Seeking a Dragon:

“Has anyone ever seen, a lizard who licks the air, smells the sounds, hears the tasty gnats flying ‘round and knows the instincts of his prey while holding fast his scaly-green statue on a hot summer’s day with his eyes like pinholes straight to hell, his hunger an anxious frantic swell he quickly darts after his dinner devouring that faithless sinner?”

Am I,
protected and Ignorant?
Instead, choose to
countlessly amount problems.
Often wondering that romance, anyways
blind being without shade:
Sun-gazer;
fry pain from eyes.
As closed eyes turn,
eyes open for curiousity
you punish
No, just no…
Punish you, curiousity for open eyes.
turn eyes closed
as eyes, from pain, fry.
sun-gazer;
shade without being blind.                    
anyways, romance that wondering, often.
problems amount countlessly
to choose instead:
Ignorant
and
protected;
I am.

Tiny pieces of you
Linger in my very being
Burning embers of brimstone
Sulfur fills each breath
I stop to smell the roses
They turn to ash at my touch
At you within me
Particles spread as I cough you up
Multiplying in the air
Dancing with joy
At their new-found freedom

Tiny pieces of you
Rotting my soul and consuming my spirit
Burning pinholes in my brain
Memories burned away
Shadow of pain still sore, still raw

Lingering, lingering, lingering

Vacuum-sealed in cloudy plastic
Suffocating by design
No claws to tear through
No blades to slice
The coldness of the air seeps through
But no breath can be taken
Peek-a-boo I see you
Creepy clouded faces stare
Known yet quite veiled in circumstance
The harder the struggle
The weaker the fight
Light fades as breath strains
Wishing for pinholes

~~Follow me down the rabbit hole he spoke,
To a place of delirium and fantasy.
Let your mind follow as your body stays.
As goosebumps creep up your skin.
Feel me when you laugh, little pinholes in your brain.
Run free with me dear Alice,  
For a trip to Wonderland.
Just rest that thin piece of paper on your tongue.
Come with me, old friend.~~

eyeglasses nestled in the fluffy snow
frosted, with a single crack
bouncing winter sun off my tarnished window
a glint of hidden history from below
it sent me on a journey way, way back

a memory of reflected light
off a tree lined lake where i swam as a child
all day until the moon gave birth to night
and the sky was black with pinholes of white
a remembrance long ago filed

delivered back to me by a frozen emissary
whose lenses are no longer fit for eyes
whose rounded frames are a bit ordinary
but found one final way to be visionary
as a door unlocked by a cold, powdery sunrise

Sleep deprivation

***

Guilt

Sense-making and maps of meaning

Revisiting memories

Crying

Staying away from scary corners of my mind

Deliberately going toward scariness

Not resisting

Yes resisting

Respecting resistance

Compulsive tv watching

Dropping or letting go over and over again

Exploring

Curiosity

Forgetting and then remembering that it’s all happening on its own, noticing this, knowing this, realizing this

Realizing that realization comes and goes on its own

Being in love with everything

Crying

Playing with time and concepts

Craving emptiness

Love

Catastrophizing

Ranking what "works" (i.e. sleep deprivation is effective), noticing that the metric of “effective” and "works" is = resulting in greater illusions of "forgetting" with a capital F

Loving everything

Being everything

Self-flagellation

Not really believing any of the stories or narratives

Procrastinating

Being irresponsible

Getting off on self-loathing

Forcing intimacy

Compassion, large, whole, unrelenting, everywhere

Oversharing

Falling in love with a homeless person at a traffic stop

Being bored and sad and hopeless and desperate

Remembering inherent wholeness

Being stubborn

Getting out of the way always feels like dying

Loving dying

Loving mourning dying

Dramatizing dying

Wanting to be seen and loved

Self-loathing

Intensity

Craving intensity

Hating craving intensity

Knowing that nothing is a problem

Suffering

Being impatient

Being very very patient

Feeling like I don’t belong in the world, like people and things and money and social media are alien, foreign and scary

