To the sycamores, redwoods, pines, firs, and sweetgums
Unwitting adventurers
Who have seen more of the universe than I
Or the bravest sailor or mountaineer.

Tell me your secrets, I beg.

You dare to stand tall and brave
Untouched by a trauma
You can scarcely recall
From a trip 'round the moon.

I am the seed you once were.

Taken from my homeland.
Denied the comfort of soil.
Weightless, wanting, and
Utterly unable to return.

How can you stand there
As if you were always at peace?
How can you be grounded
Having touched the universe?

We don't want the world.
No one asked for this.
There's only so many walls,
So many scales and shells
And piles of warm blankets.
So many deep breathes
And shallow pursuits.
We can only scream so loud
And quietly dread
And wait for the ending.

There I was, as a child, sat
Beneath the willow tree
Beside the pool
Near the badminton court
While soft branches swayed down
Wisping onto the neighbor's yard
Like the gentle caress
Of a lover's touch
Or the fall of your hair
As you lean down for a kiss
In the pool of pillows
Where I make my nest

A child then and a man now
I love it in your shade

Abolish the police for crimes against us
(Go further; to the root)
Abolish the prisons that enslave us
(Go further; to the root)
Abolish the Guard turned against us
(Go further; to the root)
Abolish the army primed to stop us
(Go further; to the root)
Abolish the chief who rails about us
(Go further; to the root)
Abolish the laws that sanction “justice”
(Go further; to the root)
Abolish the state unjustly above us
(Go further; to the root)
Abolish the capital propping them up
(Go further; to the root)
Tear down their factories choking us
(Go further; to the root)
Crush the billionaires into dust
(Go further; to the root)
Abolish the voice inside of us
That tells us the world simply “must”

We will never forget the names of those
Who should have been known for so much more.

Sandra Bland. George Floyd. Tamir Rice. Riah Milton. James Scurlock. Rem'Mie Fells. Breonna Taylor. Too many to name. 400 years.

We remember them for all they could have been.
Not martyrs. Murdered.
People living and then gone forever.

White supremacy is not poetic. It is a blunt instrument.
We must fight it every day.

On summer days,
Still wet from thawing, I bloom
Into the person that I love
With all my heart, I sing
And laugh and race around the fire
On summer nights when my arms
Ache from a day of heavy living
My feet are light and my skin ripens
And I think, finally, "I am me"
And I pause to consider the grey,
Cold drudgery that consumes
This man for too many months.
I would weep for him, but
Cannot catch my breath in the sun

All the world is sorrow
As we force our eyes
To read the names
Of all we have lost

All the world is restless
Like a tape stuck
In a stunted spiral
Waiting to begin again

The world is dying
And so are we
One by one it takes us
And the list grows long

Every morning I microwave myself

Reheating stale words on my lips

As I shuffle toward the inevitable

Sleep that never quite takes

In the vain hope that tomorrow

There exists a new "me"

Who is finally ready to become

My mother eats music like chocolates
Consuming sweetness and sadness slowly,
And always in moderation.

Too many Adele songs, she warns,
Might cause the heart to bleed
And the world to become less solid.

She revels in austerity;
Proud that her life is clean
Even if it is sterile.

But I want to feel it all for myself!!
I want to scream a tornado from my lungs
And crash the moon into darkness...

I want to love and hate and die and ****!
To live without dread for a single second.
To squeeze the sweetness out of every pop song.

I want to kiss a boy that I like so much
Without a voice in my neck
Choking my ambitions.

I want to live without a howling past.
To die without a fettered future.
To dream without a present tense.

To eat the madness of the world
In a feast of fancy
From which I cannot return.

What the boastful fail to say
About “a man at every port”
Is how a soul can crack
Between the vast distances

One beloved in [redacted] who feels
Like smooth liquor and cries
So softly when I rub his back
Because I cannot touch him much

To be greeted by the too-slim smile
Of another in [redacted]
Who screams my name with a vigor
As if to remind me I’m still here

A third to the West
Who I visit too infrequently
But whose spark is still bright
When I darken the door

One more is a ghost
Whose visage travels with me
Who’s made the living look pale
Since the day that he ghosted me

A painful plight to be totally free
To hold someone in the night
And to flee by late midday
Never whole or fully held

I'm wading in a gentle love
(One that texts me every day)
A love that flows but never pushes
While the sun shines on my face
                                          .
Not too deep but no less lovely

There's no thought of what's below
                       .
Not a thought of what's unholy
           .
                                   o
No violent storm where we once fell
                         .
      o
                 .                                                 .
No engulfment nor impressions

        .
                         o

Of a monster deep beneath

                          .                          o

­   o
                             O

            .                                                 ­   .

