At the beach or the park it is appropriate to lie on the ground.
To sit still and do nothing but absorb the cries of gulls or the hum of an airplane or other distant sounds and smells and sensations.
But you can absorb those things standing up, and here on the ground
there is a world you can only explore if you put your eye up next to it.
At the beach it is not uncommon, when aimlessly watching people, to espy someone
(a child more often than not)
running their fingers through the sand,
transfixed in the singular feel of it and- if they are looking-
its infinite aesthetic.
Each grain is a world anew and you would not know it unless you
put your face right up to the ground and looked.
At the park it's much the same.
Two-inch fields of grass give away to dirt plateaus,
and it turns out there are a thousand little scarabs-
black & green & red jewels scurrying in the understory.
Twigs as big as logs lie haphazardly, and there a leaf is
wilting, wilting, wilting
for weeks or forever.
I knew a woman once who did not wait for the beach or the park.
In her observation of the ground she was infinitely delighted.
There was always something new or unexpected just waiting to be found if only the
right mind was there to appreciate it.
Tesoras she called them.
She would hold up a piece of dead grass as if it were a seashell pointing out a fold or dip that created a shadow just… so.
“Tesora”.
Now sometimes when the viscera of my mind have trouble digesting a certain memory
I lie on the floor and stare at the veneer of dust,
a tangle of hair,
or the husk of a dead stink bug and in my mind I see a leaf
wilting, wilting, wilting.

It was all good on paper.
The ink was set and dry.
But the writing in between the words
the ink did yet belie.

Perhaps if you had sent a picture
so that I could look you in the eye;
A thousand words to know you true,
read between your face’s lines

Then with your heart laid open,
from my heart you could not shy.
Instead these words unspoken
And one caged and endless cry.

She said
“I think I don’t have the capacity for love”
I said
“Don’t think on love but feel it”

She said
“I feel love not inside of me”
I said
“How strange that I can see it”

She said
“How is this so? That you can see what I can’t feel?”
I said
“Because it shows, it’s evident, it’s real.
I see it clearly on your face,
I see it in your grin.
I see it when you look at friends,
in the creases of your eyes
the upticked corners of your smile,
I see it in your dimples,
in the flashes of your brow,
I see it in your forehead,
lines of laughter redrawn often.
I see it where you least expect
when your features knit, your heart, it softens”

She said
“Is this love? My visage? Why would I carry feelings here?”
I said
“Indeed I do not know, but the evidence is clear.
Perhaps this is where love hides itself-
is stored and then revealed.
Perhaps our wrinkles hold our hearts
to be kept and then unsealed.
Don’t think too hard, on love my dear
it will happen by and by,
the wrinkles in your face will grow
love to hold, love to show.”

She looked at me with knotted brow,
a stern concerted face;
evaluating what to say
to better voice her case,
and then her lips flicked, just a touch,
a crisp new pleat appeared,
and with a smile, she confessed
“I do love you my dear”

I am the smallest thing you’ve ever seen,
a fingernail, a pencil tip, a hardened uncooked bean,
the grime upon a bar, a hobo’s pocket lint,
the crumble of a cork, the peelings of a stick,
the dust left in a tea can after you have quenched your thirst,
a bubble in a maelstrom, just waiting to be burst,
a blank answer on a test, not even half a guess,
it shames me to admit that I am all these things and less,
but then you hold my hand, a gentle reprimand,
and I know it isn’t true,
I begin to grow (anew)

Once my heart took flight,
Darted high into the sky,
Flew too close to the sun
and doubted it could ever fly

My heart crashed into the sea,
it slipped beneath the waves,
sank deep into the blue abyss
and waited to be saved

Soon it saw a lantern light
bobbing to and fro,
my heart jumped a little
and rushed up to say hello

Within the light a horror,
a twist of tangled fangs.
a jaw that opened wide and then
again crashed with a bang

My heart cried out in fear,
and then took flight once more,
Until ripped and bruised and bleeding
it lay upon the ocean floor

And there it sat in solitude
no hope, nor dream, nor wish,
but while it lay despairing
along came a little fish

“What are you doing here?” it asked,
“Pumping tears into the sea?”
“I flew, I burned, I fell, I drowned,
I fled, now let me bleed”

“Wow!” said the fish, mouth agape,
admiration in its eye
“You flew like a bird? You kissed the sun?
You dove out of the sky?”

“You swam into the trenches?
Fled monsters in the black?
Don’t tell me more you big brave heart
or my heart will attack!”

“All I have done is swim here,
hanging near the ocean floor,
That you’ve done too (quite well in fact)
Yet you’ve done so much more!”

“You inspire me dear friend,
I am forever in your debt!”
and with a little shake of its little tail
it swam off in a fret.

My heart sat there for a moment,
bewildered and bemused,
Then with a sigh it mustered:
“Well, what have I to lose?”

