
it is nature's patterns played out in electricity

but the farther out you go
the more the sharpness and geometry of the roads and cities
attack the eye

and the coral reefs turn to computer motherboards
all of man's ingenuity and beauty no longer draping the world
but ordering it

into squares and jagged lines
into distant pixel pinpricks
into maps

until you're not traveling through the world
but over it

It is a silver snail between the lips,
cold as a quarter bitter as a penny,
Not even the aftertaste of chlorine.
Patchy F# smoker’s exhalations
Grit the teeth and the ball of cork
lolls in its belly.
Look down your nose
it looks back at you,
Blurred.

Look back at you.
On sticky tile bare toes clenched,
and chin lowered to chest, pool-parched lips
Took the Acme Thunderer and—
Blew.

echoes whipped from ceiling to surface to
bare-slick backs of streamlined swimmers.
Spines curved into fins—
Lungs collpasing slow as a circus tent
Even the bubbles tittered with reverberation
Faster.

Not a splash as pointed feet flicked at the ankle
Casting expanding triangles of wakes
And lips kiss-close to the plastic lane line
Breathed.
And finger-tips yearned for that two hand touch.

And now—
Blow.
Only shivers of sound.
Just spit it out.

That unmusical clang as it hits the desk.
Exposing distresses of is and was
escher-impossible to tell which is which.
Waiting for that hollow echo
of high ceilings and deep water.

Freckling the sidewalks: puddles.
All a-bloom with oil, dirt and the reflections of flocks of birds --
Swarms of starlings winging around spires like maypoles.

At the ***** of the skyscraper’s spire: clouds.
Cradled into blueness by springtime, whispering away their last agonies of rain.
From their final cadence comes a tear

That tear dripping into those puddles making these ripples
Unwrinkle through needle-point skyscrapers, ribbons of starlings
And reflections of clouds.

the closest we get to feeling alive
is by sleeping with death
tangling with evil and emerging
knowledgeable and sticky-fingered
((fruit juice, apple or pomegranate))

we do not know life but as a sidekick for
our suicidal tendency, our desire to lose our consciousness
within the ***** of mob or infatuation
to ***** out our selves, swallow our senses

this is the deepest secret nobody knows
but everyone feels,
we all want to be lost in them
to die while we live
to dream awake

we want to collar up our animal selves
and harness ourselves to the plows of art
and create
and die

There is a sunset on expansive lake.
Its lip of waves soft with ripples, trembles,
eyes shed tears of falling stars and still ache,
for something other than what assembles.
Such crowds. Acnes of campfires erupt,
on the blank faces of bald dunes, still preserve.
Beach's eternity makes the moment abrupt.
sand through summer fingers cannot conserve.

Oh sun, ease our smallness before the night,
gild inevitability with light.

i've switched my dreams with reality

now during the day i dance with flying carp
and eat green tea ice-cream cake from the ceiling
and memorize the curves from your face and wait, wait
for a kiss that will never come.

now at night I'm late to class and trying to eat food with chopsticks
and speaking half-wit japanese and going to the doctors
and picking out drapes for my windows and posters for my wall
in the night i'm lucky enough not to remember your face at all.

Dark winter presses its cheek
against her window spying
with closed eyes
into a room that
no one would know
is night-time
the white walls and white lights
lie the cold away.

every part of her believes it
but her feet.
pressing the cold calloused soles
of her feet together

No, they are lost Colonies
In a flat world
Trying to make
Sustenance from sawdust.
With no savages on the shore.

Sadness is fear slowed down
so that we can observe every facet

it is a stillness, a little lucid dream
the looking at the look of our own face
in the early morning

fear is the pain
the dance turned to  chase, the story turned speech
the blindness perpetuated by not allowing a blink

sadness is the scar, that even later
when we release our hard-won anecdotes to our children
we nurse still in secret.

it is the lack of turns and edges,
the feeling of gravity strong,
but mysterious and without center.

