she delves

she delves and i am bitten

by the frost clinging to the eaves

of all these men who told me 

her place was held fast.

she dives down and down

and i am watching the 

gravity of life suck

her into a purple void.

i am a weak stitch,

unbroidered at once

by the fallacies of

the politicians of faith;

so much so that blood

comes from the eyes and

tears from the throat;

i am a spent coin at last.

what she wants is what she

cannot see without the

abridgment of her prison sentence.

and lately i've played a fool,

conjuring the specters of 

worst-worn scriptures i'd

memorized in youth.

how they told me i am the

first and the last, and she

the second moon in an orbit

of dying stars;

how her vehicle was driven

softly along a gilded path 

and that i was to be her

captor with a small net.

the policy of the unquestioned

elders implied that her 

womb was a place of sacrosanct

harmony with their god,

and that from the dawn of eve,

she was to suffer the depravity

of the unsalted sea and weep

tears of joy for everything not hers.

i delivered her evidence, her

blue truth, in buckets filled

with the oils of distrust and

maleficent good-knowing.

i imparted from my ego the

episodes of reconciliation

one makes when the heavens

of the forgotten are closed up.

i never said no. i don't say no.

i never said can't. i don't say can't

but i idled in my stupor, drinking

in her benevolence like a dog.

and i pissed on her pride the

day i forgot to let her free;

shit on her love the day

i did nothing but sit there and smile;

the smile of the drunken

fool who winks at the prophets

and tells himself he's the 

master of all that he sees.

can you not hear that thunder 

in the ephemeral distance,

that sings with the voice of

the lost and the flutes of Eros?

she loves. she loves from her 

plundered bosom, giving up her

flesh and her latitudes and her

fine, silk, aromatic tempers,

so that i may crouch in an 

un-man's fear, huddle in a boy's

peppered hubris, cower in a

long shadow of selfsame service.

i am all out of hope when

i see her bring the fog home,

and she drifts and drifts and 

clamors for the side of her ship

like that, her fingertips

bleeding from the ridicule

of the ignorant and the 

intelligent, who don't get it.

she is on a journey without

a path, an affront to my 

foolish male sensibilities,

which require a map.

i am shouting!

i am shouting

at the mirror

at my cold, senseless self.

that i missed her

meteor is such blindness; 

that i allowed myself to

labor under the sugar of fools;

that i listened to the drool

of men who required of me

their undivided attentions, but 

divided me from my epic truth.

i'm writing this while drunk

on the music of my youth;

inside tearing to shreds the

patently stupid words of priests.

she delves and i am bitten

by the frost clinging to the eaves

of all those men who told me 

her place was held fast.

she dives down and down

and i am watching the 

gravity of life suck

her into a purple void.

she deserves what she wants,

that's really the thing of it.

and i must keep water in the well

from which i must wash her

new-soiled feet, the feet with

which she walks her thousand miles

away from what she was, and 

toward what she is,

so that she comes back to me,

a better fool for her,

a better fool for love,

a better me

Read More

cigarette and faith

i gave a homeless woman
a cigarette on a street corner
while on a walk yesterday
to say hello to my lover;
it was an idle impulse.

she said i had the most
gorgeous lips, this woman,
whose jamaican nouns were
weighted under the lubrication

of a beer she held in one
hand, the fingers of which
looked liked the thin
horizon of a widowed desert.

she could not light the
cigarette so i offered,
and handed it back and
she said she was saving up

for a trip back home,
which i chose to believe
because i want to use
her in a story some day.

my friends will say i did
this for my ego - the giving
and lighting of a cigarette
to a woman without a home.

and to them i will blush
and smile down the long
tunnel of their knives and
look at my feet.

let us argue, though, for the
sake of it, and say i did do
it for my ego. when i am alone
i don't do well

and can feel the sap of
the tree in my veins and
i become a vagrant dog
at the heels of bitter secrets.

my mineral power goes dim,
you see? - the voltage drains;
the fuses of my inner column
become dry thistle in a gale.

there are naked rooms in my
soul, i suppose, that accept
only trespassers and those from
my past who've been maligned

by the exercise of my ego,
so i let them remain there
to scratch at the walls and
piss on the floor.