And so it paddled forth,
for what else could it do?
Though it had no direction
it couldn’t stay amid the blue.

I don’t know where my heart is going
but I know it mustn't cease
I know that it will find itself
safe from singe and sea and teeth.

At the beach or the park it is appropriate to lie on the ground.
To sit still and do nothing but absorb the cries of gulls or the hum of an airplane or other distant sounds and smells and sensations.
But you can absorb those things standing up, and here on the ground
there is a world you can only explore if you put your eye up next to it.
At the beach it is not uncommon, when aimlessly watching people, to espy someone
(a child more often than not)
running their fingers through the sand,
transfixed in the singular feel of it and-if they are looking-
its infinite aesthetic.
Each grain is a world anew and you would not know it unless you
put your face right up to the ground and looked.
At the park it's much the same.
Two-inch fields of grass give away to dirt plateaus,
and it turns out there are a thousand little scarabs-
black & green & red jewels scurrying in the understory.
Twigs as big as logs lie haphazardly, and there a leaf is
wilting, wilting, wilting
for weeks or forever.
I knew a woman once who did not wait for the beach or the park.
In her observation of the ground she was infinitely delighted.
There was always something new or unexpected just waiting to be found if only the
right mind was there to appreciate it.
Tesoras she called them.
She would hold up a piece of dead grass as if it were a seashell pointing out a fold or dip that created a shadow just… so.
“Tesora”.
Now sometimes when the viscera of my mind have trouble digesting a certain memory
I lie on the floor and stare at the veneer of dust,
a tangle of hair,
or the husk of a stink bug and in my mind I see a leaf
wilting, wilting, wilting.

They say Love casts long shadows but
that reduces Love to a material thing and
though it has undeniable presence
(right here, you said, tapping on my chest)
I can no more taste it than the
spectre of a long eaten apple picked clean through
core
&
seed
&
stem
and leaving for me
as if by my own gluttonous design the
sanguine verisimilitude of
hunger

the sea it slowly breathes.
my lungs quickly ebb & flow.
from far Moon has her say,
and in my ear your soft “Hello”.

not everything is beautiful

                                  (but you are)

Shampoo wends from my hair
riding rivulets down my face
and stinging my eyes.
The humid air is awash with
the smell of
coconut...
which I do not like.
But then again,
it’s not my shampoo.
When I moved back in with my parents and my
younger brother (aged 30)
I found the shower we once shared awash in
bottles.
His wife (forever 24) was one of those women who had
a bottle for everything.
Dry hair, frizzy hair, oily hair, big hair.
No hair.
A corpse doesn’t need conditioner and
After she took her life
she left her shampoo and now two years later
after moving back in with my parents
I wonder whether my brother ever moved on.
Does he shower with her ghost?
I do, when I use her shampoo
and it runs down my face and stings my eyes and smells like coconut.
Instead of talking to him I slowly attempt
to use up her memory,
so that he and I are no longer awash in it
whenever we shower
and we can move forward.
But then,
inevitably,
as the shampoo runs thin
and my eyes are rinsed clean
I wonder:
If he followed her into the dark,
how long would I keep his bottles
as daily I tried to clean myself
while simultaneously
awash in their ghosts?

Have I truly lost myself?
My humanity, my grace?
And if I am truly lost then can I find me in this place?

Or have I truly found myself?
My passion, hope, and jest?
And if I am truly found then should I lay my head and rest?

Or should I yet push forward
into the ever-shifting mists,
forget whether to be lost or found and simply just exist.

I resist (you or anyone)
sitting next to me on the train.
Passengers come and go,
yet you remain.
The time-lapse highlights
our unchanging positions.
Then it is your stop
and now suddenly I feel very

alone.

The fog scatters the light and my thoughts.
Dissembling what I deigned to build.
Through the mists, a mass of mountain,
and what do I amass, a man?
Sometimes trickle, sometimes fountain,
Alas, and I without a dam.

Life tastes of old bread and long-opened chips.
A haggard breath hanging in the heat.
A swollen tongue lolling and sticking to the roof of your mouth
getting in the way of lazy words that seek to dash the doldrums.
Sometimes the gaze of life is piercing and sometimes (now)
it is donut holes iced over and left out overnight
and then left out overnight again.
The muted voice of an underwater murmurer muttering
into cotton-filled ears something half-hearted and uninteresting.
Life is umami for dessert after a gluttonous feast
and never have I so craved the bright citrus peal
of an orange.

The Gloaming

The flames licked my feet,
I smiled.
The tickle was fleeting, the burn for awhile;
the memory lasts longest,
still here to this day,
long after the scars have faded away.
In the gloaming thereafter
I’ve traveled alone,
avoiding the fire and ash that it's sown.
Though I once played with flames,
though once I was hurt,
still the nip of the night bears no pretense of comfort.

