lately //
i’ve been making a noose of my own heartstrings //
but my father is a fisherman who taught me that the best knots don’t slip //
so i carry a bowline in my pocket for security and a tangled mess of forevers on my sleeve.
But I’ve also been tying anchor bends since i realized my grip was not equal to atlas’ shoulders.
And what a cruel paradox that is //
to think that a god can carry the earth beneath our feet but our hands // molded from clay and mud in the same image //could never be enough of a last resort to anchor our hearts in our chests.
so the loophole here,
so to speak,
is the anchor bend knot //
but! //
you know what’s funny about loopholes actually?? // you see, they were made to allow arrows to be shot from an opening // but the structure of that opening prevents counter arrows from being shot back in.
such an invention is why it’s always been nearly impossible to storm a castle’s wall and my, // have many a noble men fallen at the feet of such entrances.
so nowadays, i carry my trusty bowline //alongside the endless loopholes of those old-fashioned anchor bends.
however, I’m sure you know that the bowline is regarded as “the knot of all knots” right? it’s good for tying just about anything without give.
but the first time i ever went sailing // i learned about the round turn and two half hitches. this knot is pretty cool because the more tension you apply to the rope, the tighter the knot will get //
highly reliable for most things.
i guess the irony here is that // i am personally, most identifiable with this knot.
i don’t really ever use it. i am not a sailor or a fishermen. but i do have a really bad tendency of fastening myself to things that have a lot of pull.
the tightening tension of it
is similar to the mythical 13 knots in a hangman’s noose and what an incredibly genius stroke of engineering.
to think that the masterful art of knot-tying comes down to the basic idea that a knot will hold under tension is simply and utterly graceful without fault.
but here’s the thing;
as soon as i learned to tie a knot that won’t slip,
i taught myself the hangman’s knot:
a knot that essentially slips, but still holds merciless tension around its victim.

i’ve been tying nooses with what causes me the most pain.
with what bleeds the most love //
but as the one and only descendant of my father, the great fisher king,
i am starting to learn that if the knot slips,

you cut the line and start again.

I'd like to paint
you in an atrium of colorful
echoes zinging past your
face like hummingbirds

add in a touch of forest green, the
murky-gray lake water, white triangles
sketched for carefree sails

burnished by unusually honest conversation,
only sky blue and gold for the looks thrown
in each direction and inexplicable smiles

a rainbow,
         a myriad for the future,

but you stand alongside me
      as breathtaking landscape

and no art could do that justice

Dry veins branch the dead gulch
cinder cones set on a marble tan scape
fanning sands sketch ephemeral
fossil plates fold under columns of gray

Mountain back steep at the crevasse
sinkhole spots form on parallel nine
sulfur pipe stems from molten ash
withered shrubs and crumbling spines

silt fields cover the foothills
swayback shed near the Whipple tree barn
tumbledown shacks form the patchwork
from goat canyon ranch to big bison farm

Salt lakes fractured in amber
sickle-bush cut at the bowline knot
a half-moon traced by the viper
oxbow streams and valley grot

(I Could Not Knot a Knot.)

My tale is one of tortuous frustration,
when two ropes caused me aggravation,
and my every effort resulted in a situation
that left me in a state of angry indignation!

Oh, what a knotty problem I had got,
when I found I could not knot a needed knot!
Though needing help on how to knot a knot,
no one I knew, knew how to knot my needed knot!

I had two short ropes - which I’d a need to knot,
and which I’d knot together with a special knot,
but it never worked, for the knot did not knot,
and my knot came undone!  I felt such a clot!

Firstly, I took the ropes, which I twisted tight
together, but still the end result, was not right,
for when I tugged, the knot, not only fell apart,
but showed no sign of a knot!  Making a fresh start,

I took one rope, and placed it firmly under
the other.  This was so easy, I did wonder
if my actions should have been reversed,
for it too fell apart!  Oh, how I cursed!

Seems tying knots is not for faint hearts,
for any knot, that’s not knotted, soon parts
when it’s put to the test!  That I’m not a knot
expert, you can tell.  Truly, my forte is not

that of being very good at tying knots,
for I do not understand what knots
need, to keep them from falling apart!
Tying a knot right, right from the start,

is important, and that’s why my knot
was  not reliable, but why I did not
understand.  Yes, I’ve tied many knots.
but they’re knots known as Granny Knots.

