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.

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Ancestral flight

Chief of the Montanas
Crow's-eye-view of the land
spirit usurped
Commander in Chief of the Hill
below

Monday, November 5, 2012

River valley summer hymnal

What if a firefly burned blue? Because really, that means a firefly might burn any old color and a sleep-eyed collie on an Arkansas porch wouldn't even lift her head. But there isn't any dog, no matter what they tell you. Just you and me and a whole lot of grey dirt.

Sunday, October 28, 2012

Unmanned

War's hell that's sure. Cutting up the desert, rows of dust plumes, more fire than the sun spitting from clenched teeth. (Machine gun pulse but no heartbeat.)  Sun slips behind mountains, dust blows away in a breeze. Then it is quiet. Not a single child stands beside the stars and stripes. Flag stands alone in the desert night.

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Category 5 creation myth

Hurricane is on its way, dear. Grass between our toes whispering, rolling and cresting so we may drown in no more beautiful a starlit country picnic. Tattered and checkered ship sail. Insane with moon salt and Cabernet, thirstier with each sip. My dear mate, afloat under redshift glitter sequins on Tiamat's dress the color of dragon's smoke.  Marduk creeps through oak leaves rustling as we split our mothers down the middle, and spill their guts across our smiles. Clink chalices and sink our fangs into sandwiches. Tear them to God-damned shreds and cackle as madmen do. Chill air reds your cheeks, lifts your hair, electricity in the sky, and we may lose our lunatic shrieking voices in all the thunder. For soon the clouds are here, and they are pregnant with grief and disdain. And oh how we mock fragile grief by laughing and drinking in the rise of flood.

Thursday, October 18, 2012

Hypothesis

Love pressed between glass slides, his trembling fingers afraid to touch.
Fingers diverted to microscope dials, yearning to bring love into focus.
Dirt caked beneath fingernails, unshaven mouth whispers, What, oh what the hell is it.
The laboratory is a sharp and cold place, cold as heel-slapped roads late October.
Morning dawn frozen solid, he climbs off the bed of splinters beside the subway stop, that subway stop, whichever one you imagine, coffee burns fingers back to life and a stiff amble to the laboratory.
Where, oh where the hell is home.
Glass slides slip from his trembling fingers and shatter between feet.
What, oh what the hell was it.
There is no answer to the question, echoed in the sharp and cold laboratory where the scientific method has exploded to debris.
Now he might never find home, because he will not have discovered when to meet her at the subway train. He will have to leave it to chance or prayer, and since he does not believe in such things, there is no use.
He will climb down onto the bed of splinters beside the subway stop and dream as little as possible, to reduce the statistical possibility of her passing in his sleep.
His burden of proof.

Monday, October 15, 2012

Homecoming song

On rooftops all across this damn city, staring up, leaning back. Lonely fools starlit. Never wanting to climb down, wanting to tear roofs away like their own sleepy eyelids, and let milky way spill, seep into the walls and carpet, and spend days curling under rain growing moss on the upright piano keys and the recliner and the children, slumbering centuries until the clouds and sun fall into green and orange and then black. And they'll sit in moss and with children in lap, recline, stare up in silence, and wander home.

Friday, October 12, 2012

Tinder nests

Crows bustle on by past jet exhaust clouds, sky blue as daddy's drowned face. Cracking blue. His few remaining hairs floating lake vegetation, his fingers outstretched.  Wheat thistle digging your gums, blood swirls. Swallow. And run your fingers against the rust, rough orange blistering death eating holes into the frame. Pale yellow paint, flat tired Pontiac, tarp half folded over torn vinyl roofing. Daddy's rage and regret smoldering here in the land of shit and wheelbarrels, the grass is all dead here and will not grow again. Press your palm into the spring peeking from the driver's seat, you are his only son. Tell him, fuck yourself, daddy. Close your eyes and drive away, the Pontiac running for the first time since daddy's fist fell open in brackish shallows. So says Nietzsche, that mean fuckin hermit who couldn't bite his tongue while you grit your teeth. Mean fuckin hermit was right after all. Daddy was dead before a one cricket rubbed bow to string. So close your eyes in that shit-smelling dead field and with sweat dripping into the puncture in your palm, dull pulsing ache, and grip the wheel right where the sun has split it open like a fist, and drive into the midwest night, drive until there are so many lights you can no longer see stars. Pretend you ain't got to open those eyes. Pretend the crows ain't godless philosophers, shrieking in the unrelenting noon.

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Give thanks, oh ye whisping willows

Shutter sputters a fine November morn, stout young collared boy and ponytailed toothy grinnin girl, hair tied with marbles of transparent red plastic, the crisp air cutting through their play lakeside, thousands of tiny curls cresting on brackish blue, thousands of tiny footfalls pressing grass, photo edges left to yellow with autumn, color drains from the tips. That's what autumn is like. A fierce November wind slashing the cheeks of the boy and the girl as they rush across the shore of the lake, running away from life.