It must have been Tuesday
When you looked over and
Saw me picking my scabs;
Saw sinewy soured skin
Drip simply off callused flesh,
Like the meat from
Over-cooked, worn out, and depressed bone,
Like the petals from a posy slowly dying
With the day;
Saw my fingers playing cat-and-mouse
With my nerve endings,
Wanting the hurt to cease
But not being brave enough to
End that painful part of my life and learn peace;
Saw pus ooze forth and bubble
Grotesquely
Like stale and pesky arguments in June
That we swatted at like so many mosquitoes
But for some reason kept hitting ourselves;
Saw me erratically ravaging the memory our last date together,
What would become our LAST date together;
Saw me give one last pinch and then
Wince with a sense of finality;
Saw me bite down the pain and
Accept that the battle was over and
I could be bitter no more;
Saw the rust-blood weave down my leg
Dipping and darting,
Pursued by poltergeist memories marring
It’s every move;
Saw the drips burst like wine-colored sunsets
Over drunken lovers that overstayed their welcome
In the bonds of passion,
Saw the crimson creep slowly, seeping outward
Through my sock like the red sea crashing back down upon
A man who couldn’t let go;
Saw tears well up and drown eyes
So as to blind them from the realizations
Cringing down my leg;
Saw me catch your stare,
And drop it just quickly enough
To be left stupid, stammering, staring embarrassingly
At my toes;
Saw me get up to go
And followed me outside
Where the world quieted
And you questioned my soul;
It must have been Tuesday
When you asked me why I would ever
Reopen old wounds,
But its two decades too late when I reply:
“How better to create scars to remember you by?”

One noon I took, I took a nap,
or did a nap take me?

Yes, I was took, could not be shook,
from slumber shaken free.

I had a dream, a dream I had
the dream was having me.

And in the me the dream did have
I could not struggle free.

When I woke up, (I think I did,
'less the waking did up me)

I found that I was tired still,
from nap I could not flee.

Oh what to do, sleep gnashed and chewed,
no hope it would cough me?

Just one withdrawal, from nap’s foul maw:
Find the nearest coffee.

I am a prisoner in my own mind
and you've swallowed the key

At night I lie with my head pressed against a pillow and my ear folded under listening to myself. I am fetaled. Not the loose sitting-position adult fetal. The legs tucked up into my chest arms wrapped around them fetus fetal. I listen to myself. To the blood flowing through my arterioles, rushing up to oxygenate my brain and fuel my Night Thoughts. Ba-thump goes my heart like that of my mother’s when she and I were one- my worries none. Ba-thump. I listen to myself and replay the day’s theatrics. But I am smarter, and funnier, and less awkward of a person. My jokes have the right timing and are well received and I am benevolent towards all and I am admired. Or... my mistakes are amplified. Everyone thinks poorly of me and I can’t believe you said that you ******* idiot. I talk to myself in a way that would be unacceptable if I were speaking to anyone else. For a time. At least until I am quelled by the heartbeat my mother gave me and I gain solace with my ear pressed against the pillow listening to it. Sometimes I listen to my life, count the beats like stars in the sky and wonder at that cosmic origin that created Mother Earth that created my mother that created me listening to my own heartbeat and likening it to the stars in the sky using the synapses that outnumber the stars themselves. I have a lot of time to think while I listen to myself. At night I am a psychonaut exploring the constellations of my own mind. I’ve named them Fear and Love and Hope. Ba-thump, ba-thump.

Atop a rock, aloft.
The valley spread below.
A pat of sun melts down my chin
and smears amongst my toes.
The wind brushes my lips,
a kiss of pine and grass,
My soul, it hungered, I was fed
from nature never fast.

What am I to do with you my dears?
My mind said to my thoughts.
The ink is thick, the bustle gone
and now you want to romp.
The sun has packed his rays
and all the world its stimuli,
and in the deadened void that’s left
you want to multiply.
Though I tucked you into bed
it seems that I was tucked with thee.
Alas, besieged, I cannot flee,
my day is done, not me.

Two eyes
    amber sighs
ensconcing empty black

In the blackness
    nothing lies
just myself reflected back

In those limpid
    maple pools
afloats an orb of nearly naught

I pull the thread to
    find the spool
and end up holding knots

Amongst the knots
    a shadow roams
and suffocates the light

Two honey domes
    without a comb
and endless naked night

There’s truth now behind, that great irony:
You can’t see the forest from its multitudinous trees.
Well, at least be aware that
the spirit is there in entirety.
It encompasses space that
time will erase
unless its wisdom we heed.
But the spirit remains for a moment.
A ghost put to shame, and
we are to blame, for owning it which cannot be tamed.
Time is meaningless, but the
world isn’t gleaning this, not
understanding this fleeting kiss,
our touch is infectious, reckless
there is no way to reset this.
Denature our Mother that
we so unjustly smother
for this appetite we can never sate.
As Love turns to Hate,
Our Kiss turns to ****,
til we ignore what we can’t flee,
can’t see the Forest from the Trees.