Other knots are what folks call a Slip Knot.
Then there’s the Turk’s Head - a special knot,
as is the Cat’s Paw, Clove Hitch,and Bowline.
Truth to tell, - none of these resembles mine!

Then there’s a Timber Hitch, which is a knot
that truly puzzles me, and not an easy knot to knot!
There’s many other knots, that need the greatest skill,
such as the Hangman’s Knot - a knot that’s made to ****!

Whilst the sheepshank?  That’s a tricky one to see!
So many knots, but they’re not knots for me.
Methinks of all the knots, the one true knot for me,
is the “Lover’s Knot”, which I have tied successfully!

Rhymer. April 24th, 2018

They say that there is one
I at the heart of a storm.
This is not true.
There are two.

Butterfly blue and Phoenix ash grey,
The other molten wood full of firefly flicker.
Looking in, Looking out.

Moonlight cord taut between two like a bowline straining
in the tide.
The only glint in the earthly waves crashing, two points the only
anchor.

If language is a dead space ship between us
if its a sleeping chicken
instead of a casserole,
if it's cold tea,
a fake hug,

if it gets lost in the corners of the ceilings
and never reaches her heart
if it can't ever remove the training wheels
if it only knows dog days
if it will always be a contender

than we must start fires in the stars, with whatever we can
and stop pretending we give a **** about accuracy
or communication or being understood
I don't want you to understand me! Who gives figs for stuff like that any more?

I want you to set stars on fire in my name.
I want you to carve the lines of my body into the bowline of a pirate ship
I want you to not be able to leave the room
tear the bread in half,
don't return the library books
don't ask what I think
and don't stop asking
me to dance anyway. Even if it's an old
fashioned dilly. Even if I didn't
wear your mother's
dress, or ever can anything, even the
beautiful tomatoes that covered the red
clay. Ask me.
No matter what I say.

It’s nights like these;
when the sky feels raw-quiet
and the moon hangs so low-heavy
and pulpy, parchment yellow,
dripping and left to sun-stain and disintegrate
against dull ghost stories
and stinging to-do lists.
This is when I feel it- the fracturing.
You’re out of sight.
I’m out of mind.  

I crack the window,
blink loose stars out of focus
and send them shotgun galloping
across the flat-hum pulsing,
tin tinged and navy evening static.

The North Star needs new batteries.
He flickers and sways but won’t
extinguish. He is soft and solemn-
a lazing, dazing anchor whose fraying rope
weaves bowline knots
and hitching ties
into each inch of my drying hair.

Every strand of the night breathes itself into life.
The pieces are softening and shifting,
howling and crawling.
They become young men planning,
flexing at high tide and daring
each other further out with each set of waves.
They are posing, pretending to be
what they think the word ‘reckless’ means.

They are throwing their bodies into surf
and wailing.
They are crashing hard
and violent
against the shore.

They are shaking out golden limbs
and rubbing bloodshot eyes.
I watch bruises bloom and gashes erupt a flash
of crimson before salt water clean and stung.

They are flashing gleeful smiles
and throwing taunting screams across
whole seas while diving back,
quickly, elegantly,
into the same rough surf
that just spit them out.

Maybe they’re proactive,
maybe things hurts less when you
know where the hurt will come from.
Maybe the game isn’t to stay lovely
and bright and whole;
but to know pain’s possibilities so intimately
that when it comes time for you to break
you can do so without shattering
completely.

Nights like these;
sitting cross-legged with a blank
page open and an aching, reeling,
sickly-warm ribbon sprouting from my molars-
I get it.

Streamers wave proudly across
my body.
They grip and simmer,
they wind tightly around  
organs and bones who
gave up their hiding spots
and surrendered their secrets
the first time I let him come in.

The strings are bright and knot themselves tight.
They tether my windpipe,
weld each rib colorfully between sternum and spine.
They coil down and tie off;
thick, swaddled and bobbing, bowing
themselves regally around my coccyx.

Nights like these I have no armor.
Where is my skin?
I stir and rattle to even the slightest shift of Earth.
Exposed and quaking, I body-map bolts of light.
The light is tap dancing over lungs,
igniting blood and ricocheting through the summer camp,
arts and crafts hysteria fusing my anatomy.
It plunge pastels deep into the marrow of my bones.
The room is smoky, my gut splashes about, electrocuted.
I stop feeling tired.

