Spinal Structures

Not a dirty path, no boots, no high-noon beaks tearing at what was a man before the crack of gunpowder echoed a call for supper. Not the fur a desert leaves on the face of someone turned animal in the sun. Not some goddamned outlaw's land where what you want waits in the shadow of a cactus, to see if you're cold fucking bastard enough to walk right through its arms. Not the amount of cuts on a man's face: a show of wealth. Not the place a man leaves in the base of his neck when he comes here, a civilized territory. Not the city of the damned and the dead that looks you in the eye when you tap his shoulder and his neck turns.

I'm glad I married you ;)

I will give the benefit of doubt, think the best. See your face always with the blurred lights of a Christmas tree behind. A shutter clicks, and you remember the way you used to feel. Nothing fancy, just the curve of your fingers around the camera. The frame of black around the image you choose, so that when we look back in picture books our lives are exactly the way they were to us.

Hollow's Eve Exodus

These bones slide out of their place, into another place I've never been where sidewalks are cold and dark and even fallen leaves slide past. It is a place no one stays for long, nothing is permanent. So that when you go back there it is a different place altogether. It is so that if you walk these sidewalks clinging to a wool coat with your eyes stinging you will have traveled through entire desert nights by the time you stop to put a match to your cigarette. Also when you are there you are alone in the mysterious city of Kôr but when you are there, there has never been a city to begin with, so there could be no bombs or lights to put out. Sea turtles even have never been here, where the moon is quick to move on along in its route to California in a current of clouds. These bones can feel the displacement. Entire generations of word-addled junkies with bibles and manuscripts who are the children of senators moving west from winter. These bones seek absolution, a row of palm trees melting in the waves of heat breathed by cracks in the boulevard, a mirage as out of place here as you, and that is why there is only one thing to do here which is to seek to be somewhere else. Somewhere in no way identical to here, so that these bones may once again come together.

Fragmented Thoughts on After Life

Dear, what will it be like / when we lose / what here is, to be happy / to smell your hair / like I don't know anything else / to talk about / when you are there.

What here is / is not what we thought / it was / but is that why we endure / so well / in the presence of a fleeting / 4 a.m.

Dear, what will it be like / when the ocean / glides off / without telling anyone / and the sun / bakes mud / for our / footprints / our dirty palms pressed.

Oh Messiah / what will it be like / when neither one / can turn from the other to / face you.

Can you forgive / love / and can it / forgive you.

Dear, what will it be like / when we lose / faith / because / it had been / in one another all along.

Or is faith / a breath / you must one day / release.

I got nothing fuck off

mjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj,n goes the cat.

Ancestral Morning

Sit with my mug where the ground cuts suddenly to a cliff, and traction gives way to openness. Sit with my mug at the edge of my present tense, in the folding chair, dirt grating as I shift, a steady hand stained with dirt and coffee. Dawn, there is nothing to say in the beginning or the end. The morning flows and I drink, until the beginning has reached the end, and again I am silent in the old sun.