Feeling like I am the world

Forgetting that knowing how to verbalize isn’t the same as knowing

Wanting knowing with words to be the same as Knowing

Wanting knowing to be a Real, solid thing

Fear

Mortal fear

Bewilderment

Constant background anxiety

Hating this body

Not caring for this body

Being burdened by this body

Feeling trapped in a body

Feeling more trapped in a mind

Wanting knowing to resolve everything

Wanting to be saved

Thinking that I probably don’t need to be saved

Thinking or knowing(?) there’s nothing to be saved from

Knowing that I can’t be saved

Feeling open

Feeling vulnerable

Feeling exposed

Feeling bad

Feeling like I'm doing it wrong

Believing it all

Wanting to both believe it and have a choice about when, where, and to what extent I believe it

Not knowing where the edge is until I've fallen off

Feeling violated

Feeling like existence is non-consensual

Somehow trusting all of it, totally, exactly as it is

Watching the panicking

More crying

Being one

Being very very aware

Noticing and letting go of effort in one swift move

Compulsive clenching

Compassion

Dissolving

Disillusion

Dying without the novelty

Being ok vey very briefly and for no apparent reason/because of no reason./?

Wanting distraction

Respecting needing distraction

Getting out of the way of intelligent coping mechanisms

Villifying coping mechanisms

Understanding only in retrospect

Frustration

Compassion, deep, like warm water

Compassion, hard, like being ****** vey very slowly

Torture

Life-giving torture

Never wanting to stop

Marveling

Abundance like grace, like not deserving, like not needing to be deserving, like deserving is perverse language

Tasting everything

Endless kaleidoscopes of being and tasting and knowing

Non visual seeing

Clarity, brightness, nothing is a problem

Being alive

Being sososo tired

Wanting to rest, to die into void and nothing

Wanting to hibernate

Wanting to still

Dying to get off

Begging to get off

Finding the edge more thrilling than the center (because then the center can be anything at all?)

Loving all the previous versions of this being

Needing to hate, loathe, earlier renditions of this being

Hating repulsion

Trusting repulsion

Getting stuck because resisting repulsion

Knowing that there's no way out

Knowing that the way out that I'm seeking isn't a way out

Not wanting to do the work

Dancing around the center, constantly

Feeling dizzy with chaos, with knowledge of power

Feeling comfortable with mediocrity

Hating mediocrity

Waking up with jaw tension from the enormity of my own suppressed power

Telling stories about sensations

Relying on self-bullying methods I know don't work

Perfecting the art of pretending

Perfecting the art of self-deception

Wanting to make the stakes higher

Being overwhelmed by my own storytelling

Not wanting to give stories credibility by dispelling them

Naval gazing

Loving philosophy

Feeling dried up, tired, stagnant, disinterested, not engaged, not here.

Sleepwalking. Sleep writing. Sleep talking. Sleep caring

Not sleeping

Vivid dreaming

High weirdness

Questioning my sanity

Romanticizing insanity

Wanting to blur all boundaries

Wanting to smooth the edges of reality

Questioning reality

Destabilizing reality

Feeling destabilized

Feeling irresponsible

Guilt

Feeling sick and tired

Feeling scared

Feeling hopeless

Wanting to reach out

Feeling like everything is inevitable

Feeling like suffering is inevitable

Recognizing kindness

Discerning well (properly? Clearly? Well.)

Fearful trusting

Thinking too much

Not wanting to love my dad as much as I do.

Chasing the intellectual high

Disappointment

No need for resolution

Feeling caught in existence

Feeling caught up. Like in a potato sack; I can explore the exact measure of my confinement, the sensorial elements, the scratchiness, the filtering light from the outside, the stagnation, the wanting to stretch.

I love this being.

This. It's not a problem.