Blood in
Blood out

My heart is an *****
Made of tissue
Made of cells
Made of molecules
Made of atoms

Blood in
Blood out

No love or heartbreak

Blood in
Blood out

when my bike breaks
a shirtless boy offers to fix it
and we kneel bare-kneed on
old sidewalk peering through
grease and stuck gears
until I turn away
as if he is a night-time
I might stub my toe on.

you have desperations of joy that you
walk on short leashes
happiness has sharp teeth.
and mercury eyes.
collar tugging back
adam’s apple bobbing of
rabid throat.

Look up, beast, look up, frightened
brief fires.
when balloons bloom they pop
most times
but when they don't
they slip soul-less to skies
away.

if you're reading this the worst has happened.

a thousand bombs have exploded on the surface of the sea
causing a giant tidal wave to consume the coasts.
or maybe the scientists tangled one to many times
with mysteriously sensual black holes.

Or maybe the whole world didn't end,
but just ours.

If you're reading this:

My sand-paper quirks rubbed you down into sea-glass,
and all your barbs were reduced to arts and crafts quips.
And then you did something drastic to sharpen yourself,
but only succeeded and drawing blood from my paper-skin.

If you're reading this:
My eyes didn't shine as quicksilver as you thought they would.
And I really never understood, but managed to trick you into thinking that somehow I could.
But one day you asked me a question and I gave the wrong answer, and you knew.
Knew exactly how I lied to you.

If you reading this:
I never really loved you at all.
and you knew it.

White linen and naked lightbulbs
there is sand in the sheets.
there are children on the porch
there are napkins folded like sleeping birds.
until the dinner bell.

You worshiped false ghosts instead of gods,
whose favorite sayings were silence.
And you built shrines seven million neurons high
and six thousand hopes wide.

In return,
all you wanted was to taste the sharp edge of lightening
or watch the flight of a ****** of confessions
or have an ******.

Expectations grow in reverse when you're in love,
like that.

You started off with angels and will settle
for a little paranormal activity.
But his telekensis was made of strings
and he never even pulled them.

And yeah, it's nice to have yourself
to yourself again.
But--
Wouldn't it be nice to have a broken heart,
to pull out of your chest to summon
a devil or a doctor?

And
there's nothing warmer than a lie,
but even ghosts have got to die.

this is where i was supposed to tell you
(what I was going to say)

i guess you know now that I didn't
because if I had told you these last few lines would have rhymed
would have been details into the synonyms my heart has ascribed to your name

this is where i was supposed to give in and admit
what all my little footnotes of blushes really mean
that i really wouldn't mind it if you kissed me


this is where i was supposed to tell the truth
but all i can write are lies

because this is where i'm terrified
terrified that somehow you'll read this and know
even though i didn't say anything at all

this is where i beg myself to let myself say just one little thing
just one little anecdote, just one little truth, please?

this is where i was supposed to open my own file
and read what my subconscious wrote

this is where I stay in stasis
this is where i erase this

backspace.

The thin places of half transparent sheets,
are braided between my fingers and toes.
Waking up where daylight and dreams meet,
then with soft sighs, rolls over and goes.
I hear the warm whisper of night mutter,
“Here sweetness is spun to never break.”
But all fractal universes flutter
as eyelashes wing upwards awake.

I must forget how the slants of light were,
sharpness makes silly the beautiful blur.

I do not want your love.
It's too large for my hands to carry,
too slippery for my lips to say
And if you gave it to me
I'd only give it back away.

What I want are your little smiles,
that like tinsel decorate the minutia, the minutes, the moments.
I want them anytime and every-time.
to brand them and keep them and call them mine.

I do not want your desire.
It's too ugly to look at,
and too persistent to bear.
and if you put your hand in mine
I would pretend it wasn't there.

I want our lives to be like train-tracks
that never touch, well, never much.
and far away seem to converge, embrace
brought together by an optical illusion's almost-grace.

