#wyoming
the low-hanging clouds
mean that god is in residence
on the mountain of serpents
just west of here
tendrils of holy mist descend
adding depth to my perception
of the many canyons and rises
that are just flat foothills most days
adding understanding
by obscuring
showing me more
by showing me less
only god moves in this way
i bow my head in reverence
for my father, god
for my mother, nature
Jun 30, 2020
Jun 30, 2020 at 6:33 PM UTC
I'd feel so at home in Wyoming;
Married to my television
Cigarettes for breakfast
I'm at peace with my shaking
Clipping branches of my tree
To feed my precious pets
I never played the game
Rolling dice around my teeth
But I keep my eyes on the window
Let the creeping wind in my belly
Be all that makes sense
Thrown like a doll in the corner
Unblinking for the longest time
Measured by the shift and click
Twisted legs coiled like cables
Sealing Matthew into his box
America's fables never spoken
Her reputation and misadventures undeserved
Fit like latex on an amateur surgeon
My cardboard house unfolded
Everything in a tanned leather briefcase
I just forgot the combination
827 - 125 and the button slides
Why can't I leave my things in a crate
And ship myself off to a Grecian island?
I could be sung to sleep
Just as in my room
But now, my dear Johnny, Oldboy,
It's gloaming on Elysium
My chest is still beaten upon
I file the cold edges round
Empty another carton and call it a day
Feb 18, 2018
Feb 18, 2018 at 12:27 AM UTC
Autumn clovers leave
The dirt it stays behind
Steelheads turn up the arms
I don't wanna stay, I see no thing but pride
That man he drowned. He loses everything.
Pinnacle ladies cry, they move up the yawn.
I shake the bed, until tomorrow's grieving.
It shucks our graves in two, splits the pupil's
Fearless cast. I can't run away, I can't make Friday.
The needle takes too long, the blood doesn't leave a trace. The opening is long to go, but
We wallow with it.
Each funeral is a thousand alms
They call to each other's arms.
They won't go astray, even if
You leave them.
Sorrow is my brother's lot
It takes up the head, and leaves us sideways-
Another whim lilts in two. The bridle makes the saw, that breaks down every god. It brands the flock, I don't look at anything.
This day grief makes it hard to go
Another man is bent.
My crooked spine, he shakes in torment.
Up upon the piste, broke down onto the knees
Nothing's there, but I can't look away.
Keep me to yourself
Like a secret you don't know
If I could just find a way
To live another day.
Oct 28, 2016
Oct 28, 2016 at 2:04 AM UTC
My happiness comes from me ask my friends and the world around me blossoming in a spark of crimsony red moon glow on forethought walks through the shivering lenses of percept that trickle down our backs as we enlighten ourselves with all that is in between and unseen.
It is as if our aged limbs were caressed into a symphony of leverages and their shapes. We cannot be cadavers. We are arms of cheer and picture jasper, adolescent googled-eyes gathers with virile fixations on our partners as we prey on the map lines subtly employing our eyes as we dart across each dimple, pimple, freckle, and gently worn rash lines.
These are the dogs of our incessant barking. Idling for sincerity, as actors swiftly press Winter into us while our limbless diction presents our inadequacy Rd upon our ugly and I'll-tempered neighborly-things. Aliens of the afternoon, first floor agony and karmas standard for living in a reduced climate One.
Wearing down the hooves, undulates from Pepperdine mark trails with breaking breads and twigs and bones. Undulates from another world, behoofed and bemoved, curdling their sappy reselling a of drat and unkindly remarks. And we have begun to wonder when evolution will kick-in. When will the military come for them at the doors and vacate is all from our nontoxic lie-shrouded apartment complexes, condos, and cabins. Slaughter numbers of letters and integers right out in the street; loonies in the town square and the moose are crying.
Sep 17, 2016
Sep 17, 2016 at 9:52 PM UTC
Operational anxiety. The words I've been using don't make any sense to me anymore. It's all quiet and I have so many questions. The mountains shout, **** you!" over the Gros Ventre. And I'm lifeless and apathetic about lessons. I just turn on the Philip Glass and go for **** misunderstanding. More of it is coming and somehow I allow it in. A me circle of despair, loss, and immense love. My subjects must be growing curiouser and curiouser. Some of these adverbs dress in white dresses with black boots and carry scars on their palms while they bribe you off their tears to crawl back into the dusty desert graves your skin wants back.
