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

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

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

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

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.