Confusing familiarity with comfort

Confusing comfort with peace

Reifying confusion, but not really

Yielding, on my knees, heart to the sky

Seeing through, like pinholes in a perfectly realistic backdrop

Dispelling everything

Stripping away the Stripping away

Trying to stand still and feel

Wanting to be convinced by rage

Always loving Sad, not despondent, just sad

Feeling continuous

Feeling fragmented

Feeling like motion, like flow

Feeling like thousands of still frames, constant flickering

Grasping at impermanence

Resting in the middle

Dancing down the tightrope

Knowing perfect poise, so so brief

Everything is hysterically funny

Hysterically

But also just plain humorous

And absurd

Loving people

Feeling grateful for people

Seeing beauty everywhere

Always coming back

Like an epic

Like a great love story

Like a violin solo in a forbidden song

Like the last wring of that silk dress you're not supposed to squeeze dry

Knowing the inside of my hand

Knowing teenage shame

Knowing being yelled at, towered over, by my dad, in a narrow
hallway, eyes glued to speckled floor tiles, feeling small, nowhere to go

Loving with my body, with my hands, with my mouth, with my whole entire strong soft body

Crying with tears, and snot, and heaving

Becoming one single, concentrated point

Wanting to envelope everything. Really. Actually. With my body.

I am not this voice

Or this writer

Or this narrator

Though I am also all that

Everything (physically) erased, nothing ever forgotten. Every word spoken or written is engrained in my brain, I will never be the same. Unlike no other you came you conquered you (changed). Seven existential hours that would change my DNA and internal making, making, making what I knew up until then surprisingly malleable. Your words your actions your face your voice filled up every millimeter of me that everything else inside was pushed to the brim and seeped out of my pores. Everything I once was became everything you ever were, ever are. There is a chair in the back of my mind that is reserved for you to sit there and continue to hotwire (my mind) and thoughts into something much better than I ever could have fathomed. Your puppet strings control what and who I am and it is impossible to think there is any other living organism that could possess that undeniable ability. There is a keyhole somewhere inside myself. There is a key inside of you. Keyholes the size of pinholes as vast as Sirius. Small, believable, existing. Keys the shape of orchids and birch as natural as the metamorphosis of roots (into) trees. I never knew what (my) purpose was until you. Or maybe I always knew what I was before you and you opened the windows to the (soul) otherwise known as brown eyes so timid to everyone besides you. The smallest organs became so (full of) nothing but visions of you. There is a special place in my slowly beating heart perfectly executed to fit all of you. A twin bed that only holds one girl has an infinite amount of room for whatever (love) you could continue to bring into my life. The impossibility to (for)get and erase has left me with an endless amount of hope to see you again. The possibility of knowing that you are still somewhere out there and I am still somewhere down here, although unsure where. I cannot ascertain whether or not feelings are reciprocated but I know I know they are. I know you know where you are. I know you know I do not know where I am but you could figure it all out for me. You had it all figured out for me. Plans stretched farther than the 3000 miles separating my red string from yours. Our strings are still connected. There is nothing in the world that can cut them no matter the distance no matter the people no matter the time no matter the place. I know and somehow you know fate will bring our two oceans together. One calm ocean full of creatures so logical and tides so serene they make a beautifully flawed human being known as yourself. One ocean plagued by waves and uncertainty as to what is below the surface that makes up a human being, me. Both oceans surround land full of love. Our continents will merge. Our love will emerge. (You, only you.)

So much locked within bubbling at the surface
Pinholes of strain attempt to release pressure
Its immensity can't be touched by a million such holes
Desire to discard the cloak grows with every breath
But the fear of being unveiled and naked prevents it
As the molehills burn and the fires are extinguished
Mountains emerge in silence, born of the forgotten ashes
Smoldering embers give rise to the unfathomable
Gargantuan by comparison and seemingly unstoppable
Can such enormity be reigned in,
Or will trying be a harsh lesson in futility?
Never give up or knowing when to do so
Holding tightly or letting go
To analyze or forget
No clear cut paths in the forest of self-destruction

two of them
to my naked, simian eye
are identical twins

though one, a mere millennium
of light years away, performs its
magical fusion yet today

the other disappeared before
dinosaurs devolved; its phantom
photons now without a source

but both poke pinholes
in the blanket of night, gifting
what some call divine light

not I, for if gods were igniting
those gaseous masses, they would both
yet be furious and fiery white

and not tricking my meager sight,
deceiving me into believing, there is
eternity in an eternally dying sky

This must be what they mean by growing up.
Skin worn with boyish charm,
but I feel old in my bones.
The holes in my marrow house stagnant air;
echoes of unheard words
and half-forgotten dreams
keyhole-peek through hairline fractures.