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Transcontinental

Barefoot on rocky roads, walk too long and it don't hurt no more. Transient pain, ha ha. Thumb out, long greased hippie hair, maybe a long-barrel revolver, dreaming of wide-brim hats casting shadows on unshaved smirks in out west desert towns, bang bang. Just tryin to get out west, mister. It ain't easy under the sun. All white like dancin' sand dunes, just tryin to get out west and buy myself a wide-brim hat, mister. Might I borrow your cash for the hat, and I won't shoot you with the long-barrel revolver my granddaddy gave me, mister, ha ha. I was there after Vietnam spittin' and full of venom, just got caught up with one of the two crowds, you know? Now I see how easy it is to shoot someone, bang bang, just like out west, which is where I'm headed. We had one thing right back then, ain't no different shooting the life out someone in a war or in this here sedan. Just had it backward, you know? They're both easy peasy. Been on these rocky roads a long time, you know? It don't hurt no more. Calloused, ha ha. Well the last frontier is gone. No more savages, and I ain't got a buzz cut but I'll sure as shoot you. Rite of passage for those headed west. Only thing keeping me from the task is the playing field ain't even. What with it being noontime and yet you don't got a gun and we need some open desert for the ten paces, neither one of us got a hat brim. Ain't fair if I can see your eyes. That ain't fair at all, you know, mister? Memory's like the scars on my burnt up feet, and I don't know I got room for more scars.

Madre negra

En la noche embarazada, puedes presionar la oreja contra el suelo y escuchar el latido del corazón de la mañana.

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Sea level, above, below

No mountain angles incising horizon like ice picks left behind from climbers in their final, delirious, burn-eyed footfalls, no iced caps melting against cloud, drifting, parting and coming back together, lovers one. In the swamps, we must resign to cut our hearts on alligator teeth and sink into our muck, warm and nonetheless comforted in the mosquito rhythm of home.

Sunday, September 30, 2012

Muddy delta baptism with q&a

How do you reply when I say that you've disappointed me. That the sky is no longer a mystery, that ventriloquism isn't enough of a distraction with the strings showing in spider spindles, sparkling with the dust (floating lightning bugs in the quiet room). That if an Emerald City sits at the end of this chipped and sun-bleached road, I won't bother to look behind the curtain to see the scared and injured little man hunched over wet stake-scarred palms, because I've pictured him many times before. That at some moments I am indignant, my best moments of imperfect rage, wanting to drown the whole goddamn world so only I may see stars and it will all be fucking quiet for once. That these are the moments I feel closest to you, in the sins we share, the moments logic seeps through our fingers like the sediment that remains when the water clears.

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Porches

Rattle wurring ac box washes over the black velvet midnight, screened safely in and the leaves grazed by moonlight the way ripples knead the shore when the sandpipers sleep in shadows, and suddenly I am sitting in another porch, no lights past dark at the summer beach cottage for the sea turtles are searching their way home and even the glow of mom's cigarette might be the guiding moon, beaconing out into the gulf horizon we cannot see past the screen. A tear in the porch screen of the first house we shared let the dog run and disappear into the black velvet night. We mustn't make the same mistake. We cannot let the things we wish to keep in rush out through a faulty mesh.

Monday, August 20, 2012

Brown sky cast on skin

You're my little coffee bean. Press my lips and lace my blood with caffeine tremors in the quick of predawn.

Sunday, August 19, 2012

Extra credit question

When the sky falls from burning second story rafters, pinning us beneath, what message will we scribble in frantic thinning inhales?

Saturday, August 18, 2012

Those who with oxygen will burn

The cardinal must be like a flame on the wind, and so she is never surefooted and rarely alight. She is a songbird's subtle language. I hear your restless voice rushing through the open window.

Thursday, August 16, 2012

Rain song

I let the rain soak in my skin. I am a pop culture sponge. When weather presses down, we bear the weight by
57 percent while an uptempo love song plays quiet and sweet under the torrent.

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Sleepy soujurn

Spired lighthouse mothers in our ships on cresting blanket. Weaves needlework clouds pregnant with storm by flashlight in our bedcove.

Saturday, August 11, 2012

Fixing the Music

Shrieking feedback drawing blood from my eardrums, discerning no music from dissonant anger. Waiting for a sign from God and never getting a Goddamned note of sympathetic score. All I can do is turn to the audiologist on my knees and submit to her care, and ask her to wait a minute before fading in the softer melodies, so we can appreciate our silent stares in deafness.

Thursday, August 9, 2012

Out with the Tide

We should go to the ocean more often. Landlocked ain't our lot, be sure of that.

Monday, July 23, 2012

Danger in color

Yellow postit notes and unfurled legal pads sit before me, maize numbers on my football jersey, in a pattern that is not a pattern. A pattern only because there is no other yellow in this section of the library. Because we look for patterns and when you look for something you will find it right where you expect it to be.

