let lovers leave

this clearest-stated, calmest-kept

place within my deepest mind

woke upon where life had slept

and left my fears therein to find

let lovers leave as they would want

in knowing they'll return to you

let go the rooms that fears will haunt

and all the gods you thought you knew

there's something good in the decay

of life's conventions held too fast

by those of you who'd wish away

the only thing that's meant to last

i'd rather that my lover be

nothing more than what she should

returning to imperfect me

in such a splendid, cluttered wood

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hold the balance

hold the balance of the
hours in one palm,
and with your
dirty knuckles go
into the world.

moonlight havens
and sunrise gravity
can be wretched things when
you're infused with darkness,

so be the nearest
star and skim
the surfaces of
lakes on your
quest for love.

there are salts of passion
in all things, and
the trick is to ameliorate
every taste of this life
with the tongue of the heart.

you have your father's
sense of lost direction;
the wanderlust of a boy
racing away from the
fevers of a thousand marks

left on perilous skin
by the lashing barbs
of the wicked and cold
wingless fools.

how are things?
how are things in the
eyes of a boy who
loses sight of the
footsteps of poems?

to be standing with you
in the upswing of your
glorious springtide is the
ascension of good souls.

i have dreams about you
and how your cells were
different, and how your blood
was different, and how your
first vision was that of another
father.

i can't fathom the depth
of that loss! to think
that you could have come
dancing into another
man's life! not my son.

i am cold without
your comfort; a bleak
waterless tide; a sound
of wasted wailing against
a tripping wind.

to my thinking - the
thinking of a smaller
man - you are the fingers
on the grass, the singing
bird in his branch; the
taste of green.

make still any tempest
and climb from within
your wildly beating
wings and solidly craving
soul to meet me.

you are the son of a
man who paints with
a feather upon the
canvas of joy and pain
and are the bright ink
therewith.

so:

hold the balance of the
hours in one palm,
and with your
dirty knuckles go
into the world.

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she said

i'll tell you what she
said to me once,
spoken from her slender
current, the one that runs from
top to bottom:

she said -
          and i relay this
          as a boy would
          because i was a
          boy when she
          said it

she said -
          and i find myself
          of a changed mind
          these days, reflective
          as onyx-colored ice

she said -
          and by no means
          should you, my friend,
          feel the least bit imposed
          upon to be quieted

she said -
          and this was at a time
          of lots of turbulent records
          playing in my brothers'
          bedroom upstairs

she said -
          and i am as diminished
          as dust blown from the
          corners of long lived-in
          rooms made of sand

she said -
          and truth be told,
          i was one never so
          possessed by the flavors
          of love as i am now

she said -
          and i recognize the
          sin-stained look on
          your brow when you
          smiled at your hands

she said -
          and we had a wonderfully
          lunatic german shepherd
          at the end of our road that
          chased kids on bikes

she said -
          and it was in the summer
          of the year my oldest brother
          left for college and took all
          of his albums and his long shadow

she said -
          and i am leaving out the most
          purulent parts of this life;
          the parts in which there was much
          crying, because they came a bit later

she said -
          and outside the heat did
          a dance of solitude with a
          good enough breeze that
          i could feel in the eyes

she said -
       
she said -

          "stop crying. you'll be ok"

          and that rank flavor
          of blood from my tongue,
          and the rash-burn down
          one arm, and the skinned-
          swollen knee, and the
          fucking bike that bucked me
          off, and the laughing sister,
          and the holy hymns thumping
          down from my brother's room,
          and the german shepherd who
          got in the way ...

she kissed away with coveted words

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you look at me like

you look at me like
you're looking at an approaching
storm that

growls across the horizon,
the colors of godawful
bruising and retiring embers.

so i whisper something into
your neck, perhaps a prayer
to the moon and her lover;

something about wanting
or about will or about the
salt of passion in tears.

we lovers all begin with something
to die toward; it's the bellows of the
heart that keep it stoked.