No more dire premonitions   .

          .                                  .
O
             ­                      .

                     O
                                    

                         ­                    o

o

             O                .

    

     .               o




                                     .
As you swept me off my feet

I'm sorry that I'm not enough
Or maybe, babe, I'm just too much
To ever gently linger in your touch

And babe, you know I'm just too rough
To treat you like I've got the stuff
To heal the broken love that you've got

So tell me that I did you wrong
Tell me that you're moving on
And that I'll cry forever when you're gone

And you're not wrong.

I can't bluff.

But I'm not strong.

It is a very human tragedy
That we can name more lengths
Of waves of light than our eyes
Can or will ever comprehend

To know that something exists
And is very likely beautiful
Just outside our grasp, forever
Is the most human thing of all

At least to me.

When I was with you I would dream
Of lying in your bed and looking up
As your long, thin hair formed a curtain
Around us; expelling the outside world
With its fabled intimacy.

In this dream, our eyes could not be torn
To look away or stray from love.

But today my own hair is long and thick,
And I see in my periphery as it falls
To embrace the head of my new love;
Who I hope also dreamt of this moment,
And who will not be disappointed as I.

Come now, apocalypse! End my pain in one fell blow

Bring the fury of nuclear winter or the fire of Hell below

Do not make me wait for death. Do not linger by degrees

Do not be silent or stoic while you bring me to my knees

Be swift and sincere as you unleash those unnamed fears

No more heartache no more hoping no more half-unshed tears

Come now, my love. Be direct with me, and deft

For I know a deathly quickness is the only kindness you have left

I'm a weak and anxious man, prone to insecurities that I only dare mumble to myself and my god and my therapist

--But mostly just myself, for fear of losing the others to the mayhem.

The brain is not a perfect vessel.

But you are. And still, the whispering comes at times

When we are far away or you are in my bed or we need a moment's space to breathe.

The wait is never long and we return to be as happy as sunshine

But periodic clouds cast a longer shadow

To those of (me) who lived in the darkness and learned to crave the bitter truth -- even when it was only with my eyes closed.

And isn't it sad? How I cannot hold tight the thing that I have more faith in than god? (Or even, often, myself...)

To see you smile up at me--perfect--and not be forever content??

Strike me down for my sins against you! **** the rooster if it squawks again; my denying days are finished.

Oh love, will you forgive a weak man in the eye of a storm?

Tell me about those future tides
That move within the crinkles
At the corner of those green minefields,
Which stare with such intensity
That love has wrought
And pain has sharpened
In the lakes of corn that hold
Too many graves for you,
My sweet.
Your sorrow crashes down
While you look up at me
And marvel at
How many times you call my name
And how many times I answer.
Still,
I wonder if it is enough
To understand the sorrow without
Having felt it in my bones
Everyday-- a lack
That cannot be filled no matter
How softly (or rough) I kiss you
Or how badly I make it known
That you are mine.

Late in the night, when crows flock and moon swells,
You arise from the dead to haunt me.

My room glows with an eerie blue
My crystal ball turns black and rectangular--
Still cloudy and shining, but now with technicolored lights.
And sound! Not with voice or a ghostly yawn;
But the pin-***** "ding" of a message from beyond.

It tells me that heaven and hell cannot contain you.
That you will not be silenced by the end.
There IS no end because you will not let it;
A corpse too stubborn to die, too cold to live.

Your laugh quick as a flash of light

But moods dark as the sea

And always with that biting humor

You bit too much outta me.

Billions of years ago,
Before language and iPhones and photosynthesis,
Before God and sin and war,
Before cars and Paris and capitalism,
Life began with a separation.

A single cell of unknown origin
Deemed itself worthy of infinite reproduction
And cut itself off from a world
Totally alien to ours (but the same).

