trap doors to the tops of trees

dragging the lake

2011-06-22T18:17:00.001-07:00

darling put on your garbage dress
and take me to the fair.
i wish to lay awhile beneath your downpour.

or let me say please
with my paper and my tongue
and spin you through the aching marmalade lights
until we hate music.
we can kiss psychotic on the ferris wheel
and get sky-drunk inside the high-up nighttime summer heat
where i can taste your promises.

later
with your naked back
pressed against the warm tar of the road
and the double yellow lines
running in an endless scrawl beneath us
i will drive you home
to the best near death experience of your life.

we will end up at the lake
clothes orphaned of use on the shore
laughter decorating the landscape
bodies passing through the cool silk.

just two creatures
come to purpose at last.

change the channel

2011-02-09T14:22:00.000-08:00

the reach of the world has not increased, only our collective imagination of what the world really is. the fact has always been that the world is limited that which we can see immediately surrounding us. the rest is hear-say. and no amount of television or internet will change it. starving children, war, love, all remain myths until you find them in front of you.

even torn sails still billow

2011-02-03T13:53:00.001-08:00

the way we go thieving is a murder of death. all any single one can be expected to do is survive, and there is no failure in doing so except to not.

the lack of free will is a liberation. if i do not choose my actions, then i am not to blame for them. i need only follow my nature. to be led to salvation or doom. but shrug off all notions of imprisonment. we refute not belonging to ourselves.

it is clear that the rules of this place are not just. otherwise explain the death of the good, justify misery in the face of bounty, happiness at the center of sorrow. the choice not to see the whole is just that, a choice. the fact of embracing one's own powerlessness is not a giving in or a giving up, on the contrary it betrays the presence of those willing to look life in the face. these are the true saints.

Naked Woman Playing A Burning Cello

2011-02-01T13:36:00.001-08:00

In the gap between sleep and dreams she sits,
her music a crushing lightness upon you,
thin red ribbon of desire
tight around your throat.
Her bare flames, a phonecall
from a smoke of voice, half-familiar,
bathed in fog.

She pours her forearm forward
in a question mark deja vu
that carries up over the slope of her shoulder,
slow walk through the bright-flowered fields of total madness.

Your body holds itself in a paralyzed slump,
enslaved by the gradual morse code
broadcast between ember and ash.
The curve of her back is a knife edge searing through your ribs,
like being destroyed by a feather.
As the flames beneath her fingers begin to sing a death song
in the key of hollow twilight minor,
you start to sway,
the notes gorging themselves upon your vertigo,
all your molecules running together like watercolor,
ecstatic sex of dissonance,
your lungs a palace of drowning,
ready to let in the flood.

When she finally looks at you,
at the top of the precipice she has built,
you can feel yourself go,
your cables cut clean,
an elevator in the throes of a swan dive plummet,
frenzied rush of stories pressed into manic lights and sounds that kiss you as you pass,
the sharp lines that geometry begs for from the chalkboard,
all things frozen at another level now,
breasts pressed against the wood,
gravity's grey anger spread below you,
perfection,

and then blissful nothing.

When you no longer hear the music,
it is not that she has stopped playing,
it is that you have unravelled from your spool
into a heartache of yellow thread,
gone endless upon the floor.

empty jar

2010-11-02T16:27:00.001-07:00

tonight these pillowcases are filled with lonely. when i open the front door, i find myself twisting inside the low groan of a city. i am the jealous lover. i am the self righteous prick. i am spurned. let us assume i am alive, and that i will live a life. i will find myself raking leaves some autumns. i will carry trash many times. i will swim in the ocean at least once. i will find myself thrilled breathless at my daughter's first laughter. moments will mold themselves around my form, turn my hands to wrinkles. i will lie awake in the nighttime, walk to the window, stare powerless at the infinite moon. i will drive many cars, sit on many toilets, cry many times. perhaps i will marry. perhaps i will love again. and then, will it still hurt when i think of you? let us assume i will make my way to the place when the people i love will begin dying in greater numbers than i can bear. i will spend more time than i want to in hospitals. i will never see my own casket. when they put me in the ground, i hope they will mean the nice things they say. i hope i will have placed my bookmark in a few hearts. i think death will be a great relief. it will be nice to let my bones come apart, to sit in the soil. so even then, when my dusty belongings fade from family attics, when my collar bones turn into oxygen, this is no scratch on forever. fetch me from these cold pillows. i did not call your name, will not call your name. please tell me tell me you despised my face, could not stand my eyes, could not bear my arms, tell me it made you sick to wake up next to me, tell me it was my fault, make sure it is my fault, because i cannot bear it if you have bricked over your heart because of the old terrors. i will build a desert in my chest for you. i will grow into an old man for you. i will walk toward my grave for you. but tell me what forever means. in a universe of collapsing stars, is dead love a powerful thing? i cannot bear your eyes because i remember your body. i hate imagining you. so remove your loneliness from my pillowcases. it is not welcome here. my stitches are healing now, and you will not look on the scars.

time's blur like a shawl around your shoulders

2010-10-20T10:11:00.000-07:00

sometimes i am lost for months at a time, the fog around me like a lung, my heart pumping the life from me one instant at a time. the passing of the days is stitched together with memory loss and sleeping kisses. i stumble blind into the ether, daring to hope, with faith that the ground is being created beneath my feet each moment just as i step onto it. this will happen until it does not. there are a thousand ways to die, and only a handful not to. but how perfect are the hills in late October, yellow as a tow-truck, with the last warmth of the season trying to reach their bones, not a fuck but a cuddle, a yearly tryst, proof that love can exist between two points an infinity away from each other, that vast distances can be bridged with light, that bodies can nestle into each other for now and hope for later, even if later never comes, proof that we can reach each other, across the years and the miles, and that it matters.

the shy tongues of quiet softness

2010-09-14T13:42:00.000-07:00

give me the flash of color and light. give me the faces, the chaos and the dust. when i lost myself in the desert, i went through the cracks, found the piano in my own wilderness, let it grow like a flower and set it down, and with the leaving and the looking it became the truth. the pieces have crumbled and in crumbling have become whole. so come rub your newsprint against me, come set free my birds, come wash in my hurricanes, and lets go begging for music. because i have found it, that twisting current of abrupt beauty gone ablaze in the sky's skirts, and there is no need for crying my dear, there may yet be again, but for now, for now, we play.

becoming unbroken again

2010-07-21T14:45:00.001-07:00

a soft music rose from our bruises,
notes we hadn't known existed until then,
making love to each other in the air around us,
a music like trampled snow,
and I held you there in the grass,
even though I was alone,
even though you were gone,
i held you,
every inch of your memorized body,
full in my arms
our wholeness speaking a language only trees know.
and I cried.
i cried so hard for the loss of you.
and it was then,
in the grass,
in that music,
that I finally forgave you.

how bodies turn into candles lighting up rooms of roses

2010-07-06T00:08:00.000-07:00

these warm nights grow knife-like inside this soft body. somber city caving in with desire, drunk as sunday. this kind of night is made for lovers. the tar gone soft beneath stomping feet, running out the madness, staring down the stars like wishes were fighting words, and them up there just burning away, solemn halos of horse-hearted restless love. never beat so loud, these hearts. sweat-slick shirts stuck against the smalls of backs, hands drifting up and down bodies like shifting tides, lips and tongue rising to purpose. this is what mouths were made for. the lingering kisses, more true than a fuck. this is why they invented rooftops, for nights like this, for loves like this, because the city's rumble and the stars pushing their stems of light like brooms and the heavy summer air were meant to mingle and mix and be held and kissed and fucked inside of. light up, you bodies, you candles. light up the rooms of this night full of parking lots and strip malls and strangers. light up.

feasible drudgery

2010-07-03T06:41:00.000-07:00

my bed spent all night twisting me in knots. it's okay though. i'm not harboring any ill will. we've had a lot of good times together too. but my bed wouldn't write me a note to give to the morning to explain why my eyelids are at half mast. i'll tell you what i miss though. i miss when me and my bed and that girl who used to love me, we all used to get together and have a nice old time. it was like a soft fireplace. i sure do miss that.

name your price

2010-07-02T12:57:00.000-07:00

the ramparts of your undiminished smile, burning down amidst all this decadent misery. i point my flames at you, but i can't bear to let you feel them. teach me how not to become hardened in the face of a city full of grief. no one is blameless. heart battered and hell bent, we sit, count the colors of the days, tearing rose petals like lottery tickets, peeling back expectations like scabs to discover all our drowning loves. this is the thin line between fucking and getting fucked. an ugly longing. most days i still love you. most days i can stand up and carry myself into the world. i do not expect to forget you, but i am grateful that distance and time will feed my memory a lesser truth than i know now, so that i may disremember how many parts of myself i sold to a buy a true love for you.

