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record them

3/24.
Tapping her foot
while doing her
worksheet: "Value Traits."
Staring off into space
because she is done.
Looks at speaker sometimes.
Distant
(eyes don't seem focused).

It was a fine white linen tablecloth the size of Sevastopol
and I smoothed out the slightest wrinkles one by one, flicking away
tiny—almost imperceptible—crumbs

Front-end loaders delivered the silverware, crate after crate, and
wave upon wave of thundering Chinooks dropped parcels of pleated,
excruciatingly well-starched dinner napkins

An army of kid-gloved waitstaff painstakingly unwrapped a myriad
of fragile place-settings and carefully laid them straight, bristling with
an anticipation heretofore unknown

A steady scarlet stream of hosed fire engines rumbled past to fill each
finely-stemmed water glass around shards of ice chainsawed, ton by ton,
from the diminishing glaciers of Greenland

The steamy aroma of luncheon filled the atmosphere enveloping most
of the entire Eastern seaboard as the sound of tongs metallically clattered
amidst the hiss of the multitudes of grills

All appeared in readiness as I surveyed this near-perfect hall, the size of
Barcelona, and murmuring voices of those waiting mingled with sunlight
passing through the sheer, breezy drapery

I smiled wryly to myself for today I would be supping with those who
have also experienced the loneliness I often feel inside

They saw Her brightest hour
blest of thy Humble King
and, thus, o'er Her, garlanded
marvels in that once-forgettable manger
blooming in the Holy Mother’s heart

Then the harpings in the manger
did smile unto the Lamb of Mary,
strangely heralding the night-tide
beneath a dome of heavenly stars, a sea of
quiet hours and Mary’s grateful prayer

Guide His noble crown, ward
of that Humble purple chaplet
O Speechless Child, wrapped so in
kingly prayers that never had Bethlehem
in nativity kept, nigh or afar

when we began, we had no secrets
and we devoured each other's honesty
like milk, like honey

now we are weaned and we hunger for
any truth among the muddle of secrets
kept from each other's mouths

when numbs the autumn wind
I panic, dear
and see the changing light
of pastures and riven houses

solitude meets me yet again
moments change
I change, I without nerve
who once might have onward leapt

but you, entranced
you, who cannot ever be patient
ever longing to meet
now, as in our first garden

flowers, sunbeams, trees
nourished by light and passion
once housed in exaltation
now inert in landlocked slumber

they became an unchanging place
that fits not so easily these days
where time, in its patient receptacle
learns to wait

my faked dreams
shattered
my stupid mind monsters
woefully
bellow

the nasty bleeding
half-written
bloodstained ******* lines
unfinished
verses

ear-piercing weeping
mournful
failed prose scribbled
pathetically
broken

to touch people’s hearts
wishing—
tears wait in shadows
stories still
unspoken

I believed you lost your ability to hurt me
long ago

and I do like to think that remains true
even now


[but you still have the ability to cut me deeply
in so many unforeseen ways]

rarely ever straying, mired in those mourning hours
trying to recover tired shadows of how it once began
counting all of those buried nights in a flat red voice

our distances are littered with blood and bone, dear
still you, by pieces and joints, strive to mend this battered love
listen, old friend, to the graying silt of bloodless waters

heart, lips, hands all once breathed, emerging slowly
no wiser now, you blindly dredge the impermeable darkness
for promptly repeated pasts, not unspoiled beginnings

we once shared potential
now shameful, disgusted, belittled
we slept together in prisons of
what we tend to avoid:
memory

traumatized adult children
now sleeping, eating, cleansing
facing the prospect of time
unashamedly scavenging
emptiness

I sip my morning coffee
and you open a bottle of Coke
I give you a little kiss, but I wonder
if there's really any hope
You listen to me slurp
while I listen to you burp
Sometimes I have to wonder
if we can ever make it work
'cause I'm a cup of coffee guy
and you're a bottle of Coke

You've never seen a Western
Where's your streaming service hide 'em?
Those biopics about Russian aristocracy
won't be suggested right beside them
You order pretzels at the theater, baby
and I get Junior Mints
Do you think that maybe we both
should be picking up these hints?
You're a cheesy pretzel girl at the movies
and I'm just the Junior Mints

How I can watch a title fight
you find completely incomprehensible
But as you know little about boxing, your
position's a little less than defensible
You don't know the rope-a-dope
but I'll admit I don't watch daytime soaps
and I don't criticize them because
do I watch 'em?  Nope.
I'm a nighttime rope-a-dope kind of guy
and you're the daytime soaps

I'm just a battered old paper cup of take-out coffee
girl, and you're a refreshing... curvy... glistening...
completely and wholly satisfying...
bottle of Coke

other clocks, there are,
living through nature
depending on fixed rotations
working in time and sense
segmented, experienced
forming a continued understanding—
a different timekeeping


people do think
speculate, order the intuitive
hold to their understandings
successful and precise
keeping time enslaved in minutes
controlled and grown into hours
and days, navigated within


abundant rhythms
when overlapped in natural ways
house landscapes and observations
in well-kept gardens
a careful harvest
working together in fields
as servants watch


a sense, a time
befitting such gardens
a sense of clocks, inexact
a completely different literacy
the particular clock-time being provided
through a framework overseen
by these plants and water

call me

if you have too many thoughts

if you can't sleep

I always think of you

I never sleep

Isn't it funny
how the more I need you
the more you drift away?

