the door is still ajar and there is still a lamp lit
and hue spills out in a straight line
where I follow markings on the
sides of highways to forget
how I won't forget the impression
you leave on the sidewalk through
season after passage of next to
brightlit stripmalls somewhere
with snowcapped mountains
and lakes and lakes and lakes away know
I'll probably miss you

when streetlights burn down
when stoplights wear out
I'll be out on the ocean
you'll find me in
hillsides on
indian summer mornings
or in
rain flecks on train windows
winding trails around
provinces I'll
never figure out how to pronounce
you won't miss me

rain falls             consolidated
dust          it opens up gutters
outside        the pristine bank doors              there was (there were)

a bird (birds), and                      a
girl (laughter),   and a passenger
side                      rear-view wing
mirror (spider's long gone)         we saw
everything                                    always
party to           the                    low lights
disappearing                                            
            days (weeks, decades, et cetera),

how does this just keep happening?
the endless benefits of                      
                                    a three week
tooth whitening regime       you'll
be                            
so                            
              popular                                
                   with          all the cool kids

gutter        bees wax          shoe polish finish         forever
                                                                         in
                                                                        your midlife
                                        so bri quets; rain:
ame (雨)
pleure, Βροχή, pluvia
वर्षा, წვიმა
lullabies             in cold            words, shuffled                
you, singular field,
words, words, worlds  away,

you and I still fall                                                      you and I still I.

once,
I
had a
rabbit,
like you:

saved from the gutter,
as lightning fell piecemeal.
escapism,
all shining eyes,
all tiny scraps of flesh.

and we
let
him go,
but I can never let these things go.

I guess, I haven’t handled
complex operations, like
the removal of you,
before:

maybe that’s why I didn’t get it
right,
and now,
there are still suture stains,
scalpel tips,
leaf litter,
floating amongst my workings,
etched with your syllables.

I suppose I’d thought of
what I’d say,
if you said “come back, please?”:

if I could, no.

most likely an uncertain shrug,
before resumption,
again, following each of your tender footprints.

but, no. definitively, no.

sure enough as the sun eventually slips,
I’ll find another shadow to drag across my aching heart,
no matter how your remnants last,
stinging, to remind me,
of what I had once wanted.

another quiet song I shall sing,
this one, upon newer ears.

hopefully, not another deaf set.

you spun silk across the skyline as the frail sun
spilt, onto the far-eastern seaboard, while those
consistent clicks fell resound and washed away
down the drain behind the blanket ran to pitch
as the clamourous small hours from city centre
disband the overcast to stillnesses and grandeur
of emptied haloes, trickling with dust, so i open
my muddied lungs and laugh; for now i know i
have kept fallin' anew all along, if i think i think
i will be alright will i make it through this night?
will it be any better, in the dawn's soft light? i'm
not
                  afraid
                                             anymore,
                                                                    though.
we were star-crossed, but for one single moment:
the sky tore wide, and all inside of your ribs, the
constellations swum where once i'd only found
doubt, inside your eyes the lights played
out melodies in time, as
dawn opened up
beneath
us.

tired autonomies, days keep on flailin', seizin'; darlin', I'd
be bolder if only I'd tried. makin' plans to abandon 'em,
the dark reach and tenements of those towers of regret for
all of my inactivity or self-targeted hostility, and those dreams
meant everything to me until awakening into morning hours
or afternoon, more likely, with the dull grip of uncertainty
shudderin' all the windowpanes back and forth lightly, oh
so **** delicately, and I think about you as soon as I've
drawn up ambition to make any kind of move, the pieces of
the vast puzzle I've called your mind for the better part of
the calendar dates I've drawn up into fifteen gauge shells of
the ghosts of my past, those that follow my footprints in evenings,
the pools of aluminium meltings and lemon extractions
to constrict the summer hours, convictions that bleach out
all other chances of hope.

so relinquish your grip on my red and unfolding heart I've
been beating the syllables of your name with, and abusing
the page width of headspace, serving only to alienate the
froth on the shoreline of daring chances: I'd have given
my all at the sight of romance, but I sit here with no
glimpse of intention from you; the crestfalls I subject myself
to, not for the sake of lack of want, but full lack of what
I'd do if I called and asked where you wanted to go at
three a.m. or five p.m., or any other canonical time of
the day; I'd spend any of 'em with you, and I'd
ask, but I'm somewhat sure you're not that into whatever I
could mean, or whatever my words do seem to transcribe themselves
upon contact with your mind, so keep on existing and I
will do the same.

[or, anyway, at least I'll try]

The star exists.

The rain exists
to fall.

The tree exists
to breathe
and fall.

The bird exists
to breathe,
and sing amongst the trees,
and fall.

The beast exists
to breathe,
and sing amongst the trees;
to wander,
and fall.

