recipe for a mountain

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

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

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

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.