blade

i came across this blade and strummed her with a finger and i watched the dew tumble to my bare feet waiting and i thought about the will of its wanting and the arch of its back and the pearl beads riding on the thin ridge and of their tumbling down. it's all about the collapse into the self and the phonetics of the helpless toiling we all make. how a man once said that...

Read More

apples, fall

i saw you flower in the spring of this particular year, the nurturer's air rushing in as if from bellows and beneath the tree from which you hung, the grass beginning its rise to the goddess i stayed away from the tree, and from you, for various stretches of time, although you spied me most days when i came to fetch the children, who were out in the back field thundering in...

Read More

the girl who dreamt of the exploding sun

the girl who dreamt of the exploding sun regards her moon in a temper of mutation and solitude, singing about a day or two not long ago when love's lifting wing left her on a diver's ledge a wail to the stars has caused her temporary blindness, so she bleeds from her eyes until the salt in them returns in a melancholy flow down onto her hands, her lap, the floor and...

Read More

my witness moon

my tempest purity, my witness moon, you've devoured me and my pale armor; plundering me, my pastoral monarch, my wild testimony, rending my sea. outside my window, on this day, the harvest epoch continues with plaited rains, lashing the barn and drenching the fields while i roam my hallways to your chime. flecked with joy and crowned with cascades of laughs, you came into...

Read More

to the girl sitting alone at the wedding last night

i. to the girl sitting alone at the wedding last night with your gloomy lover: i saw you twice for hours as you looked at the idling table cloth adorned with the ornaments of convention and he didn't ever talk to you you wore a dress that you picked out for hours and you made your hair a canvas to Eros and he didn't ever stroke your arm you watched the bride escort...

Read More

father fury

my son, with his drooly speech, and his excitable howling and his fumbling dexterity and his shoes on the wrong feet and his open fly and his picked-over sores and his near-egregious, gargantuan, gaping smile and his stewing adolescence and his incapacity for meaningful discourse was not dislodged by the snickers of the boys this morning when he'd launched his boisterous...

Read More

they raised a marble statue for you here

they raised a marble statue for you here the oldest member of a stony choir who sing a mourn about your lives afire and how each breath was forged by angst and fear in wonderment i walk among your heads and ponder on this day with all its good the lives you led and if you ever would unlive your fates to slip these earthen beds this marker is a lie to all your youth a...

Read More

all the lovers are miles away

all the lovers are miles away and a fence post in the pasture is too aged to keep her barbed wire well hung all the lovers are miles away and the gate handles are too entangled to release them from their holding loops all the lovers are miles away and the horse and her two companion minis graze upon browning autumn grasses  all the lovers are...

Read More

what have i

what have i but the dim lights of you lovers lost behind a bleak window, through which i must hurl myself headlong if i am to gain you back after all these days, shattering a barrier erected when our intercourse was poorly spent? all the estranged eyes of all the lovers i engaged with and released are scowling through the film, straining against it, hurting for the...

Read More

no latch

he wants to be in your company in the corner away from the dance floor because he does not dance, that's not his scene it's difficult for him to bridge, to admit to the emotions across the abyss of all those years of programming he'd rather his hand on your knee, perhaps, or around your back, so long as he can feel your pulse against the heat of his searching and i've...

Read More

intellectus sonet

you've approached her through that age-old passage sure her inducement rises with your hand engorged by the hubris of your passion then foiled by that which you don't understand: mouth the opening of her intellect breathe heat on the aperture of her mind erect a statue to her introspect then have intercourse with all that you find she'll then hear the beat...

Read More

my baby, she got toes

my baby, she got toes sunk so deep in that morning grass that she says, daddy, i can't walk. and i say no, i can't pick you up, you need to walk honey, it's just from the dew my baby, she got hair blond as the sun, and it shine in july the way the heavens weep down on the forgiven and i say, i love you, and she look at the tree with the horse swing...

Read More

shed

there is a spirit of her in the things she wears when she disrobes and disarms after a long day and she leaves a pile of clothes in the bedroom and with them she leaves a pile of echoes in the small heap of pants and blouse, socks and bra and she loosens her life and unlatches her clasp on a certain reality outside these walls; her release of a cold day is the emission...

Read More

the lily, for good

i recognized the face of the girl who passed away recently and to whom friends were writing messages of love and loss across the sterile wires we went to high school together, i'm sure of it, yet we never spoke and today the idea of that leaves me in an echo chamber with my own clanging sorrows i sit and ponder the face of a woman, once fully-fleshed...

