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.

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...

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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”

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

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

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