Sunday, July 22, 2012

Pointing skyward

Minarets like masts on the ship of countrymen headed to a coast jutting tall buildings upward, so that in their past, their present and their future, they obsess with tearing through the sky's filament.

Thursday, July 19, 2012

Our maiden voyage lands

The red light from the radio while we are wrapped in 4a.m. black a beacon for us to come home from the storm, a 90s ensemble playing us in.

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Why I find it hard to write today

The dog licks the puppy bites the dog fights with the puppy draws blood from the dog limps away with head bowed from the puppy whines like a teakettle at the cat claws at the patio blinds to get the attention of the puppy pounces the glass doors to get the attention of the cat licks his genitals, ignores the dog watches the puppy terrorize the dog watches the cat lick his genitals.

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Classrooms as a social activity

Reb1rth is not some scribbled dead sea scroll markered on a particle board school desk in first period. It is the student from second period who considers what has been written so that it saturates her understanding of geometrical theorems, of Chaucer, of the Trail of Tears and women burning in shirtwaist factories. A word that means practically nothing but connects her to some sleepy and irritated boy with blaring headphones in  a way he will never consider. A boy who sniffs fumes from the permanent marker, black, which he used to lazily scribe the capital letters and number 1 in place of i.

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Things you can't take back

To protect the pathetic little naked tree from the winter squalls who blanket the city in bitterness, you have to keep all the pathetic little naked branches from snapping off.  You'll need those for later, after the unending storm.

Old loves, new adventures!

We'll take a trip to P5
Nice little venture
New Horizons
Navigating our way
Through thick ebon
Pinprick Earth
Suns
Settle in
Where moons are
Dwarfed by Methane Gleam
Pluto at the
Center
of our
Gravity-tugged
Hearts

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Hair stylist who uses Manic Panic/an evening in

Electric Banana in afternoon
Wildfire at dusk
Decorative hedge
Hitchhiked sand spur
Drawn muslin
An upside down salad bowl
Salad
Straight flush
Sheets ruffled
Raven black after midnight

Monday, July 9, 2012

Thy festering gums as catalyst

The kind of thing you want to say with a dental drill leaned into your darkest cavities. You are now paying for your excesses, the dentist reminds you as he wipes his brow on his sky blue scrubs sleeve, checks the gold watch set in his bush of arm hair. The kind of thing you want to open wider to shriek, a tribal howl as you gag on your own tongue and he scrapes bits of meat from your molars. "Spit," he says. But you find yourself speechless without pain to compel confession.

Sunday, July 8, 2012

Timelines

Fingers set in motion down her back, down his back, parallel lines. Skin fissures, primordial pulling of time's edges together, volcanic pressure builds new life from the puddle of its prehistoric predecessors, and finally he fits into the curving lines of her back in the hidden dark edges of the universe.

Friday, July 6, 2012

Mark 16:17-18

Rain batters a church's tin roof and the bayou creeps up, moccasins like a hundred ripples in the mud. In times of flood, the congregants hold on to faith that kills.

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Warm pillow, cool pillow

A fear of death, but that is really a fear of other things. A fear of not remembering a saltwater smell on a Gulf coast. A fear of disembodiment, a loss of warm breath settling on my neck. A fear of blindness, deafness, muteness. Impossible to wake up and find you still pressed into the pillow beside me.

Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Day for patriots

So we cannot forget the bitter taste of gunpowder on our tongues.
So we may sweat alcohol, through our shirts, shoulder to shoulder, beneath fiery rain.
So we may illuminate the faces of our sons with sparks, as if God, shooting from their very hands.
So hot, the other children's faces are invisible beyond the tips of their lit instruments.

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

A seafarer's idea of faith

Tidal inertia pulls flotsam away from the wreck, a matter of prayer.

Monday, July 2, 2012

Kinetic teakettle

The teakettle's spout has been left open as it sits on the cool stove top burner. One of the many things it is not currently doing is boiling water for tea, though this is only one of many things it is not doing.

Sunday, July 1, 2012

Wonderful ride

The world literally shakes beneath and we clutch as it hurtles around, weeeeeee!

Saturday, June 30, 2012

Hustle&bustle

The pavement cracks from pressure and velocity, each new fissure spreading with its own sense of urgency.

Thursday, June 28, 2012

Shakespeare died a long fucking time ago

Roses die and then what do you have, oak bark for skin, bitterness crawling underneath like maggots, and some vague memory or idea about a rose. Cracks showing on the bow of the SS Idyllic. That feeling in the pit of your stomach is substantial, that drop out from under you is an indication to head for lifeboats, if there had ever been any, which there are none. Drink up, then, the best moments of your life are not ahead of you in the frozen black North Atlantic death rising up, they are not in the constellations shaped like roses, mocking with the sharpness of their patterns out here where you can see nothing else. Drink up, these are the best moments of your fucking life, such that it is, this feeling of cold wind raising your skin like whole oceans.