when i am alone i pester
the fruit on the branch;
i foil good commerce with
the old suffering of the pale;

i hide behind the smallest
stones, licking away the salt
and whispering to the void
some inane song about loss.

i am weakest when i don't
have in my glass jar the
presence of some other
extremity, as if i am an

unsingular being whose
engine is fueled by the
self-blood of others and the
wayward wind of their eyes.

earth's rumor has it that i am
sick with hope-trembled shades;
that i am at odds with the
contentment of the loved;

that i am in bitter contact with
my less primal and that all i
give is what i am assured will
be taken with both hands.

there is a malignant insistance
that i find who i am in the mouths
of my betters; that i'd rather stay
on the hip of the green-blue coast

than swim out; that i am a threat
to the fabric of my own truth
for the sake of keeping the
balance within my humid air.

so it is my ego, to be sure. the
imperially dressed; the secretary
to my wanton stomach; the vague
harbor master; the immersed scar.

but anyway...

the jamaican woman, who held
her beer can as if it were the crown
of the blessed angel, who could not
look me in the eye for more than a second,

said she loved me as i walked on,
motionless in my steps toward
what i believed were the grand
institutions of happiness and joy

- down a cold sidewalk,
thinking

what of it, my ego...

i am here, my friends are not

Read More

aperture

my brother said,
he said:
- about the cleavages of
religion and its crowns-of-thorn
swagger and its impoverishing hues -

'i believe in god
but not God; it's
nobody's business
what i believe in'

there was always a red
gem in his mouth when
he talked about the
protrusions of faith,

how they herniated and
metastasized into the
hardened stones of
shaded, casting-down silences.

how the spokespeople
of that particular brand
of BOGO magic were
the salt of the deadened

and cast men like
him from the gardens
of their own skin and
banished real Truth.

'i mean...i believe in a
lot of things,' he would
go on, spooning out to
me his new-old poverty.

'the Celts. the Pagans. the
Native Americans. the
Christians...' he would trail
off, thinking of others to
moisten his argument.

i would listen while he
waved his hands
and sipped his beer and dragged
his cigarette across our secrets.

we grew up in the same
yellow seafoam of
hymns and overspreading
glories-be and throbbing prayers.

and while i had found ounces
of wonder and joy in
the bedrock of our
family's church -

had found a ripe
wind among the souls
there with people who'd
burned their acres for a
view to answers -

he had grown calloused
early, his feet pricked
by coals and his hands
tied together by foreign tongues.

his version of those days
were calcified by an endless
voyage outward in search
of the master of his confusions

so that, later in life,
he came to feel god-not-God
in what he could smell
and taste; what he could
breathe in with his own eyes.

it was no surprise to me
then that the pale pebbles
of long-away ancestors, who'd
frolicked under the stars and

sang to the wind, found their
way into the pockets of
his soul and within the underthings
of his fragrant dreams.

he was fore-bent that way from
birth; always had a dark
grandeur in the manner in which
he stole the galleries of hurt faces.

his mantel was firm in
its place from conception;
his mark was that of a
man of inexhaustible refuge.

'fuck.
if i want to read the bible,
i will read the bible. if I
want to go outside naked and
dance and shout at the moon, i will.'

he had what i wanted:
a singular delirium of endless
flowers unkept in a striated glass
vase on a sill;

a bald wink at the fires of
hell and a thirst for a glacial
voice that boomed and
cleaved the contemptuous.

he had muscular glory in all
the things i was taught were white avenues to damnation: hammer-pride, sexual fury, profane histories.

i wanted for his open mouth,
his believing star, his volume,
his soft-cold-rain humor,
his aperture opened to the pages
of his own scriptures.

he said,
my brother said to me:
'have a beer'
and i blushed no thanks

'suit yourself'
he smirked and lit
another cigarette and told
me here as in other times later,

'you're just afraid.'