There must be something in the wind,
the way the dust is kicked up from
the soles of our shoes
to dance with the last night’s
idle bedtime prayers,
and find intimacy with dew
that will never fall out of love with grass.

We said,
Black out the lights so that I can
catch my breath again…
and we looked for shade under rootless trees
and couldn’t quite decide whether the night sky
was everything our grandfathers made believe
in stories that smelled like cigar smoke
and typewriter ink,
or if it was nothing more than
card stock and pinholes.

And as the footsteps that find comfort in concrete
step over our flickering, kerosene city lights,
We hummed hymns into the
crevices of our collarbones
and serenaded the sky with
our songs of sin.
They interpreted the tip-toeing crescendos
for the hearsay of rats
and the cricket gospel of violin legs.

But what they never understood is that
I came clean with careful lungs.
Listen,
the air was a draft drawn through
an almost silent note of a harmonica,
*This Town is more fragile than a whisper.

In the bardo*
you are floating
aboard the barge of couldhavebeens
and moments that were unseen
not the world
not a boy or a girl
lost
Lost boys are found toys for Thor’s hands
to play with
Lightening lick of guitar solo
striking health into blushed cheeks
Soon you’ll no longer need to be
painted
The eye patches will be removed
and pirate life won’t mean
Scrounging and wishing for an oasis
you’ll throw a life saver
throw a light saber
Glisten the sparkzap through tables
laden with all that’s been spat
from vitriolic minds

Listen
sore elbows from nudging bad spirits away
Blades of bone
and intention can saw through sadness
to the light beyond
like the sky’s pinholes
Stars aren't the cuttings of children
the dark is just a covering
Poke a finger through
Don't fear if you get stuck
for it is only the backdrop to a stage
hiding the mass of light
only there to protect us from blinding joy
Like sunglasses
So be one with your sadness

Saturday tastes like bitter tea
Stuck between atoms that cannot be seen
The mirror ripples and the motor bleeds
Wrap up in syran and lie in the streets
The business end is no place to stay
Water from the naval is the only grace
Drink it in and enjoy your night
Your touch is candle wax acid bite

Let me remind you that the company sings
They never stay quiet about the things we've seen
Don't look now but we're about to drown
These are the things I think when you go down

Make skin with my teeth and a hard blast beat
Summer lovin burnin hot rain in the road
Cigarette pinholes and a lump in my throat
We all float on water when we croak.
Choke on smoke, Columbian coke
Serrated knives at the end of a rope
The knots fall off, the calls all stop
And the needle in my neck is soaked

We see the stars on our ceiling
We see fireworks on the walls

The world makes noise when the sun retreats
To weep with the fishes while the movie repeats
They sleep in the fission circle glowing, we eat
The sick on my pin cushion, unfurl, flowing, recede
Be me and see the need to breathe the ivory creed
Planting the seed for the last of my blood
Feel the trees grow in your lungs and free
Yourself from superstitions of heaven and love

Let me remind you that the company sings
They won't keep quiet about things we've seen
Stars on the ceiling
Don't look now but we're all gonna drown
These are the things I think when you go down
Fireworks on the walls

Still more, in words

In experience

Confusing Familiarity with Comfort

Confusing Comfort with Peace

Reifying confusion, but not successfully

Yielding, on my knees, heart to the sky

Forgetting

Seeing through, a single pinhole in a perfectly realistic backdrop

Pinholes everywhere, more than can be contained

Not containing

Torn all over

Dispelling everything

Stripping away the Stripping away

Trying to stand very still and very quite so I can feel, hear, sense

Perfect realism

Wanting to be convinced by rage

Agitation, but only conceptual

Feeling tight

Feeling rehearsed

Feeling like an imposter

Wanting to impress

Wanting to be convinced of Self, of Realness

Fortified by others knowing, or preferably- admiration

Like being constructed out of sets of other peoples' eyes

Like being made real by propagating in more minds, many more minds, specific minds. In countless beating and virtual hearts, likes, thumbs up

Not wanting to be forgotten, while alive, while dead

Taxed by maintenance and constant imminent collapse

Compassion, like collapsing into a safe lap

Relinquishing

No pretense

Bare being

More naked than when unclothed

Total exposure

Outed, in the light of knowing

Self forgetting and glimpses of freedom

Trusting sighing

Always loving Sad, not despondent, just sad

Feeling continuous

Feeling fragmented

Feeling like motion, like flow

Feeling like thousands of still frames, constant flickering

Grasping at impermanence, visceral

Resting in the middle

Dancing down the tightrope

Knowing perfect poise, brief equilibrium

Reifying stability. Gone.