My oven mitts aren't even of animals. I stare at the deer and moose from our second story balcony. My wrists hurt in a loss of practicing this habit. Subject matter that burns through the nights where I don't sleep. I torment myself in nursery rhymes that don't rhyme. Beds that don't water themselves, and the stories that keep my fingers soggy and pruney, drowning their dactylic digits in infinite keyboard unfulfillment.
The music is familiar. It throws its knife-wielding notes into my gut- my innards are bleeding, and my headache is growing stiff. I could mutate like Alex Mac and operate in a vacuum. I could be an incubator of self-aggrandizing disastrous behavior, an awful diaspora of introspection, a sickness that starts in soft flesh and tissue and summarizes me in the faces and heads of people and children that never turned their heads to listen.
I am wrestling your poems out of your hands. A royal couplet you try to explode against your innards, and a ****** prose that cascades upon the walls, in a mushy textural, even artistic mess of crimsony soulless words you throw around, things haven't changed but you I think you were just pretending to be haunting.
Winter hoarfrost and summer sweating. Integers upsetted by short-acting suns and cold and chilling dips in frigid waist-high water. The rocks are slimy and I don't feel like the fires are still coming. I point my nose to the water and take fifty paces. When will I have my forty-two minute day. Children are ***** liars and ought to have no sugar or treats. But let's not feed them from bowls we place on the floor.
My fingers are freezing, my cheeks, nose, back, and elbows too. I am smoking and never going to stop. I have met Joe Black and he tells me he used to command David Berkowitz into shooting people in cars, so I tell him the only thing certain in life is death and taxes, and that we need a new dishwasher, a cheaper place to buy ice cream, and a rough concrete square of floor I can torture myself for experiencing too much as human.
Sep 1, 2016
Sep 1, 2016 at 7:59 AM UTC
Eleven to you
Star-crust in de stijl courts
Silhouettes and shadows
Speed boats race around the lake
On and on and on and on and
Guilty pleasures and guilty moldy blues
Sandwiches on the weekends
Pasta and pesto or gnocchi every other day too
Common mysteries follow the bayou
Heavy heads laden in niello swamps
Does acrostics in the daytime
Pleasures herself with crosswords on her days off
Sacks of coffee, potatoes and ivory- beer at 5am
Three fingers lay across the stitch
This needlepoint is something good
No one died but someone could
Heavy on the hops, melancholy Wednesday's
Miracles in wrestling Russian masters
Thwarting automobiles without their governors
Faster and faster they go
Growing faster and faster they show
Aug 30, 2016
Aug 30, 2016 at 8:46 AM UTC
The date is printed orange
in the bottom right hand corner
of my very favorite picture.
It's from two-thousand and eight
And, as my cramping legs keep ambling
every gavel foot falls faster than
the one that fell before.
I'm wondering
where the Hell the years have gone.
You were all brown eyes and wide white smiles.
I was all youthful bravado.
As your laughter swelled to confidence,
I was sinking straight down to the bottom.
And the water rolled on past us,
Goose Creek
swelled with the Summer run-off...
Tell me where did all this time run off to?
The moon is looming large
in the hazing, ashed-out corner
of my wine-enchanted eyeball
on this too-typical night.
And every hyphen lends some extra space
to staggered breaths as I recall your face.
Now I'm spelling out
my own verdict:
defendant's moving to convict.
I don't know the final cost.
But I got enough memories
to say what future I still have,
well it sure ain't coming free.
I got enough memories now
that I don't know where I will be
when a year is just a yawn and a sigh,
and you're still lodged
deep down inside of me.
You were brown eyes' living confidence,
I was yellow, fading cowardice.
I know you were the better one,
and I've always been scraping the bottom.
And the water stalled beside us,
Red Riv-
-er choked with Winter ice blocks.
Don't know why I was so dumb and frozen.
But thanks
for believing
all those years.
Aug 16, 2016
Aug 16, 2016 at 11:36 AM UTC
White-bodied black bird raven like creatures that sit everywhere and obnoxiously yell to each other from the wilderness we live inside.
Wet birds. Soaking in mod colors affixed to the numbers the looms set in the torn threads of an old tank top named with the characters of Dune.
And in sweetly moving breaths of air the peaks pull through this range of mountains seen from our back deck.
Friends, join us as we balk putting away cardboard boxes as not to put a hinderence on the relationships with our neighbors and instead traverse the moose-trails the tourists stop and crop their lenses at- only to make to Brouhlim's.