The human exists
to breathe,
and sing amongst the trees;
to wander,
and whisper, under starlight,
to love,
in despair;
and, finally,
as all else does,
to fall.

it is no hidden truth:
writing about those teeth
and twisting schemes of
sadness in my dreams is somehow my dependent everything,
but patterned lists of the same words
in permutation
becomes tedium in waiting;
there's that illustrious want for novelty, no matter how safe the same may be,
and I still just write
about that exact ******* love
and ******* everybody else wants: so, am I this predictable? am I this formulaic?

probably.

so, how does one take some respite?
how does one choke back their routine penstrokes and fabricate
experiences they haven't yet or ever will gather,
when all they've held was in the ritual letting of ladders down ductile tunnel foundations,
the vestigial fathoms that remain floating around in
your eyes, your eyes! your eyes I
tear open and crawl in and curl up inside,
the feigned lust I set out to fake and then finally, silently, made
and now it's all the mistake of concrete stained with
letters heart letters on a date that lasts forever,
but your letters are tiny lies
and mine are misery
held in contemptible disguise and
how I slip just that **** easily into this lackluster story about
I, you,
people I never knew and
never know anybody.

and

how the grass would have grown and grown if the lawn hadn't been cut down, and the patch of death in concentric center where outside, under the stars, I lay curled, foetal, and drained of bile; for now, in ascension of sterility I am feral once more, I am, at last, just a tremulous, pathetic and miniscule animal waiting to pass through the dirt. That moment hit me, like all stones in august. So I stood. So I ******* stood, threw off my dripping eyes, screaming at the moon 'til I spat blood and cursed life and I swore, I swore down to the skin of my teeth, I would conquer it until it conquered me, for, as far as the wild was concerned, my casualty was a drop of rain in an ocean. So I become the ocean. So I dig my palm into the earth and let dust ground the stray electricity. I no longer lie, I no longer bide time until it's too late.

But I lied
and I do lie.
I waste abhorrent amounts of time.
I still just hang my head and leave things up to fate. It's always too late.

It's always too late.

Through the glaze of snow falling from ninety-nine cent aluminium, we'd taken the remains of a novel formulation to remove the stars from the sky and plant them in a field. I took crushing endlessness and the heat of leaves growing in moments to make the autumn of a town I hadn't yet seen. This is how I escaped from the sealed-elevator flight plan the first time; talking had failed me, pinned against the face of a fleeing infant. His mother could never find a way to paint him as a forgery, a skeleton, and make it stick, so he coughed rough and eloped from the schematic with his brother as their father remained on the ground, paying out the parking lot tower fees, unaware that he, himself, was only a figment.

and I, just another figment, ventured off into the village, the leaves cascading and trembling, the gold of their hues dissipating as the flight crew shook a lifeless husk, spent lives ago, now, with the clamour of shells dividing, each split or junction or birth yielding arcs of light as my sister tells me how the strings she pulls around her wrists tell metric time whilst I brush my hand against concrete and glass, leaving traces of skin within the grain, sloughing away finally in the small moments as I float through an antique dealership: mahogany gods, carved tall as redwoods, and bathed in mist like the western coast at dawn.

and I, indifferent to the television sets implanted between memories, broadcasting coffee-stain eyes lost midsummer years ago, still indifferent.

as I finally reach the elevator, the last level, the depth below, struck me. I am the test subject, my irrealities are just trying to get out, to survive this feigned life, to be born into the world I frequent. They are abstractions and know it. I have not said a word as I step out onto that plane, amidst the rising roar of engines and the row of the crowds and the swell of my emptiness.

I breathe in and become the field, at last.

the overcast window haze casts shadows over farmlands at distance, past ferns and cottage solemnities out on plains cold and alive; meanwhile, concrete and preservative-laden once-trees cage in the zoo-horde of humanity this lovely city is built upon, through the steep divides between the walls of foreign strangers, still neighbours, calling telephone lines to the lover that makes their heart shrink in the cool sheets at a distance of eight thousand leagues under kitchen sink designs where drips escape onto a blue-grey dishtowel, strategically placed to avoid having to address the issue over farmland holidays when stormclouds gather and sleep 'til the grand show, back over the alps, as the fallabout planes drift under blue over grey with distorted fantasies sandwiched three abreast internally, whispering "you'll be here, I'll be here, seventeen minutes" as the black gown of evening bids its farewells to the long-worn ball of flame we call upon for life's little affirmations, the skin and bone we call home, the constructed caves we wish we didn't, and, letting frost's call begin, the last of the seasons hauls its bulky frame over the horizon and clusters on the fingertips of tree limbs, coercing: "let go, it's late, it's so very late" and so the sidewalks choke with debris under the wearing off of summer feet, and the declination of that peach-pit feeling of sanguinity as the blankets pile up and the distance consumes once again, long after delusion gave up the chase; we all want to be left alone and want someone to pursue us at the same time, we all dream of the grandeur of timeless monuments: the desert road, the glint of illuminated heavens, the mist's rise and fall, the electricity in her eyes.