You'll feel so hurt
when I do end up
getting along anyway

Isn't that funny?

Masculinity is pervasively formulaic
and just a bull in the forest to me
Women are far more genuinely human
and breathe comparably better air

we sadly haven't drowned our blues
like fragile creatures, the snake drained
yeah, we weave a troubled escape
out of someone else's everlasting bruises

our romance worships forgotten letters
seemingly locked in imagined contact
a prayer drum’s darkened destination
caring aching crying, but changing entirely

and wept no shadow flowers
when all burst autumn
the course of nature changes,
flux enough to burst the waters

and wept no shadow flowers
all becoming, then, light
within this garden of colours
rich with the hills' laughter

those hills, that laughter
that world, recalled like a baby
lying still beneath the trees
without any summer

my heart’s comfort has not been recaptured
but, not dead to feelings anymore, I’m waiting

always seeking fleeting holes in hard places
and sleeping without much space to dream

I have suppressed; sometimes I have wept
because I’m always too uncomfortable to forget

my spirit feels the power of wings
born as I shed the full cloak of my birth
humming a quiet little verse to myself—
come!—comfort me among these flowers

soft desires freed in this, our bed of grass
I scent the warm rising dough of your skin
I sense the sun heating the dew and wonder
when will this lover wet my skin with tears?

late summer Sunday tea
a cup of afternoon dream

ghostly sincerity, passion
and suspicions

angry love, fatally mislaid
somewhere in an isolated heart

only the purest wings survive
in irresistible fires

i.  
events do listen
but distrust your best work
different sounds, hostilely expressed

striving for bottomless love
amid falling consequences
sensually discontented


ii.  
that critical leap
alive, whirling, voracious
promising new room to grow

engaging interactions
amid blinding love
hunger enmeshed


iii.  
complex opportunities to
examine sourly the mirror-ice:
corrosive, acute and deteriorating

completely sheltered still
by murmuring landscapes at night
perceiving conflict reborn

fear and rearranged writing
committed disgusting drinking
holding, expecting, waiting
reckoning nothing but
anger and poisonous hopes

Tired clichés, filed away
Somebody saying, “I’m here for you”
In so many ways
that particular phrase is something
I’ve found has never really been true

You made it clear that you’d actually be here
if I ever decided to call for you
But drawing you near
would be my greatest fear for
I’d have a problem just asking you

To be devastatingly honest, I really don’t know
        if I’d ever be able to say
       “I need you here…  Please come”
That’s me, though, it’s not you…
        It’s me
        It’s not you

Inside me I know that you won’t let me go
reassuring and frightening simultaneously
But in spite of my glow
there’s still trouble below because
Help is a four-letter word to me
        Help is a four-letter word

God’s flaming muddy puddles wanna smile
but those flickering window flashes lie to me
returning Bible darkness from beaming light

I reach, raising these soiled linen shades
to the pure, blessed tones of the church bell
that claw, tear, but mend—dancing, echoing

exposed, keeping my willing palms on the book
healing emotional knives licking the demon poets
it’s just a dusty Bread Week Sunday, after all

What are you trying to tell me?
     Can’t you hear what I’m trying to say?
Do you sometimes wonder if we know?
I’ve learned that some of our questions
           unspoken or not
           may never have really been heard
           never really have been heard

They may seem lost
     They may yet be found
behind your soul’s locked doors
Sometimes they return when
           you and I least expect them
           in some written or spoken word
           in a written or a spoken word

Someday I may awaken
     to find you’ve up and gone
and I’ll probably claim to not know why
But you’ll have explained it all to me
           perhaps not in so many words
           and I just won’t have wanted to hear
           No, I wouldn’t want to hear

I want to understand
     the meaning of all of those things
you’re so desperately trying to tell
And I’m learning to listen, though
           with my heart and with my soul
           for what I never hear with my ears
           I’ll never hear them with my ears

There’s a certain level of comfort
     and always a measure of surprise
to be found amid our verses and our lines
And from within your silent armor
           behind the truth, within the lies
           I know it will all be there for us
           in your own time