coming of age

2010-06-21T17:16:00.001-07:00

there she was,
just echoing in the doorway.
the moon had given way to rain,
like an army of sunflowers,
but the glow from the window stayed.
foghorn in my chest.

a slow waltz on the record player.
quiet tears down her face.
the blood pooling bright red on the black and white kitchen tiles.
slow blooming velvet rose.
feathers falling heavy through the room.
knife clattering on the floor.
i moved like sleep,
touched the stumps on her shoulder blades.
she cringed.

this was never what i wanted.
not like this.

the back of her hand gentle on my cheek.
electrocution.
never such eyes.
death a trifle.
forever become meaningless.

moss-lined and crowded with grief,
my heart continued pounding.
she kissed me,
and i flooded with light.

the magic words have stopped working

2010-05-19T14:22:00.000-07:00

Where the city shaves slivers of itself in its own eclipsing rotation, burning at its core the molten liquid of the forgotten dreams of dreamers--spinning the unmoving spin of the center of things, the kiss of a cherry blossom frozen in midair before our shipwrecked eyes-where it conjures electricity in the snap of metal fingers - tempts wire walkers with its unabashed opulence and mesmerizes even the sky in its catatonic embrace. I will see you again. Even if only a single old man survives the glaring beauty of your disremembered eyes, I will see you again.

the truest blue of water's real name

2010-05-11T23:10:00.000-07:00

when i am a ship, big and hulking with time's weather, having known the timber of many a land inside the splinters of my bones, i will still think of your harbor and cry. and still, sticky with salt, i will burst through the seconds of the rendered days, as a dreadnought through the armor of night's thousand shrouds of shadow. i will not call out your name. i will bury you inside the love i held for you. my wooden heart will become a graveyard, and over my stitched up chest they will put earth. and through an ocean in which each drop of water reminds me of you, i will sail. i will sail. i will sail. i will sail and i will not stop, with time's murderous hammering bearing me always back to that bed where we slept, a night when i was awoken by the moon, and you, still sleeping, raised your head and kissed my bare shoulder blade and then set it back to your pillow. when i asked you later, you remembered nothing.

put away your sleep fists when i'm dreaming

2010-04-10T15:55:00.000-07:00

those blue clad body bruisers have stomped in to spoil lives again. and me all fog-headed, trying to breathe like a cloud and have one serious conversation with the whispering stars. tragedy it is then, for i put it to you to give me the mind of a violent man. my chest is an echo chamber that always screams the same words and they do not mix well with the rules that have been written for us. so i will go all cryptic, and i will still love people, and we all will continue to be fear blossoms growing inside the curdled heart of a thing that may never have been beautiful, but that we will continue to pay quivering homage to nonetheless, and for all the lies we are told, all the purposeless destruction, and the ruins of our own imaginations huddled in the decayed cathedrals of unchased dreams, we will be sick many a day, but we will go on living, hand in hand, heart in heart, we will go on living.

blue jean sky, i love you, you mother fucker

2010-02-23T15:09:00.000-08:00

pour it down. soak me silly. sea swallow these streets with your sweet nothings. the calm, quiet, clam that is my heart is sitting still, knowing you are there and loving you for it. what a miracle of moments it has all turned out to be. you play your harp and i'll sit in this aching body, pulse with life, stare out from these bones, think a flock of thoughts. i'll signal you when it's time. i'll line up my feet with walking. i'll plant some seeds for you to remember me by.

make your tools forget their work in the homecoming of your hands

2010-02-21T21:46:00.000-08:00

because the moon drips light across the invisible boundaries through, inside of, and between the lips and tongue of language. because your spine binds you like the most beautiful book. because families of thoughts brush up against the sighs of telephone wires. because seasons ramble through our years and graze upon us like the idle dreams of sleeping bullets. because the city is the constant erased etch-a-sketch of the ceaseless tides of people. because turtles dream of music we can't begin to imagine. because flowers are just the earth reaching. because mason jars like to be full of tea. because boots enjoy stomping. because books relish the concentration of our eyes. because dancing is the soul of restless winds. because the hunger is too great and too vast to ever be permanently fed. because the point of socks is to keep your feet warm. duh. because the smell of shaving cream, the smell of fresh cut grass, the smell of basil, is the knockout punch of instant nostalgia. because your eyes are the polaroid camera of your heart. because you get swallowed by grief's thorns, but get blossomed by love's water. because the strange ocean of your mind resembles the blur of hummingbird wings. because wine makes love to your blood and laughter massages loss. because you're good at breathing.

this is why.

the sky opens its mouth like bursting hearted halo holder

2010-01-26T00:01:00.000-08:00

these two hands, they shake because they are not big enough to unbreak all the brokenness, all the car accidents, scraped knees, and dead parents. dawn's temper tantrum finds me bleary eyed and seam shattered in the wake of all the unholy visions sleep gave birth to. these cities, they churn us through them and spit us out, leave us vibrating, humming, collapsing on curbsides, grasping for other hearts, tears tormenting the pavement. i will not let your light be eclipsed. i will not let your heart be swallowed. these hands, they are small, but strong. they can't do everything, but they can do much.

on the day it rained horses, i swallowed a birdhouse

2010-01-22T09:31:00.000-08:00

when they looked inside your guts they found salt crystals the size of apples. they told you angels had been sleeping there. the beds were freshly made and still warm. they asked you if you had any enemies, people who might have a grudge against you, might want to hurt you. caught off guard, you started quoting tolstoy. their eyebrows shot up like bottlerockets, foreheads like week old newspapers. you cleared your throat, embarrassed, and said "no...not that i can think of." outside, a bird slammed into the window. you were thinking of old lovers. one of them was rummaging through an old toolbox, the other was pouring tea. this was an oddly companionable silence between strangers. for a moment, you wondered if maybe this was the afterlife. you sneezed. one of them grinned. he told you that you just needed to sign a simple contract, pulled a cat out of his coat pocket and handed it to you along with a pen. "it's not legally binding," he explained. the other was still rummaging through the toolbox. "aha! i found it!" he said and handed you a shabby blue scarf, stale smelling and full of holes. "if anything happens" he said solemnly, "use this."

brand new forever

2010-01-15T00:07:00.000-08:00

pull the shutters closed on your own well-swept invincibility and lie behind the shade. you can find brilliant blues beneath the murmuring grey nothings. i don't claim to seduce worlds. i'm not the greatest, or the best, at what i do. i have a lot to learn, and it begins with whispers that get louder and grow into boulders. i just walk around sometimes, for hours, and the hammering pulse of the city is too much for me. i just walk, and the cars and the buildings turn absolutely horror show all around me.

one hundred starlings writing words with their wings

2009-09-21T09:38:00.000-07:00

i like the way the streets are deserted at 5am; how you can barely tell it's morning. you can walk and hear nothing but your heartbeat and your footsteps. wisps of dream drift like smoke from sleepers in their beds. the sky is particularly mysterious. and if you are awake enough, if you are paying attention, you can hear the faint murmurings of some secret being whispered, meant only for you, in only that moment, and you never can hear the whole thing. but i think it's a process; that you gather all the bits you can find until you have enough to put it together. and that's wisdom. like saving up for a piggy bank. i think if there is anything we are meant to learn, it's that.

god's fingers on the spine of autumn

2009-09-05T22:02:00.000-07:00

there is a certain perverse beauty within the slow strangling desiccation that ever accompanies the whistling rhythms arranging and rearranging themselves so resolutely inside midnight's blinking posture. just beyond the frigid air forcing itself upon the starlight, there is warmth. it is beneath my corduroy blankets. i will meet you there.

sling your guns sir, this is a revival

2009-08-31T18:40:00.000-07:00

don't listen too loud. there aren't many safe sounds around here. you're clearly a person of great distinction. i wouldn't want you to wind up in a situation you couldn't read according to familiar maps. things here are not what you used to be used to. it will take some adjusting. now the first thing is, you have to focus, concentrate real hard, you have to remember dying. you have to remember your own death. otherwise you won't believe. see we've all done it. but it's such a shock that most of us don't remember it. memory loss is known to accompany severe trauma. until you remember you won't be able to see the way the sky looks like a marching band. you won't get to hear the way the flowers sing like lounge singers. you won't be able to feel the riotous orgasm that lives inside music. the thing about death that nobody realizes while they are still alive, the thing about death is, it is the railroad to god. and i don't mean god as the living have conceived of god, i mean god as god actually is, ineffable, indefinable, the very limit, boundary, end of any language's ability to know, to articulate, to encompass. see, you wind up here, and once you are dead, there is no need to talk, because understanding, knowing, pervades everything. you have endless time to explore the intricacies of the world you never even glimpsed while you were living in it. i have spent years just watching dust settle. a century watching a sleeping woman breathe. ten thousand years inside the wind. do you understand how many different faces there are to a single leaf, a single blade of grass, a single drop of water? no, of course you don't. but you will.

