Monday, December 31, 2012

Dawn in the drywall

In the shade in this room built from tree bones, skin smooth, cool. Press fingers into and crumbling. Press until springing a leaking sunlight across pillow. Now, sleep.

Sunday, December 30, 2012

Banshees by candlelight

Like oil on river water. Strike a match, o-light-the-match, friend. Your eyes twinkle and I am imprisoned in the blind-retinal fire reflecting across my landscape. Do you see the patterns? They are the patterns we have seen all along. They are the patterns we see in the darkest hour. Pumpkin time, and we carve the faces we will wear. So open your mouth and shriek with me. The forest burns but that is the cost of the soft glow's comfort. For yes, we fear the darkest hour. We prefer to walk on sunlight, not water. Our messiah is wax melting. Hallow's Eve is our rapture. And our shadows count the hours till we must leave the shore, gliding like oil on river water.

Thursday, December 27, 2012

Big top pop quiz

What do you call a trapeze act without a net, and without a trapeze? Phrase your answer in the form of a eulogy.

Monday, December 24, 2012

A red bow

Christmas eve is cold because we are arm in arm, and our clattering bones keep the rhythm for carolers, cheeks red with flask-joy and snow-burn. Our skin is alien to the skin of the infant us; we have left their tiny cells across the paths we took to abandon them [except in our shadows that rise suddenly from a streetlight's glow cast on bricks / the streetlight pole tied with a red bow]. New snow will cover our tracks, and Jupiter will fall into the moon, swirling endlessly swirling. My dear may I have this dance?{there are embers now behind the fire screen.} Cold reaching into our spines, tossing our heads back in chill, and the chilling vibrancy of your dimming skin <like ice lakes in twilight>. My dear, we are the night's pinprick sequin stars on Christmas eve. Too cold to still our bodies among the voices.

Sunday, December 23, 2012

Heliotropic evolution

Transcend, they say. Okay. I will be an energy wave. No, that is already the case. I will be water pressed through the neck of a vase. No, that is also what I am. I will be an electromagnetic field, vessel to a magma-blooded terrain, wild turkeys, sunflowers that turn to let starlight sifting through my fingers warm their faces, sea turtles and angler fish on dimmer pilgrimages. I will be the starlight, the glittering moon, the flowers and turtles. But that is all merely noise. Then, I will be music. No, I will be the resonance of music. No, it has always been the resonance of music.

Saturday, December 22, 2012

Bulk

A boy wonders if the gun pressed to his stomach like a cold hand should be dropped into the slot. He touches his hand to the cold blue mailbox. Then, for a moment, he wonders if pressed the trigger will expel confetti from the barrel. It is after all his birthday. Thirteen today. He shakes his head, no, that could never be. What a young fool. Act your age, he says. And drops the gun in the slot. BANG, it says. But a muted bang, from the gun striking the inside of the blue mailbox. The boy feels like mourning, as if his ribs have been struck. He scuffs the sidewalk home, where suddenly he grows old and falls into bed. His hair white, long and frail, his hands white, long and frail, his eyes...the boy, now very old and near death (who knows how many years), closes his lids as afternoon drops into evening, the sky a cold blue. The sun soon touches the horizon outside the bedroom window, where he cannot see. It might be something like foolish sleep, like confetti.

Friday, December 21, 2012

A steam locomotive patriot folds his stars & stripes like this

Railroad laid, train slipping away in thunderstorm, steel still warm. Overalls, coffee-sticky finger webbing. A spike hammer slung right shoulder arms, gait something like parade rest. In the other hand: flag whispers gentle along the rocks between ties, trolling behind, collecting trackside dirt. Sign says this way to Pennsylvania.

Thursday, December 20, 2012

Dust devils

Scatter my ashes where I can see them, swirling in air currents, a predetermined dance that has been leading to this all along. I'm tired of you people. Just tired. We all know the ending. A pencil sketch is the most appropriate representation, the smudges the curl of your hand makes pressed against the lines you've drawn. Those are the words you can't gather to say to me. It's okay. Fuck it, let's just get this over with and draw. Count of ten. Or is time irrelevant. Or have you already drawn, betrayed me. My ashes mixed with gun powder, swirling in air currents.

