engel

growing

2012-02-03T13:39:00.000-08:00

My hands are starting to look

more like my mothers.

Settled skin,

deeper knuckle creases,

thinning fingers

as though the

layers of youngness have shed.

I am just noticing.

The entire length of my body

is finding it's way to a state

of adulthood—as the lines

that frame my mouth seem

to stay well after my grin

has forgotten the joke.

I want to cling to everything

so tightly—grip the youth in

my eyes,

the softness of my skin,

his hands,

with violent fierceness.

The sun is out for far less hours

in a day then I can ever remember

before. Months pass,years.

And those few things I can see

in my future but haven’t quite

caught seem to be hanging like

a carrot on a string, and all

I can do is chomp at the bit.

A tired horse. Darkeyes.

And wait.

Love Check List

2012-01-24T12:15:00.001-08:00

I count up the ways

I love you from one to

fifty two. Or so.

Your eyes.

Your smile.

Your disposition to

keep me close.

And somewhere in the

thirties, I realize these

things—small or large—

on a bone blank page,

associated with numbers,

aren’t it at all.

My love for you

can’t be counted.

Or named.

Or explained.

Like before.

The thread that binds

those numerical additives

can’t be showed

or contained. Andyet,

I simply feel the need

to outline how I feel

in a list to be checked…

because the logic of feeling

seems so obvious, yet

understated.

The way my breathing changes

in the night as you roll over,

can’t be audible.

How everything made sense

mathematically,

physically,

spiritually,

and not at all,

when you held my hand

over the tomatoes in the

supermarket can’t be

simply understood.

how to get to milwaukee

2011-08-29T18:45:00.000-07:00

I watch the sky turn--pale blue
laughing pink—then a purple so deep
it cuts wounds in my eyes.
the moon hangs above it all in
an attempt illuminate the colors,
somehow unaware it has actually
created them.

I am going to somewhere—
for the first time in a long time.
heading in a direction, flying
over colors of clouds like a bird.
and when I finally perch you
will be there, like a swallow,
waiting for me to return.

the more the distance closes
between our wing span,
the brighter the moon hangs
on the bow of this carrier of
people. so bright in moments,
I can’t close my eyes for fear
it will only burn through and
leave me blind in my turning
away.

in a few hours, we will have landed.
together. and separate.
and I can’t wait to feel your hands
on my feathers and to see the new
colors that have appeared in
your molting. we rise and fall
together now. tumble and roll.
flight and release.

weak spots

2011-06-16T19:44:00.000-07:00

i have this idea.
it changes colors daily.
from the color of the citrus
sitting silently on my counter
to the color of the clear water
that surrounds my eyes.

you can say one simple word
and the color changes, migrates,
and takes roots in something
altogether entirely different.

nothing is dressed in the color
it appears and you are translucent
in moments and at times
the color of the thickest dark.

i open my eyes over and over
and still can't make out the clear
lines of your face. i wonder
what spectrum you speak--
every color that falls from your lips feels
somehow not to be as bright as you
want or intend it to be.

occasionally, you look at me
and the color of your eyes matches mine,
because you look away faster than i
can grasp the name of it.

and i want to name all of you.
and i want to color outside your lines.

detonate and bloom

2011-05-13T12:34:00.000-07:00

i have lived at least three lives.
          one: groundwork
          two: explosive theory and practice
          three: the art of eruption and collapse
those mishaps.
those misunderstandings.
those things that entered my skin
closing all exists,           have now dismantled.

all the mistakes--
the limbs lost in mine fields--
all the powerlessness that sank inside
this chest laden with fireworks—          exploded.

and then was doused.

the dynamite, unsettled,
is now transformed electricity,
which I control, choose,
and illuminate with.
there are no fuses.
there is no gun powder.
this new pilgrimage
          is calm
          is life-giving
          is existence
with an undercurrent
of perfect voltage.
a beautiful spark buzzing
in an arc over my salty skin.