Everything is hysterically funny

Hysterically

But also, sometimes, just plain humorous

And absurd

Crying

Loving people

Grateful for people

Seeing beauty everywhere

Encountering this, intimate, me, indistinguishable being, but everywhere

Ouch

Awareness

Always coming back

Like an epic

Like a great love story

Like the last wring of that silk dress you weren't supposed to squeeze dry

Feeling like I shouldn't know what I know, like I couldn't. This must be illegal, cosmically illegal

Knowing the inside of my hand

Knowing teenage shame

Knowing being yelled at, towered over, by my dad, in a narrow hallway, eyes glued to speckled floor tiles, feeling small

Loving with my body, with my hands, with my mouth, with my whole entire strong softness

Loving with understanding

Loving with teeth and nails

Music, lacerating

Crying with tears, and snot, and heaving

Becoming one single, concentrated point

Wanting to envelope everything. Really. Actually. Like physically with my body.

Knowing I am not this voice

Or this writer

Or this narrator

Though I am also all that

Distant trains still sound alarms,
Blinds are drawn, people yawn,
It's time to call the day.

The sun's turned off,
The moon's turned on,
The stars like pinholes
Blink till dawn.
The animals are bedded
On the farm;
Beneath this counterpane we're warm.

Today our work is done;
Tomorrow worries not begun.
But tonight I'll sleep
Like the seventh son.

A barren home,
but not of things,
where silence wanders
curiously
down the empty halls.
"Who's there?"
She stands to peek
through door ajar
at the dust  ::BOOM::
on the floor.  ::BOOM::

Nothing's stirred
and all's in place
and all is still
but subject’s face:
fieldstone hues
and wrinkles too.
A desol't eve
in fickle blue,
she’s marching dusk
with throated heart.

Purpled cirri
and pinholes white
high above her
stalwart ceiling.
Shunted thought.
Listless thunder.
Turn on heel
to pinioned sleep;
a reeling sanct,
an effete lover.

When you were a little girl, did you think love was an easy concept to grasp? Didn't it make you laugh the way that everyone said,
"It's undefinable, it's complicated, it's the root of so much pain"?
When I was a young boy, I used to sift through sand looking for the broken beer bottles
Because I wanted to try and find beauty in something horrible.

So I have done for years.
I've lied, cheated, stolen... sometimes from my own family members.
I used to assume I could pop into your life any time
Like a bad father
And you'd come running into my arms.
Just like a bad father.

When I left you standing at the altar, dressed like June Carter
I remember wishing I could have altered my timeline
So I could be Johnny for real, and we could make it big
People could start writing our names on jail cell walls
"R.I.P. Alex and Sidney"

These are the days where I scatter papers around my room
Pinholes in the carpet from relight after relight
Trying to find the right words to say
To convince you that I'm not the same as I used to be.
I've seen my own eyes gazing at me without a mirror
I've seen galaxies screaming at me and exploding

You pull my heart-strings.
You separate my anxieties.
You are the little bit of crazy within me
And when I let it out it's all sadness and wine
But when you let go, you're just a sugar plum fairy.
You dance and you sing and you laugh like I were a comedian.

Oh, that's right, I am a comedian.

Well, if my job is to make people laugh
Then my last laugh would be you.
This is a bad time, I know
But I still would do anything to rewrite our history.

I can wait a year if you want to run your course
Maybe you'll stay in our little town.

But this poem is to tell you
Your clothes should be in my laundry.

