ducks quack to keep the sadness away

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

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

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.

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

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

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'

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?