2011-03-27T16:44:00.001-07:00

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how to get to los angeles

2011-03-22T18:56:00.000-07:00

as the plane heads south,
i watch the highway i have
driven my whole life get
smaller--but not less familiar.

the mountains, still snow capped,
surrond utah lake like an
emerald in the center of
an earth bound ring.

i have entered and left
this valley so many times,
each with the lingering question:
what am i leaving behind?
what am i arriving to?

the wasatch range from this
perspective is simliar to, but less
magnificent,than the one from
the 4 person plane i sat in
circling mt mckinley,
only months ago.

i am snaking my way to
72 degree weather and the
4 walls of a hotel for 4 days.
and all i can consider is that
the further my chest gets
from his, the more hollow
it feels--clenched.

coach seat

2011-03-20T14:12:00.000-07:00

i am a business trip.
i am cartons of plastic and
wastebaskets of polycarbonate.
i am mini bottles of wine and
napkins branded with
tiny blue jet planes.
i am a seat in the upright
and locked position,
covered with a flotation
device whose material
might be used in the production
of handbags for underprivileged
youth someday. i am iphones
and ipads and touch screens,
longing to be swiped with forefingers,
talked into, and wiped clean.
i am electronic devices
tucked into purses and
breast pockets, while
being handled every
thirty seconds for a blinking
light, a small pictorial
envelope, a voicemail.
i am airplane mode,
silent and unmoving.
no vibration, no signal.
i am styrofoam boxes--
full of prepackaged sushi,
sandwiches, and chicken
caesar salads. i am energy
drinks in small refrigerated rectangles
waiting to wake up international
travelers until they crash.
i am boarding passes spit from
a computer after searching databases
for your name from a sleek plastic card.
i am gate 52A.
i am boarding section number 3.
i am nothing more than a coach seat.

caementum

2011-03-01T12:57:00.000-08:00

there was that moment
in the car on a sunday
morning when i stopped
breathing--for a palpable
second--one so full of
substance, my chest caved.
you may not have even
known this happened--but
my clasping fingers finally
clutched, melded, attached
to yours--and now they
are intrinsic. they are
embodied, certain, absolute.
your smile was sealant--
a binding agent so forceful,
a fastening was laid like
concrete--glued like epoxy,
and i am bound.

i am not your blank page to fill

2011-01-16T17:08:00.001-08:00

so many beautiful mouths
speaking so many beautiful words.
your tongues ripe with promises,
your breath heavy with understanding.
my eyes lock and catch the
light that seems so real, like
diamonds in water.
my furrowed brow, rising
with question, with skepticism,
finally softens as something
so simple as a kiss, opens my
heartwalls and lets
you all step inside.

maybe it has something to do
with the night, the absence of
sunshine or reality, that makes
it so easy for you to design
words that penetrate all of my
armor. or realize that perhaps
i never had a fortress to begin with.

maybe it has something to do
with the alcohol in dimly lit
bars, or the wine in my glass
on my coffee table that liquefies
strings of sentences into promises
that i never asked any of you to
make, but that you made anyway.

maybe it has something to do
with the idea that you are constructing
yourself while looking me in the eye,
wanting to believe something
about yourself--but you are
so far from that man, when the sun
finally makes an appearance,
you remember how little you have.
how little you are.

it is irrelevant.

perhaps if you watched those words
come out of your mouth--if you told
those lips and hands to behave, rather
than touch me so delicately i freeze,
i might be able to understand.

but you are all the same, so it seems.
with your sly smiles and your pretty
paragraphs. with your hot fingertips
and your tongues that dance whenever
you see my face. how do i stumble and
fall into your arms? how do i end up
spending sleepless nights wondering
why you chose to say anything at all?

would it be so difficult to tie your
tongue, bind it like telephone wires,
waiting to deliver sounds to a
listening ear? your words are unceasingly
vulgar in their beauty. your fire hands
have scarred, and i am left continually
smoking.

photobooth

2010-12-22T17:14:00.000-08:00

i pulled a coat
from the closet
on a whim.
the black slick
pea coat hadn't felt
the shoulders of
my body in months--
a number of them i
can't quite remember.
throwing the light
sleeves over my colored
arms, i crumbled into
the warm crevasses of a
familiar warmth,
right hand fixing
the collar
and left hand slipping
into the pocket,
searching for nothing.

and in the dark
of the cotton slit,
i felt the corners
of a small, simple
square. a picture
of you and me,
so small, it nearly
slipped through my thumb
and forefinger. shakily.
one section of a series
of shots, taken in a
photobooth in a
darkly lit city bar,
rested in my hand.
a reminder.
an exploding heart.

