Everyday’s affliction with what we know is missing
Countless moments wishing that fishing was as simple as whistling
Remembering that willows wither in winters un-warmed
and wandering wonders willfully repose when rivaled against ripening woes
Come closer potential memories of exposes’
Clothes skydiving with expectations of faceplanting into the floor
Lady classifications disguise the actions depicting a *****
Heaping hopefuls cascade over glistening gazes that persuade the perilous to lay dormant
Come closer to the oops
That second guess in the back of your head that taps the shoulder and says go
That same go that was an initial no and now corruption has spidered the criteria


It seems the cat may have found the trick to the ball of yarn

Superimposing marks
On red, swollen lips
Bit and bled from chattering teeth
That tolls nervous as a cuckoo clock chirps.

A bumpy road with
Spidered cracks
Like a well dried jerky strip
Wrinkled, and tough.
Bit and chewed
With no bones underneath
And no guts to go forward.

Warning skies
Of red in the morning.
And thunderstorming nights
That flash with lighting so intense
You'd think an old-age photo party was commenced way up high.
And rain so furious
You'd think the clouds were tearing themselves to pieces.*
--------------------------------------------------------­-----------------------------------------------------------------­-------------

As a cloud,
I think I should add
That we aren't all fluffy and white
Nor scary and dark.

Our seasons do not come easily
For we undergo much
To make it "rain."

And even more to keep it calm.

Thunder is not a weathering crash,
It is yelling from another room.
And the lightning flash,
rage,
That leads to liquid pain.

The hard pressed wind that tosses your hair
Are witheld screams
until tolerance level reaches maximum,
And snaps. Like that old willow's trunk,
Wrenched from the earth,
Because the sky is powerful
And we are only along for the ride.

But, there is sunshine that warms our tops
While the bottoms are in shadow,
wrought in darkness that writhe along uneven surfaces.
But, there is moonlight that makes us gleam,
Like silver was sewn into sides.
But she is not always there,
And as her light fades
So
Do
We.

Dedicated to John and Bob

From first flesh we move down widening halls
That lead to lives of wondrous walls.

Our spidered fingers gripped walls of brick,
Cruets, cups and candle sticks.
Incense clouded open graves
When we too believed we too were saved.

Between Annex walls we learned our phonics,
On tin-roofed walls we lived our comics.
Garage walls scaled showed different views,
Kitchen walls steamed with soups and stews.
Our school yard walls tallied pitches
That marked our summers of youth and wishes.

Now lift memory's pane and go back
To the white-framed walls of a secret shack.
There, in confusion we would cling
To the unknown wonders girls would bring.
These young boys' walls we both outgrew;
Now new walls sprang, as we did too.

Coffee House walls offered something new.
Wet kisses lingered near shadowy walls,
We heard poetry read in a backroom stall.
Recreationals made our new skin crawl.

Cliff walls were breached by stairs of clay,
Carved by Incas on a turquoise day.
Tent walls echoed with impish fray,
Green walls beckoned at the end of day.
These walls gave rise to hot desires,
Like Vikings planning funeral pyres.
New music, cheers and weekend guests
Stood us ***** to pound our chests.

Those walls no longer ring our shores;
Time swept us forward with worldly lures.
We doffed our coats of suede and frills,
And donned new clothes and workday skills.
The walls of work are a rocky climb,
Stones laid by us, for yours and mine.
Such towers & turrets of heart & hearth
Guard all we know of any worth.

I see distant walls on cliffs, in fields;
Where do they lead? What will they yield?
Yet, there three friends climb one more hill,
Climb one more wall. Then all is still.

Call me by another name.
Call me waspish,
or boyish,
or fountain-mouthed.
Prate about the crooked,
curved curls of my red-ribbon tongue.
Whisper myths down spidered-ice hallways
about the melted wax love games
fixed between dust-dressed candlesticks,
and the unfaithful rumors
of wine-stained table cloths.

Call me by another name.
Call me button-eyed,
and hollow,
and brittle-garden crucified;
Bind my face with burlap
and replace my spine with
a wood-splintering post;
dry my veins gold
so that my flannel fetters in
the tornado-dry breath
of fraying hay.
I'll fight off autumn winds and
the gossip of crows.

Don't fuse my footsteps to the echos
of Lightning Bearers and Stilt-legged Shadows;
Fasten my shoelaces to the
anchor dreams of drowning cannonballs
where I will only spell stories
with the sharp skin of coral reefs.
Call me by another name.
Call me typewriter-toothed,
or backwash,
or eight-legged.
Just prescribe me a name
that I can live up to.