glow quietly and scream moonlight, this is our last kiss

2009-08-30T20:58:00.000-07:00

The rhythming of my lungs bellowing a slow motion projection on the inside of my chest, the tracings of silver on the edges of my heart, my arteries weeping helpless and lost. We are stuck here. Stuck between living and dying. With no instructions, and no test to tell which voices to listen to. The city an orgy of tangibles in an ocean of invisible. Our prayers find themselves caught in the brambles of each other's anger. We wade through floods of cash, useless, an absurd facade, liquid power. The burning cities are the last kiss between two people who are not special, who have no clear future, who are strung out on their own ambitions, who dream in black and white, and never question the ways in which this cultural violence is carried out. It is a mutual suicide. A lack of imagination. It is death by neglect. Dead flowers. It is done.

to wrap arms about the sunset's daughter

2009-08-30T16:22:00.000-07:00

tell your dreams to me. i want to know the way sleep enfolds you. i can see you sleep-eyed and slurring beneath the summer sheets, your smile a blessing in some unfamiliar language, your body a dream the flowers have forgotten. i would like a bouquet of you to decorate my rooms, that all my days might hold beauty.

evidence of disarray

2009-08-19T21:34:00.000-07:00

the trashcan fires have overslept. it's as if we are all lit matches trying our goddamndest to be the sun. i can burn down a building if the conditions are right, but i will never heat a planet.

put the door locks on the windows and the windows on your lungs

2009-08-18T20:41:00.000-07:00

begging for Egypt to turn purple will not solve your problems. the asylums are overflowing with people who aren't witnessing the same world as the majority. all conflicts are ultimately disagreements about the perception of reality. when what i see, doesn't match up with what you see, i kill you. the funny part (but not like funny-ha-ha) is that neither you nor i are even capable of seeing.

penis sunburn

2009-08-17T18:22:00.001-07:00

ouch!

how i met your mother

2009-08-16T21:30:00.000-07:00

when you start feeling like your skull is a shallow grave that the violated remains of your brains have been buried in, it is time to go for a walk and get some fresh air. the sad truth is that we are insects. we scurry and fuck and multiply and build anthills, but we are not as big as we think we are.

stomachs are not vacation places for food

2009-08-14T18:29:00.000-07:00

sometimes when the birds sound particularly lovely outside in the trees singing against the overcast sky, i flip myself over so that i can walk around on my hands, and, if it's even possible, they sound somehow lovelier. what is happening inside my brain is this: at first all the red inside me moves like slow motion snails, and for an instant that seems like a moment that is really just a second all the squishy gadgets inside me are wondering just what the hell is going on, and then my veins turn into roller coaster rides for my blood, and every single blood cell has its hands in the air, going round the loops and turns and screaming 'whoooooaaaaaaaa!" and then wham! all at once they cram into my brain like spelunkers dropping into some sort of upside down underground cave and their sudden entrance creates a momentary vaccuum which results in a sonic boom that instantly eradicates all the thoughts that are normally careening around in my head like futuristic Tokyo hovercraft traffic, and in that miniscule fraction of a second that is already pulling away from me, my ears open up a little wider and convey that far off singing to my brain a little clearer and those little tiny creatures singing their great big songs that used to just be the backdrop to my all-important existence have suddenly become the purpose of the whole entire thing and i remember what the word 'lovely' actually means.

shout stoutly at the volume of slow motion into my somber seashell ears

2009-08-11T16:20:00.000-07:00

in the fleeting forest of your glance, my skin gives birth to a thousand buzzing bees. i have seen men dig into the earth and take residence of the sky. i have seen the hacking and the hunger; the quiet crowing of cities at twilight. the life will be spilled from us yet. we know this. it is writ. and in all we do, there is a question. a sailing ship. a handful of bone. drunken wizardry. the answers are why we continue. and yea, though i am lost at sea most moments, when i am laying in the tall grass, as the light declines, watching the pink hills curl themselves about my shoulders, while the bats beat blindly through the ether, and the crickets make music of their bodies with the meandering melancholic notes breaking their own hearts, in those last hours, at least, there is some comfort.

broken trees marching to war

2009-08-09T15:34:00.000-07:00

the way the heat sits, you would think the whole of the land was a furious kitchen. the sweat and the dust and the crumpled paper smiles. We fling ourselves through this world, bouncing off of each other, just to see where we will land. The music crept inside me last night. It jostled these rickety limbs like forests of muscle and bone in a thunderstorm of clanging guitars and harmony. The lesson here is simple: no matter how hard you dance or stomp or crash yourself against the ground, you will not move the planet. The trick is to do it anyway, as though you can.

birds in mid-flight over an ocean of enormous, believing in the place they will rest

2009-08-04T18:09:00.000-07:00

climb down into my ribs. there is an aching. put on your boots for the dank and the wet. be sure to bring your tools. bring the adze, the auger. bring the hammer, the saw, and the level. bring wood. there is much work to be done. do not concern yourself with silence. when you are inside, you will hear the rustling. light a match in the darkness. you will see it, hulking there, quivering in the flickering chamber, wine-colored mass of pulp, whispering meat flailing in that humid cavern, murmuring in an alien tongue long ago lost to us. you must fix it. you must reach your hands into the machinery, and let it resonate through your bones. you must build the scaffolding high, venture into the inner reaches. ply your trade. i am trusting you. you must help me. you must.

Sex, Like Death, Like Apples

2009-05-31T14:03:00.000-07:00

It always starts with a word...

A syllable or two,
Just a guttural hurricane stumble,
The larynx boiling over,
That primal vibration earthquaking the throat
With the molecules rubbing each other tectonic
Between two lips and an ear:
"Hi!
It's nice to meet you!"
Spoken like dry sand,
And then an avalanche of eyelashes,
A smile like land after seven months at sea,
A hand against the collar bone,
And a couple of hearts
Crashing around like caged beasts.

And just like that, we become cave people again,
Inheriting meaning for the first time,
Writing entire dictionaries with our bodies
And grunting with the weight of the momentous occasion
Of the discovery of a voice.

It always
Starts
With a word:
"Hi!
It is so nice to meet you"
And then in another moment
That is another now,
I am tasting the sweat of your inner thigh.
And it tastes good.

In exploring the topography of your body
I have become a mapmaker.
The canyons of your finger prints,
The ocean of blue beneath your wrist,
The hollows of your hips,
They are the moment that the beat drops,
They are a painting that can stop me in my tracks,
They are the ways we have taught each other to build light.

Because the sky is constantly roaring overhead,
and because we have all felt that silent, empty ache on our shoulders,
and because death is always in the room,
and because the terror and the beauty are one,
and because there is something holy in our touch,
for all these reasons we must touch.

We are rhythm, movement, and measure.
Call me clock, and you time,
And let me hands move inside of you.

They are selling fruit in the marketplace.
Pears that drip
Mangoes sweet to the tongue.
Your tongue is in my mouth.
Someone is rowing on the harbor
His muscles taut
The sweat between his shoulder blades.
You taste like the sea.
The white curtains billow from the open window.

Somewhere a tomato
Pierced by a knife
Gushes its juices
Onto a wooden cutting board.
Our clothes are grinning at us from the floor.
A garden is growing in slow motion.
Your breasts are rushing toward my tongue.
The scent of lavender is lifting through the window.
Your skin is growing goosebumps.
The ocean is swaying its hips.
A seahorse thinks
A beehive behaves
Your nakedness surprises me.

In the next room
A telephone is ringing.

I want you.

At a middle school dance
Two kids sway together
Without ever hearing the music
Playing around them.
Their stomachs touch like electrocution.

The air is swollen with heat.

A mockingbird shreds the night
With a song drenched so heavy in sweetness
That the heart swoons to hear it.

The room is melting around us.
Your back is arching.

In the slanted light of afternoon
Through the window of an empty kitchen
Two dust motes chase each other
Around and around
But they will never touch.

Your orgasm is the fall of Troy.

You gasp.
Your body jerks and spasms
With the dying throes of Achilles.
There are gunshots in the distance.
We both hold our breath as flames lick the walls.
A moan escapes you
Echoing the screams
Of the murdered innocent.
From the street
The wail of an infant.
Across town a paramedic
Presses his palms
To a man's chest wound
Trying to hold the life inside
From spilling out.

It is all in the touch.

All our muscles are tensed.
Priam is weeping
To watch his great city burn.
The sweat glistens on our skin.
We are welded together.
Through the wall
We can hear the laugh track
Of the neighbor's television.
Our eyes are locked like a bank vault.

I have not used this body until now.

Paris returns his arrows to their quiver
And you shiver in the exposed air
And for just a single
Moment
The silence
Is absolute.