Humanity, the island
I swum round, circles made eventual stone,
'til I'd learnt that I'd learnt nothing,
-know nothing-;
for all the purported wisdom,
accumulated with such great care,
I was none wiser than
the first breath I had taken,
adorned with the sterility of hospital pine- or lemon-scented antiseptic.

I know the world, now,
I know the hair on disappearing creature's skin,
I know the strands of broken bamboo,
I know the endless breaking, upon the shorelines,
I know the words of lovers,
dead and alive,
the words of enemies,
and of those impassive.

I've known the grand vastness of the empty above,
the crawling complexity of the unceasing below,
the burnt haze of day,
the dead silences of night,
the spaces between lips,
the lonesome tied in white sheets,
the rending denial of mind,
the sardonic acceptance of heart,
the weight of life,
the light of whatever comes after.

Yet, still,
I know nothing.

like all life, in turn,
the wind falls for the sea.

he whispers secrets to her surface,
the words of every voice
that had screamed or spoken into his midst.

the sea retorts:
"I can not love," she says
"there are too many a ship's wake
I still bear on the skin of my pride,
those vessels that had torn holes into me,
sunk, to my depths,
and, now, all they do is decay."

the wind heaves a sigh, and a town, picturesque,
seven thousand three hundred and fifty-four miles away,
rustles under the front.

the land, that child, bristles, fumes and
the wind brushes the sweat from its forehead,
sings lullabies,
'til the earth does not heave any more.

under the choir of stars, the wind weeps
the sea takes his misery in,
and, feeding her countless children,
she sings back
to the wind:

"you breathe the life into me,
without you, all my organs would cease,
but dry your eyes, love,
all your ripples on my skin
serve to tear me apart,
and, by this moonlight,
I shall not know
where either of us begin"

the wind calmed, smiled,
fell and drew near to his lover,
sighed once more, content and delicate,
and, on a shoreline
four thousand five hundred and thirty-seven miles away,
a child, watching the sun fade,
felt the slightest hint
of a salted breeze caressing her hair.

scene: Fast-food outlet half plastic paper cup rolling aberrant twixt the fingers of a mild breeze, leaving traces of hollow sounds against the leg of a bus shelter.
~
Feeling diseased, predominantly symptomatic of the hard shutdown and cardboard cutout nervous impulses of this nigh-fluttering arrhythmia, the haunting thought of how I really just can't do this anymore, permanently leaving dwellings of what could've been in sheltered murk; remembering the sound of exhaling as I had fallen to delicately brush your cheek, the little things you never noticed... you never did notice, did you?

[not that I gave you any reason to.]

And, now, it's all loss and letting go or giving up: so, nothing has changed, save for long-deliberated decisions finally made, regarding quitting and cutting down on thinking about such matters and moral dilemmas whilst time dries out; I have more lives to lead, do I not? Even if, once, the belief was that you were all the life I needed, in whatever meanwhile we tangled up in our collective noose-knots. Even if I thought I'd loved you.

Left with the curtain pulled, grey rolling hilltops, all I have to admit is that there's no reason, any more, to get messed up over these bits like gravel and tar into tender soles; it all drops out with disaffected expressions, a little pain [much, much less than would eventuate, if circumstances were left the way they are*], and those lingering half-degree burns your lips left around my breath.

It's not your fault.
I never meant to fall for you in the first place, anyway.
I'm trying to make things right.

So, don't worry any more, for to neglect the corridors of my heart set aside for you is all I can do, now.

it took that walk home (the same three hours as usual) one last time, or at least the promise of, to realize, maybe admit that there's no good reason any longer to pretend to know what idle thoughts (those ones that had been left to mull for the last three months, at a minimum) had or have to do with reality, if they've even stayed remotely consistent or if it's the predictable chaos of daisy petals, tiny and pure clean as they are, dropping sequences of murmurs through wound car windows or heartfelt sunrises or collapsing into the mess of sorrow in the library for the fourth time that week, the flash of peripheral reflections across the ceiling and slowly forgetting someone else- she'd said "don't ******* off, this time...", but all these stories blur to blue clouds in these porcelain hands, wondering why the same circumstances pass with all those skewlined angles on the surface of this world, distinction-drained lovers, and it all culminates with that **** centre point: the human, half in covers, could god have built him so wrong? (or does all will lead to the same end, am I fated in freedom to such fallacy?) I could forget everything, you know. guess I'm just waiting for a reason to.