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Thumper's Aphorism in a dark bedroom

Some things are better left unsaid. Maybe that's why the puppy shrieks nonsense at strange dogs passing the window, shrieks at volumes that pierce the walls and reverberate in the belly of my guitar. Shrieks all night, man. I think, to keep from saying something she'll regret.

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Instead of a rainbow

Rain sprays from one shoulder of the road to the other, glinting in Florida sunlight like glass shards, so that one has to blink to make sure their eyes haven't shattered out into the passing storm.

Monday, June 25, 2012

Creed of the USPS

 In this digital age, how might we transpose the blood soaking the mail carrier's socks and darkening the legs of her uniform?

Sunday, June 24, 2012

What Floridians might do after a hurricane

Ice cream melts. Birds' nests burn, and windows yield to shattering forces (such as trees containing the nests). Cars move sideways down murky flooded streets. The sun emerges from curtains of rain swept violently out of sight. We dance in rocky road puddles in the kitchen,staining our feet with chocolaty goop. We patch our roofs with charred twigs and invite the birds inside. We brush glass from the sill and hang ornaments on the tree's crown jutting into the living room. We wade through the carnage with some new things to share.

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Plot holes in Futurama

Bender's tie is magnetic as he rides along the starship Titanic, but this cannot be. Magnets dig into his subconscious like a finger leaving a hole when it is plucked free, leaving only show tunes to play viciously as he swings about like a sad Disney creation, trapped along the side of a track where grubby-fingered children point from passing railcars. But he is not trapped in a Disney ride, he lives in a world where jokes upon jokes cover up his friend's, his only friend's shattered timeline. And so in this moment he is not himself, though he is in love with the robot countess who is funny because she is Rose from the movie Titanic and this is funny because we can understand, we can relate to this, though we cannot because the robot countess stretches infinitely into a black hole, neither living nor dying (says Schrodinger). And so love is lost, God is dead (says Nietzsche) and so what do we make of Bender's tie. This tie that goes unexplained, that cannot penetrate his love in this moment, that cannot leave a hole. What do we make of a world without holes.

Monday, June 18, 2012

Misplaced body of water

When the shore shines most brilliant, white sand blinds my teary eyes and I cannot find the ocean. The sky, too, vanishes. And then I, myself, burned up by the afternoon.

Saturday, June 16, 2012

Disillusion

Surrounded by ants. The dogs haven't shit. I'm looking around for something beautiful. Not sure if I can see it. But looking around seems good, at least.

Friday, June 15, 2012

Bricks at sunrise

Workmen wake before the sun.  When it rises, they lean into it and wipe their muddy brows.  These endless days (though the days clearly have beginnings--this much the men have seen) turn their forearms to leather, their fingernails caked with crescents of dirt and cement and clay, their boots splattered permanently with the same.  A low grumble, a clatter, a hissing, and the shrill, penetrating, echoing warning sound of machinery going backward as well as toward.  The birds can't compete, they go back to sleep; the morning has been taken by the workmen, it belongs to them.

Thursday, June 14, 2012

Subsurface REM cycle

Sleep seeps in like water into the lungs, a weight that sinks a forgotten dreamer to the ocean floor so he may finally rest there, softly, far below the tumult of the air.

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Libraries and florescent light spectrums

A wall of books has only so many colors.  You must pull them from the shelves, pitch them to the ground so that they open like oysters, and there reflecting across the words, like pearls, you will see how a ray of light might be torn apart.

Kinds of birds

If moonlight glittering off sea foam is the Atlantic's milky way, and jellyfish the clouds, and pillars of coral skyscrapers reaching up from the softly sifting sands, then fish must be some species of bird not yet cataloged by ornithologists who think, mistakenly, that they are not standing beyond the stars.

Monday, June 11, 2012

Unable to lead the mourners in song

Hey hey, my my. RocknRoll will someday die. Glancing at the preacher, Niel averts his eyes; Hey hey, my my.

Saturday, June 9, 2012

Study in Entropy: above, below

If a comet reaches to the sun and expands, melts away, trails, and if ice cubes melt in the summer, pooling the cement, slipping past the roadway shoulders, or first evaporate, then fall in sheets of rain, then slip past, what other parts of us can we expect to melt away in space and seep into the dirty Earth?

Friday, June 8, 2012

Ursa of Аляска

One Kodiak bear says to another Kodiak bear, "Why do we kill the defenseless animals that hop around the woods?"

The other Kodiak bear looks up at her confused.  She doesn't even realize there's blood all over her snout!

"Actually," the second bear says, "we mostly feed on Salmon, and rarely attack the woodland species such as deer or goats.  If we eat their meat, they're usually already dead from the winter."

The first bear looks skeptical.  "Then why do you have so much blood on your face?"