And then
We breathe again.

teaching angels how to breathe like touching

2009-05-23T23:09:00.000-07:00

Burn bright. She told me to burn bright. We all have to burn a little, she said, it's just a part of all this, but when it's your turn, make sure you burn bright. Let the pain of the flames that consume you also be the fuel that moves you. Flames have a tendency to engulf, but burning in light is better than drowning in darkness, so move your body like you are gasoline and everyone you encounter is a lit match, let your prayers be crackling embers exhaled up to kiss the stars. All this living is bound to hurt some, she said, so you might as well make the hurt worth something.

the copper in your bones is calling for blood

2009-05-09T18:06:00.000-07:00

giggle, grin, and kick. when the rules are being re-written, there is always a period of mild anarchy. remain calm. stay indoors. do not, under any circumstances, riot or loot. don't drink the water. good. you're doing good. when it is over, there will be plenty to buy. you can resume working again, and the cycle will be complete. produce. consume. produce. consume. good. you're doing good. forgive me. my mind is running in circles again. there appears to be some barrier that it cannot get around. strange. oh well. i wonder if anything good is on television...i should not be writing in this state of mind, it seems i am far too filled with rage. good. you're doing good.

The Death of the News

2009-05-04T18:19:00.000-07:00

When books go extinct, I will replace my eyes with computers and my ears with headphones. I will have my heart surgically removed and replace it with nothing. I will think about how much progress we have made.

the myth of light

2009-03-07T15:19:00.000-08:00

your kisses fling disembodied birdsongs through me like i am a basement staircase that cinderblocks are crashing down, into a darkness that is heavy with rusted bicycles, old birdcages, and teenage memory. it is an engulfing darkness, shaped like the insides of your arms. if human-kind is a flurry of short-lived self importance, creating monuments to its own destruction, reaching to extinguish the light, then i will walk like a clam, straight into the darkness, holding your hand in mine like a rare treasure.

on the nights when the moon is like the sky's brain thinking too much

2009-02-28T01:35:00.000-08:00

you wonder. you wonder what the hell happened. you wonder how the tumors and the ice bergs came out of nowhere. the sleet sticks to your face and it burns like goddamn. you sit on the front stoop, while all the illusions drain themselves from your head and go swirling into the night, and for a few brief moments you are empty and you can see the world for what it actually is.

you, in your new boots

2009-02-27T10:26:00.000-08:00

the sex is amazing. it is a storm licking the ocean. it is a lighthouse burning down in it's own ecstasy of light. it is film run too fast, melting on the reel, all emulsion tongued, bright white resonance, bursting onto the screen. we are just a couple of farm loving, punk spattered, academic rogues, turned loose and let be, burning down rooms with conversation, blaming the media, with pockets full of excuses and hands full of fingers ready to push any button we might encounter, yes, the sex, it is amazing.

too much coffee

2009-02-26T16:14:00.000-08:00

the city swallows up the days like a dinosaur. it is an endless haze of humanity, bubbling over, wondering where it all went, ticking off the seconds. there is no right way to bleed, you just do it. these are the rules. and when the garbage and the graffiti are strewn across every empty space, there will be peace. when the blank walls are filled with art, there will be peace. when money stops mattering, there will be peace.

red

2009-02-25T14:37:00.000-08:00

don't fire truck me, son. i been all through that bloodstream and it's built like bricks. no amount of fisticuffs is going to paint that place proper, so just set back and stir yourself a bit. the swirls, they come and they leave, it's just nail polish on a pretty girl's toes. what i need to know is how you can just couch it? i'm tearing up roses over here. it's a regular candy apple parade. come on now and drop that curtain down, we're all just tossing rubies anyway, and the front and the back of it is a rather bleak blend of the good stuff gone bad, so don't go all volcano on me. i'll need you on this before the end. we'll get this thing fixed and the maple leaves'll glisten like cherries and that red jello sunset'll tear down the sky at least one more time, so we might as well shoot these shotgun shells while we got 'em. you never know which robin song will be your last.

tampering with the mail

2009-02-24T10:31:00.000-08:00

cotton hearted and polyester-veined, i was staggering, sweating some sort of wool blend. there were hookahs, guitars, and houseplants strewn about at random. the big, thick wrinkles on my forehead were all bunched up and scrunched together like a five-car-pile-up, my crow's feet were dancing, the smile-lines were frowning, and the rest of my face was just rubbernecking it at the carnage. what caused it, though, was the letter. when i read the letter, i crumpled up on the floor like paper. then i found the gas can and the matches, and after it was all over, i didn't have to think about it anymore.

wish you were here.

the last twenty five

2009-02-24T01:00:00.000-08:00

the roof keeps letting the rain in. i think they have made some sort of deal. so we sleep together in the same bed, the rain and i. it is a strange love affair, very serious, like half a funeral. i awaken suddenly in the early morning to a damp pillow, and for a moment i think i am crying. i squint at the grey sunrise, laden with the feeling of train stations, my dreams still pawing at me from the purple. not entirely myself, and not entirely anyone else. and in those spectacular, gloriously bleary moments, peering through a haze of sleep, out the window onto a world that is half made up of dreams, i am a little bit sad and a little bit ecstatic and i don't possess the proper machinery to process the feeling, so i nudge the rain over, lay my head back down, steal back some blankets and fall back into sleep.

self fulfilling prophecy

2009-02-11T17:40:00.000-08:00

oh those salted wounds of the epic battles we hurled ourselves into that no history will remember and no one will sing songs of, with their taste of iron and hickory smoke, marking our guilty flesh that we may remember the bodies of comrades left and lost lingering in our dark places, wearing death masks and painting with finger paints over the gaping eight year holes the images of their never to be lived futures, their could have beens, and the child faces their ever closed eyes will not spy again. we are healed now. all the books say move on, march forward, be brave and act as a soldier should. the televisions have wandered to more interesting stories. the rhetoric says what it always has said. we are good and honorable. proud and many. strong and willing. we will find a way to paint this positive. we will ignore the truth. we are very good at that.

the never-was sailor

2008-11-29T13:58:00.000-08:00

standing on the deck, staring out over a calm sea, like eternal pancakes running forever to four horizons; hoisting the sails to bleed white in the sunset and carry wind in their palms; aching through the long lonely isolation of that enormous blue wilderness, that alien landscape, while my beard pokes further from my face and my heart hurts with the dull shock of longing; thirst floating on an ocean of undrinkable water; a triumphant return from far lands to my wife and children, and the rise up of that blood feeling like electric eels inside of me, ecstatic, before the old itch returns and i feel the pull of the sea once more; all the things i have never felt because my legs have never left land for long enough.

the book trials

2008-11-22T12:31:00.000-08:00

the beehive is buzzing beneath my skin. i am zippering up the last melodies to fold up and bed beneath for the winter. be a tree for me, sling your sap sticky over my tongue, stain the shadows in sweet phosphorescence, and caress the wind with your whispering needles. when i was a child, my father used to cut my hair. our kitchen turned into a barber shop those afternoons. i remember thinking what a talented dad he was, that he knew how to cut hair, but did something else for a living. my hair is wild now, uncontrollable. it is learning to sing. my girl has a body like a fire truck, like something i used to dream about. when i kiss her i become the numbers above the elevator, switching every floor, our lips touch and the doors open, and every number i am, i glow.

when the future looked like a cartoon, the bellowing was faint, but now that the future is a fist inside an anthill, the bellowing is an empty belly

2008-11-02T20:34:00.000-08:00

when the dust settled, our guns were rusted over. the man at the bar crumbled into a pile of dirt with daisies where his grin had been. the arriving twelve o'clock train sounded like a mother in hard labor. we didn't move at all. for three hundred years we stood there. the time felt like sand on the back of my neck, grains shifting, moving, blowing in the wind. the building collapsed around us. they built an enormous city where the town used to be. we were statues in a park. everyone was under the impression that we were great works of art. but at some point i decided to move again. the people around me seemed pretty alarmed. my mouth tasted like cactus death. i sure could have used a beer. but out of nowhere a massive snarling mechanical beast came roaring by. "what in the hell is that?" i said. "it's a car," said one of the funny dressed people. well, i didn't know what a "car" was. "aren't you a statue?" said another one. "son," i said "i've ripped off a man's hand and fed it to him for less than what you just said to me." and that was the last he said about that.

my grandmother's coffin

2008-10-15T21:45:00.000-07:00

it was lighter than i expected. like moving a dining room table. the cancer only left her skeleton and her skin.

you reach inside your heart like it's your back pocket and at the end of the day all you have is a handful of scribbles