Jul 20, 2016
Jul 20, 2016 at 10:33 PM UTC
On Ohio nights, you've got fireflies.
Out West, we like our rifles.
Never pull your days out from the roots
'til the nights have all been ripened.
City lights are purpling blackened streets
and we can see our way to habits through
these neighborhoods...
Our sentences are carbines.
Order up a few more rounds.
I guess it's almost automatic
when the late reports all sound
like we've got
rain all week.
It's rain all week.
And you're so sick of parades.
You say you want a Summer.
One that never ends.
One that takes you back to Ashland,
brings you
sense of time and feelings for old friends.
I think the party's over.
No streamers on the wall.
Pack your bags, punch a ticket,
bring a
jacket and I'll see you in the Fall.
I'll see you in the Fall.
On Ohio nights, you've got fireflies.
Out here, we've got some mountains?
Never load your words into your clip
'til the shells have all been counted.
City lights rain gold on midnight streets
and we can feel our way familiar through
these neighborhoods.
Our paragraphs are Kevlar.
Knocking down another round.
When the night sky tries to swallow
you, the late reports all sound
like we've got
rain all week.
It's rain all week.
I was so tired of parades.
I'm looking towards the Winter.
Know how that one ends.
It'll take me back to Sheridan,
bring
sense of time and memories of old friends.
I think the party's over.
No streamers on the wall.
Pack your bags, punch a ticket
bring a
jacket and I'll see you in the Fall.
I'll see you in the Fall.
Jul 8, 2016
Jul 8, 2016 at 5:34 PM UTC
It aches when I smile.
My State's a disaster.
Coal rollers, burnouts and days full of rapturous
laughter and "Red Face"
down in Lusk in the hot days
of Summer--it's boiling;
Winter winds burn up your face.
I first learned to hate
myself in a snowstorm
on Dow Street in Sheridan.
My best friends are the slow warmth
that spreads through the chest,
lifts a cold heart, grabs popcorn and pints
at the Blacktooth on hundreds of nights.
And 500,000 simple souls are a sight.
Still they're just half a million salty
drops in the ocean--
A quick squall of rain on the Bighorns.
They've opened the floodgates for *********
morons, bigots and rednecks
and rich, ******* ranchers thinking
everyone owes them.
And their dollars are deadpan
gallows jokes down in Cheyenne.
But I've seen cheap smiles 4 miles wide
out by Sundance.
And I've got good friends that I still carry with me
like the potent, sweet, earthy afterburn of good whiskey,
or the smell of the lodgepoles in the Spring
up in Story.
And it's still my home
even though it's so empty.
It's still my home
though it sometimes seems ******
That State's in my bones,
I don't think it'll leave me.
So please understand that some nights
when you find me,
you've stumbled across a small splinter
chipped off of Wyoming.
Jan 25, 2016
Jan 25, 2016 at 1:12 PM UTC
It's 2 o'clock in the morning now.
I'm on a late night drive to the Acme pit mines.
With muddy thoughts in a midnight mind,
a mound of gravel in my guts,
I'm churning up
The last 4 years
and knocking back a cocktail
of wins and losses.
Wyoming night in the early Autumn.
Do you wanna come for a drive?
Take me back to that Winter night
when we walked outside
and filled cold air with our voices.
We set the icy, empty streets to rights,
and just talked all night
until our frozen throats thawed out.
3:10 a.m. It's still warm outside.
The gravel speaks, with each step, under my feet.
Tally up the feet and miles I've gone,
the feet and miles we have lived.
A memory walk
is vignette stops:
Those nights we spent drinking wine
on your rooftop.
Wyoming night in the heat of Summer.
Do you wanna come for a drive?
Thinking back on that April night
when we stayed inside
and hid from rain in the Springtime.
We let our favorite records spin all night
while it soaked outside
until the red wine sky dried out.
An empty ghost town. 3:45.
Imprints of gravel on my legs are a star map
I'll follow back to the times we had
through mounting years and empty space.
A distant place
I'm dredging up.
The one laid down; woven thick
in our fibers.
The map is laid out but I know my way.
So do you wanna come for a drive?