I do not want your trust.
It's too delicate to display
and too complex to comprehend
And when I gave you mine,
you sold it to a friend.

I want my leaving to be like loosing a balloon.
with a moment when your eyes slowly rise,
rise to the crests of cirrus and you sigh,
sigh softly, tenderly, but oh-so audibly out-loud,
and then grab for the string, through the crowd--
but I am gone, gone into the rivers of cloud.

I do not want that sigh,
I /need/ it for it is your due.
It shows that you will miss me
as I have long missed you.

We had a language you and I.
Not of lips or hips or trembles.
but of words, and thoughts
and the tangles between ideas and emotions.

And now that you are gone the words I once spoke you
try to push through my lips, my body convulses
to speak again that tongue we taught each other.
that language we shared.

Sometimes when I speak with others I hear echoes of it
and I try to form complex sentences that belonged
to our language.

But they are not of our kind,
no one is of as much my kind sometimes I feel,
as you were of mine.

And so now I sit a tourist in the world,
and sometimes at night I remember
that once I had a home-country with you
and a tongue.

You are not a peace coming midst chaos and despair,
You are rare, and if there quickly disappear.
You are the fear of the fear, immemorial and earthreal
impossible to feel between the tides of insecurity
the shipwrecked nativity turned to the ashes of cynicism
And yet I lust for the echoes of those ashes,
But you are not in crashes of lips or slips of Aphrodite tongue,
You are an aria not to be sung, poem not crafted to write,
You shed no light on what I ache to know
Yet, I think, I would die if you should go.

i feel like measureless music
a throng of vowels
living in-between fog and smoke
like almost black and white
the string of a far away kite

my mind has become stuffed up
and all the world tastes distant
and slightly curdled.

like a telescope
focused on the landscape of a palm.

I have no faith in these hills.
They are too green, the colors to deep.
At night when the fireflies dance under
almost-ripe grape vines tangled in earth,
I wait for them to disappear.

I can feel myself forgetting the smell
of the sun-dried roses and half-cleaned out fire places
the smoke of wood and ash,
the strange bugs I find on my damp towels.  

I can taste the blue of those far away hills
smell the red of the ancient brick of
faraway conclaves of ancient cities.
But I already forget their names.

I watch the rain tumble down the hills covered with cobblestones.
it's midas's touch deepening the colors of the stones, the fossils of labor.
I listen to the sounds a mountain makes when it cries, nursing it's million year wounds.
The green river never stops pouring through it.
But I can't remember the cause of its sorrow.

But I know the cause of mine.
I will leave these hills.
And paint them into a postcard.
or a poem.

i was your favorite ghost.
you'd visit me once a week
throw some roses
read some proses
allow some tears to leak

you no longer visit me
not once a month or at all
i sit here waiting
my mind debating
why I allowed myself to fall


then one day you bring her to me
she smells like butterscotch
i comprehend
why we had to end
but i can't bear to watch

still, i am just a ghost
a graveyard fantasy
and you have love
someone to think of
who lives in reality

I find echoes of you within me,
your savage, tender truths,
as if our blood had mixed,
as if our genes kissed.

I thought for a long time  that I could forget you
but, I cannot.
To forget you would be to forget myself;
if I ever did I'd be someone else.

For as the infant's face mimics it's mother
you and I are like the other.
And though I have been orphaned,
a lost child of our connection,
my soul's chromosome remembers.

I think you're dead.
You haven't replied to my letters, my calls, my emails, my texts,
my body language, my thoughts, my wishes,
the almost-silent tickings of my heart as it beats closer and closer to where you are.

I didn't want to write this poem, because I didn't think people would believe me.
I thought I should make it a book, or a story, or a newspaper article.
Man Leaves Woman With No Reason, Probably Dead.

We met on park benches, and  under bridges.
In abandoned train stations and  church gardens named after poets.  
We never went out to dinner, or back to each others apartments.
We were too much that combination of whimsy, fear and patience.