Read More

love is curtains toward a view

i'm waiting for my turn on the stage with the seashell footlights shining silhouettes against a cream-colored scrim i'm waiting my spotlight - how can it be so not simple? i sit in a bedroom with white curtains, a fan oscillating on a desk, cooling my fever while behind me is the bed in which we made love last night i can't make my art today for...

Read More

be present

how do i approach the edge of my everything and leap with the conviction of a man in search of a fickle faith? i am the promises and the comfort of things i offer to a select few, but beyond that i am mostly deferred by the dead and living among me who dog me as spirits chase the frenzied man into corners of vacated houses i want that i should go sightless...

Read More

the soul is the master of itself

he frets: what passion is this that comes dawning over my horizon like a prowling feline? i am unawares and ill-prepared, my heart now inflated, my mind thrown into flux make it stop! (but stop it slow) make it cease! (but fill me first) i'd say to him: consider every new love is an  exercise in delicate variations of chaos, its violence truth to the core he paces in a stir and says to the muse who brought him here:...

Read More

little. league

i remember matty from little league who'd broken his arm from elbow to wrist while going after a sharp grounder to short, how he wailed in the dust of the infield while we players all looked on i stood absently in left field watching the chaos of running grown ups and seeing the faces go white as the boy was carried off the field by his father, who let a cigarette dangle between his lips, the smoke slipping soundlessly across his son's pinched face a...

Read More

i yearn for the unveiling release

i yearn for the unveiling release of the artist who can open life with the stroke of the brush against canvas she paints with blood, and each approach is the forfeit of her virginity again and again such an artist longs for an appreciation of her existence and must stand naked before the canvas, ready to give birth - a rendering on the weave of her pale womb and the pains of it are tidal, each stroke a violent lashing against the quay built with...

Read More

her smile is the thing

my mama, she holds the puppy in one of her black and white histories and her smile is the thing a bare-footed gypsy in the  early years of her epoch, building up those resistances i think i might believe that  that smile is for me-in-waiting,  because i called for her even then her youngest child, who would be heir to her runty, her lush...

Read More

lost joy found

i see in you a flicker of the joy that hides now in the well of this grown man a flame lit when he was an active boy a prince of all the fields in which he ran a certain seed was planted in the rows within the hallowed virtues of his youth it is with love and life that something sows to bring to fruit the wellspring of his truth and in a time he sees the goodness drowned by all the labors of the evil kind who whisper death to joy without...

Read More

the love of many

i'd wish for you a second lover's lips to sing the praise of your passion's passion, for the largess of your engulfing love, how it spills from founts to overtake the seas love is not a bound volume, to be spent judiciously or loaned with the frugality of the moneylenders, but a thing refreshed by the vitality and desire of the giver, who cannot stem the tide any more than cease her heart i'd wish for you a third lover's lips to...

Read More

no pyre

i'm minding the folly of my own conceit that burns in my breast for men whose art i envy in life's balance the gifts of the creators are pyres set upon their mountains and lit for all burning the corpses of their creations to let the ash rain down upon the heads of all receivers in my darkest i have fallen into a valley and the summits rise up to cast me in their shade and urged by malcontent i scale their jagged slopes to gain the peaks and...

Read More

one hundred thousand thousand and one

every moment now is past and therefore marked and the names for each are etched onto melodic strands that you drop into a jar one hundred thousand thousand and one marked moments that make the jar a perfect measure of the virtuous time and pleasant peace and tidal epic that you once shared the jar a wide-mouthed ewer of crystal that you place upon the window sill of your aggrieved mind and when you reach into that blessed...

Read More

jennifer's sonnet

i sit to write a psalm of spring and love when morning sun has made her light be shone through frames of glass and cast from up above this violent view has left me all alone a crooked thing that bleeds into my room was once the purest form of all that's true the sun, a bride, and life her lovely groom are separate now in time and rent askew a friend whose sister's breath...

Read More

body in the river

it was the beginning of april and the local river had glutted her banks and shouldered away a man who'd jumped from the bridge. when i met a lover who was a poet and who told me she was put on this earth only to change people. she had full lips, which is all i cared to know about at the time. she believed also in past lives and claimed that her prima persona had originated...

Read More

fall down with the day

fall down with the day now, fall down the day- let the fever go. let it go now if you were afloat in an ocean on your back you'd let it let you feel it let go and your arms would be outstretched like falling down with the day. now, let it fall and get those arms outstretched and wait for the collision with the world we all love the fall-feeling but...

Read More