The eyes snap open,
Like the shutter on a camera,
Pupils fixed and tracking,
Watching every move,
Never blinking,
Pinholes peering into the depths of you,
Below subconscious,
Leering at your mind,
Keeping record of your every move,
Seeing inside,
Knowing your thoughts,  
Knowing what it thinks to be 'you'
A total surprise,
'no one can tell, right?'
It's like beauty,
Obvious to some,
Invisible to others,
I know ,if you know, and dread these dreams,
release me.

whipped back across the line
in harsh tones of childhood trauma
vile acidic tongue
lapped and corroded the biodome,
which maintains the constructs
of who I am needed to be
white smoke fills the black space
changing gray as it wafts through
ever so slowly

Patch the chemical burn!
Patch it NOW!

before it compromises emotion
before it spreads and corrupts
the foundation of all
the slightest justification
can stop the seepage
Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies
honesty isn't truth
when used as a weapon

watching the dome slowly fail
smoke seeping through pinholes
waiting for the death of hope
frozen in place by hateful expressions
of those who claim not to care

Touch the sky with me
and we can fly, fly, fly
away from these places,
wrong faces, all the traces
of the spaces we created
between our lonely hearts
and forgotten minds;
the parts of us that shouldn't exist
crying in their cavernous
pinholes, echoing
and rupturing in feeling
through the waves of something
more, something undeniable
and true. The pinprick
in which my emotions
are contained
is gargling with a blood
that pours black yet,
as it trickles through
me, I can feel it restoring beauty
to the yellowed valleys of my skin.

i have scars of your fingerprints
blemishes shaped like your lips
cracks in my spine
from the sound of your voice
and pinholes in my heart
from the way you look at me

We care for her, brushing her tangled locks, soothing her calloused feet.
And yet, an empty gaze never falters, never flinches.
She remains a stone that never cracks.
To see our deeds firsthand is to peer into a void none could bear to imagine.

We moisten her lips with raindrops. We flex her bones with thunder.
A palm to her chest reveals a faint heartbeat. But what can we do?

There are things a soul cannot unsee.
Things forever etched across the mind's lucid eye.
The cries of ghosts and the laughter of someone else,
As there will always be another.
Another to smile when we frown. Another to rejoice when we fall.
A balance is maintained, and we all struggle for release.
If only her eyes could see that.

She swallows once, quenching her throat with dew from a leaf.
At last, a tear forms as she accepts Fate's design.
The chair fades away, and the canopy is pulled taut.
... Those pinholes twinkle unusual.
We each take a hand, and her eyes gleam with life.

"Follow us, sister. These stars shine for you."

Back
         when       we still saw things
through Incandescent eyes &
undiscovered memories
                        waited for us
like
             a first snow in January
She showed me the midnight sky &
                      All the blinding pinholes in it
     where
                     angels peeked at us
The
watercolor sunrises
        while lying on the hood of her car
                         How
kisses                on the forehead
              could mend shattered hearts &
    scattered                         thoughts
         & chasing each other
through art galleries
        out         into droplets of rain
                brought us
closer        
               to
                          god
Those days when
riding on trolleys or
         drifting off to sleep    next to each other
Meant believing in love
           because
                            we wanted to
Furthest from my mind was
              the simple fact,
                        That she
        could make my entire     atmosphere
Collapse into nothingness
                &                        She did
She introduced me
                        to the stars & the sky
&
              willfully brought them down
         on top of me

the grass is coarse beneath us
but your hand is smooth in mine.
the summer humidity
has run its fingers through your hair
and the makeup that you didn't need
is smeared beneath your eyes
but you're still beautiful.
we don't speak any words
but the rising and falling of your chest
says everything we need to know.
we look to the inky black canvas
of the night sky
pricked by tiny pinholes of light
that are actually far larger
than we could ever comprehend.
the fireflies enact a light show
as a maestro cicada plays his concerto
and this summer setting seems perfect
but nowhere near as perfect as you.

Beautiful night's sky,
a splattered canvas of light peeking at me through pinholes,
watching me..
mocking me..
wondering why I am alone.

It is too fair a picture to look at alone.
I try to stare at my feet.

All love's efforts, dreams, and hopes,
put through the meat grinder and wrapped with a bow.

Why do the stars taunt me with their judgmental eyes?
What do they know anyway?