"Oh, that," says the second.  "You see, we all have that."  And it's true! The first bear has blood on her snout!

"How is this possible?" says the first.

Says the second, "Because it saves us the trouble of confessing later on."

So both bears stand among the trees under the northern borealis, emerald and pink, like fresh salmon arching through the sky. One has only to look up at the salmon of the sky, and easily forgets the blood matting the fur of the bears' snouts, as do they.

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Slow rise

It all seems a bit silly, this brick-by-brick ascent.

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

The power goes out

The Earth grows dark. Well, what is there to do? We could go extinct. Or panic, loot and horde munitions, murder. We could conquer what is left in the black night. But that is uninteresting. Unoriginal--we've done that already. We could dream. Dreaming is a bit of old hat, but at least there are possibilities for novelty. Endlessly so. Yet dreaming seems somehow unproductive, or an irresponsible use of our time. Well then, we could go about making light. But that seems unlikely. Not anytime soon. Or perhaps the dark is an end, and there is nothing to be done. Dusks and dawns have for too long been regarded as givens. It's time we learned what we've been taking for granted all these mornings&evenings. Yet for those who've stopped to look at a pink sun setting on a gulf of green waves, it's unlikely this thing that looks so much like another world is being taken for granted. It seems unlikely that our fragile incubation, circling one behemoth spherical incinerator of billions, wouldn't still excite (or horrify) us. Can it even be said that we deserve this darkness of the planet Earth? We can always hope that it is an eclipse. If it is an eclipse, we will have learned something about ourselves. Even if what we've learned isn't entirely clear, and anchors upon the image of a corona. But could it really be said that we haven't learned about ourselves already? So we are left with this question, then. Unanswered. Unanswerable. The Earth is dark. At least maybe we can make up our minds about God--but probably not.

Monday, June 4, 2012

Identifying features

Soon enough your skin flakes off, your nails and hair grow until they need to be clipped, old socks get holes and are replaced with new ones, your DNA becomes new DNA, or something like that, and suddenly you're an imposter. Though if you're a new person, with new socks, maybe this means your memories aren't yours anymore, either. They belong to that other person, who is also an imposter pretending to be you. Liar! Well, you can scream, or you can turn to the present moment, which is wholly yours.

Worry

One thing people don't worry about is the death of the last veteran of war. Or maybe people worry about it intensely, so much so that they begin to shoot each other in the afternoon sunlight.

Saturday, June 2, 2012

Cleopatra's lawn care ordinance

A worm in the warm dirt must wonder, why are the people so jealous of birds? Flight can be brief and cold and sharp and deadly, but the dirt, one can never get too far ahead of one's self in the dirt.

Friday, June 1, 2012

From a blind man to Mr. Humphrey Davy

If you stare into a light bulb intensely and for enough years, when the filament breaks, you won't even see the black-singed glass, the dark thing right in front of your eyes.

Thursday, May 31, 2012

Understanding different languages

An Argentinian chaco tortoise (Chelonoidis petersi) and the Patagonian mara (or Patagonian hare--Dolichotis patagonum) competed in un maratón. The Argentine people placed their bets. 

"Eres un animal muy lento," said Patagonian mara.  "¿Cómo vas a ganar?" 


"Vamos, vamos Argentina," chanted the Argentine people. "Vamos, vamos a ganar..."

"No puedo ganar la carrera," said the tortoise (Chelonoidis petersi). 

"...que esta barra quilombera," regaled the Argentine people.


"¿Perdón?" said the Dolichotis patagonum (Patagonian mara/hare). "¿Por qué me persigues?"

"No te deja, no te deja de alentar!" concluded the Argentine people.

 "Porque," said the rival of Patagonian mara (hare), "Años más tarde, de todas las personas que pasaren por tus huesos--despues que la gente ha tomado tu piel para calentarse--I will be the only one to understand your goal in running."

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Combustion of the mind

What if a phoenix didn't rise from fire, from ash, but simply awoke quietly, in private, and suddenly it stood and revealed itself as if nothing had happened, that it had not been near its nest when it ignited nor was it aware of the tragedy. Were there survivors? it asks. Would Herodotus's skepticism seem a bit more desirable than the human imagination?

Copa de Oro

Bradbury flew Icarus too close to the sun to snatch Yeats's golden apples the way they teach you to swim, sidestroke, pass the apple from the hand to the basket hanging by your pruned foot and then grab another, like swimming into firmament with no gills or heat shield. As if the Earth simply sneezes and woosh! there we go, expelled from the atmosphere for a moment to look back at her and exclaim. For a virus we are optimistic about finding another body.

Monday, May 28, 2012

Ballad of an aspiring musician

By 3:23a.m. the guitar strings have all snapped. Thank God, say the upstairs neighbors. Praise be unto Allah. The room darkens, and suddenly it is apparent to all that no one could sleep in all this silence.