24 months and 2 days

2010-11-02T19:37:00.000-07:00

at the age of seven,
i asked my mother
why there were so
many songs about
love. she shook
her head, knowing
somehow, who I
would become; how
my heart would grow;
how it would take
root it so many
people it shouldn’t.

she said, ‘because
love is the most
amazing thing we
get to feel in this
short life of ours.’
even before I was
a decade old, I knew
she was right. i
knew that i would
always crack my
heart open like an
egg and pour it,
delicately, over men
who smiled like
snow in the sun.

i count the months
since the day I met
you like I count
fireworks on the
4th of july. each one
an explosion that lit
me up and then
turned into nothing
but a smoke trail in
a black sky--
too clouded to fly.
too polluted to rain.
too drenched with sulfur
to remember sparkle.

but then there are
the songs—bringing
back nothing but
electricity that could
light a sky larger
than I could ever
imagine…and
i become nothing
but an explosion;
a detonation of
memories, that keep
me on fire until I scorch.

extraction

2010-10-22T12:34:00.000-07:00

there may be
something in
my heart
that is colorless.
a shallow, watery
puddle, that at times
overflows
into nothing,
and at other times
drains
into nothing.

something is missing.

my blood doesn’t
boil or chill or
pulse fiercely.
it may have
turned into air
that sits still
in my veins.
unstirred.
unmoving.

i am floating away.

Rebuilding

2010-09-22T21:00:00.000-07:00

I am sitting on the edge;
the line where crossing
over to better would be
only merely a fall or a
stumble. I am new in
more ways that I can
count off for you. I am
more wondrous than
you ever saw. But
I sit here paralyzed,

frozen.

the falling over seems
like crashing and the
wondrous seems
forgetful. the next
minor step ahead
has me caught in
between the hating
you and the loving
you that I have
always known so

perfectly.

I will not catch myself
or put my hands down
to brace my fall. I will
plummet head first into
this regenerated feeling and
forget you. The pushing
finally caught my breath
in midair saying

your name.

memory

2010-06-07T18:25:00.000-07:00

when I drink wine,
all I remember is your
tongue on my neck
and your forearms
wrapped around my
waist.

the way your
words form lace
around my the nape
of my hairline
and cradle the air so
that I can feel it for
days after—

like a ghost haunting
me each time I
realize I am alone.

a parade

2010-04-09T13:03:00.000-07:00

i am an artist.
like the small
bearded man who
can gracefully
hammer a nail into
his nostril…
after years of
practice.

I write poems
the way people
look at a caged
animal.
appreciative
of the sight
but somehow
saddened
by the containment.

I am an escape artist.
I just haven’t performed
my routine yet.

I am a comedian.
I just haven’t made you
laugh at the perfect time.

although, you do laugh.

although, the nail
doesn’t matter.

I have played tricks
on myself. the kinds
of tricks you find at
the bottom of a cereal box…
when they used to
burry tricks in the bottom
of cereal boxes.

there are birds of colorful
feathers that run around my
yard, in my head, in my fingers.
I haven’t caged them yet,
because I haven’t decided
if I want to keep them.

but I want to keep you.
and I haven’t even seen your
colors yet.
I already want to put you
behind bars, where only
I can feed you.
where only I can see those
mystical colors that confuse
other spectators.

I convince myself I know you
better than anyone else.
although, I know you in
only bits and pieces.
primary colors, rather than
a spectrum.

but I still want your feathers
to adorn my festival.

I still want you to watch me
swallow fire as I look in
your eyes and tell you,
I can’t feel a thing.

a perfect day

2010-04-07T09:23:00.000-07:00

my hand is in your hair,
holding steady like it is
supposed ornate your skull
in the same way a halo glows
in the dark.

sometimes when I touch you,
I feel immobile. frozen
like winter, while under the
skin, everything moves quickly.

when winter comes, I forget
colors. except for the color
that shatters in your eyes
when you look up into the sky.

in moments, that sky can
wrap around my entire
body, like a thousand thread
count sheet. pure satin,
and cloudless.

my head in your hands
is nothing but a sphere
of clouds on the verge
of friction. your mouth,
flint sparks on my forehead.

a perfect rainstorm in my
chest is where you sit. where
the sun peeks through the
sky in more places that it doesn’t,
where the rain comes from
all of the sky in my mouth.

lightening from my tongue.

how to get to st louis

2010-04-01T12:05:00.000-07:00

over the great salt lake
we rise like a phoenix
from a dust bowl
that the tourists
mistook for fog.

all day, before flight,
I could taste grit
in my teeth as though
with each breath
my lungs were being encased
with what would soon
become concrete.
dust--just waiting for a
sip of water to mix in
so it could harden and
make swallowing a memory.

the old woman behind me talks
of how grey the city looks as we
make our way towards the
cylinders of wind that await
us miles in the air,
of the unexpected landing
in Wendover, NV, due to
eastern winds,
of the long hours of travel,
to her home in St. Louis,
where she is headed,
as I leave behind
sand and salt.