Under these starry skies,
I used to hold her so close it hurt.
I kissed her told her everything would be ok.

Now I can't bear to look at them.  
I try to stare at my feet.

Beautiful, starry sky...
Another casualty of war.

Under a bold lettering of pinholes
  A night time sky cast in early essence
Lay - infog.the remains of a broken bell
  Hidden in a lost hum of silence,
   The first cries- a grebe or grieve..
For the time to rest our eyes is over
The blue starts to show again, slowly
Whats waiting in an envelope,
Fortune cookie type numbers odometer
Coffee
Our radio kicking back into itself
Folk take buses , trains, automobiles
Some walk- others sleep
And i . Breathe
And cough
Put my shoes back on
Come to a stop to-
Wait in line for a cigar
Go home and climb sore, not soar
Aching- into the only bed i long for
My dreams

He reached into the paper bag his friend handed over and pulled out a small picture frame.

“Do you want it?” his friend asked.

He turned it over carefully to see what was in the frame. Through the glass, he saw a beetle mounted in cotton, displayed along with a strip of paper that held its name. It looked like something good to have hanging in his room.

“Yeah, but why?” No one just gives away nice things. At least no one gives stuff away without a reason.
“Why, what?”
“Why are you just giving stuff away?”
“Oh,” silence, “I just don’t need it.”

It was a non-answer, a truism, something people say just to get people to asking questions without lying. That’s not enough, he thought. If there was anything he knew about his friend, it was that he liked to talk.

“Wait, so why don’t you need it?”
“Just take the whole bag. Maybe just give back the 3DS games”

He turned the frame around. There was a mark in the back, like someone tried to open it up with ballpoint pen that ran out of ink. Whoever made it gave up after one try but still managed to leave pinholes in the cardboard.

“Are you sure?”
“I think you’re asking too many questions for free stuff, guy”

He looked through his friend’s bag, wondering what else was inside. It was clothes, mostly, and ruffling through it wafted up a scent. The smell and the fabric, it was decidedly feminine to him. He had more questions, more thoughts to investigate.

A car, pulled over next to them. “My ride’s here,” his friend said.

He looked at the beetle. Its wing casings were a sickly yellow. He saw a few writhing brown dots come from under it. He felt sick. Maggots, he thought.

“Carlos,” he called out, handing back the bag, “I’ll keep the beetle”

His friend turned back, took the bag and left.

Hearts, not heralded in art,
Are broken, mended,
Beating, fragile and still.
We are surrounded;
The unknown to know
The aches and pleasures,
The confusion with love and despair,
Remorse and resentment;
The empty longings,
The burning fulfilment.
Cave walls, train trestles and sidewalks
Are sprayed in verses of universality.
The coupling, birthing and dying
Are the continuous unison that endures
Through the elasticity of love.
Ready to wrap the unravelling.
Our teeth may become straws,
Our ears pinholes,
Our eyes pinwheels,
Our skulls pinheads,
Our bodies pincushions;
But keep heart.

Soft rain has fallen
And tiny jewels are fastened to the landscape.
Succulent prisms lay strewn about
And the night sky hums.
Fumbling branches, the North Wind has apples
Falling to the damp earth -
A 'thud' becomes a murmuur in the lush,
A blanket of dead leaves
Absorb ripe fruit
And clouds part, revealing the full moon
A blush of white lights
Sparkle in the wet eyes of stray dogs.
The Milky Way... gilding creation
With Giants the size of pinholes
In a black melon.
Between low hanging clouds, a billion worlds burn.
And earthworms, born without eyes...
Look up.

To marvel at the Heavens as they drown.

the vast sky glisters*
with millions of pinholes
on this clear bush night

we are fortunate
who view such a bright display
*its brilliance so grand

We turn around

and find  pinholes,

water streams of light,

from stars

who swallowed

and took our lives.



With sounds of snorts

and whiskered,

bully throats.



Whose heart

am I searching,

in this season of

hello goodbyes?



We look

upon them long

into night,

such twinkles,

of stars

that stole our loves -

their sweet

tender smiles.



Give back our dreamers.



Lend to us more - for years

into years.



2012 Barry Comer