When you get there, to the frozen apple’s core,
climb the first hill that you see. Tall one,
floored in rock a-glitter, breaching the noon frost
at the center. Horizon’s white-hot gleaming.
It’s quiet here. A flock of somethings and someones has
built these lines together. Not a barn, nor cathedral either.
The beams vibrate squirrel and chickadee. Be.
Be still in the ice, and their voices will come down
to shiver your pen across a new page.

We slump in mismatched chairs. Two hunches
over shame and a 3am breakfast, I think:
There’s gotta be a reason why art rhymes with ****.
If you want anything to go anywhere with any respectable…affect,
the force of pressure on the inside must exceed that from the outside.

Interrupting this genius, He asks:
How can you eat that crap? It’s so…empty.
He is flipping through his coffeeblack back pocket note rag.
It’s soiled, wrinkled concave with the ever-heaving
stomachfuls of his inky midnight doubt, and I would really
rather not have it at the table while I’m eating.

I am pouring another glorious bowl of Frooty Froot Hoops—******,
store-brand sugarfuel for the lower-middle-income child poet.
He spends another tasteless oatmeal evening
reading essays about how to improve his writing.
Instead of, like, writing to improve his writing.

I ask:
If you took a knife to the edge of your boundary’s boundary—stabbed right into your life-world’s fleshy monad-sac,
glory running ****** down your blade,
As you breached forth into the well-lit unknown,
would it still be courageous, if you emerged from
your warm wet ignorance, and they were all waiting outside with mylar balloons, a banner, and "Congratulations on your Artistic Rupture!”  
in blue icing on the cake??

There's still a moment there, right?
Petrified in the sap of thrill, in the momentous-stasis between
The arrow flung and the arrow fallen. A moment of
advancement …a moment of abandon!

(He nods along, but he isn't listening.)

I say:
Newness, originality, (birth), is purely indexical.
It points, and no one notices that all those shiny vegas lights aren't really moving anywhere—It's just utility bills and light-bulb trickery.
They're asking for genesis extended, genesis again and again
and each false gesture points only towards another
incandescent unreachable elsewhere.

(He nods along, still, not listening.)

But there's little monotony in taking a stab!
Even if it's just for them, again, those perennial spectators expecting,
Waiting outside with ***** little pocket notebooks of their own,
crowding the bassinets, ever-eager to begin another “surprise" celebration.

Gulping sweet, sugarpink milk, I say:
I happen to like this crap!
It keeps my knife sharp.

(He nods along, but he isn't listening.)

I drove for ten hours out of the last 36.

Something about those 300 miles made it seem like we would never come back.
I saw more in that garden level apartment than in the wild of Yosemite.
We were intoxicated by the city. Filled with wishes and dreams…and *****.
"I never want to leave." and I think a part never will.
One more place to call to us.

It rained through the halls.
Over door thresholds and under Christmas tree lights it spilled.
Funny how the sun light changes things.
Like picking up a full glass to find it's half empty.
Something expected to have weight is blown away by the wind.

26 hours have never held more until now.

wind blown bodies
rush by flustered
and the diagonal
rain is exposed
under the one
streetlight

that feeling of waking
up and everything is
exactly the same

where has the warmth
gone? it is in that wood
stove with logs stacked
neatly outside the
uprooted tree did not
die for nothing

the only place to go is
back go back home
back to work back to
sleep back against the
wall

at night i used to hear
whispers clues and
remnants of an
unknowable beauty

now i walk always
with listless purpose
and it is loud but
empty the scraps
banished and i wake
up to the dreaded
sameness that robs
me of my body

Everyone's lying
But nobody is listening,
Coins glimmer and shine;

The truth still glistens
At dawn over crop fields,
Sunlit canopies.

Nature prevails
To show us our failures,
Yet, mankind squabbles.

The death toll rises
And nothing ever changes;
We don't have the time.

Keep spinning the wheel,
The sunset brings shade.

"A lightning flash... then night! Fleeting beauty
By whose glance I was suddenly reborn,
Will I see you no more before eternity?”
-Charles Baudelaire, "To a Passerby"

The material of the scene burns and
grays, burns and grays in my mind:
City soot in the frost. Cracked plastic.
Broken glass. Cheek creases where you
said your name. Salt stains on a denim cuff.
Scruff. Tartan scarf. Navy wool. Feather
down, laces, leggings, a buckle. Teeth,
fleece, a crumpled hotel matchbook.
No heat lamp here, where we wait and
meet, wait and meet on the windiest
night. Would you scoff if I said
"Love is two strangers trading fire.”

Smaller matter, now, an Altoid tin of
cherished ashes. I have it, and it murmurs
your lines to me, when I crave that kind of burn.
A familiar ice cube down the back of the neck.
These thoughts have sunken—a bag of pennies
in my gut like a phantom step on a dark staircase,
or the imitation of death in a dream.
Saying something about the lateness of the 16,
You cupped your hand, to shelter the flame.

I try to remember the melody.
The harp strings at the nape of
my neck sang mid-shiver, and you
said something else, which I couldn’t
hear over the choir under my hat.
This missing line is my mind’s one
sound conception of Infinity.
And that’s enough for flint.

A lightning flash…then night!*
A flame frustratingly lit, but profoundly felt.
A gasp, a gust like a god's grace, like a song.
Like just enough time for a quick addict’s fix,
like the length of a single, ****** matchstick.

Will I see you no more before eternity?
And do you by chance have a light?

my bones are impulsive
and they rattle and shake
jutting and puncture
each time i twist
each shade of my mother used
to say i did it for attention
but my manic-depressive
spectrum yearned to feel something
much more special than the chroma of love
as my disorder matured i saw sweeping
patterns that flummoxed the grass i stepped on
i phased in and out of gravity too much
to feel how i used to feel about you