2008-10-07T22:14:00.001-07:00

we send ourselves out to scraped knees and the edges of buildings, knowing they will hurt, and knowing they are necessary. but we forget, when we are standing on the edge, why it is that we brought ourselves there. i can't sew a dress and i can't ride a horse. i can play a few chords on the guitar and sing a quiet song. i've been thinking, maybe we all know it is a farce, and we just have to let it be. but that's where i get caught up, i think i see through it, and i want to point my finger and say "Look!" but maybe you just have to allow for that. sure this is all an act, but maybe it is all we really have. if i'm playing a part and so are you, then we make up some whole that neither of us can see the outside of, but we know it is there, and we know what it feels like to be inside of it, and maybe that is the whole point right there. i just dont know.

the fruit that grows into a washing machine haircut

2008-09-03T23:57:00.000-07:00

in the dreams i am naked. the sky is a drug. zeppelins rupture the air, whining like puppies. the blues man is holding his guitar like it is a marriage. he is really belting it out, and the ripples of music seem on the verge of melting all the buildings for blocks around. he is inventing rock and roll with fingers like an eggbeater, his eyes are closed doing the eternal equation that translates music into sex, where x=the rhythm of the bassline and y=the distance between two bodies. we are laying on a mattress on the roof of a building in the middle of the city. i am rubbing your back and the looks you keep giving me, mixed with the sounds you are making are turning my blood into liquid fire. the desire is thick. just as our lips touch, the sun shines in my bedroom window, right on my face. when i wake up, the fan is spinning on the ceiling, and it is stifling hot in the room, and i am so mad at existence that it was all a dream that i feel like punching it.

if i kiss you where it's sore

2008-08-03T15:06:00.000-07:00

when they kitchen sink your back, replant the volume inside unfamiliar music, and set a pack of dogs to sleep around you like flames, there will be no loss of emotion in you. your feet have memorized the steps, even if your head cannot keep up. you are a stronghold. there is a man in the boiler room, red faced and sweating, who keeps it all moving. his fingers are the size of staplers. his chest is a cardboard box. his biceps are the bulging roots of an oak tree. he pushes and pulls, burns his hands, and billows the fires to grow mountains, to engineer car crashes, to burst a small cloud into ten thousand raindrops, to bring my thumbs up to brush away your tears. you remind me of an old song i used to know, the way you get stuck in my head. i find myself humming the melody of your lips. it's the prettiest tune i know.

painting pictures with fire on flammable objects

2008-07-31T20:08:00.000-07:00

the piano keys, they are running through my bloodstream, building monuments out of sound, translating the unbelievable fact of hammer put to work direct from physics to emotion. the waves toss my body like it is just a body and the ocean is the ocean, i am small. the sky can't see me, even when it looks closely. i rumble along on the air currents, as the secrets are whispered into my trapdoors. i know the secret knock that blossoms the blue doves into the open air like a door bursting open from a burning building, lungs heaving, empty thoughted animal knowing. i know the pearls that cage themselves in campfires, only to be set free for that dying ecstasy of a glance. it isn't here, that elusive answer. the waiting is what kills us, that spiteful thought that there is something behind the veil that we can't see. but when the sheet drops we discover that we really did know it all along, and we just could not bear to let ourselves believe. it is the not knowing that we shed our tears for. and the loss.

the building blocks of a ribcage

2008-07-26T03:18:00.000-07:00

i spend the days stacking patterns crosswise endless through the air. the sweat paints itself out from my skin. it is a brain runner. when i sleep i can see it all. the colors are fluorescent, blazing, pointing into my eyes. the fans spin themselves chaotic. the rooftops watch the sky. and in my head i am somewhere else. the windows burst like a thousand sparrows and the words fill my throat with fire. i watch the sun turn itself soft and swallow the sea and i am learning history. and it is all a fiction in the face of the truth.

the string plucking nostalgia

2008-07-23T22:32:00.001-07:00

feet planted like daisies in the bottom of a pair of boots, slinging toe tapping rhythms on the road with a thumb at the sky. ill be your blazing blue streak, death on two legs, sweet talking, tune whistling, traverser of these american roads. god bless it. ive got a picture in my pocket of the prettiest thing you ever saw. she makes houses turn gold when she walks by. all the birds know her name. the sky even tried to talk to her once. i got something in me, and it grows, sometimes it blooms and sometimes it sits. it makes me strong and crazy. it knows the shape of her collarbone by heart. it knows the taste of her. it presses its fingers against my heart. sometimes its not soft and i feel it furiously, bruising ferocious in one of those tin can afternoons with that toothpaste sunset blinking at me, but it always gets calm again. this human being stuff is exhausting.

machine guns growing from the hardwood floors

2008-07-16T23:00:00.000-07:00

it is a thump thump thump rhythm breaking into my ribcage like arena rock and roll blizzard road show serenade. pump in the snowflakes, my veins wrapping ferocious inside wallpaper skin, all wandering houseplant decor. i dig your style. i have a photocopy of your laugh that i keep in my back pocket. i kiss it when i need to cheer up. there is the sand in my throat, the harmonica between my toes, the seashells in your eyes. i can remember the ocean in you, the rhythm of it, the taste. it has been too long since i swum there. my sneezes are my soul escaping my body to try to hold your hand, to kiss your collarbone, to fly a kite with you, to bring you soup, brush your hair, touch your shoulder, to sharpie your palm with "i belong to you", to sing to you the song that summer has written inside my bones. i will draw you a map. it will have on it all the places. i will sign it at the bottom. and when you are ready you can climb into it, and i will be waiting for you at the place where the X is. it is beautiful there. there is a bougainvillea blooming fuchsia and a violin that when you touch it's strings plays perfect back to you the songs your mother used to sing. i will be waiting with iced tea, and coffee for you, chocolate (and peanut butter), a string of pearls, seven avocados, two paintbrushes, the single wish of an oak tree, and my lips. when you get there i will hold you. i will hold you like a hammock, and we will lay there, swinging, a giggle factory, twin grins blossoming, the true love of the forest. and we will talk about all of it, until our voices are sore. the squirrels will laugh. i will bruise your lips with mine. i would like to get myself a new pair of eyes so i can see you for the first time again. that is what it will be like anyway. i miss you. i miss your fingers, the shape of your thoughts, your breathing next to me in bed. it makes me crazy inside my head. i feel like i live in an aquarium and breathing water is not so bad and i would give anything for you to be a fish here with me. we could kiss beneath the fake ferns, and sleep inside the castle. i have restrung my spine. it holds me up higher now. i am trying to teach it your melodies, but it is hard without you. i am trying to grow my arms longer so they can reach you. so far i've only gotten an inch. but it's progress. my biggest hope is that you know, that you know about the garden, the way the trellises stretch jasmine up, the tulips who nod, and the begonias waving at you, the treehouse with the sleeping bags, and the turtles i've met (they would like you), also the photo-booth that's latched itself onto my heart, and the way i've been teaching my skin not to get so sad because it misses your hands, and how all the rum on this island reminds me of you, i hope you know about it all, all the stuff i'm collecting inside my chest and saving for you, i hope you know.

all the doorknobs to the house are in my stomach

2008-07-15T12:40:00.000-07:00

i am lonesome and psychotic. it is a helpless feeling, the waiting, the not knowing. i am frantic with it. the heat is growing palm trees in my blood as i porch sit and wait for thirty days to pass. i long for the gentle cave of her voice, and her porcelain touch. meanwhile i try to let the ocean soothe me, but i can feel the tears hiding behind telephone poles, waiting to sneak up on me.

bells furnishing the insides of your ears with music

2008-07-11T11:57:00.000-07:00

my breathing feels like the tidepools. i can feel the ocean heave and my pulse is aligning itself with it. the air is thick here. you have to push your way through it, like putting your shoulder to a wardrobe. it hangs on you. tells secrets to your blood. you have to move it out of the way just to sit down. it is madness. my tongue is sweet with the fruit. my hair is filled with salt. i walk my feet barefoot, sleep beneath hurricanes, keep the best bird songs behind my earlobe. i shudder with the breeze, sit on the porch like i am a desert, and think about loving. this beating thing in my chest, it seems to be trying to escape. and i have a fairly good idea where it wants to go. but it has no passport and it doesn't speak spanish. so it is stuck here with me, while she helps the turtles to get living. but it misses her so. it really does.

recipe for a mountain

2008-06-20T00:08:00.000-07:00

i've been feeling the inside of my chest growing, in a slow rhythmic water movement, like the sea licking the shore as if it were an envelope standing ready to send a love letter. the humidity is haunting, a hanging cloud of passion ready to have sex with a thunder storm. the fury and the heat. it is the shape of the blues. the insects are ferocious, boiling the air, trying to squeeze every bit of life from their 24 hours. i am a teeth gnasher. i sit on the porch and watch the cars paw the road. there is a box of tears sitting deep in the folds of my throat. i can feel it getting closer. i find myself looking for ways to mail my heart to south carolina, and the rest of me along with it. there is someone there i want to give it all to.