I think about the quickness
of flight. the ease of the ten
minutes it takes to cross state
lines, to feel boundless, to feel new.
and for the first time I can remember,
I don’t feel as though I am leaving
something behind or arriving at
anything drastically important.
the air is but a catalyst to a new city,
new faces, cultural languages,
but I am no different.

leaving behind nothing
feels weightless and heavy
all in the same breath.
home base is nothing more
than me in this coach seat,
wrapped in a familiar blue scarf.
I want something to leave.
I want somewhere to arrive.
I want destinations and
starting locations...
with a familiar song
singing me to my landing.

to hope

2010-03-15T21:11:00.000-07:00

just when I think there is nothing
left to say goodbye to,
I find one thing more
that needs a farewell.

a person
a thought
a dream
a home

a part of myself I forgot I had
until that moment
when a song,
a touch,
a laugh,
reminds me.

at times, I think I will
forever be saying goodbye
to the same people
over and over.
the same hopes,
the same idea of you.
you who I do not yet know--

with a toast of Boudreaux
and a half attempted smile
to assure you, I am ok,
even when I am not.

I want your smile
at my doorstep
when I don’t ask or
expect it.
I want to kiss
with a fierce intention
in a unknown street
with unfamiliar smells--
except for the scent of
your neck on my lips.

I dream of you,
sometime between
midnight and three
in the morning.
when the air is most silent
and my throat begins to parch
from holding my tongue too
firmly against the roof of my
mouth.

it wants to break free
and talk with you, kiss you
and find you in those mornings,
when I can barely make out
the tulips on the night stand.
when the dogs roll over and
moan and then lick their lips
as though they are running
after something.

like I am.

I wonder what it will be like
when you arrive. how my
sheets will smell. how I might
cook dinner a little differently.
how my dog might lay across
your lap as though he has known
you were coming.

I wonder how I will change.
which music I will choose in the car.
the color of lipstick I might try
when you take me out to dinner.
which heels you would like.
or not like.
perhaps you might simply prefer
my feet in your hands, flopped
over your knees like a rag doll.
tired, limp, and at home.

the summer will taste differently.
the way I curl my hair will
fall softer around my face.
perhaps, my fingers will fall softer
upon my skin in the shower,
on my chest, in the morning as I wake,
on your face in the hours of the moon.

and I will love you like
the way words love
a blank page.
and I will hold you
the way a garden holds
the fruit it will bear upon
the ripening of the seasons.

and I won’t grasp so tightly or
so loosely that everything clenches
and escapes at the same time. and
I won’t forget the way your fingers
imprint sorrow and happiness in
one touch. I won’t forget you before
I have even met you. I won’t
get thirsty before the water has
found its way.

to jabber

2010-03-02T21:49:00.001-08:00

someday I will learn
how to slow down,
how to let things
come to me,
work their way
from my fingers
into my heart,
from my heart
to my tongue.

someday I will learn
how to say the
things I need,
without the
statements that can
go unsaid.

someday the way
my words hit the ears
of others will resonate
in the ear of
that one--

one who wants
to hear more.
one who can’t
hear enough.
one who says,
‘you can never say to much’.

in twenty seven years

2010-02-18T11:39:00.000-08:00

each time your foot steps
onto another jet plane
i can feel a separation,
a distance, a cavity of space.
as though the womb of our
mother that once held each
of us has nearly forgotten
that your blood and mine
are a mixture of the same
resonance, with intonations
that are different, but
complimentary.

so many things know of you.
so many places have seen you.
the most emerald of grass
and bluest of ice—
sea levels of height
and of depth—and each
enhance their color after you have
explored them, charmed them,
loved them.

while the space moves
in and out of us, space never splits,
never divides, and never damages.
rather, embellishes an alliance
that could never be forged by
time or expanse. we are cellularly
fastened, more than blood and water.
everything you see, makes my
life more amplified. every word
i write sits in your ear.

you are more than my sister.
you are my world traveler,
my seeker of newness,
my fighting ally,
my maker of music.

--happy birthday to my beautiful sister. when you are in new zealand, you get a poem. which, may be a better gift in the end. love you love you love you love you! --your big sis.

occupation/avocation

2010-01-25T18:06:00.000-08:00

the heaviness of living
between 4 walls, with an
overwhelming lack of windows,
for one/third of my day,
five/sevenths of my week,
and an intolerable amount of
time from my life—
has me longing for flight.
I will call myself a bird and
I will forget the colors of
grey and cloud.
I will set up shop in the
Pacific Northwest,
a California coast,
the precipitation laden
bogs of Ithaca;
sell loose leaf tea in a shop
on the corner of a winding road;
do yoga in the back yard while
my dogs lay in sun filled spots
of grass and flower bedded soil;
sit on a hillside in the middle of
the afternoon, on a Tuesday, and
smell the air as it lifts over me.