Read More

to friend

my elegant, pastoral find;
my storied discovery
among the leaves of the
naked:

how truth may thunder
in the temples
when one stumbles
upon your smoothed stone.

the bloodroot of eternity
resides within the
finding of you and
spreads to all corners.

with some, it just comes
as naturally as the
orbit of the moons
around their mothers

and you fall up to
a fine grace together
to make the joining of
two lonesome nobles,

in a quest toward
the inner organs of
faith and kinship that
surpasses mere association.

when it comes -
truly arrives -
there becomes a
vital new luster

to the old star
rebirthed by the
collision of two
dreamy atoms.

how? how can it
be that a voltage,
vast in its
sovereignty,

be so captured
in a fleeting moment,
be so sent and received
in such precision but

with such dizzy
randomness, that all
of the universe would
have to be complicit?

hearts live in a chilled
world most of the
time, occupying
a firmament of ice,

making such a union
a deep, heated,
cosmic rapture of
fidelity to aimlessness.

we harbor subterranean
hopes and wants,
wishing against the wind
that we get what we pray for,

but a conjoining of souls
who've before danced
alone is the beginning
of divine symmetry.

you eat the words they
give you. you lick
the flavors of their
passion from cups.

you thick-and-thin
hold in contempt
the acrobatics of all
the fools you've suffered.

you lie together in
sweet foliage, breathing
in the sky and her
lovers.

you echo in darkness
all their utterances,
all their gestures, all
their looks in the eye.

you kindle, you enmesh,
you enthread, you
finger the top of
their lamentable reef.

you give them out
and prise open their
heads with your
softest teeth.

you forgive the mark
on the skin that
bears the name
of certain enemies.

you have a new
latitude of snow
and wind that sketches
across the gloom.

you banquet together
at a feast of
teeming stars and
hapless demi-moons.

you know what
knowing means
and shed all
expectations of gravity.

the sacred mother-child
comes to mind when
considering such a
trembling, quiet freedom.

how it is to be
at once a passage to
relic love and the
modern face.

to have this in its
wholeness is to
carry the empire on
one's heart-brow

and see oneself afresh.

Read More

i could sleep

i could sleep
inside the homes
of abandoned
goodness

i could fly
outside the rays
of given
apologies

i could wish
without the need
for angry
demonstrations

i could swim
beneath the howl
of laughing
moons

i could plead
toward the face
of selfsame
awareness

i could pray
within the chasm
of all lightness
renewed

i could say
everything on
a straight line
without your care

or write what
comes to me
in the best sense
rebroken

just to ensure
that meaning comes
from the tongue not
the eyes

Read More

the bed

the bed is not
made where
they laid last night,
the covers holding
the passions like
air in the lungs
and i stand there
in a state of staring.

the next morning
came, of course,
the next conversation
over coffee came,
the next movement
around each other came.

i remind myself
of my worst self,
how the fullness of
life evaporates into
sin sometimes.

my lover and her
lover here in
this epic solitude;
i smell their serious
versions.

and i pretend to
not play with
pretense as the
light of the day is
shunned by a
drawn curtain.

or the bags on
the floor hold
within them the
story of another
calling.

or the carpet
upon which their
bare feet have
padded echoes
with secretive sounds.

or the pillows
dance askew and
and say the words
said in the balance
or counter-balances.

or the empty
bottle bans me
from tasting the
salt of lips.

this is a church
in its magnificent
silence and towering
prayers said in the dark.

what is so
unrecognizable
here?
the tangible is
not a metaphor
any more than
the river is when
i stand in it
up to my knees.

it is an
object to action
separation, really;
it is holding
no new hand,
kissing no new
lips, it is swallowing
no new windy word.

it is a bed
in a quiet room
and harbors no ill
will toward light
or dark; holds
no malice toward
head or heart.

i leave less
grieved and walk
among Douglas firs
and bowed birches
that have looked
down upon these
lovers with no more
affection and gratitude
than they do for me.

and in the bed
the covers remain
and the world outside
is moving and the next
morning came, of course,
the next conversation over
coffee came, the next
movement around each
other came.

with me.

Read More

lovely receiver

my blanched smile,
scalded to slip off the
outer skins that have kept
me away.

i sit near a drafty
door in order that i
may calm the new fever;

the cold coming from
beneath the crack
is a spectral wash
in her reaching up-toward.

where is the calm
quiver i've come to
love so much,

but in the invitation
of your timid smirk,
your peculiar increase?

the pearl is there
waiting when my
lovely receiver sends
herself unguarded.

now there's an invitation
to lurk at her door,
peer into the color of grace

(or the sea, which
gives and takes likewise;
flowing with the lull of tides.)

say something here of
the predicate of good love,
i tell myself,

but come up empty-headed,
weak with the exertion
and lowered in my humility.

when you find someone
who receives you, you
have unearthed the stones
of the gods,

and the white-bright
pageantry of gifts
purchased by the balance
in the universe.

because, really, when
one receives one gives
if the intention is there.

to make oneself
vulnerable as the
conquered land -

to make oneself
inside-out and
exposed as the autumn
maple -

to make oneself
hold back the head
and put forth the heart -

is the mark of
a lovely receiver
who is free to fall
and fall fully.