wearing my eyeglasses like a drug

2008-06-14T19:42:00.000-07:00

i am filled with it, this longing. from the hollows of my kneecaps to the backs of my ears. there is a space in me that will not fill. it gapes there inside of me like a yawn. and i dance these bones around the city trying to remember. once i was stopped in my tracks on the street by a painting hung in a nameless window, unable to move while people rushed in a tide around my corners, and i gazed dumbfounded, knocked silent by the sudden beauty staring at me from an unexpected place. i don't know how long i stood there. but eventually i left my trance and found myself confused in the street, utterly exhausted, not knowing where to go, feeling ecstatic and heavy with the moody crawling of that paint on that canvas, on the verge of tears with an inexplicable sweetness, the weight of that reminder. i was suddenly aware of my hands. and their heritage of possibility. daily you are the reminder of that painting for me. and i am tired of saying goodbyes in airports.

it pours like polyester rain in a desert of style

2008-06-01T10:42:00.000-07:00

you stitch the seams unruly and glide it onto your frame with care and move calm through a swirl of moving bodies with a wink and a blown kiss in a slow spin that resembles gambling. your movements are slight, but the cloth explodes around your skin in bursts of color like you are wearing the fourth of july on your back. there are no fairy tales. you are true. i have seen you. you are true.

clearing my throat like a chainsaw so i can whisper quiet enough

2008-05-25T11:15:00.000-07:00

i have made a pile of mailboxes in the front yard. my theory is that sending someone a mailbox is much more meaningful than sending them a letter. it's more of a production. of course you can always put a letter in the mailbox before you send it.

lately when it grows to deep night, i have been lighting candles and watching the walls flicker like they are melting and reforming in the space of a moment.

my brain keeps growing leaves. and i can't for the life of me figure out who planted seeds there. it is a bit disconcerting. i keep having to trim back the foliage from my ears. it's embarrassing. i mean' what do you say to people? "oh this? yeah, there's a plant growing in my brain." nobody understands this kind of thing. i should probably hire a landscaper.

the warriors holding blades of grass

2008-05-24T12:07:00.000-07:00

i have a window. it is not too big. but not tiny either. it is a medium sized window. and i can see things out of it. i look at it and i see other things, things that are not my window. it is like television, but more interesting. i can see the sky in my window, it folds itself blue over like eternal laundry permanently stained in the upper parts, and teasing the ground. i can see cowboy hats, cigarette butts, and piles of wood. my window is always changing disguises. sometimes i don't recognize it at first, because it looks like police cars, or fist fights. sometimes it looks like lovers kissing, or a man crying. there are times when i don't want to look. but it is not because i am mad, it is that i can't bear it, and it feels as though my chest will crumple like red construction paper and my breathing will be the size of an ant and my crying will magnetize me to the floor. it isn't my window's fault. it is just that sometimes i can feel the horizon careening outward in all directions and the planet isn't solid enough beneath me, but there is nothing else to stand on. i guess sometimes i panic a bit. but i always get better. i like this life thing, even though it hurts sometimes. and somehow i always end up going back to my window and sitting down near it and waiting to see what will happen next. and something always does.

i walk around in dreams carrying trees

2008-05-12T13:17:00.000-07:00

it blossoms white and tiny, miniture supernovas igniting the air with scent, its pale branches running up into the small spaces the sky creates for us on the ground. it turns golden in the sunlght, whispers secrets in the wind, goldfish swim in its blood. it is afraid of axes. we know each other well. we move together. we have twin suitcases. during storms we sit and speak words that turn our emotions into rodeos and us the clowns that run off after ourselves into the dust inside, as we sit on couches sewn together from plants. where i go, it comes with me, roots and all.

i am tree carrier.

ducks quack to keep the sadness away

2008-05-06T17:06:00.000-07:00

it is a fragile fabric we are woven from, when you get to the real meat of the heart, and the towering trees some see as only wood. we all will become broken clay pots on the floor and flesh in the ground and bits of ash in strange mouths. i wear my wrist as a reminder. the water will reach our necks and keep going higher, the wind will find us and begin to tear, the fire cannot burn in reverse. i am trying to remember that all this love will end in heartache, and that i would never wish it otherwise. it is just one more reason to paint colors across this day as though my hands were brushes and the space i move through just empty canvas begging for something beautiful to be whispered into it.

the axe is making out with the tree while we look the other way

2008-05-05T17:31:00.000-07:00

we have grown extension cords from our spines, replaced our teeth with computer chips, learned the rhythm of a synthetic heartbeat and now we dance to it. our pulse swings predictably wild, a regulated bloodstream of binary code. there are digital bathtubs waiting for us to soak in them. we leave footprints on all we walk upon now. we exchange silicon based conversations, laugh in gigabytes, mourn in minimized browsers. it all adds up very efficiently. the numbers are exact. you can calculate the keystrokes. but there are still green things growing from the ground. blossoms still explode scent and color in ecstasy every spring. the sea is still salty. the sun still shines warm. the desert will still make you breathless with its silence. animals still sniff the brown earth, inhaling the damp richness of roots and leaves and decay and growth. we still eat. we still breathe. we still make love like we are wild creatures, taste one another's sweat, collapse in mutual exhaustion. my question is this: what is so wonderful about the cold efficiency of technology that we are trying to re-create ourselves in its image?

the palm of the sky open like a flare

2008-04-30T16:43:00.000-07:00

when the wine bottle reaches half mast, uncork the barrels. in the waning light of autumn, the sea scrapes sharply these cliffs we are planted upon, but we will take razors to our roots, lay out our veins like roadmaps and point to the places where we watched the sliding grace of change break through our kneecaps, our beards, and our voices. so hoist a glass, let the praises sing from your lips, cradle the pain you felt like a wounded bird for sculpting you more concretely, for heaven has emptied of its angels, there are feathers on your tongue, and by morning you will taste what it is to take flight.

by the end of this we all will bleed.

2008-04-29T20:04:00.000-07:00

grind your dirt teeth as the rocks they curl themselves beneath your knees. there is smoke in your lungs, a funeral pyre in your chest. the bodies they stack ever higher and god is getting further and further away. a gun sight never blinks. a bullet has no conscience. the dead don't complain. those of us still alive, we are the minority. open up the filing cabinets of your veins, store away the visions you will never be able to speak of. deep in the nighttime they will come to you, swirling above your head, red like memory, purple laced with fear, a yellow the color of swallowing, there will not be words, but understanding will pervade, there is a sickness here, it infects all of us, we drip with it, it has burrowed down and bedded inside of us to the point that we no longer know what it is to be without it, to the point that we feel "normal", but something important has been forgotten and it is far too late to go back and remember now, so we stumble and reach, ever missing, and we do not cry as much as we should, and our bellies, they remain empty, and our hands, they will not wash clean, and the one wish we have above all others is to see each other at last.

he-man's manly thighs

2008-04-25T19:06:00.000-07:00

consider me silent and manly. a drop in an oceanliner. a frog in a mess. movement will be the death of me. and you too. i can hear the melodies in your dance. i know somewhere deep down you are probably beautiful. but the church is on fire. the white house is sinking. we are living in our own karmic filth. and there is no way to speak of such things without losing someone's attention. so fill up your gas tank with sea horses, rein in the sparrows, pull the drawstring for the sunset, and wait for the countdown. part of me hopes that i'm just a pessimist. because i'm worried there's not much time left for being hopeful.

the tea kettle is screaming something about hell

2008-04-24T20:00:00.000-07:00

they took our portraits underwater and now we look like dead people, sitting in frames in a dining room that people politely walk through without saying anything controversial, always agreeing with everything. the papers sit crying insane claims from inside their metal boxes on street corners, already looking like the bleak pointless catalogue they will be in twenty years when we look back and wonder what the hell happened, and find no answers there.

streetlamps don't blink when you say 'i love you'

2008-04-22T17:06:00.000-07:00

there is a slow rising, a bellowing from deep, tiny heartbeats, and a few balled fists. while the first rain is still strong in your nostrils, i want to rest with you. my grandmother was strong and crazy. she is dead now. i still feel the rasp in her voice, the stale cigarette smell of her car, the blue veins pressing out against the skin on the back of her hands, the way we spun and spun and how it seemed like we would never stop spinning when she ran that red light. there was that incredible feeling of knowing no one is in control, of knowing death is standing right next to you, and then feeling it leave. my sister was crying in the back seat. my grandmother seemed confused. i felt like i was supposed to speak for her. like she wasn't really there. i couldn't have been more than 9 or 10. she was incoherent. she complained of pain in her neck. she thought it wasn't her fault. the thing i can't help but wonder, is if your family history is filled with bad people, is there any way for you to turn out okay?