Saturday, May 26, 2012

TITLE thoughts in hyperlink /TITLE>

<REINCARNATION/>
<"perhaps suggests a rose by any other name"= is still alive but unable to scream/>
  <"I saw this documentary once about folk who cannot scream"= avalanches of terror built and unreleased bury them/>
   <"alive because their skis are broken 9a metaphor0"/>
    
<IN SPACE />
   < "if folk die"= they float forever/>
    <"never stopping"=until they strike another object/>.   

Thursday, May 24, 2012

/ to find a calmer shore

Pink scratches draw a road map crossing my forearm / a puppy fights her imagined war along these routes.
Chlorine roughens my hair into coppery wire / grey swivels high above the water and far off thunder suggests conductivity.
All in all a rough afternoon / doggy paddling through wine water cerveza

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Avoidable contact.

It's easy. To lose control. Keeping traction, that's the trick. To stop the fiberglass from rushing in.

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

an equation (solve for x)

Aftermath is the rubble we wade through looking for another explosion.

Monday, May 21, 2012

halogen eulogy

After all, the night is not a thing but an absence of things, and what is an absence but something we cannot allow to seep into us, or rather, we cannot allow the things that are in us to seep out. That's why to look up at night is the same as to look down from the night, like a still summer lake tucked into blackness, stars above and below the surface. At one's will it is not night, it is florescent day. Let there be not night! Yet we cannot stay awake. Not for too long. And if we do manage to keep awake until dawn, we will sleep through the sunlit day into the florescent day, and soon there will be only an absence of things which we mistake for the thing we so feared losing. We will not even realize it is missing, so long will we have obscured the shadow of night. All the while we will tell ourselves it is a thing, this absence of shadow. But we are confusing terminology here, just misinterpreting two halves of a loss.

Memories sprout from our heads

The memory of you comes as if through a tunnel, a long concrete cylinder like the one that soldier killed himself in, too lonely a place to bear. So this is a tunnel we reach to the edges of, to pull ourselves through though we never can leave it entirely. The dog runs beneath the vaulted ceiling, laps up and over the futon, shoving the cushion to the ground as she tucks her legs into her stomach, peels her ears behind her spotted head, keeps pace. The wise old tortie and the roundish orange tabby (sometimes Garfield swiping food, sometimes Winnie the Pooh stuck between fence posts) tucked in the closet of a bedroom strung with quarter inch cables and boom stands and guitars leaned against walls. My music room, across the hall from your photography room. A room for each of our unfinished business, the things we would later abandon without ever thinking we could let go. A burgundy ring around the bathtub the color of hair dye, the color of the SUV a drunk totaled from behind at a stoplight. The stain in the tub reminds me that this memory is outside the tunnel and I am not, because your hair is no longer that color.

Sunday, May 20, 2012

R is for

Hand in hand
in the cricket night
we watch the rocket ship
ascend
a tower
not into heaven but into
nothing
empty
impossible to breathe
so we hold our breath, still amazed at it
like magic
still waiting for it
to suddenly come down
but it is just another light now
in the cricket night

Friday, May 18, 2012

Symposium, expanding & contracting

Buddhists and Whitman say the body unlocks the universe, the cosmos, the searing yolk of the spiral. One Armstrong said, what a wonderful world, the other said it was one giant leap. Scientists and Moby say "We are all made of stars." Jesus Christ's father once said let there be light, but only small islands of light in an empty dark. The sensation of falling that causes you to jerk in bed, though you have not fallen, is called a hypnagogic myoclonic twitch. Doctors call vertigo a sensation of movement when one is still, and psychiatrists call the fear that rushes over one looking into the sky, thinking how easily they might fall into it without clutching blades of grass Anablephobia, but mathematicians say the Earth's equator spins at a constant 1,670 kilometers per hour circling the sun at 924,704.922 kilometers per hour and our sun travels 72,000 kilometers per hour and the Milky Way at 2,155,233.484 kilometers per hour. The speed of the universe is unknown, but it is unlikely for one to become still. Galileo said Earth revolves around the sun. Nihilists suggest we're circling the drain. Though Niels Bohr argues that nothing exists until measured. Measurement is a culinary art and food does a body good, but who can tell which is better, to consume or be consumed?

Thursday, May 17, 2012

I've got a few questions here.

If time is cyclical then why don't we see ourselves? Why can't we predict the cracks in the asphalt that will swallow us? Or call out to keep ourselves from stepping into the paths of our own cars, blistering down the highway with our without us? Why can't we see who we are, and then if who we are is, for instance, a wild and mange-stricken dog, broken and snarling, why can't we turn away? Is it because, cyclical or not, with or without us, to look away from a snarling dog is to become nothing?