From the visions of sparrow vanguards
that fly insatiably onward.
From the tombs of ancient hearts draped
in flowing, moth-eaten fabric.
From the fighter jets stalling somewhere
above solitary and succinct farmlands.
From the bottom of a broken purple
sunset that lies embossed on my brain.
From the silliest half-thought left
unvoiced in the vagrant light of a damp
and desolate lamp lying in a landfill.
From several mouths at once.
From oracles cross-legged in caves.
From the gills of a catfish on a hook.
From mythical forgeries and the perjurer's tongue.
To the subdued hope resting in a
trembling hand gripped round its pen.
To satisfaction that is oneness that
seems to never arrive but is there
all along.
To the peaks of the Himalayas.
To my spidered desk light, shallow with doubt.
To my flustered and torrential page.

Oh, Progress!  We found you at the back of
The movie theater, spidered around a boy
And we watched.  Progress, couldn’t you
Wait til the previews were over?
At least we could tell he was gentle.

Which reminds me of the story of the father
Who beat his son until the son
Could beat back, and after the son
Killed his father he went cross country
Beating everyone on the way
Beating the mailman, the bar back, the students
He kept on traveling until he knew he was
Unbeatable
And he traveled more and went on beating
When he met his dad in down in Santa Fe
They sat down to drinks and talked
About beatings and beatings
Then they kept traveling West.

Yes, Progress you were a ***** girl
Ignoring whatever went up on the screen.
18 seconds of mutilated armies and a Noble Charmer’s
Ascent to the throne.
17 seconds of painstaking laughter and a fat man.
19 seconds of a young man’s rise to success
His defeats, resilience, his ceaseless winking
And his moral fiscal triumph in the end.
16 seconds of naughty men in suits drinking highballs.

For a movie theater, the chandelier was immense.
Dangling, finely cut glass
Suspended over the audience, crystals tapering
Down to rows of translucent points.

almond fronds for  visions
spidered eyes black a wink kisses
the cheeks   a sunrise nose spry
lips of tangerine peels left after eating  the heart
calmest flowing rivers shoulders of
the places bream nip
for joy under a water slip
she is jungled
shy as the panther in the shadows
sleuthing blending in and standing out
when your eyes do meet a sudden
reality
by god she is  beauty
the forest the green lush
thickets impenetrable dark illusive
illusory a dream a destroyer saviour a wild thing
a nerve fiber a coiled up  bindle  
of masks and hard sharpnesses and soft fur
purr

The spidered light of a September night,
shallow and sparsely flung about the room,
reminisces the sound of a phoenix in flight,
while webs inside the rafters loom.
The phoenix song is like the pallid glow of a chandelier.
Waning, yet resilient,
it coos in mystic merriment
melodies in the key of a rattling nearby mirror.
Every so often the song completely stops,
filling me with a silent bit of despair.
Commonly this follows loud scores of pops
indicating the cycle residing in the flare:
into ashes the song bird bursts again.
It's Rudolphish nose begins to scrunch up ---
I see it even now as I fill my water-cup ---
a sort of reincarnation acumen.
But the bird isn't really real or here;
it's more of a half-truth or memory,
similar to tales of the origins of tea.
It sways, forgetful on my cerebral pier,
nearly falling into the waves of my brain,
dipping it's feather mid-refrain,
repeating it's song again and again,
and again.

I watch the blade pierce my skin, yet I feel nothing

Pearls of blood gather in the seams of the wound

An errant thumb smears across the coppery beads of life

Staining the subtle, spidered paths of my palms

I lack the courage to push deeper

I try not to curse the steel as I feel my hand shaking

A crooked "T" forms out of the scar tissue

An odd accompaniment to the fading india ink smiley face I so proudly engraved at 12

The angry pink flesh of my grief cries out for recognition

With a pasty blue grin, the naivety of my youth only mocks this unspeakable pain

Tears fall quietly down my face as I prepare for another wave of pretending...

Another wave of forgetting
   Of regretting...
      Of blood letting.