Friday, December 14, 2012

Linguistics performed as tragedy

Today the sun will set, or has set, on a desert somewhere, the color of the sky like pale flesh. And when the wind picks up, the image scatters, fades. The girl's words become sand expelled from her throat, slicing the image in her eyes. The words, if they could be said, could not connect to images, are scattered letter by letter. And though the letters themselves have shapes, well, soon enough those shapes will wear away. You won't remember the girl in the desert, or the setting sun, the wind, you can't picture it; you'll never say her name--you never knew it, did you? But now and then you'll stagger, your throat will burn, as if caked with sand. And then what lines can be uttered?

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Solitude at 8am

The duck doesn't care about the urban planning that has led to this carefully arranged shrub, its ceramic pot set to frame the lake and trees beyond, and neither do I care about the shrub. But then, the duck also doesn't see its path spreading across the lake, or the dewy grass along the bank, and feel your absence. It's the same separateness a viewer must yield to any pastoral art. For example, one time I tried to reach into a painting and the canvas ripped away. It was a hard lesson to learn.

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

The biology of scholarship

War is histamine rising to a mosquito's saliva. Slap! It's easy to kill. Essential. A pleasure. Peace is every library book you cannot imagine exists, because you have not yet thought to search.

Monday, December 10, 2012

Etymologies

A bullet defined by the hole it leaves. A well defined by the soft echoing pebble reaching its bottom. By how many echoes since it's been dry. A door irrelevant until isolation becomes a disease shared between the occupant (eye pressed against hole) and the visitor (knuckles bullets banging). Love defined by who is the empty well bucket.

Saturday, December 8, 2012

Dandelions and lemonade

She pours lemonade from the pitcher's lip, presses her lip to the glass, cool sweat dampens her forehead. Ice cool palms, dirt crescent nails, face burned red, yellow hair pours. Wood rockers swaying and her garden soon to sleep.

His hammer strikes nails, the porch boards creak beneath wood rockers swaying. Sweat pours. Last yellow sinks below the lip of the creek. The crescent moon rising in the evening, a cool wind rustling the palms. The red nosecone rising high above him. He hasn't slept in days. He wonders if there's time to disappear before the world burns.

The porch boards creak beneath her swaying. His hammer strikes nails in the yard, pressing her garden, the red nosecone rising high above them. The cool wind pours over her burned skin. It's a wonder the world can sleep this evening. Her palms rustling against a glass of lemonade.

The creek is like glass, reflected crescent moon lips pour across. Dandelions along the edge of the wood swaying in cool wind. In the distance, a hammer ceases to strike. He wonders how many have burned in their sleep this evening, lit yellow and red. He wonders how soon before the burning world presses in.

Finally he finishes. They are harnessed beneath the red nosecone, backs pressed, crescent moon reflected against their glass helmets. Her lips hammer t-minus ten. The ignition strikes, pouring red, then yellow. Rustling, swaying, then high above.  The yard burning with ignition, the garden burning, the porch. To the dirt bank of the sleeping creek. The nosecone aimed at the crescent moon, rising high above and burning, then disappears.

The fire reflects across the creek, the dandelions lit like skin.

Friday, December 7, 2012

Gas giants is why I drew this map for you

Tear every page out to make a narrow path of testament. So ink stains like dirt between toes. Disillusioned is subtext, never printed but always a fire hugging the hills into dusk. That's where we're headed. So maybe you walk with me a while, try not to laugh when the pages crinkle. This is supposed to be serious work, our trek to the sea. But soon Jupiter will rise beside waxing moons. Lunatic moons, nightgaunts flowing past in receding tide. With the sea turtles they leave tracks and wet their wings and choke on salt and drown and float through shipwreck. And we breathe against their current, their bodies brushed by. And what can we do, under lunatic moons, with Jupiter's air so sweet, but laugh.

Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Life in a river current

From the waterfall orifice, birthed into free fall. The roaring fluid mutes our shrieking, our choking heartbeats. Gravity mutes the roar. And so on.

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Arachnophobia in A sharp minor

Web brushes the hairs on my ear, I brush it. No spider; pulse quickened with magnetic potentiality. The hairs on my ear stand with the brushing of static life. We prefer portraiture, I think. It doesn't crawl beneath like leaves' shadows in wind. Little cold poisonous moments, skin rises, then falls. A species of terrified hammers striking forks: attack, sustain, decay.