artificial wind blowing on artificial lovers making artificial love beneath an artificial tree

2008-04-16T09:14:00.000-07:00

i do believe that violet is the color of your breathing and escape is the notion of your ribcage and the right three notes in succession will melt your tender body into a pool on the hardwood floor. there are fists and broken things sitting and staring at each other inside fleabag apartments. the trunks of cars are sitting glumly beside a highway, waiting to wrap metal arms around something. and you, what are you waiting for my love? is it the quilted death dangling beneath the soft skin of the forest? or quiet love in a wooden bedroom with white curtains billowing? we are warped creatures, you and i, we drag our claws along the concrete and breathe our moans like sea lions, we stitch up our chests with fishing line and burn good mahogany to cook scraps of rot, it is a junkyard pile of dust that we crave, to lie upon a soiled mattress beneath cities of trash, scrape our flesh clean and wear new costumes for a day, we are not bad, we human beasts, we are just lonely and we don't know how to show it. we just want to dream a little, without being scolded for it.

i believe in the existence of strawberries

2008-04-09T01:40:00.001-07:00

there are ugly things here. messy things. things that drip and smell. ugly the way no one wants to see, but everybody has felt. it is not pretty. (its ugly). (i already said that). (pay attention).

honey raincoat

2008-04-06T11:06:00.000-07:00

it is a soft croon, the way he sings it. the music is like surgery, opening us up, fixing something, and putting us back down gently, our bodies different, aching a bit, but better somehow. fill my veins with pollen, buzz the honeybees around me, teach me to stand like a flower. pour that stuff into me like i am a pitcher. all the houses are going to start sneezing soon. you better be careful. they say a sneeze can have a force up to 100mph. and nobody wants to get slammed by a couch going 100mph out the front door of a sneezing house.

my father, on the eve of his birth, 57 years to the day

2008-04-05T10:59:00.000-07:00

whiskey drunk, we stumble onto the dock and watch the sea crawl toward us on its belly, somehow whispering and screaming at the same time. he speaks as though he is a forest burning down. i am mostly silent. he says "a birthday is just another day." i think "i am glad you were born."

flowerpot

2008-03-29T14:26:00.000-07:00

my eyelids are turning into raindrops. wash me with sandpaper and put me to sleep. the nights are football field long, and i find myself in the middle of them, walking.

never talk to strangers

2008-03-24T00:46:00.000-07:00

as i am walking down the street, there is a man in a third floor window. i look up and smile. he says: "what the fuck are you looking at, dude?" i keep walking. people are good, deep down.

obituary

2008-03-23T00:07:00.000-07:00

i hope they say i was a crazy sumbitch who never listened to anybody, but loved people like the way mountains speak, and was one hellof a dancer.

for rosie, a run-on sentence

2008-03-16T23:24:00.000-07:00

the sky bursting with light, a forest burning down, the rain like a sigh, planes writing in the blue, ten thousand daffodils, a single letter in the mailbox, watermelon, driving all night, sleeping under the oak, all that laughter that went un-laughed, swimming in the river, the way summer feels inside my skin, how every tiny little piece of me scrunches up and buzzes like my body is a radio playing classic rock at top volume and i am running as fast as my lungs will take me and it's the way the ocean feels, touching so much at once, and it is blink, breathe, kiss and all those little pieces strung together, and me trying to stretch myself bigger to contain it all, to fall on my knees, to be planted in the soil, it is tiny explosions in my chest and sea turtles in my belly, and i don't think i can take it, like the stitches holding it all together will come undone, and my chest is a hot air balloon, and it is just so much, and i think i am a falling bridge, but there are arms to catch me, and somehow i am picked up and polished and it all looks different and i lay my head on a pillow and just like that, i am new again.

i like the sound your voice makes, i like the way you feel. yes.

a quilt shaped like your hands

2008-03-13T23:38:00.001-07:00

telephone poles are a city's way of trying to touch the sky. the artery is thick, it moves like traffic, there are snakes in the blood, the ceiling inside the vein is painted like apples, it makes a sound similar to gravel. what i am trying to do is make sense. there will be twin ghosts sleeping inside my feet tonight. at the edge of heaven, there are thirteen children playing a game that seems like the burning dreams of a forest that holds shadows inside its wood. they sit in a circle all day long, as trains go by. the ground they sit upon is feverish. there is a swirling. mockingbirds watch them. their laughter rings like gravity. they will never stop.

a couch on the freeway

2008-03-12T14:14:00.000-07:00

when it plays, you will hear it. the molecules that make up your body will spin. the room will turn into a hurricane of walls around you. there are archers with flaming arrows behind the 7-11. the leather armchair in the front room has turned into a time machine again. when you lay down in your bed, your body keeps catching on fire. a black lincoln continental is selling acorns from suicide doors. i don't trust it. the porch light in my chest has a burned out bulb. we are born with gravity ringing in our ears. what can i say about the night? your wrist tastes like flying. your collar bone feels like silence. the streets have filled up with gasoline. all it would take is a single match.

that aching heartbeat that stays with you through all of it

2008-03-10T22:57:00.000-07:00

i have taught myself to sit still on park benches and watch the city turn purple around me, it is the only way to see the holes where you can crawl into someone else's life. we move through a fluid more soluble than water. it can be picked up, touched, kissed, moved and spun around. but you can only catch glimpses of it. there are petunias growing in a garden somewhere, and a mandolin sitting by the window, and smiles aimed like lasers. to the east, the desert is sighing. and winter is beginning to hiccup. i am watching people walk home from work. some of us are eating hamburgers and some of us are forgetting to breathe. we get stumbling drunk, we make enough money to eat somehow (and sometimes not), we talk to old friends in the street, children come from our wombs, we do what we can, buses take us places, we read the newspaper, other people sell us shoes, we register for library cards, elementary schools, elections, our shopping carts fill up, we make friends, sex drives us crazy, we do things we can't take back, music creeps into our bodies and stays, we touch each other, houses hold us, we close our eyes and listen to the hum of the train, we lay in bed late some mornings, boats move beneath our feet, we teach each other what we know, dreams haunt us, we read books, grocery stores overwhelm us, we get mad at our parents, moments move us to tears, we see beauty in things we never expected, we let ourselves fall in love, people we care about die, we try to be good, all we are is ten hundred billion freeze frames set side by side, jumping like frogs, and nestling into each other, because nothing else is worth doing.

a memory

2008-03-10T21:07:00.000-07:00

i remember eating peach pie on the patio of a highway cafe, and watching the rain fall on a roadside farm with my old true love, while she drank de-caffinated tea and told me about Russia and her fiancé, and we tried to pretend we hadn't turned each other's worlds upside down. i remember feeling vaguely sick, and thinking i had eaten too much pie. i told her i had never seen a cornfield, and she, being her same old enthusiastic self took me to her favorite one and ran off in the corn. when i caught her, and grabbed her, it was the first time we had really touched in years, and i should have kissed her, but didn't. instead we walked back to the car, dragging the way we felt behind us like the bodies of heavy kitchen appliances, not realizing how big the sky was above us. in retrospect, it wasn't the pie that made my stomach hurt.

for link (the beginning)

2008-03-10T00:31:00.000-07:00

it was a blurry day filled with heaviness, like we all walked around carrying boxes filled with pianos. the sky seemed a bit shaky. none of us knew where we were going to end up. (we still don't). i saw you beneath the trees. i didn't know you then. but we shook hands. it was good. (it still is).

piano fingers on a sleeping airplane

2008-03-08T00:36:00.000-08:00

if i was sleeping beneath a pine tree tonight, i would wake up and smile at the stars for a second, before falling back to sleep. i wouldn't be thinking about anything that i am thinking about right now. sometimes the people just don't fill up right. and 20 feet to the north different things are happening. like dancing, or love. tonight my ribs felt like an empty bird cage, and i wanted to curl around them like it was all going to be okay, because it is, it will be. it feels good to talk about serious stuff and to kiss you on the wrist. that is the god's honest.

as the hive grows to the brink of a straitjacket

2008-03-04T09:44:00.000-08:00

we are elephants at heart. but we are as smart as pianos. all this pushing and no calm. there is a festering madness growing inside of us. but we didn't know any better. so we scramble for the only lights that can save us. love or kindness or imagination.

the cracks your feet make in the sidewalk and the dents your fists leave inside music

2008-03-02T23:32:00.000-08:00

walking downhill away from kissing you was what fire would look like if it learned how to smile. i've been watching people and how tender they can be to each other and i've been walking through neighborhoods and wondering how it all can get so still. i find myself really missing the moon these days. and i am wanting to see the sun set, but i keep forgetting that days are ending and by the time i realize they are, they are over. so. turn my blood to chalk, so i can draw you pictures on the sidewalk. teach me jokes so i can mess them up and become embarrassed. and i don't care if my socks match, ever. cause i'm starting to remember. its the simple things that i need. your hands feel good in mine. and you taste like the chapstick you used to eat. and this sounds more intense than it is. i guess i'm just trying to describe a feeling. and that's just not something i can ever do.