Perhaps you don't know but I'm from-
San Diego!
Where the sun bursts in a sky of absolute blue
364 days a year
I mean, nothing's perfect
When you are born in good weather and chill attitudes
You can't help but be a beacon of happiness and optimism

So as soon as my mother struck the legs of my cradle
into the sand of sweet, sweet beach
Sun soaked into my hollow bones
Drumming laughter, laughter, laughter into my palms
And warmth lingers still on my deceptively pale skin

So that when a storm strengthens and the clouds rage and upset is on the brink
All I have to do is catch my reflection and see the yellow ring pressed around the pupils of my eyes
to know it'll all be fine
And maybe then some

Perhaps you don't know but I moved to San Francisco
to be alone
To shelter myself in all things books and tea and gorgeous grey
Here I revel in myself, in my own time
In the anonymity of fog and the beat of the city

I have logged countless thoughts on bus rides
-Like those on love and life and intelligence and how to grab the window seat away from the homeless man

Here I am alone
Not to say that I have no company but rather that I can seek seclusion with such ease and grace

Here I construct my mask
from pavement and street art
Wrap myself in my own blanket of fog
Who is she? Nobody can ask
Nobody can see me
Thank god, I can hide here


Perhaps you don't know that I dream of
Thailand
Of ripe, juicy mangoes that taste like life itself
Of bustle and confusion I can wipe off with my sweat
Of tastes my tongue has yet to meet and sounds my ear may just shrink from
but Thailand is a challenge
And so I dream of grasping dirt in my spidered hands, raising earth above my head and shouting
VICTORY

Perhaps you don't know that I dream of the world
Of smiles and laughter, Of seclusion and mystery, Of challenges and of mangoes
You see, I collect country facts like the social butterfly collects friends
I gobble them up and then spit some back out
And no matter the case
I know place is important
And that it's also not
but either way we all think one of two things
Where are my feet standing?
Where am I going next?

the stained glass window in my bathroom is broken
I see it every time I ***
three shards of missing colored glass
bleeding non-filtered sunlight -
a washed-out contrast to the flavored
beams shining next to those jagged wounds

a more discerning eye might notice
  the scars
on two more pieces of tinted glass;
cracks that promise
to sacrifice their host, hint at
a future for the frame with less glass
and remind of it's eventual doom

I’ve often considered repairing that window
but I never do
the missing glass, spiderweb cracks  the flaws
make the window less ideal,
but more perfect

Washing my hands today, my face illuminated by
green light,
  red light,
    yellow light,
      broken light,
        and spidered light through cracks of glass
      I think again;
I really need to replace
that glass.

I used to be a dried up riverbed.
Desert sand ran in my veins.
I was the wasteland, the dust bowl of my sadness.
And somewhere inside for all those years, the waters rose, the storm brewed.
I never really noticed.
Until one day I cracked down the middle like a clay ***,
And everyone got to see the rainstorm of my tears.
They fell with all the force of a roll of thunder,
And all the searing heat of a lightning strike,
And all the hopeless endless downpour of a monsoon.
They fell and woke me up, and in my anguish little cracks spidered out until I was a web of fissures,
And of a sudden I fell away.
It feels odd to have no shell anymore,
It feels strange to cry in front of strangers when they pry into my heart.
I was never that girl.
I was a desert, dry as bone bleached by the sun, and as hard, and as abused.
And now I am a river, fed by the rain of my troubles drumming on my back, and my feelings show on my face not because I cannot stop them but because I no longer have the will to.
For months I was tired, and when I stopped drowning I realized that there was no going back.
I cannot drag myself to dry land, and so I must learn to swim the waters of myself, however deep, however dark, however painful.
I must learn to hold my breath, and let the tears fall when they will.
I am a river.
Stopping the tears never stops the pain.
This I have learned.

For a year now,
that cat balanced on the fence,

mewing the distance
of the alley ways.

Oh, how that animus
loved to complain.

his lonely cries
and the sound of clocks keeping time,

could keep me awake,
my sleep scattered for days.

Unprepared,
my eyes form rivers

spidered into tributaries,
that ***** out, in search of Your Seven Seas.

my hands treading the water,
attempting to pull out consistency.

i am amazed,
how at once You can both

stand me
and buckle my knees.

Quiet, now.
The Conductor speaks,

wet your mouths
and reeds,

for soon,
He'll point to you

and say,
"sing! small child, sing!"

Forty miles
Pieced by gannet
The saint who never was
Keening through skirts of sleet
Her broken psalm
Against time

Forty miles
To jaws of gabbro , dark Hirta
Boreray, Stac Li. Towering teeth
Bird-crammed. Men spidered, scaled
Over a void where one fall
Could blacken time

Forty miles
The wheel spun, warping language
The world weaved on
Behind oiled womens fingers
Picking at time

Forty miles
Over sheened cobbles to the bay
Men and dogs taken last
Out of a mornings haar
To stranger seas in time

I can only say I miss you in so many ways.
My syllables plunge like suicides
Into the space between us
the cold glaze of your wine-dark eyes
unmoved.