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Peninsula

It doesn't snow here in winter. We lace palm trees with lights, white, or many colors. The night sea breeze bites some, forty degrees, and if it dips a little lower we have frost warnings. Bring in your pets, cover plants. Snow, if it comes, melts before it ever touches the grass. One pacific northwesterner uncle wears shorts during a December visit. The rest of us are bundled, probably overbundled. Some of us dream of getting away from this place, the sun, the lightning. Musty air you break a sweat in walking the length of a parking lot. But we don't know yet about snow. If it snowed tomorrow some of us would die, unprepared, idealistic. A mirage in the heat. A mirage in the snow. Maybe that's why northerners come to get out of the hard grey, though you couldn't call it an oasis. Not if you lived here full time. There is a lot of fucking water, though. You have to give it that.

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Double Negative

A shallow chemical pool burns and sets an image, and suddenly the memory of birth is gone, the white fading into the shape of something that was never young and will never grow old. In this way, birth and death are twins.

Monday, May 14, 2012

Stratospheric Doldrums

A creamy white swirled by gray, a jellyfish plume cut into the foreground, this is the sky I see today. A curious sensation of drowning in air.

Sunday, May 13, 2012

Road

Carving out a road, carving it slightly different from the rest. That's what we do. Our road is many roads cut through many sets of trees, mine an unpainted tar path that winds through the thick pines of a national woodland and you will pass me in sneakers and a dirty tanktop. No, fine sand shooting off from right-angled corners, through a bamboo forest, a rock garden somewhere in the middle of all this where you sit barefoot and meditate, or draw a tiger in the sand, an image you will destroy when it is finished. Or a slippery path of sand dunes and a gentle but unruly bramble of panic grass and sea oats surrounding and crossing the path.  The sky blacker and stars milkier and gleaming brighter than any other spot we know. You stand at the edge of the black ocean, the edge of the long, cool sand, land and ocean and sky nearly indistinguishable, and though I am afraid you embrace me and pull me carefully under. There are many roads, each person's road is slightly different, and though I have several mine are all the same road.  You know the secret, that you are the cause of the sameness of paths. That the reason my roads are one road is because at the end of each is you, waiting for me to find my way.

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Flightless Bird, American Boys

How much ground is lost over a lifetime on useless legs, one in front of the other, so fragile and small. Like a glass figurine bird who has lost its way home.  Shuffled here and there in a crowd of patriots.  Easily lost, stepped on.  Dirtied with the mud of their boots.  They're all going the same direction down the sidewalk, non-descript buildings hugging their shoulders.  A sliver of sky peeks between their tops.  But the bird does not know how much or how little of the sky peeks between the buildings, because while the patriots do nothing but crane their necks, point their noses upward, laugh and discuss the rain or the cloudless blue or Apus/Aquila, they cannot ever see him, who passes beneath them and does not look up.

Monday, April 23, 2012

A puppy song for my neighbors

Whining, always whining is this puppy who is new and who wants to know the answer, though the answer she wants is not the answer to a question, but the answer to a shape, a shade of grey, a yearning to be lifted into arms. The answer is warmth, an atrophy of which leaves her head hung submissively over the edge of the couch back, waiting for a coming together of bodies.

Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Her gulf stream

An attempt to be happy beneath a rusting beacon. The temporariness of a finger's touch, a pressing thing. As the skin changes there is anger in the white left behind. White like island sand in shearing late afternoon sunlight, transitioning soon to a deep orange and then to sleep. Like sand forever shaped by the hug of the gulf's piel suave, blanca.

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Written Behind the Turbine of Engine # 2

Anonymity maintained. No image comes to mind this time, and you can shove your other senses into a wastebasket fire of white noise. Accelarant boy, sidekick to the solar storm, haha never see it coming. Gathering words and abstracting concepts neither of us fully understands, not until sleep catches us lying down on our backs. Ready to be penetrated with a deep and lasting silence. Some of them say we wear masks to hide our faces painted in the blood of our fellow animals. We try to tell them, these are not masks. Trailing smoke in a downward corkscrew with flame like a ray of light from the clouds to the earth. It is with the wind of final approach sweeping across our blank looks.

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Declaration

I am a bull, after all. Cornered, sometimes. Killing, sometimes. Sometimes killed. I am a patriot. Taste of grain and blood and dirt. Breathing in the dusty Spanish air, el aire de España. Exhaling sulfur, charcoal, potassium nitrate. Viva España. Viva el toro. There is a war, a tauromaquia, and there is an enemy, torero. After all, I am a bull.

Monday, February 20, 2012

Cartography, in Brief

Delicate, bending easily to your clutch. Impressing fingertip maps in my skin, pressing so hard because it is so easy, so easily one may destroy softness. Like nothing. Like wind passing by, us watching the moon eclipsed in dark fields. Because our world overwhelms and blinds us from various light sources. Lamp light is allowed, from a distance, to draw shadows from our tapping feet. Skipping across chasmic sidewalk cracks, pressing our white palms together because, full of weightless terror, we await our mothers' inevitable deaths. Because our palms weigh down with sweat, a solvent that like time makes this embrace a simple moment, an impress of fingertips.