I don't know where you live, or who your friends are.
We are ghosts meeting together always passing through each other
never touching.  

I always knew you would leave.
I didn't know how, but I thought I would.
I imagined fights, or the slow dying,
our affection like the tired kidneys of a person
who could no longer filter all the conflicting elements out of
themselves.
I imagined reason.

You only gave me mystery.

Before you left, you said you had to go do something.
You left before I could ask what. You ran away.
The sound of your feet against the pavement like one-handed clapping,
like a tree falling in the woods with nobody to hear it.

Without your return you made me into nobody,
and turned us into a fantasy,
into a poem.
That no one will believe.

i wish you did not strip my brain into a live wire
make my electricity coagulate like blood
peel back my layers of dead skin
and paint new coats on in primal mud

i wish you didn't build our love from hate
or at least the artful dodger's ambiguity
like an electron giving me only time or place
but never reality

i am a little chernoble
cradled in the ***** of radioactive lakes
and cursed platoons of miasma snowflakes

my atoms were ripped apart
you were ripped from me -- and I did it
I tore out my own elementary particles until
i gave myself some kind of quantum complex

and now, he, them, the men in suits
they're coming to clean out the mess you left
the mess admittedly I made
and maybe they won't dive as deep into my soul
maybe they won't power rockets to far away moons
maybe they won't create realities.

but they are men and they are here
and they will recolonize me until
i grow weeds and eventually
a solitary flower.

For a place can never die,
even if it wants to try.

after they send the chapters to bed
the beginning and end slip into each other
plotless with heat.
sweating syntax one
word lying next to another
in beds of metaphor
they make love like similes
and dream only in poems.

It hurts not that you let me go,
although you did.
It hurts not that you sold me,
although you didn't even bid.

I don't mind that you love another,
although with every kiss I know.
I don't mind the lies you tell,
although every day they grow.

It hurts not that you hurt me,
although with every word you do.
All that hurts is that I love you
and that you don't love me too.

In summer dunes slopes
to midnight edges of lake
we press our bodies to the sand
roots searching for sun hidden
underground.

the high G# was born on a Sunday morning.
It came out a little early, (whoops)
but it's mother,
a soprano, standing much too short and singing much too high,
always held the philosophy better early than late.
which worked quite well with appointments

but like the birth of a child
the birth of a note is a ******, messy thing.
even the mother looks on at in disgust
the audience does not look at all.

it strains against the folds of her throat,
while she squints at the little dots fitted in between lines.
(notes laced into the pages of music,
like slightly old whisky into watered down punch)
the choir director arms circle wildly,
motioning:"breathe, breathe"

Finally it breaks through,
cracking,
whipping
out of her mouth--
a sharp cry.


Through her trembling lips and chin she smiles,
victorious
it is alive.

the note's heart beats,
once, twice, three times, and after the fourth,
it dies.

The forever I was promised
is hidden under my bed
the cleanest secret I’ve ever kept.
and I never look,
afraid I’ll see
monsters of empty dust instead.

when i was young i had a story
it made no sense.
and ran on forever.

when i was young i lost a story
i didn't miss it much
it was one less thing to weigh down my pockets

i don't remember where it took place
or who my friends were in it

there was no middle or end
always a beginning

i don't remember the story
but I miss it.

to middle of lake
The burn swim
where echoes breed,
and return to die

The quick dive to
humid underwaters
of held breath
and silence.

You're there behind the window pane--
yes, you're whispering my name.
Every syllable fogging up the glass,
a medium for words elegant and crass.

But you can't love through a wall
and if I can't have your love,
I'd rather nothing at all.  

So even though you can see me; I am not really here,
Even though you can almost feel me; I'm not really near.

when it hurts
but i like it

The sky has a ***** face:
cloud-stains sun cannot erase
the storm has bruised it red
where lightning’s heat has fled

death hold no triumphs
absolute and naked
do not promise me forever.