This stupid book has nothing to offer me
In eight pages on stiff paper board.
The pictures are saccharine,
A fat headed boy
In colorful clothes
Shows us what he can do.
How could I see the value
In knowing this simple stuff?
I’m too far removed from my point in time
When “jump” and “run” were just sounds,
When jumping and running were just what they are,
Far removed from the labels we gave them.

So it comes to this: this stupid book
Among all of God’s ink-sodden paper,
Is an achievement of gold,
the height of literature,
a swell in my throat,
When you brought it to me
just today, and said,
“dada”
“read”

Do you see yourself there,
In this life that you've made?
Arcs traced, just so, by the motion of eyes?
The flicker as they search, the pause before they rest,
The metrics of biology, could they possibly tell?
Whose child was whose,
and what they were thinking?

I led her, at last, to the lip of the crater.
The smell and heat had been increasing as, each conversation,
We drew closer to it.

Apprehensive, I searched her eyes.
She saw it fully, my greed and my shame,
The cavernous need of my worst natures.
Flames singed her hair and the smell choked us both.
But, "still", she said, "be still..." and smiled into my face.

My friend, My friend, Insomniac,
You're ******* crazy.
You asked me to stay up late again,
like every other visit.
We smoked and smoked, We kept sleep at bay,
Held it off with caffeine,
but tempted it with liquor,
and you awoke me in single digits, low ones,
and wanted me to hear that song.
As much as I care for you, I realized something that night...
I'm no insomniac! Just a pedestrian, a faker!
Honestly believing that the sleep deprivation and
Not the drugs, not the alcohol, or the company,
Were actually killing me in the morning hours,
and, mumbling incoherently, I could not appreciate
The thing you wanted me to hear or see.
It might have been both.
So, yeah.
Sorry about that.
You're the best in my book and always will be.
Thanks for some great nights.

Hello again, raven, I’m glad that you’re here,
It’s been far too long since you came.
I missed your black feathers, your gravelly call,
Becomes music when speaking my name.
Lean close, my bird, and tell me a secret,
Any, if yours, will do.
I’m too long alone, and the world is too guarded,
I’m pinning my hopes all on you.

Lean again, bird, and tell me some more,
Black feathers cantilevered,
Away and Away.
Drink of me,
And Drink of you,
As we think all the night into day.

Take countless photos, when the mood so inspires.
You may as well have not even thrown the shutter.
For the things that move you right in this moment,
Will not adhere to the chemistry of film
Will not flip one single electronic switch
Cannot be stored, except in the mind,
(A shoddy storage medium)
For the sight of your face,
Your beautiful otherness
Mingling with me in the air in between us-
( As you try to pick my nose… )
Your head is on my shoulder,
Heavy with sleep
And trust, always growing,
As your eyelids drop lower
My arm, sore, bends to raise you up.
I’m relishing the time
To be quiet, close, and still.
When I can find, in my heart,
All the words that mean something,
Not tossed about casually, in the noise of the day.

Confidences
   were something we shared, but then,
Secrets are nothing per sè...

Confidence
   was a thing that I'm lacking, but that
Never stopped me, anyway...

I pressed you, you starved me,
It was wrong, but it couldn't be helped.
I said some things that I don't quite recall
You said a few things yourself.

It was a ridiculous assumption, and god **** it,
You're right.
Forgive me if I don't always hear your advice,
Or look away from the truth.
I'm still listening, I swear it.
I'm afraid you might think I'm just here for your ***,
Or afraid you might think that I'm boring and dull.
I'm just beginning to learn that others perceptions,
Are all, as they should be,
well beyond my control,

But, still...

Your eyes of ocean depth see me,
I want you to speak my name.
Searching all my cliches in the dark,
Forgetting the lies from which we came.
But what if all my words are true?
What if they show me the way?
What if the light between oceans is thought,
And words sufficient to make you stay?

It's a ridiculous cliche but, ******* it, your eyes...
Forgive me if I don't always make eye contact,
Or look away too soon.  I'm listening. I swear it.
I'm afraid you might think that I'm full of myself,
Or afraid you might think that I've no self-esteem.
The truth is much simpler than either extreme.
The truth is I'm somewhere right in between.
but still:
Twin seas draw my stare and I fear what I'll say.
Fear falling into their unlit depths, where even my silence could betray.
The source to illuminate and fuel our lives' desires,
Find it in her hands , her touch,
Find it in her eyes.
Her eyes of ocean depth see me,
Giving no safe place to hide,
Searching bad cliches for the light, the otherness inside.
But what if all of my words are wrong?
What if they drive you away?
What if the light between oceans is mute?
Insufficient to make you stay?