Jul 2, 2015
Jul 2, 2015 at 1:34 PM UTC
i stay awake late
contempleting the possibility of decoding the illustrative lyrics
spoken between my head and my heart
my wheels keep turnin' circles
still
it's a start
Dec 20, 2014
Dec 20, 2014 at 1:12 AM UTC
if looks could ****
i'd be slaughtering the masses
and if these walls could talk
they'd probably never stop laughing
but if that ***** of a mattress should crack
and leak the secrets of mine that she keeps in her chest-
like tightly bound metallic coils-
so help me lillith
i'll burn this house to the ground
i'd rather see all that i've built turn into ashes
than to hear her voice rehasing all the whispers i'm slinging whilst fast asleep
or how i cry in bed for weeks
or the way i flinch when the sun crosses my face
like a shadow i can't name
i'm a mess
a natural disaster with whirlwind hair and a lightning strike pulse
in a second-hand dress that doesn't fit right
i'm fine
i'll survive
but should you be the boy i find
and i bring you home tonight
just know that i'm better than alright
know how very much i feel alive
regardless of the subconscious soliloquies you unleash in your half-silence
divulging secrets whilst you slumber
i wake like the waves lapping at a fallen empire's shoreline
and quest to test your lyrical limitations and the possible personification of your breath
and your chest
heaving like the sea himself
Dec 16, 2014
Dec 16, 2014 at 2:34 AM UTC
You’d think she really was
Mud sticking and stiffening to the Loud Lady’s toes,
And her sigh sticks in mine.
Don’t let them do this to me and I didn’t
But I did. God’s great pillar carried us west.
They dragged her like a fog.
The men who cried **** spit and grinned
and the smoke grew sorrowed with girth.
How I long to breathe in Black Hill breath
to drown in the Belle Fourche
and swallow the palest Crook ashes that float,
Chewing the body that I left and let-
But there is no redemption in the tops of towers.
No spiral of justice. No figment
of grace in these sooty species.
No Bear Lodge witches that the Loud Lady cried
So surely that
You’d think she really was
Dec 10, 2014
Dec 10, 2014 at 1:57 PM UTC
I know the contours of your face
just like the streets of my hometown
you'd squint your eyes
when laughing
at the corner of Main and Dow.
Blacktooth Brewery
on frigid Friday nights
frosted glasses, fogging breaths
and laughs caught up
in tightening chests.
Kendrick Park can keep its towering trees
and midnight charms
if I can keep your laughter with me
when I sail for newer shores
Something in familiar signs,
buzzing blackened Bighorn skies,
keeps us just above the water line--
afloat for one more night.
Sheridan Iron Works
Red, rigid lettering a raised, distant hand
Watch it wave from on the hill
above the Kendrick boardwalk,
soak December in our smiles
choking back our April cries.
Snake's head yawning
from the I-90 exit
slithers down Coffeen and tails
our icy footsteps
Rattle. Rattle. Rattle.
Shake this town to its bones
with our Thurmond Street jokes
and our glowing Gould Street hearts.
I hope
this is enough
to buoy our ***** up
against the weighty ballast
of this tiny, yawning town.
Settlers of Catan
played on a windy Wednesday night
over another drowning round
of clinking Wagon Box pints.
The contours of your face,
icy streets of our hometown,
our squinting, gasping laughter
on the corner of Main and Dow.
Blacktooth Brewery.
Frigid Friday nights.
Fogged up glasses. Frosting breaths
and laughing, clutching tightening chests.
This freezing town
will test your mettle.
Settle up and bring your friends.
Sep 9, 2014
Sep 9, 2014 at 12:36 PM UTC
back to the days of dandelion dreaming
tasting the sweetness at the center
and squeezing the sap from the stems
onto our dirt dusted hands
frantic finger-painting on the cement dance floor that we bloomed from
back to the sage-dressed lake bed
she laughs
and boasts silently to the sky of her emerald depths
i laugh
and boast ineloquently to the bottle's neck of my mermadic swimming
always got my head beneath the surface
but this isn't suffocation
no
just transformation
i am on the rise
back to the nights of meteor showers at the top of the world
from the hood of my car
sharing candy bars and over-ripe secrets
it's the browning fruit that tastes the sweetest
so freedom must be the color of garden soil
or maybe just the same shade as your eyes
back to the laughter
erupting from our child-like bellies
like hot water
from granite springs themselves
remember?
back to the tents
and firepits
and unmapped road trips with no end in sight
back to the chapter
with the "happily-ever-after"
and the monsters under the bed packing up for a holiday in spain
back to the light
that's how i'll survive
Apr 1, 2014
Apr 1, 2014 at 2:51 PM UTC