The thing is- what I’m really trying to say,
is that I have no words right now.
There are no pretty lines caught in the twine of
my hip joints and no fiery prose laying
eggs in my spinal fluid.

There is no poem to write
about the fleshy, sour
smell of my own heart
roasting on a pyre or the hours it will take
to scrub off the charred bits of melting muscle
now staining the carpet.

This bitter heat creeping up my throat
and the sallow contraction of my
belly are not the prologue to a revolution-
my diagnosis is not a metaphor.

They are simply the tangy symptoms of the sadness
pinging around my insides and playing
peekaboo among the weeds of my broken body and sticky mind.
She will wait, biding time, for a properly rapt audience.
I whisper then whine that I’m too messy,
too slouchy, too emotionally ill-equipped to house a heart
maybe breaking,
definitely ripping, across-the-ballroom
slipping and wrecking-ball imploding.
Sadness smacks her lips and smirks.
No one rides for free.  

Nights like these I think
maybe I’ve wasted all my words;
my sentences and precious syntax and swooping rhetoric,
on lighter blows and mere heartaches.
I am a ragdoll limply stretching.
I am standing completely still, taking inventory.
I’m puzzled, though decidedly unthreatened,
by the glass-littered ground, my bleeding feet.
I mean look at the big picture:
I lit myself on fire.
I’m not worried about sunburn.

I know now that it has happened-
the hurt circulates my veins
and pumps me full of vehemence.
The act of breathing is ferocious,
I am a tangle of raw nerves.
This is the night I’m left with a heart shattered
in six hundred pieces on the floor and absolutely no poetry rising
from my pores to help glue it back together.

I said I get it.
I should have practiced.
I should have left my clothes on the sand and
ran toward the sea, naked and unembarrassed,
while diving head first into fierce undertows
and crashing with the boyish bodies of the night.

I should have experimented;
explored all the ways hurt could find me
while the beach was still mine to breathe out and yell for
without fear of being told 'no.'
But I didn’t. I kept my clothes on and my secrets to myself.

Tonight I’m a wreck and this isn’t a test.
I'm so far out, weighed down
by this boxy, heavy pain
ripening in my arms.
I'm panicky and paddling in any direction,
trying to keep my head above water
and praying the shore will appear and welcome me
once I get through this next set of waves,
through this next set of waves.

The first day we arrived
you gave us all a piece of faded yellow rope
"Keep this on your person at all times"

Day in, day out

Alpine butterfly
(Secure the canoe so it won't fall off the trailer)
Reef, figure eight
(Simple stuff, multipurpose; the kids do this)
Sheet bend
(Connect two ropes with different diameters)
Double fisherman
(Kept it around my ankle so it wouldn't get lost)

But thank god
That the last knot I tied
Before I left
Was the one I was best at

Bowline
(Attached my heart to the sailing docks)

I lost something within you,
Radiant, high-handed sea!
A loss so great and true,
I cannot let it be.

Great heart of mine, stolen,
When I sail first your deep blue,
Winds had pulled my bowline,
And filled my sails anew.

And as the sea winds whipped
The heart you took of mine,
The bow had sharply tipped,
Against horizon line.

I merely skim the surface
Of your lovely darkened deep,
Search without a trace,
For my heart you hide and keep.

Everyday I leave the shore,
Cast off into the sea,
And with the journeys more and more,
You become the heart of me.

Hastily, suddenly,
plunging oars down in the pale sea.

Glistening, expecting,
his eyes shined anticipating.

Bleached pale clear, shining near,
jewellery sitting heavenly here.

Can’t go back, t’face attack,
waves outnumber the stars in the track.

Bigger ships, faster ships,
displaying greater workmanship

Begin to shrink, as anchors sink,
they look like grains of sand in a blink.

Storms go in, he thinks of his kin,
and anchors the boat, grazing his shin.

Reef, clovehitch, a bowline itch,
clutches his thumb like a tall stitch.

Abruptly, in agony,
he cuts his thumb so aimlessly.

Blood spills out, near the trout,
he jumps in the sea without any doubt.

Deeper down, fetching his crown,
he grabbed the pearl and screamed like a hound.

His heart did ache, in the great lake,
when he found out the orb was a fake.