Brief whiff
and insanity
I drift
and calamity

As armed ants advance
Beautifully beyond blasted borders,
Crazed caterpillars create
Demoralizing defenses
Engineered effectively.
Fiery fights form
Gracefully. Gleaming gear
Hints hardily
In ill-prepared insect incisors.
Jowls juice. Just
Keep killing. Keep killing.
Lordly lust leaps, leading
Maniacal maggots mercilessly.
Not nearly neat nature now. Nasty new-horror negates
Original order. Overlords order;
Paternal pressure pokes
Quills quintessential,
Reaching re-riled responders. Rest rowdily royal
Slaves. Soon shrill sounds shout silently. Sun-break signals
Too-terrifying travesty
Under umbrella’d
Vulcanism. Voracious vulgarities
Wrap war wistfully whilst
Xeroxed Xanadus
Yearn yearlong. Yawing
Zephyrus’ zeppelin: zephyrs zoom zilched zealots.

Surprised by my feet, I am.
Err… why?
Were they not always there? Well yes
and so I was aware, I suppose
of their existence, as it were,
here nor there, to and fro
Perhaps their connectedness, to me
was startling in my lapse, you see
of norm mentality, or
they are not as they appear, not mine!
Not of my own design, but
I wear them all the same,
why yes! of course!
The piercing truth aparts the clouds, so now
I bathe in its luminescent source, aloud
I divulge as if quite to myself, for sure
the secret I have come to learn:
Beware those who bear you faithfully
for time will come, you wake and see
though you have been carried far
Surprised by feet, you are.

At first there dribbled little
not a lottle.
But then I had to go and get a bottle.
Then I got a bucket,
and after that a tub,
all I wanted was a sip
but instead I got a flood.

New Year’s Eve
and the clatter of suitcase handles
defying the quiet car
concerning the woman in the seat beside me
silently screaming
into her teeth.
Pop! Pop! The train is under attack
the assault we fled from our point of origin follows us as
chaos kids chuck
firecrackers on the rails,
new worries, same as old and
further furrowing the silent screamer.
The air is must, jacketed bodies still heaving
from the sprint to catch the train
now sweating in repose and slipping off their winter shells and
no one is comfortable
so you know we must be traveling.
Someone cracks a window to combat the stale air,
sliced bread eaten plain & crumbs crumble the floor
furrowing brows yet further.
We’re all going somewhere
as our minds trace where we’re coming from
collectively and silently screaming
“THIS YEAR WILL BE DIFFERENT”
and most of us now sporting
furrowed brows
as the train pulls us inevitably forward
towards the future.

I run my fingers slowly
over the lips of another;
just to see.
But those lips
don’t brush as tenderly
against my tips
as yours did,
my original lover.

Like the licking of an old dog that insists you take her
for a walk
the insistent swell
laps your legs.

Off port, headlamps
slip by in an unending current
supplying the illusion of your
inevitable progress forward,

and little certainty you had ever been moored at all.

Lying in repose, limbs akimbo
mirroring the reach of a vast mauve
starfish above me,
half-hidden in the shallows of the night.
Ungripping and unmoving.
Still as time.

It does not toss
        But I do
It does not turn
        But I do
It does not think
        But I do

The ceiling fan is off but I am on.

Though even scars fade,
though even stars burn out,
though sunlight soon gives way to shade,
as facts are drowned in doubt.

Though death hounds every life,
and all beginnings find their end,
though what once was young must meet the scythe,
it soon will grow again.

For nothing will stay stopped
since all has been begun,
all false summits seem the top,
yet there is no final rung.

We sat hand in hand on blissful beach.
Toes wriggling genially in warm sand.
I watched as you commanded the waves
to crash backwards into setting sun,
dousing day into night.
You smiled sweetly as ebbing tide
sped you away into the arms of the pale moon.
I cried that night.
Until I had created an ocean of my own to control.

Heavy lids cinch sockets shut
allowing only in(ternal)sight.
Awash in slumber
I witness dreams
those interdimensional thoughts,
that stuff of other worlds.
My consciousness has entered their land
and they drift toward it, permeating it placidly
like nubile nimbus innervating the sky.
I am enraptured by their ever-changing narrative.
Wispy cirrus with its fleeting skeleton story,
cumbersome cumulus, pregnant with meaning,
eager to spill forth and shower me with its mysteries.
I gaze at the heavens and I am their architect.
I mold the ever-shifting shapes they show me
into some semblance of significance
as they dissolve before my eyes
and new forms take their place.
Though I will remember none,
their impression leaves
imprints,
and I awake with more questions than answers.

My tears
           slid down your breast
    into your heart.