Read More

a road, at night, cold

i have a lover,
mutable in her dress
and bra, sitting
there with the
countenance of
the goddess of chance,
fate and fortune.

my lovely
tyche, she weeps
and then smiles
and goes back to
weeping, while
outside there is
something moving.

i would have her
held while holding
her; have her
loved while
loving her; have her
sung to while i
sing alone.

we met at the light
that cut the path
of darkness, caught
each other on an
intersecting plane;
a slice to the hands
and we bled together.

i am in her, as
much as she is in me.
our chambers are
guilty with it: this
passion of the deep
and willing limitations
of the flesh.

yet there is more.
always more; and
when you love a soul
you say to the rest
of the world that no
one thing can undo
the mystic's work.

she is in her winter
now; the dream-state
that calls for the
long-coming resurrection
so long as
i let the beauty lie
and not disturb the soil.

the Mother has taken
her in again, like every
year, and i stand alone,
waiting for the enslavement
to end so that i can
dance in her fields
soon.

i stand on a road, at
night, my feet
frozen to ghosts and
thoughts that won't
have leave of me, so
i must talk to myself
aloud, shaking.

the sky at night is
a friend of this type
of pass over, when
a man is yelling at
himself, at the woods,
at the unsolvable
sentence he's been given.

why must i push against
the evolution of lovers
when i accept the passing
of seasons? they are no
different, really. a violent
circle that rotates in
the womb of the Mother.

i have a lover,
mutable in her dress
and bra, sitting
there with the
countenance of
the goddess of chance,
fate and fortune.

my lovely
tyche, she laughs
and then sighs
and goes back to
laughing, while
outside there is
something moving.

cast my body into
the best of this night;
broaden my eyes to
let it fall upon me;
feel the presence of
god in the spark that
glows in her bosom

as she lies there,
buried in the Mother,
resting and curled
up, waiting for the
rise; accepting her
evolution, waiting for
the indisputable.

while this man stands
in his cold feet and
yells at the stars and
tells himself that all
good things loved are
best felt when loved things
are left to love.

Read More

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

Read More

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.

Read More

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

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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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the truth about trust

my natal fear is that
of being prised apart
with the economy of wind
against october leaves.

when she departs
the bedroom
my hands occupy
themselves with the salt
of her gone flesh;

while in the forest, at night,
trees are made recumbent
following the swift
ejaculation of windy-ice.

the moss and earth,
exposed at her felling,
are flipped up and fanning;
this alluvial, dark spread

confronts the fool
whose curiosity after
the storm took him
to where he lost the moon.

i'm merely being cautious,
making myself ironic,
deciphering all the new
coded perforations in my skin.

she is
as she ever was,
standing unabridged,
full-lipped, free and
considering;

a magnetic stone,
air within air,
water within water,
consistent as time

and swaying in no
other direction than mine,
bending to a cause of her own,
deep-welled and flourishing.

so her departure
is departure not,
but a ranging out
to find sanctuary.

only to return,
emboldened by
certain answers to
her own selfsame
fears.

it all begs this question:
do i find my own self deeper in
by dint of some dark
magical summons?

or do i find myself
out from the sheer
exertion of will against
the tide of calcifying angst?

i believe in love
and her attendant
earthly endowments
of flesh and blood;

i believe the river of
a lover's touch runs
a course over all
the minerals of this soul

and goes dry only
when the tears are
denied their rain
upon the wary heart.

