We sit on the edge of the bed
too high
on its milk crate box spring,
sliding toward its edge
on jersey fabric blue sheets
that are impossible to sleep on
for their uncanny ability
to coil around legs and arms,
passing the piece and conversation.
The rug comes and goes
as it pleases, a striped long haired,
four legged sprite
scuttling along the floor boards and
occasionally pausing on its errands
to wonder aloud
in its clipped crip walking voice sounds
at the four feet
hovering above it.
The wall behind your face
keeps tight to your edges,
but never tight enough
to make me believe
you are not a late addition
to what is here and now visible,
a very badly edited photo,
a vacation I took alone and set a timer to,
propped on my desk,
a sand colored sunset along a stony beach
that thought it would look better
with you in it and made
last minute corrections
before the time for "having a blast
wish you were here" Christmas cards
at the office rolled around.
"Are you here, in me,
like I'm here, in you?"
Every time you move
the air drags around you like spilled
oil paint until it pulls thin,
tissue paper wet, cotton thread taut,
tearing with the sound of velcro.
I can barely make the words, gunned
from your moving lips, match speeds
close enough to read but,
my fingers grazing your palm
as I place the ball of hot glass there
gives me the cliff notes and I smile
because I can
still hear you
above the noise and distance,
feet dangling to a wood planked ocean,
a woven paisley tortoise, and
the sun in our mouths. "Wish you were here."
original works of parts
Recurring Dream
I used to have this dream
when I lived at home
that you had this amazing penis
the size of a body pillow
and in Winter
we would sleep with the
bedroom windows out of their frames
because your morning wood
was like a giant lava lamp
I could hug with my whole body
while I kissed your lips and
fill my cat's cradled ice lined
insides with and melt the shadows of Summer
away like the frost fleeing
from my eye lashes
before your breath
every time you would kiss
my closed eyes while I sat on
the Waldren St platform waiting for
the 7 A.M. downtown.
My father asked me if I slept with
my old aluminum bat,
dented with the rocks I used to hit,
grip worn from carrying it
when I used to walk my dog nights,
because I was afraid of him,
but really I was
afraid of being
unable to love
openly so I
answered him "no,
but I am afraid of
rooftop ninjas,"
and was
able to
breath again
once he left my bedroom,
the black beads of his eyes
cut to twin wells of disbelief
behind searching black slats.
It has been a magnificent thing
being out here
permanently gone from home and
the pain there,
but I do miss that dream and,
all too often, you.
when I lived at home
that you had this amazing penis
the size of a body pillow
and in Winter
we would sleep with the
bedroom windows out of their frames
because your morning wood
was like a giant lava lamp
I could hug with my whole body
while I kissed your lips and
fill my cat's cradled ice lined
insides with and melt the shadows of Summer
away like the frost fleeing
from my eye lashes
before your breath
every time you would kiss
my closed eyes while I sat on
the Waldren St platform waiting for
the 7 A.M. downtown.
My father asked me if I slept with
my old aluminum bat,
dented with the rocks I used to hit,
grip worn from carrying it
when I used to walk my dog nights,
because I was afraid of him,
but really I was
afraid of being
unable to love
openly so I
answered him "no,
but I am afraid of
rooftop ninjas,"
and was
able to
breath again
once he left my bedroom,
the black beads of his eyes
cut to twin wells of disbelief
behind searching black slats.
It has been a magnificent thing
being out here
permanently gone from home and
the pain there,
but I do miss that dream and,
all too often, you.
Three Hundy
Three hundred sets of words to make birds catch fire
and fall like ashes into snow above funeral pyres
of being and ways of seeing forward and two word
bits of witicismic flicks of enlightened states because
the life examined not is not worth living and knots
tied in strings of the unbearable lightness of being
that can't be undone can be cut one song at a time
with skeletal frame shaking rhymes and I tire
of the vastness, the big "is what it is" grassless
deserts of acceptance when everything can be cooled
and fools turned to dumpster jedis in duels
with absolutes if a body gets up and undresses
the spools of pretended lives into oil nudes.