It erected a membrane; a shield;
A boundary between itself and the great,
Dark unknown of chaos and calamity
And, in doing so, banished us all to worldlessness.

Even now, the defining feature of the individual is the lack:
We awaken one day and realize we are not our mothers.
We are not our fathers or siblings or friends,
And we are not QUITE our own reflections in the mirror.

This first, great trauma exists as a reenactment of life
Tearing itself from the universe to make a new whole.
This first, great trauma births an individual being
Constantly in search of a universal it can never return to.

This first, great trauma is why I sit in my well-furnished
And spacious apartment with food and AC and Netflix
And feel a great rift between who I am and what I know;
A condition created before life on Earth had barely begun.

Such power does a porchlight possess
That it lures a thousand insects
To fry in the dewy-white comfort of its glow

Where we see the mundanity of a helpful object
Moths see beckoning beams of moonlight
Like Icarus soaring too high at midnight

Perhaps God in all his alleged wisdom
Could never have imagined the horror wrought
By positive phototaxis and the electric lightbulb

Perhaps this whole **** world is the unintended
But deadly consequence of a God who could not
Predict the ways that lightbulbs and moonlight
Merge to Mock him.

In a 2013 study, human scientists wished to know
The depths of the heart of the common rat,
And devised an experiment to prove that
Empathy can exist even in the smallest of creatures.

The scientists, in their logocentric wisdom
Born out of centuries of Western philosophical tradition,
Metaphysical assumption, and scientific methodologies,
Trapped one rat in a tightly confined space and watched.

To their small-minded astonishment, the rats performed,
Again and again, the role of savior to their fellow rat.
They did this without need for compensation or compulsion
And, if given, shared the reward with their de-caged brethren.

But what the scientists failed to realize is, as is often the case,
That they themselves, with all their complex cognitive capacity,
Had failed an experiment which the rats navigated with ease.
For it was them who had caged the rat, and rats who set them free.

Grev ca the loqi el
Fel world sitram onj
(Is vetr yil eff)
Uner random eeja na
Wickreta and ilst
Unjust oli scon

Is my life isolation or a space for creation;
A gilded cage or a hideaway?

Shall I claw my way out or embrace desolation?

I live and eat and work alone—
There’s no one else who’s coming home.

I dare not dream to let one in
For fear my sliver may grow thin.
Best to keep to myself and rule it all,
And forget that my kingdom is unbearably small.

The crushing consideration
That maybe I wasn’t meant
To survive this storm

Or the scarier thought
That maybe the storm won’t come at all
And this will all have been for nothing

Half a world of maps unfurl
Across the empty table of my misery.
Who allowed these seas to part us?
Who enabled this continental crawl?
How can the expanse of my suffering
Be so casually drawn on a thrice-folded page?

Let me collapse the space between us
Like the crinkle of a map:
Ohio, Louisiana, and Nebraska now one;
New York City meets Seattle;
Las Vegas crossed with Columbus
All gloriously fused together and merged.

Space and time and geopolitics
Aborted for their troubles.
We have no need for boundaries
(We have enough of those between us).
Release me from this isolation!
God of winds: ******* forward in all directions

Just let us not be parted One More Night.

Love is like an echo
It rings many times
And all the same
With little changes
To let you know
Time moves on

I have loved many times
The same person
In different forms

One more false idol to tear down
One more myth to discard
One more Godhead to guillotine
One more song to ******

One more fiction to problematize
One more demon to behead
One more creature to stigmatize
One more ruling class dead

A den of crows sings a song so sweet
A tune that makes the carcass weep

The lion roars a mighty note
As if a love poem to a goat

The fire's burn and smoke's caress
Fills the wood with tenderness

Young Nero plays a mournful tune
As his kingdom falls to ruin

And billionaires do all the same
While Congress dares not speak their names

These corporate creatures should be hanged
For the role they play in climate change

We are told to "make lemonade"
As we inhale the bitterness
Of wages and rent and hunger,
Student debt and job insecurity.

We are told to squeeze ourselves
Tighter and tighter
Until we are made of bones
That crack like whips to the time-stamp tune.

Flesh, they say, is the enemy.
It is weakness and untamable.
It does not fit neatly, and so must be destroyed.
It belongs in our beds, not the workplace.