my kingdom for the keys
that would unlock these manacles;
the fetters of my soul-sinews,

that i might release
myself from the Mother and
into the harmony of free-life.

i don't like the strangers
in our town, with their half-closed
faces and shattered hands,

but i'm not pure so i will sit
in silence and beg forgiveness
'til the day they die;

or swallow the hemlock blood
of the best people i've known and
be done with it.

love is edible and her consumption
is a rite of all the warm-blooded
fools who dare.

it props you up and splits rocks
and draws venom from blood and
expands eyes to the point of being crazed.

i look at you like
i'm looking at the beginning
of a wave

that growls on the horizon
of the sea, the colors of
fallen sky and doomed angels.

you're not supposed to
be made sense of like
an algebraic cloud of sand.

and that's been my mistake,
(i apologize)
but you're too beautiful.

so i ask for your mercy;
that you break the rules
of natural law for this one time

and allow me the chance to
love you with the power
and uncertainty of blind yearning.

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i want wondrous moments

i want wondrous moments
of half-holy corners
cleaved into glass; with your
splintered shafts of errant
radiation now beacons well-spread.

i would grieve in my words often,
how weak they became
in the face of your
tempest eyes and
heated host.

i could not find the
words i needed to
disallow the things
i had feared lost
that were never departed.

so.

i want wondrous escapes
beneath the canopy of
your longest horizon;
to let fall the rain and the
fire of that beating organ.

so that we might meet
in every way and smile
at the stars that have
chosen us as friends like
fingers within fingers:

the hysterical strength
of the moon on her
beloved child is how this
started after all, and now
her tears are pure petals.

so.

i want wondrous anecdotes
from your fine lips and into
my palms breathed at a
distance no greater than
the thought of a lit candle;

so that once spoken i
can shift my mind to
better, more elegant
answers to the foolish
questions about life;

holding the balance
between us two in
such close proximity
that your faith is felt
in the pulse of my eyes.

so.

i want wondrous moments
of half-holy corners
cleaved into glass; with your
splintered shafts of errant
radiation now beacons well-spread.

i won't break nor bend,
really, now that i know
that you are sitting here
in my company and
casting gently toward me.

telling me, in your own
small-voice way

that you love me.

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this prophecy is the baby on the hip of my love

this prophecy is the baby
on the hip
of my love,

who stands there, in a
vast solitude, looking
with delicate pupils
toward something.

perhaps toward that
town you left me
for, the one with
the oily black-sky
sorrows and salted air?

you joined me.
why, again?
and again, why?

because i am dubious,
at times; entrenched
and needing to be pried
from the ice of a self-inflicted
menace.

i was no match for
your alter; i had no
armor against the
incense of your
sweet summoning.

i knew, somehow, you'd
hold the answer
to my paramount
question,

and if it takes my whole
life to reach that
mark, it will have
been worth it.

for this prophecy is the baby
on the hip
of my love:

the burning-meteor progeny
of our delirious elopement
so many years ago.

and i've not had to close
my eyes more than once
to see framed the
image of you and her
standing there
together.

how many times since
has the temptation arisen
for me to cross the room
of that vision and take
hold of you by those thin,
subtle lips
with my own;

to return to the
source of my
passion's passion
and throw (once again)
a line toward
you before going
too far adrift?

if you think
i'll ever be extinguished
you're wrong,

for this prophecy is the baby
on the hip
of my love,

who stands there, in a
vast solitude, looking
with delicate pupils
toward something.

perhaps toward that
pain you felt
with the arrival of
so many old, latent
mornings,

when it was supposed to be
easier this time around?
we found that if we
had to change our lot
we had to retire our
losses.

you joined me.
why, again?
and again, why?

because i think you
knew, in your threads
of twilight, in your
secret deaths, in your
infinite dreams,

that you saw the future,
peering out from some
glittering moment
when we were entangled,
a prophecy that held

in it the stitched fire
and braided ancient
waters of a love
that blew up the world;

that came from the blood
womb and the cream heart
and forged, for you and i,
the beginning of this good life.

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