After reading the poem, The Knowing, By Sharon Olds

2009-12-28T20:07:00.000-08:00

A fresh tear makes its way across
my reddened cheek bone and lands
where my lips meet each other then
puddles until my tongue lifts to
meet its salty flavor.

It has been a while since I tasted my
own tears. Weeks actually.
But this one tastes familiar. The briny
texture of the taste of loss, and
those moments when suddenly I remember
what it felt like to be her.

“I am so lucky that I can know him.
This is the only way to know him.
I am the only one that knows him.”

And again, I remember I no longer know.

I consider those moments, the waking,
the lovemaking, the looks of total
recognition. I knew someone once.

And as I sit, in this large bed,
enveloped in new sheets, two warm
smelling dog-people beside me--
I fear the not knowing. The
stranger in myself. The silence
that has become such a dear friend.

Loving myself has proven so much
more difficult than I could have
forseen. Loving another is easier
and infinitely more rare than
even a poet of the most romantic
notions could have suspected.

*************************************************************

The Knowing
-Sharon Olds

Afterwards, when we have slept,

paradise-comaed and woken,

we lie a long time

looking at each other.

I do not know what he sees, but I see

eyes of surpassing tenderness

and calm, a calm like the dignity

of matter. I love the open ocean

blue-grey-green of his iris, I love

the curve of it against the white,

that curve the sight of what has caused me

to come, when he's quite still, deep

inside me. I have never seen a curve

like that, except the earth from outer

space. I don't know where he got

his kindness without self-regard,

almost without self, and yet

he chose one woman, instead of the others.

By knowing him, I get to know

the purity of the animal

which mates for life. Sometimes he is slightly

smiling, but mostly he just gazes at me gazing,

his entire face lit. I love to see it change if I cry--there is no worry,

no pity, no graver radiance. If we

are on our backs, side by side,

with our faces turned fully to face each other,

I can hear a tear from my lower eye

hit the sheet, as if it is an early day on earth,

and then the upper eye's tears braid and sluice down through the lower eyebrow

like the invention of farmimg, irrigation, a non-nomadic people.

I am so lucky that I can know him.

This is the only way to know him.

I am the only one who knows him.

When I wake again, he is still looking at me, as if he is eternal. For an hour

we wake and doze, and slowly I know

that though we are sated, though we are hardly touching, this is the coming the other

coming brought us to the edge of--we are entering, deeper and deeper, gaze by gaze,

this place beyond the other places,

beyond the body itself,

we are making love

reverie

2009-12-17T19:34:00.000-08:00

I am so removed from
the place where I began,
even if I cant say
where place that is,
exactly.

Each night’s repose is birth,
with all its pain and all its
creation.

With every small
day and night,
I feel as though
starting over is eminent.
The day and the sleep
are always only
temporary.

A life in which
I was just living.
The breathing and
the speaking.
No birth,
no death.
Just alive.

....not perceiving
understanding.

Now, life is new and painful,
as though I am waiting
for sustenance from outside
in perpetuum.

But I am the only nourisher.

I am the only giver
of nutrients,
of secrets.
of love.

If I do not give to myself,
I willl be empty
so significantly;
as though I were skin only.
No vitality,
no beating pulse.
no heavy breath.

Alone, I am responsible
for this encasing;
the things it protects.

There is a difference between
fragile and broken.

to suppose...

2009-12-05T17:15:00.000-08:00

I have never sat here.
I have never smelled this air
or felt this sun on the left
side of my face. I have never
walked the streets in this city,
I have never been familiar
with anything here
but you.

And you have made everything
here seem like home since the
moment you walked me up
the hill on the day of my arrival—
just to see the sun setting over the ocean.
I could have seen it the next day
or the day after; but this was the
introduction to your world you
wanted me to indulge in.
The orange peel sun was glowing
like a pumpkin on that Halloween
night and it appeared more real than
any sunset I could remember from the past.
We were harvesting nine years
of trepidation, of wonder, of hope.

In this moment alone, hours before
I travel back to my home, where the
leaves are falling, burnt orange and
dusty brown, where snow and grey
will surely overtake my heart in the
next several months to come, i don’t
feel afraid of leaving this place, or
the citrus washed evening sky, or
you.

Confession

2009-11-08T21:34:00.000-08:00

“everyone who gazes will sooner or later feel the urge to go out into the desert” -Rainer Maria Rilke

Footsteps condensate from rain.
Fat chrysalis balls of salt-tinted green
or blue. Carving out steady lines,
perpendicular alters,
left before, now covered up, blown over.
Glass copper grains weaving
like sandpaper around ankles.