Perhaps you’ll remember,
though most of us don’t
recall our earliest days.
What relative scale could you use
to describe the things you saw
and the things you felt?
It seems too unreal for a mind
you would one day call mature
and an intelligence
deemed sufficient.
If you could, would you choose,
and what would you find,
if you could retrieve these moments?

when a warm, familiar heartbeat
kept reassuring time,
in a comforting bed at blood temperature,

when hands twice your size
would cradle you completely; move you
from bath to crib,

when loving giants would come
when you called,
to sing or to soothe your pains,

when sleep held dreams of this and more,
in a language we all have spoken,
Beautiful to hear, forgotten on waking

Raise, for your experiences, a city.
Build a warehouse, down the block,
Where you’ll keep the cosmos.
Build a bookshelf, within a brownstone,
Where some other things can go.
Like the time you grasped a flower,
Felt beneath, felt the spines that
Pricked your skin,
Made you cry.
But that shelf will be revisited many times,
In this fragile, crumbling zip code,
Forsaking more majestic memory palaces,
Because the vision reached your soul,
Through pain,
Of all that beauty, soft, red, enfolded into itself,
On such a slender stem.

Always, I have been here before.
I tried living backwards with her,
Asking the questions after her answers,
Falling in love once she was long gone.
But that was another, not the same, in a chain of serial Dulcineas.
But then you came along and climbed down from that pedestal,
you slapped me,
Hard,
But laughed,
And I realized,
how you had been right,
All along.

His love for her made her
More like him.
Her love for him made him
Like her more.
His love for her made him
More like her.
Moreover, for them,
She made love more like him.
He made love, at her whim,
More like her than like him.

I floated in the corner, and I waited for a sign,
From the place where visions come at cost,
Where three sharp eyes, two heads, inclined,
To see me where I stood and spoke,
Aloud, to no avail,
Some truth, some lies, some love, some hate,
Was then I felt the nail.
Two eyes spoke, but only then,
To ask that I had felt,
The flesh that held the nail I bore,
From up there where they knelt.
The single eye was silent, still!
She would not even cast,
Her monoscopic field of view on all this violence past.
If only she would turn her face,
And three eyes become four,
Then she might open for the one,
Come knocking on her door...

"Nothing waits below for you", mermaids smiled, and spoke to me.
Memory fled, then all I knew was written on the sea.
Great paragraphs, on ocean swells,
In running, sodden ink,
The bow broke foam from recollections,
My wedding day,
I think.
Words rose up the sides of waves,
and flung me down the other side.
Then licked the shore for crumbs they found,
That rose up in the tide.
Heartbeat slowed, my body sank,
Turned empty eyes beneath.
Rays of light revealed your face,
Colossal, in the reef.

Miss sits in silence and understands,
Nothing breaks the spell.
Missing nothing, understanding,
As far as I can tell.
Miss spoke and said, the word was "sure",
An understanding guess,
Missing understanding pure,
The answer could be "yes".
Miss came and understood for sure,
But wouldn't stay for long.
Thought was insufficient lure,
When I think my guess was wrong.

Twice lost, one soul appeared, unbidden,
Ambushed, in plain sight.
Results?     All hidden.
As I walked, I thought of this,
Imagined as I sought,
A sign of full surrender,
In the battles that we fought.
I threw what always seemed, to you,
The ordnance of the soul,
Words on leaves and tissue tigers,
Weak and boring, far from whole.
My engine had an inner working, impossible to see.
My feet still carry me to you,
And you just stare at me.

His feet carried him there with no plan but to see.
Beyond that, the ****** appendages were ******* useless.
But he can't blame his feet for the failures above,
In the brain that is always awash in a chemical storm,
Not of it's creation,
But rather, from failures up higher,
Where angels throw darts and roll dice with God,
(who disdains such a sport),
And anyway...
So, here he is again,
With a mind full of wonder,
When he wants only, sorely, for this:
To have something to say,
Through the fog and the chatter,
To find that within,
Which is real.