Three hundred sets of words to make herds
into stampedes of murder crows and live lyres,
out of tune but amassed so thick the nuance
of feedback on feedback leaves deep tracks
in the annals of knowing like artifacts,
curling jet spirals of evidence like tickets from speed traps
and bring back memories so distant you need well caps
to prevent horizon blotting smoke from rig fires
and need armies to cede back land consumed
by time's march and turn preoccupations into
destinations and manifest destiny from empty guile in
the unending bad machinery and badder robots
running wild like skin searing 'tricity from loosed wires.
Three hundred sets of words and not
a God damned thing to be said
for the bed made and at a loss for a lay
or a take on the electrophonic span of
a heart beat's jagged sine wave that tells
an ear "there is life in here
and years of the game left still to be played,"
but three hundred in and riding the fence
at fifty percent blessing and fifty percent sin
there can be found enough of motive and
enough of aggression and wonderment,
enough of self pity and spin doctoring,
of past and present and narcist rhetoric,
naturalist and hallucinogenic
to believe the best is yet to be sprung
from dungeon doors and made to speak
though deaf, blind, and to this point,
blue and black balled dumb
as an industrial chemical spilled and silenced creek.
and fall like ashes into snow above funeral pyres
of being and ways of seeing forward and two word
bits of witicismic flicks of enlightened states because
the life examined not is not worth living and knots
tied in strings of the unbearable lightness of being
that can't be undone can be cut one song at a time
with skeletal frame shaking rhymes and I tire
of the vastness, the big "is what it is" grassless
deserts of acceptance when everything can be cooled
and fools turned to dumpster jedis in duels
with absolutes if a body gets up and undresses
the spools of pretended lives into oil nudes.
Three hundred sets of words to make herds
into stampedes of murder crows and live lyres,
out of tune but amassed so thick the nuance
of feedback on feedback leaves deep tracks
in the annals of knowing like artifacts,
curling jet spirals of evidence like tickets from speed traps
and bring back memories so distant you need well caps
to prevent horizon blotting smoke from rig fires
and need armies to cede back land consumed
by time's march and turn preoccupations into
destinations and manifest destiny from empty guile in
the unending bad machinery and badder robots
running wild like skin searing 'tricity from loosed wires.
Three hundred sets of words and not
a God damned thing to be said
for the bed made and at a loss for a lay
or a take on the electrophonic span of
a heart beat's jagged sine wave that tells
an ear "there is life in here
and years of the game left still to be played,"
but three hundred in and riding the fence
at fifty percent blessing and fifty percent sin
there can be found enough of motive and
enough of aggression and wonderment,
enough of self pity and spin doctoring,
of past and present and narcist rhetoric,
naturalist and hallucinogenic
to believe the best is yet to be sprung
from dungeon doors and made to speak
though deaf, blind, and to this point,
blue and black balled dumb
as an industrial chemical spilled and silenced creek.
Winter
I like to pretend in winter
that the knee high drifts
are the ashes of souls I will never meet,
half converted to glass,
the other half turned to vapor,
clinging to droplets of water overhead
for lack of religions staying power
once a body has
given up the ghost.
The crick of a smile
breaking the bone of my cheek
against the wind
that bites like a two degree piranha's tooth
is equal parts joy and wonder
at what is become of yet another
partially realized,
still promise laden, summer.
that the knee high drifts
are the ashes of souls I will never meet,
half converted to glass,
the other half turned to vapor,
clinging to droplets of water overhead
for lack of religions staying power
once a body has
given up the ghost.
The crick of a smile
breaking the bone of my cheek
against the wind
that bites like a two degree piranha's tooth
is equal parts joy and wonder
at what is become of yet another
partially realized,
still promise laden, summer.
Back to Said
It is at that point
that you realize
you've been up
for more hours
than you could afford to spend
before the weekend or any
abutment of days
you like to count as a weekend
since you've grown up.
It is not that you are jaded
or that you are living in
Pan's never never,
it is that your feet
have never touched earth
since you were
kicked from
the nest
and the moment you realize
that is okay
with everyone else
still trying
to figure out
over due north from sullen souths
is the day
you understand
why I am so full of laughter.
that you realize
you've been up
for more hours
than you could afford to spend
before the weekend or any
abutment of days
you like to count as a weekend
since you've grown up.
It is not that you are jaded
or that you are living in
Pan's never never,
it is that your feet
have never touched earth
since you were
kicked from
the nest
and the moment you realize
that is okay
with everyone else
still trying
to figure out
over due north from sullen souths
is the day
you understand
why I am so full of laughter.
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