They give us lemons so **** they burn,
And tell us that we're lucky to receive them.
They say it is the natural order of man and machine.
But the fruit of our labor is a lie!

Today I learned that lemons are not fruit.
They are not found in nature;
They have not fallen from heaven for us.
They are engineered by a snake in the garden.

Lemons are like wages and rent and hunger.
They are like markets and stocks and *******:
A human invention we are told is better for us
Than the Apple we once killed ourselves for.

Today I realized lemonade is the enemy!
It's not the cost of bread or the breaking of backs;
It is the dismal comforts we construct
To tell ourselves that we are free.

A judge too beautiful to conjure has stolen what was once in my head:

The careful oddities of an amalgamation that apparently included you

And me and my childhood nanny (who was transformed into a dancing Jane Fonda).

Like a raging sign of my heart’s discontent; a honeymoon I refuse to entertain;

The sleep-sewn cloth of a dying emperor’s last adornment.

Where are you outside my pillow? Why have you come into my dreams?

Explanation be ******: get out! It was you who scorned me on your birthday,

And now I must kindly, failingly ask for your removal from my rotation of isolation.

Even if the times we shared were golden and last night was a dream!

Right now in the Arctic Circle, it is twilight. The sun has hidden from the vast fields of snow, and it will not return for months and months. Not for all the love in the world. No kiss can conjure it. No hug can replace its warmth. No secret whisper or extended hand or careful laugh can reverse the orbit or adjust the tilt of a rock hurling through space at sixty-seven thousand miles per hour.

I am frozen, my love. I can no longer see the light. The months stretch out like an abyss before me; a semester's worth of sorrow. You cannot save me, no matter how sweetly you try or how desperately I want you to succeed.

We cannot fight the sun, my love. So let me go.

Time and space will never stop
But you and I will never grow
All things must slow
All things must slow

The heat of passion breaks my heart
All things break and all things fold

A noble end to a messy start
All things must go
All things must go

First: An absence. An emptiness. A brief abandonment. He left us, but only for a week or so. I cried in my mother's bed.

And I hated myself for it for months.

Second: The warmth of skin to skin contact when I rubbed my head against a friend's neck I now hate. A cat-like comfort I will never get back.

Third: That **** song that sometimes comes on shuffle that I don't remember until it's chorus punches me in the gut. The memory of your long hair forming a tent around me as you kissed my lips. Now my hair is long, and you are long long gone. It plays on.

Fourth: All the times I made my mother cry.

I was a cruel child; always picking and prodding at everyone's difference. And failing to hide my own. Pain to cover pain. More tears shed than I can count.

Fifth: Various childhood oddities. Not even the gay ones. The way I talked weird and ****** wrong and jealously attached myself to people who were indifferent. But I was indifferent too.

Or maybe I became that way.

What fools we are-- so desperate in our need to belong. Clawing at any scrap of affection. But then, hurt again and again and again. Until the very thing that we most crave becomes the thing that we despise. And hide. And bury in therapy and poetry and song.

Maybe I've tried to forget. But they've been with me all along.

I'm a little rusty on the incantation
That allowed you in my dreams
We just crossed paths in a different dimension
Now beg you please to leave

Caroline, what a sorry explanation
For a visit from the dead
The girl I knew is still halfway 'cross the nation
The girl I liked lives in my head

Visits from you have never been a good sign
That my life is going well
If I'm so desperate for a phantom's recreation
I'll walk backwards into hell

Caroline, what a sorry explanation
For a ghost of a best friend
We had it all and you threw it out the window
It's been five years since the end.

I'll admit that it is tempting
To accept the spell you've cast
Laughing, crying-- all the good times
But then why did it not last??

Caroline, what a sorry explanation
For a frauded history book
Five years ago we had a chance at reconciliation
If you ask me you're still a crook

This dim haven of the past,
Covered in cloth,
Like tired children playing ghosts
On Halloween
You won't be there.
Nor Christmas,
Or New Year's ever again.
But this dusty room will serve
As a coffin for your memory.
That chair and lumpy sofa
Will haunt me more than a spirit could--
With its raw physicality,
Thinly veiled
With greying sheets.

I love you
Long after your last breath.

I crave the closeness of fear
In my fingertips
When they type your name.