When eyes proceed skin, there is focus.
Middle-level gazing that allows movement.
In a breathless state, a tempters talk
wingbeats until bent knees hit earth.
Pure collapse.
No longer a part of sound.
solid sky bent over your back, like wood,
marks of receiving.
Lifting arms until fingers crack heaven.
now, Pray.

cut up project....

2009-09-23T20:29:00.000-07:00

this was for my new media class in my grad program. it was originally a prose creative writing piece from "observance". we then took our pieces and cut them up into sections and rearranged them. this is where i landed.

Before Sleep

I like to see the way the light falls
on his arms as they hold onto me
until sleep finally comes.

He doesn’t know how closely I watch,
he is too preoccupied with locking the door.

When he gets tired, he paces.
When he is exhausted, he drinks.

Both of these are taking place,
which means tired and exhausted
have intertwined, but he is still
smiling at me.

He stands with his back towards me,
fiddling with watches, leather bracelets,
compact discs, putting everything
in its place on the dresser for a
few hours until they retreat back
to his wrists, his pockets, his ears,
once again in the morning.

He is pacing again. Lighter in hand. Candle lit, and then blown out.

Shoulders; soft, but angular.
Broad, but welcoming.
Slouch is something it doesn’t know
because years of breaking music
over a drum set has kept him upright.

He is as attractive from this angle
as he is when he is looking
me dead in the eye. His back is
like reinforced steel, even when
the exhaustion is sitting on his shoulders.

turning on the fan,
turning off the fan,
light on/light off,
Chinese folding
wall shut/
open/finally shut,
cat successfully locked out of the
bedroom for the evening.

And then there is the choice of the music;
jazz/rock/sad folk…

In certain moments, I can sense his
overwhelming want to let those
shoulders settle and fall,
but I have yet to see it.
He never looks broken even
though I know that most
of the time he feels in pieces.

(The second candle that hung from the wall was burned down to nothing several months ago, and lighting just one seems insufficient).

He holds it in his hand,
circular and the color of horse hair—
brown/tan with that hint of coarseness—
and brings it to my nose.
The exterior appears to be
falling inward upon the wick
like it has been caving in on itself
more and more with each night
of that singular flame.

I smell it and say:

“too bad it is nearly gone, those candles smell amazing”.

I trace the pictures of red and black
leaves and filigree that have been
scarred into his skin as I try to
remember where the lines bend
and turn; where the red becomes
purple in small spaces until the
black takes over again. It always
seems to change like he does.

Like we do.

And tonight I know I will sleep
like exhaustion has asked me to.

The lamp stays on after a few
thoughts of perhaps turning it off.
I don’t mind because it is delicate
and doesn’t hurt my eyes and
I like to see where his eyes are focused.

……and then finally settling on jazz;
sitar jazz to be precise; Middle Eastern
essence flowing in and out and all around us.

The candle smells the way jazz sounds;
in my ears and nose like a memory
that I won’t forget. He places the
sphere on the candleholder that
had been empty since the second
candle was thrown away. Things
seem off center now as I know its
place is three feet over in the holder
it has known since I have known him.

No fire tonight.

I am lying there on the bed, watching him.

horoscope

2009-09-16T11:52:00.001-07:00

things might seem
as though they are
getting out of hand.
as though the waves
of your promises and
you breaking them
has made life so dizzy
there is nothing
left to grasp hold of.

i approach you differently
each time; try to rectify
the situation i continually
blame myself for. when i
should be walking with one
foot in front of the other,
i end up bringing both feet
off the ground at once
and hitting the floor harder
each time i realize i have no
infastructure. no footing.
nothing holding me upright.

my reaction may determine
the length of time we dance
around this, once again,
so i become as reactionless
as possible in fear of
a recoil. moving from

ankles extending over ankles
in a vast mountainous cloud of
down comforter, to such
long durations of silence,
is like tumbling quickly
into unknown air that
clenches my throat and
then asks me to scream.

lower case

2009-08-06T14:26:00.000-07:00

All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth. ---Friedrich Nietzsche

my nature says not to fight you

when you are using the word “truth”,

as if your personal (T)ruths apply

to the masses. For you,

it is mathematical: one answer,

one outcome, one final number

that everyone should see--if they only

solve the equation correctly.

Subjectivity is my axiom.

A genuine open eyed prayer,

a substantiality that is personal,

even if the words spoken are the same.

The sounds I make do not take the

same shape as yours when they

hit the atmosphere.

