even torn sails still billow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.