Friday, February 10, 2012

Remember the Castle

If we lived in a castle, buttresses and stain glass cast in yellow moonshine, warmth slipping away through stonework, darlin you and I could slip. If the castle were big enough, we could see it from the places we wisp through, and remark to one another, remember the castle where we lived? But eventually we will reach a place where we do not remember, and it is no longer the castle we lived in, it is only a castle, cold, empty, not a home.

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Mutual Reassurance

Saying something worth saying isn't worth saying when a struggle in the dirt leaves a reminder of falling in black crescents under your nails. When raising a middle finger reveals your weakness. When showering does not help, and you must clip away and discard parts of you, flush them from sight, to keep appearances. Unsure if this has helped or merely seems to have helped, you must shake hands, shake a hand and when you are finished shake another, firmly, to reassure yourself while you wait.

Sunday, January 29, 2012

A Place of Forgiveness

Must I be clever, caked in mud, cold. It is degrading. The things I feel when I lie to sleep. You'd never know. Not you whose clothes are clean. It is easier to run in clean clothes. So do not think yourself clever. Knowing there is nothing worth saying, knowing the mud is the attrition of us all, all our last stand, softening our fall. So keep being clever, but in the place of the things you say, think about all those blank goddamn bible pages. Think about those pages, buried in dead seas as dead as scriptures of forever and ever, just think about all those dogeared hymnals screamed with the deepest hate for fathers who did not cause all the fuckin cancers and pain and the time we all need so so much more of, though nor could they prevent it. They stand a brittle wall divorced from sin and weak of flesh, and we hate them and we tell them we hate them, because we are too brittle and weak from the chemo to tell the Father of all our fathers to fuck off, though we want to and we are bitter with words in our gut like bile. We get off on fantasies of ourselves in some dirty desert town sucking to the butt and letting smoke trickle from our lips, our eyes never leaving His. Hairless as we came. Riding nausea, a mustang taking us God knows where through the dry brush. Mud under our fingernails. Everything we touch stained this way. Wanting reconciliation but first revenge. Blood of our Father, our own blood, a fine mess it is. Morning comes with drowned and bloated bodies floating downriver, who know there is nothing worth saying, washing up on muddy banks under the rainbow. From some storybook without words. And here, on the shores of dead seas, wearing mud on our clothes and under our nails, nothing to say, we can forgive.

Saturday, January 28, 2012

You were the reason I cried at my friend's brother's funeral

Heard someone say one time, don't say goodbye. Some good advice, for how will I say goodbye. I'm not sure. If only some mail truck could hide me for a time, in the swampy night. I wish I didn't have that dream about you trying to hurt me with a fork, it isn't how I think of you. I wish we talked more. If only some mail truck could shade us for a time, in a front yard somewhere. We always wanted the best, we were always quiet about it. Sometimes we get angry, too. There are days I drive to collect debts. Burned my hand with your cigarette one morning on the raceway infield, tongue rough from coffee burns, skin sunburned, eyes burning. Like nitrate. It's fucking stupid that we don't talk more.

The Things Between

Sky so white the eyes erase blue, red, orange, black, green, grey, from memory, from the atmosphere, from life, from death, from sunrise, from sunset, from the centers of pupils, from the tops of hands, from reflections on white gold bands, from afternoons, from rainstorms and beaches in wedding dresses, in nothing at all, in her, in love, in between, thighs, legs, fingers, pale, slick, sky so white atomic shadows of nudes genitals pressed together on the walls like hieroglyphics, explicit, pornographic, sky so white erasing everyone but two, bodies obliterated to particles and images, to essences of feelings, of an aftermath, a decimated pile of flesh melted onto a pile of sheets, sky so white, the eyes erase the ground beneath, gravity, cities, worn mattresses, stars, and the things between.

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Applied Geometry

It is difficult to remember, is it not, is it not difficult to remember where digging through the bramble will end. It is difficult to see, looking up with thorny constellations to lead us north, where will it end. Wipe the frost from the window, a single swipe of vision, watch for me to emerge. Remember and I will remember you. Wait for me, you have a home with a window to keep in the candle light and to stop the cold and I cannot stand yet but to stand implies leaving and if I stay beneath the bramble and you stay behind the window we are point and counterpoint and perhaps someday I will emerge but that day, that day when I will stand on my own, and it is difficult to remember, we will not say goodbye because our juxtaposition will have us facing opposite directions and it will be difficult to see, whether it is north, or it is not north, and this is what our Lord must have thought when he lay a broken pathetic liar in the eyes of the one he loved. So you see, it is that you feel my absence on the tips of your fingers when you clear winter from the pane, and it is that I will imagine the candle casting shadows across the snow, and that the pattern we draw will not melt for some time.