“(T)ruth” leaves my lips like a lie,

as though he understands that I do

not believe in the equation he represents.

But, from your tongue “(T)ruth” laughs

and wickedly grins as you embellish

his ego with no second thought.

"(T)ruth", the scandalous deceiver, is

a mischief-maker, a causer of problems

for those who find solace in the context

of life, of experience, of personal revelation;

ideals that "(T)ruth" can never speak to.

Nothing can speak of condemnation

like your "(T)ruth";

with its verity and straight lines.

Universality is a made up deception.

Absoluteness encompasses nothing.

not by chelsea

2009-07-16T09:46:00.000-07:00

***probably, you should all download this song***

Sunday Afternoon

Rachael Yamagata

It's a choice
to stay
It's a dream
& I wanna wake

You have blood on your hands
and I'm feeling faint
And honey--
You can't decide

I'm a drug
Ya don't wanna give up
Smoke your cigarettes
Make your love

You poured blood in my heart
and I can't get enough
I'm drowning, drowning
and you can't decide

It's not about geography, or happenstance
you need to fly, & take a chance
You don't need to soar to emptiness
Float on high, & forever dance alone

Your scared, scared, scared
because I feel like home

I hear your voice
Knew right away
If you were here
what your eyes would say

There is blood on my feet
as I'm walking away
Rivers are red
Its starting to rain

I'm not gonna live for you
or die for you
Won't do anything anymore for you
because you leave me here on the other side
You leave me here on the other side

Not gonna shed one more tear for you
shed one more tear for you
I'm not gonna shed one more tear for you

At least not til Sunday Afternoon
Sunday Afternoon

Leave or Stay
Leave or Stay

waitress poems

2009-06-30T15:28:00.000-07:00

I recently have found a lot of poetry that I had forgotten about because I didn't have it in my computer. I have spent some time now putting things into this representation of "paper". This series of poems I wrote in 2001 when I was waiting tables. Every one of these poems was written in between waiting on tables and all of them were written on the back of my order taking pad. I had completely forgotten about them until I found them while packing for a move. Boredom sometimes produces something good I suppose.

Waitress Poems
Written 2001

1.

Blushing warm boys
forget what it means
to be subtle. They
kick back their dark
ales and eye me
like a sweet sweet
chardonnay dream,
calling at ill advised
hours, leaving strung
out rambling messages.
I save them for reasons
I can not really say.
It isn’t their voice, nor
is it the words they
string together in a
drunken speech.
Maybe it is the tone,
or the melody.
maybe it is my body’s
reaction to utter truth—
to words he won’t remember
saying in the morning.

2.

They hang upside down.
shards of glass caught inside
oval cone shapes they hold
with such elegance.
Crystal words drip down
the length of their legs,
as if singing words from
each pair of lips that has
held them.

I saw a man with my father’s
eyes. Caught off guard,
I almost spoke to him;
felt at home as my hand
naturally saught his direction.
until I saw his mouth,
how it didn’t curl the same,
how the way he spoke didn’t ease me.
Then the hollow came, as if at
moment, the voice of my father
was the only familiar thing
in my life.

3.

He sits like a little boy under
his mother’s piano—she hasn’t
played in years.

You glimpse a foot; which he
doesn’t know you have seen.

That is who I see, as you sit
there, unattended, causing
mischief in your adolescent mind.
This isn’t a choice.
This is who you are.

I drink gallon of visions—through
the crystal glasses hanging
in front of me….

You appear more real through
distorted glass.

4.

The problem is this:
not knowing what YOU will
be tomorrow.

How you will say my name
at the other end of the line.
The tones and balances,
why I can tell you are
looking at your feet
and how I can intertwine
right and left and
up and down
without dizziness, nausea.
Slowing closing eyes.

The problem is not:
how your hand felt on my hip,
Like heat,
Like coals.

5.

One of those days,
your skin felt like plastic.
saran wrapped.
nothing allowed to penetrate.
not your sulfur lines,
copper breath.

6.

Your face, bleeding comfort,
pausing for a moment
to rethink your already
scanned over fragments.
is exhausting.

7.

They come at you like a
swarm of flies. A black
floating amoeba taking
shape after shape.
picking so delicately
at your skin, that
together you feel
as though muscle is
showing—

Bone glistening in the sun.

8.

There comes a time when
the thin pink bubble around
you becomes so think,
that the world is for a
moment supple and warm
and all you see is circular,
inviting you to roll
the curvatures of your body
over all that exists.

9.

There was nothing but a pale
dirt road for eternal lengths
in front or behind of your
dad’s old station wagon—
white as the 70’s bounced
as gravel spun out under
the weight of the tires.