In my memory, they are still bright
Peeking around the old oak as we played tag like children
The scrape of bark across arms
The warm press of your waist in my hands
the sweet brightness of lemon and gardenia cascading from your hair.  
Now when I reach for you
There is only the chasm of cool air
across our bed, the rise of your shoulder
the fractured points of ambient light
illuminating the Cassiopeia constellation of beauty marks  
At the nape of your neck
I once kissed every night.
My lips still remember the feather touches of your hair,
The heat of your back against the curled sanctuary of my chest.
But now we are empty cloisters,
And when I hold my dreams before you
Like pairs of polished dimes
You tell me they,
and I
mean nothing.

You drive one, pink-nailed finger through the cavity of my loneliness
relishing in the slow soft flesh
That will always bend to you
Even when you turn away.
I am the sea
limbs bruised black
From the slamming of waves on levee
And I want nothing more
Than to flood you.

I am tired
Of reminding you that I miss him, too.
That every day
I feel his phantom weight in my arms
Wake in the night
To a changeling’s cry.
And I know it is the grief-bored holes
That drive us into cavernous waste,
Poison the well between us.
I see the wine bottles
You hide behind the washer,
the way you only clean his room when drunk,
Stumbling, teary-eyed, the way you always hit the mobile
When dusting the crib,
and its twinkling notes
Collapse around you.

I can only say I love you
In so many ways,
The folded laundry, sunflowers,
The lingering gaze on your still effortless grace, whispered “you’re beautifuls” across the night,
The favorite candy bar I find uneaten in the trash.  

Can you hear
The scraping rift of each fissure
Running down my back
The spidered cracks
You only drive wider—
Are you only waiting
For the shatter?

Harmonious chapters of blank page nights,
Halloween soon around the bend, all beauty comes to and end in here, it suits you for social daunt freight!!!!

Bald currupters stareth down your colleagues path of discourse,
Mellow breaks to cellos own silence,
Malice comes in remorse!!!!

Taint mercury water,
Dew is pasteurized ,
All gets criticized when it's your self led to hence slaughter!!!

Sharia law drastically overtakes these black widowed spidered bunks,
Politics are in the roles.....

Pipes to glass, as thy glass flows to bowls!
This indefinitely is not thy warm wanted heaven!!!!

The barn door swings open
with a heave of rusted chain,
padlock clanking on timber.

Step inside the barn
and the air is cooler.
Dust motes hang
in shafts of light.
High above you, witness tobacco sticks
tucked into the crossbeams like bones.

The tractor is dead.
But there is a baby doll
propped against the wall.
She has wisps of desiccated hair
and straight bangs that hang
over an empty eye socket.
Her bland face is spidered with cracks.
The ragged hole in her chest—
such an indelicate wound—
reveals a wire skeleton.
Her right hand, missing three fingers,
cannot smooth the tatters of her dress.
Her naked feet are ***** but
undiminished and intact.
She smiles, almost.

The doll watches you watching her.
A wasp lands on her one good eye.

You step toward her through slants of light,
dust settling on your shoulders and shoes.
The metal roof temporarily catches
the shadows of planes and birds and clouds.
As mice scurry beneath canvas drop cloths,
the barn door closes slowly behind you,
pushed by an unexpected breeze.

Many summers ago
you were married in this barn;
it rose up like a cathedral around you—
white candles and the smell of fresh straw,
relatives warm in their folding chairs,
a man playing acoustic guitar, golden rings.

The old baby you see is new,
detritus gathered alongside
dull hacksaws, scraps of lumber,
the mechanics of broken things.

It is time to turn around now.
It is time to walk into the meadow,
wearing your most beautiful dress.
It is time to notice the sun high in the sky,
to feel your heartache cooled as you buzz
between the shadows of tall flowers.

In the way the lightning spidered across the sky,
In the way the clouds were light from the inside.
I asked the sky what it meant,
What it wanted.

Leaning against the wall on the patio,
With deafening cicadas
Broom in hand
Watching

I saw a sign in the storm,
I couldn't quite make it out.
So I assigned it my own meaning,
And heard Kord.

He told me it was time for change.