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my weakest cause

i once thought that this is what i deserve:
this caustic imbalance
this toxic enfolding fear;

but my weakest cause
these days
has eroded the tissue surrounding
the head, finally

so i let the collapse
begin, having hope
that the attrition will
reveal, in time, the hot
marrow of my heart
and leave me in a fine stupor;

receptive of the best
signals, the warmest
impulses that once thundered
in the vein and drove me
to far fields and left
me the master of stars and moons

some days, yet, i'm
again small in a smallest of rooms
where the voices of the most
violent stay me here fast,
wondering ever wondering:

what did you do to you
to do this to me?

no matter
really no matter

the head is ceding the victory
to the heart
and hope is due,
while my weakest cause
erodes
and erodes

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feather on the floor

come walking over
and find me in
your own way
and tell me who
you've found

with a flower
between your lips
and dew pressed
beneath the tongue.

i am happy
you've found me
sitting beneath the sun
with eyes closed.

i tend to dream that i
know myself as
you know me,
but the image always blurs.

i see me as you do,
approaching, your
eyes mine and
we're smiling.

but nearer now
i, in you, collapse
to edges and the
image becomes all haze.

tell me:

do i dance? sing?
orate greatly?
pass on with the wind?
sigh against storms?

in my eyes i am
small, yet larger;
leaping with love
and abounding energy.

i am a victor
in my losses,
loyal to all comers
who dare breathe me.

i am the feather
on the floor i
discovered this
morning,

as meaningless and
random as any
natant dust
in a light.

but simply put
and no less important
and divinely placed
and no whim of God.

i was
i am
i will be perishable
but true!

come walking over
and find me in
your own way
and tell me who
you've found

just as i came
walking over this
morning and found you,
the feather on the floor

and found me.

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father

fomented seas below him thrash the heathen rocks
          into a million-year submission and he is suddenly

ambushed at the edge of the world. tempted to peer down
          just once he then restores his focus and altogether his soul is

thrust outward toward that line between black and turquoise,
          the one that splits the Mother from her infatuate, the Moon.

hymns of the sea birds overspread the ear, as a whiffet of air - matron
          of dreams - makes them dance on a line, while

escorting the man's own desires, loves, fears out to a far-gone place he
          can barely see, then towing them back;

retreating and advancing on the ticks of some sort of cruel
          metronome, time and love both a wistful tide

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time and unsympathy

on that horizon
a cackling spectre,
summons me there
with a tremulous claw.

in his convulsions
of simpering laughter,
pulsing with ticks
and their ravaging flaw.

what is unwanting
when echoing footsteps,
padding down ways
of a narrowing chance,

send you soul-digging
for nurturing mothers,
breast-less and weak
in their twilight-ing dance?

i do remember
day's lingering softness,
under the skies
of the faraway sun.

the true intentions
of un-sinful children,
swapping their lives
for a mythical one.

but i recover
to emulate fondness,
something to ease
the mind's emptying faze.

don't i adventure
to inquiry's cavern,
escape to dark
in her infinite grays!

all that deferment
of deepening sorrow,
buried me low
in a chamberless cell.

not one allowing
for insightful ponder,
tindered my heart
to a soul-draining hell.

what is all-living
but treacherous biding,
governed by love
for unsympathy's kiss?

caught up unguarded
i willingly waded,
sinking in deep
to a fatuous bliss.

if i'm respondent
to elegant favors
un-lent to me
by a spurious friend,

might i beleaguer
your effusive kindness:
protect my good
'till the comfortable end.

with this determine
the unfaceless demon
fingers the strings
of a rotating hand

i am forever
the laboring figure
cold-linked to you
in this humbling land

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silly

silly
how the moody winds
blew your particles of fire
my way and burned the blades

silly
how the boasty thunder
rumbled with your voice of reason
into the ears and flattened the eyes

silly
how the waters of the high crevices
spilled from your too-low sky
and drowned my last lingering fear

silly
how the piercing silence
sang your tribal hymn
and pumped my lungs with goldenrod

silly
how the rain rituals of the sun
drove the tides of your loins
and penetrated my fallow bones

silly
how the bald conversations
of the fat and shredded despairs
were soaked with your single kiss

silly
how the handful of hungry flowers
felled their pedals from your mouth
and baptized my delicate moon

they don't get it
they don't get it

it's really alright

it's along this stained path
among the yellows and the greens
   among the silent cries and loud looks
      among the cycles of this woman
         among the rigid paleness of this man
            among the showers of the day
               among the hot quivers of the night
                  among the good horizons
                     among the miles of explosives
                        among the overhanging boughs
                           among the tripping toes

that you are silly
for me, this silly man

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