You who are more and less
Than words
On a vacant screen.

The danger of sharing
My failings
To no one but the world.

My mouth is too dull and large
For the sharpness you require
To unravel your form.

I am your benefactor and bruise
I cannot turn from you
Or risk my life.

There is too much sorrow
And joy in you
To ever let you go.

But the doctor says I'm wrong...

Crossing this path for the third time. God, I hope it's the last.
Sometimes I wish I knew what was in your mind.
Other times I just laugh.

Bethany, we have such a hard history. Childhood was a brawl.
I wish I had more compassion for you.
We were both so small.

Now here we are for the third time; oh what a shameful act.
Is it that we have too much pride?
Or perhaps it's a lack.

Oh, the horrors of family relations.
Oh, the binds that wound our salvation.
Oh, the lack of any sense.
Oh, the death of innocence.

Back at church camp, we did not know. We were caught unawares.
I ****** his **** (I had never before).
He kissed you on your nose.

I hear now he's engaged to a girl. I guess you won in the end.
But we both lost so much dignity.
He's still my Facebook friend.

Oh, we were so gullible.
Oh, it felt so horrible.
Oh, the lack of any sense.
Oh, the death of innocence.

Score number two was my fault, I guess. I loved him very well.
In middle school he called you his girl.
Now we're all going to Hell.

But in my defense, he was my first kiss.
He might have been yours as well.
I'm sorry, my sister, for liking his hair, and all the lies I tell.

Oh, now I've gone and hurted myself.
Oh, I can never ask for your help.
Oh, the lack of any sense.
Oh, the death of innocence.

Three days ago I discovered the third, which you confirmed in a text.
Did it have to be with my Paris love?
It was the first time I had ***.

Still, I win. If anyone can.
You'll date him in Ohio. It's mean to say, but it's the truth.
You're just his beard and a smile.

I want to say this, little sis. I wish that we could be friends.
But secrets breed secrets, which breed some more.
And we all die in the end.

Time stole so much from us
Don't think I could forget
The way you wreathed and swayed
While dancing in my bed

I think of decades in my future
When I revisit you in dreams
And seek to find your face
On my Apple spy machine

It's a special kind of sadness
To know that she won't be a he
And I'll always sadly wonder
If I ever could compete

And while I'm glad you're happy
In this distant future sleep
I'll be angry that I let you go
And even moreso that I creeped

If the world was right
And all was just,
Our souls would be conjoined
Without any choice of freedom.

For what good is freedom
When feet must leave,
And lips must part,
And hands grasp only to let go?

The earth spins 'round
And orbits and tilts.
The winds whip and continents shift
And nothing is ever still.

The universe itself is locked
In a rush toward infinite expansion
'Til one day every atom will subside,
And all will freeze alone.

What good is freedom?
What good is Earth?
What good is this whole ******* cosmos
If leaving is all there is??

I do not want to move.
I do not want to walk or speak
Or disconnect your hands from mine.
I will be totally still.

But it is not enough.
The **** universe conspires
To draw us to our knees,
And wish for one more hour

Just. Like. This.

Some love is like a freight train. Loud, fast, eventful. A pain to bump into, but a thrill all the same.

Some love is like a whisper; as warm in your ear as a summer breeze. A quiet word that makes your cheeks flare and fingers dance.

Some love is like a snowflake. Gentle, soft, and dreary. It lands on you without intent and fails to make a mark.

Some love is like a bullet. You hear the shot and just stare as it ***** your life. The blood it takes is straight from the heart.


Some crash and others crumple. But love leaves us all the same.

We all take shelter in the shade of ambiguity that only poetry can provide. With words, I take a candle toward the darkest reaches of my heart and let you determine the nature of its shadows. I hope and pray you are not as wise as Plato, for I am Icarus. One day I will forge that candle into a sun, the cave will glow, and all of you will run.

Save your gravity
For the fragile bones
That tread your mountainous rock

I will not fall again.

That slippage comes too quick
When weak men crawl
Like ants upon your surface

I am the fallen angel
Whose wings were too burdened
By the golden kiss of truth

I have fallen to this world
To this mountain
To this cliffside coffin

I have torn from the stone
A house and a life and a lover
I have risen beyond the curse that binds me

And I will not fall again.