     I know it will all be there for us
           in your own time

the wind at last has shifted 'round
from the north it comes rushing in
cutting deeply into my face and hands
sending shivers along the surface of my skin

the temperature here is dropping fast
snow and ice are beginning to fall
you can feel it well up inside your bones
cold enough to make me want to cry out:

I'm icebound
crystal forms beginning to mass
I tell you I'm icebound
waiting for the storms to pass
i need the warmth of seeing you again
to finally start
the beating of my heart

pavements encrusted in sheets of glass
the winter holds me like a vice
i have to watch my every step
my feet so cold they cannot feel the ice

seems as if my senses have all been dulled
snowflakes drift as they fill the sky
they don't even melt when they touch my skin
feeling so numb it makes me want to cry out:

I'm icebound
crystal forms beginning to mass
I tell you I'm icebound
waiting for the storms to pass
i need the warmth of seeing you again
to finally start
the beating of my heart

you, ignorant still
your talk almost turns to courage —
as once did your poems—
around years erased

a written anniversary
memories of you and me, stirred
******* engraved with the time
when trust gifted us

mixed layers of alcohol thoughts—asleep
collapsed—freely replaying frozen cycles of sins
that biting absence of happiness, permanent:
the perfect winter-silent footsteps of a man

Freaks:
perceive its
inherent meaning—
societally or personally—
depicted as aberrant;
amid deviant imagery
works individual fear

Freaks:
riven tableaux;
shards and flawed objects
poster children of abnormal
creation, amusingly ******
sideshow tattoos shared
freely among their own

Freaks:
characters sell
self-loathing as humor
without any constraint
singularly populating
deep-rooted circuses
like lines in their Bibles

into wordless work falls
one's soul—and I panic!
will I awaken God
in this quiet of years
that still deafens like a wall?
will I learn by His seventh word?
for you, by you
good fruit was raised
in our own garden
quiet and strong
gathered, rooted
in the golden summer air
whose breath told of hours, of days
of far richer poetry

trees die, however
like lovers and myself
speaking often of tears
yet never any face
giving over a once-nourished world
to hushed laughter
our world—spent—
we now groan
and meet the changes
with neither peace nor trust
just seasons
grasses and farewells
the wakes of ghosts exposed
by fertile reason

inevitable frost patterns
encircle our moments

infinitely falling mirrors
that quietly sparkle

send icy messages of
wind and eternal regret

bring our lost hearts back
not to analyze again what must have passed
but to chance forgiveness

souls condemned to remember
everything, sadly, regardless of a torture
perhaps now diluted

no, forget this cruel lot between us
lost, cursed, judgment without friendship
and, unfortunately, without sleep

You’ve placed these boxes carefully
   almost ruthlessly in my path
Must I sidestep them?
   Simply tear into them?
Or draw myself a heavy breath, pause
   and rest here among them?
Are they just packages full of our long ago
   or perhaps flush with a future?

I learn so much just watching your fingers
       move along those strings
       so quickly, so gracefully
       from note to note
I try to follow while my clumsy hands
       struggle to keep pace
       from fret to fret
       I suffer, but you smile at me

Your shining nails will
flash along that violin
anticipation rises as I wait
for you to begin
Well, I might be in the wrong time
and I may be a measure behind
but I look for the confidence I find
       in your blue eyes

You give so much, I see it in the faces
       of those you have touched
       would it help you to know
       you've also been touching me?
So play your songs, those simple melodies
       late here in the afternoon
       can't you see just what it is
       you do for me?

Your shining nails will
flash along that violin
anticipation rises as I wait
for you to begin
Well, I might be in the wrong time
and I may be a measure behind
still I look for the confidence I find
       in your blue eyes

I wonder sometimes
if you knew me every day now
if you would even like me anymore

Joy seems so far away now
and we used to feel it all the time

locusts ring, the evening's damp
the moist grass bleeds in stillness
the moon remembers what it's seen
and all the things that might have been
your silence comes back all too soon
and suddenly it goes

rousing the air, a ceiling fan
curtains stir an evening mood
the quiet takes me back again
to all the things that might have been
but your silence comes back all too soon
beneath this sky and vacant moon
as I resurrect familiar tunes
and suddenly you go

It feels as if the last words
I heard you say
were “Keep holding on to me
Don’t let go"
and I won’t, but I also know
that it keeps getting harder all the time
        it keeps getting harder all the time

I guess there are still some things
you just don’t understand
about me and where I’ve been
and who I am
You thought I was a simple man to understand
but now it’s getting harder all the time
       it keeps getting harder all the time

It must be hard to read me when
you can’t look into my eyes
across the miles on a
telephone line
and I know you never mean to be unkind
but it keeps getting harder all the time
       it keeps getting harder all the time

I sit to write of emotions that
are not easily defined
about feelings I might try to hide
but can never manage to
I can only say I long to be with you
but it keeps getting harder all the time
       it keeps getting harder all the time

at times, my heart asks
why can one hate so many?
and who made this rule
that we may love only one?

hearts filled with love
are a rightly worthwhile goal
but actually: love only one,
fall in love with just one

to love more than one's
worse than not loving at all
hate whom you will, dear
but fall in love with just one

How do you know what to do
When you have no idea
No idea
No idea
What to be…?