business as usual

2008-03-01T00:47:00.000-08:00

as i walked out of the gym at one in the morning on a friday night, after running in place on a machine for a few miles, which is something i do sometimes, i saw a carton of milk launch from the window of a speeding sport utility vehicle, miss the stumbling drunken teenagers it was aimed at, and explode on the sidewalk behind them. they looked confused and drunk and slightly afraid. then, down the block, a man was standing in the middle of the street with an overturned bicycle, which he repeatedly picked up and smashed on the ground, over and over again, screaming "this tire is a piece of shit! this tire is a piece of shit!" (i suppose he was screaming it to me since there was no one else around.) when i got home the palm trees were silhouetted against the clouds. my first thought: "who does that?" my second thought: "life is weird."

my sleeping belly dreams of being a snail

2008-02-29T12:29:00.000-08:00

sunlight is walking in the way the roots spread, invisible beneath us, like fireworks exploding underground, in hesitant fingers of survival, seeking out the source. inside my belly, a pear tree is growing like excitement. outside this cave of stars, the heat is rising. the air is pregnant with perfume and smoke. the oxygen around us is swollen and waiting to burst. it pulses ferocious through our lungs. our throats grow thick with words. the cherry blossoms have turned out so beautiful because they are trying to look like you. within the right balance, all things tend toward life. when i stop looking at you, the sky is going to fill up. i am okay with that.

wrist to the sky

2008-02-27T00:05:00.000-08:00

my tongue is grand central station, when what it needs is to be a jellyfish on the bottom of the atlantic. there is too much to say and no way to get there. my spine is clacking like a cable car up san francisco hills with the sobs that wrack this frame, eyes like a busted fire hydrant in the summer heat, when barefoot kids need some way to cool off and water is the most fun. you are a building falling in slow motion. i want to catch you, but i am just a person. you are too much to hold. i can feel the city buzzing. it feels like the inside of my stomach. all those people, all that pain and love. i wish i could make it better for them. and for you too.

driving with no lights on.

2008-02-25T16:28:00.001-08:00

the way we balance truth and mystery like a stack of books to the ceiling, swaying like a forest shaking hands with the wind, (which is a playground for trees to go insane inside of), is clear in the way your skin tastes.

drop your weapons

2008-02-24T00:32:00.000-08:00

it is an overpass in here. there are swamps inside your knees, and crocodiles who are lazy. this doorway is built out of the way you look. and when i walk through it i will build a tower out of electric guitars. it will sound like a stairway to heaven. but i can't figure out how to make sense. my blood is made of tea kettles. all day it has been the rain, falling like a car accident. i want to curl up in the warmth, be still, and maybe sleep.

blame needs a triceratops to hold it

2008-02-23T03:42:00.000-08:00

swing below the clouds with a refrigerator for a fist and blank canvas the migraine of the modern conscience with the weight of the stop and listen. you are what the world needs. it is a simple song if only you can hear it. you could learn to sing it if only you had the patience. i know you don't give a fuck about me, but i am part of your history mother fucker, and you are part of mine. you and me are family. we have to care. and that is the fact of this predicament we are all stuck in, boots glued down to the muck quick sand tight and startle-faced silenced. i am bleeding through my teeth for you. my kindness shows through my anger. i want to love you, if only you will let me. we are beastly creatures, this human race. fighting all the way through this brutal life, but there is beauty here. i promise you, the ugliness is worth it, for the moments that catch in your chest, that drape themselves over your shoulders, for the people who stop your heart like a bullet, hold your knees like gospel, breathe now, there is time, we can solve this all, there is a way, i don't know what it is, but it exists, i promise, i swear, i believe in us, and what we can do, there is a way, i know it.

there are elevators inside your veins

2008-02-22T01:04:00.000-08:00

there is a table. and four chairs. and some food. and people. the conversation is a series of strings going out from our chests and tying onto each other. there is light. and laughter. there are eyes. i can see the gaps between us. we are all cliffs, staring down, hoping nobody falls off our edges. there is a sky. and a moon. and the cold night on our skin. and there is warmth. i am not a prayer or a church. but i stand like both. i am learning.

there are silk flies in the air. my skin is a nightstand. sit beside me. these are kisses i want to put in my pocket. the kind that should be framed and put on the wall. your lips are like falling from a plane, the way my heart goes all butterfly. my palms want to rest on your body. my skin wants to feel your skin. i want to touch you.

only 14% of bullets want to kill

2008-02-20T00:54:00.000-08:00

the rain is the shape of the inside of my wrist. i stand on the hood of my car next to the freeway in order to shake the sky open like a blanket so that music can learn how to dance with itself. my legs are rolltop desks and i am running. time is a cedar tree that i climb the way light bulbs climb moths. i have buried too many flowers. when the vases crack i feel my veins stretch and moan and i look for mountains to stand on top of and if there aren't any, i use buildings. they will do. some evenings i sit by the sea, while dogs move like cities and men and i feel twilight's dull ache in my chest, and when the color drains from the sky i think i might cry, but it is when i do not, that i know i am happy.

your eyes bloom like peacocks

2008-02-18T23:26:00.000-08:00

what is it we stand beneath? there is fire everywhere. and people crying behind curtains because we aren't supposed to feel anymore. there are men with guns who are pointing them at people. what is it we are doing here? tell me. there are people with emptiness like lakes inside their stomachs. whisper it slow. we are a mess of tears and love - of violence and death - of sleep and anger - wrench these doubts from my hands! i am curled on the floor like a dress. i am sick with this. i want to be able to love you even as you stab me, but this rage is a long sea unwilling to subside, and it has demands like the simplicity of honesty and the passion of love. do not ask of me the hard things. i am not ready for them. not yet. i have built a machinery of shadows and they live like horses inside my veins. i am happy, i want to shout, i am happy! but the language to say it in does not yet exist.

blink until the blind dogs come running

2008-02-18T14:27:00.000-08:00

i caught myself writing nonsense on park benches again. i just thought people could use some moral support from the things they sit on. stuff like "you are a good person" or "keep up the good work, champ!"

i keep running into the other room to look in the mirror and make sure i'm still here. but sometimes i'm not. it's strange to look into a mirror and see nothing. i don't know what to think. winter is breaking its own back and there are armadillos curled up on the welcome mat, waiting for the desert to come plant a cactus between our shoulder blades.

butterflies sleep inside her collar bones. i have seen them dreaming. it looks like a sunset painting itself across her shoulders. she walks like the breath of the planet. her body is a flower bed.

giraffe tongues leave a lot a room for being speechless

2008-02-17T00:41:00.000-08:00

when they wallpaper your dreams with deranged deer and trap you unmoving inside your own body, blinking is like lifting a skyscraper. let the candle light come up slow. the words moved without our having to push them, or breathe life into them. they had a color, a shape. we grew libraries. we led a blind prophet to the liquor store. we walked inside saturday night like a hallway. there were horses nibbling your fingers. the city was made of watercolors. our footsteps held hands. the tea tasted like mint. i told you my name. we ate until the chairs turned upside down. there were so many questions. there are still more. and now that i know your lips taste like soft, i want to kiss them again.

when we live in refrigerators we will dance like magnets

2008-02-16T01:28:00.000-08:00

we move. we move instinctively, like faucets flooding kitchens because it is the right thing to do. we wear these bodies like houses, we live inside them like masks, and we move. the turtles are sleeping in the garden, while candles burn on top of their shells and old records play the blues and two people dance as though one of their bodies was the sky and the other the storm sweeping across it. we are electric. we always have been. plug me in, amplify me, broadcast me over your airwaves, turn up the volume. the sound of my veins is slow harmony bamboo. my collar bone sounds like the moon whispering. if you listen too close it sounds like static. all this excitement has planted a refrigerator in my stomach. conversation is a ballet. i am on the edge of my seat.

a drunk valentine

2008-02-15T01:11:00.000-08:00

we are made twins by disaster. after a certain point we all become family. and then we are in each other's back yards, eating pears the size of your head and sharing opinions on barbeque. the cities are made of shops where nothing real ever happens. we mill about, buying, talking on our cell phones, hoping, praying, something might just be different for once, hoping that this isn't it. but every time i look in someone's eyes, i find it. it is all right there, and there is no longer any pretending. you are here. and i am here. and i know you feel pain the same way i do, even if it isn't the same pain. and i know you laugh. so let's remind ourselves not to forget. let's set a timer, and if March doesn't become the orchard we thought it would, let's catch a boat to the islands, learn a new language, and promise, that no matter what, this time we are going to live.