How do you know how to feel
When you have no idea
How to feel
What to say
Or just exactly what to do…?

How do you know how to live
When you have no idea
No idea
No idea
What tomorrow wants…?

How do you know what to think
Or how to live
And no idea
What to do
Or what to be
Or how to feel…?

Right now
I have no idea
No idea
Simply no idea…

one-thousand tiny footsteps
trembling, bleeding, cracked and sore
dinted by a veiled and pallid marble princess
listening to a long-shattered voice

a broken innocence grows
amid years of silent birds pretending,
wordlessly, revealing fleeting green memories
hungry and helplessly hopeless angels

during bleak and violent winters
a lonely twilight shadow dreams of escape
soft prayers fancifully catching late night flights
into tomorrow morning's perfect arms

no innocence pursues reward
and, once satisfied of esteem's pursuit,
it will certainly sacrifice
its inferior wisdom

nothing of pompous dignity becomes
great, no noble integrity, but it surely
brings knavish adoration which
changes its possessors much

rogues and virtue, since deceived,
fear all—unconcerned with pain themselves
never is happiness easily learned, nor
things of such a present wisdom

You’ve given so much throughout your life
and been content to live on dreams
Sometimes they’re all you’ve held
     alone as yours
And although that may be the way
     it’s always been
It’s not hard for me to find the words to explain
     You deserve so much more

I’ve seen you staring past me
with a distance in your eyes
I’ve felt the burden of guilt you carried
     through the years
I’ve felt the warmth of your hands
     beneath the autumn sky
but you said you’d rather put me in your past
     than to stand and hold me here

Did you see yourself as I do
as you fell into my arms?
Could you see yourself reflected
     in my eyes?
Didn’t your lips touching mine help to
     tell you who you are?
Did you learn anything about yourself that way
     lying in the grass beneath the stars?

        Well, I hope things can be different
        and that a change will come for you
        to wash away all the pain you feel
        from your self-inflicted wounds

Frightened and confused
perhaps happily alive

Hell has a history written by the author
of this awful game

And while poetry laughs at our troubles
it tries to understand

I'm just a ruddy human, God
****, ******, **** it

****!

Sometimes you're my elder
and sometimes you're so young
Sometimes I think you're crazy
But I believe that you're the one
These are the very words I told you:
Sometimes it's difficult to feel sad
when I can feel you all around me
and see a future I never had

If I could paint a portrait
that could show you what I see
I really think you'd understand
more of yourself and more of me
But I just don't have the talent
not the colors, nor the eye
to paint you both inside and out
but how I'd love to try

So sing to me of all the things
you find it hard to tell
and stagger me with your written words
just when I'm sure I know you well
Trouble me with your unnamed fears
your thunderstorms and rain
and trust each other as we move together
through our growing pains

Her scent kept the animals unsure
She imagined people living happily, ordinarily
utterly soaked in their usual, sober directions
masking traces that suffer a sort of revealed thrill:
A lean cat’s desire to embrace men’s secrets
in nice boxes, shaken innocence and sour blue haze,
warmth flooding those damnable death-oil pools
Yes, her scent kept all of the animals unsure

patience eclipses, with thievish grace
love being too much in my care

any progress wants art, colour, bravery
locked in disdainful eternity

no cunning, no colour, little breath
I am ill-used, fully, simply desiring sleep

do not disturb my wishing anymore
my situation, body and time
will shape my own bed
accentuating rapture—
mutual pleasure ours
unimaginable sleep
without pillows—
I’m vulnerable
far too vulnerable
and you’re someone
I wish I’d never dreamt

evenings flicker, stairs empty
a fresh letter near a telephone
these days
I always write
down my changes

winter dawn, another cloudy year
fast clock and a cool train
our mouths will fly open in
honest laughter
****** before the frozen rain

purple afternoons, wanting light
tenderly crackle against trust
only loneliness now
and mine is the weighty wait

a sharp reunion near bedside paint
secretly bite and later lick
vivid, liquid sounds
reaching this:
burning limbs that shatter the night

feathers touch, join, as if by letter
your early star
it looks angry as we eye
broken windows beyond the candles

stretching alive, tender insides
our screaming complete in the glow
crisp battles fought
to take her back—
back from a misunderstanding

water runs like red wine spilled
watch the sparkle
the wet grass darkens
anger smooths, drops  
and the exhausted birds crash

our music carries frenzied doubts
that we both still hold aloft
Oh, I am another me!
this night won't last but
tomorrow might