These were the only
moments we had—saved for
heavey breathing and
white knuckle pawing.
you—slick in the sharp
blue light sneaking through
the back window.
You—soft and lingering in
this makeshift penthouse.

I have known you in the breath
of touch so many times.
this inhale always tastes new.
exhale sheds nothing.

10.

These legs of glass—
hot blown,
red flame just
ascending off the surface.
still bendable.
still shapeable.

11.

You are the colors
that are found miles
outside the sun.
Sugar orange and almond.
Your movements are
charged with the power
of stars…
crescent moons.
You are orbit surrounding
vast molecular structures.

12.

Salt cracks in crevasses,
on arms,
between thighs,
like the class cane
used to progress my
footsteps—
It all crumbles,
disintegrates with water,
with saline.
rivers shed away surfaces,
but the dry lingers
on the top of my tongue.
teeth brittle and black,
sink into new skin,
your skin in which
oceans are foreign—
Iodine stains wash clear
with
one
drop.
one word of pure
bleached out rain.

13.

Once the sun came up—
sleep was stolen.
the room remained dark,
but the knowledge of light
was a demon successor.

Your face rested on my
upturned forearm,
and the reaction was eyelids
open. Dry and unfocused.

Wanting to touch because
of the ease of access.

A warm body—
unfamiliar, yet there.
under same sheets.
in and out of consciousness.

Waking up next to you was
stranger than drifting to
sleep by your side,
only hours ago.

Alters

2009-06-30T15:25:00.000-07:00

I am institutionalized.

I hang by my ears from blood vessel clouds.
One hundred percent sway and bend.
The spaces around me vacuum my skin to persuade
the motion of the stars control.
Hairline fractures compose my mass,
and the base of my neck is elevated as far as the
curvatures I own, mid knee.
still, not accessible.

When current stops…

I find myself at the base of progress.
at concrete square grated stairways—
front looking at the evergreen door.
Beyond nothing stays attached, movement
retracts and complies itself near street guttars.
One anxious foot inside, body programmed to
intake, not produce. As I enter this church to pray,
Rising; inevitable.

Remembering March

2009-06-30T15:22:00.000-07:00

For Craig Arnold
9.04.01

I had never tasted Sherry until that night.

Strong and smooth—like every word he said.

Something about the movement of his fingers,
how they danced as he spoke, how they felt across the
swell of my back.

My eyes didn’t seem to focus at any moment;
plastic cup numbed in my hand. Then,
he lay there—horizontally—too long
for a sideways bed, as I took in the reading of the
most beautiful poem I have ever heard
from a poets mouth, in my ear:

"...because at the play, backstage, on opening night
she conjured out of the vast yards of her dress
an avocado and a razorblade,
slit the one open with the other, flayed
the pebbled skin, and offered me a slice"....--

And for a brief moment, I thought I was in love.

Later when he kissed me with the same mouth
from which those insanely amazing words danced from,
is another poem entirely.

Confession

2009-06-30T15:21:00.001-07:00

“everyone who gazes will sooner or later feel the urge to go out into the desert” -Rainer Maria Rilke

Footsteps condensate from rain.
Fat chrysalis balls of salt-tinted green
or blue. Carving out steady lines,
perpendicular alters,
left before, now covered up, blown over.
Glass copper grains weaving
like sandpaper around ankles.

When eyes proceed skin, there is focus.
Middle-level gazing that allows movement.
In a breathless state, a tempters alke
wingbeats until bent knees hit earth.
Pure collapse.
No longer a part of sound.
solid sky bent over your back, like wood,
marks of receiving.
Lifting arms until fingers crack heaven.
now, Pray.

resound

2009-06-08T13:54:00.000-07:00

it has rained for 3 days
straight now. rain, blown
by north bound winds,
hits the back door so
madly that water has puddled
on the floor for hours
before i notice. my foot
skims the cold water and
i realize these windows and
doors may not be as
protective as i thought.

my cat and i wander onto the
porch to watch the lightning.
he sits in the chair next to me
like a little man and doesn't
shutter or shake at the clapping
in the sky high above us. i look
at him and wish i could be so calm.
so peaceful in my chilled skin; so
content wrapped around myself.

but i jump a bit with each crash,
as the thunder assembles itself
over my head. and i wait, with
brittle anticipation for each new
flashing spark that rings accross
the grey that has settled in around us.

for a moment, i close my eyes,
and pray to the small statue
of saint jospeh that i
superstitiously buried in my
flower bed, that these walls
i have been living inside
will be emptied. that this house
that can't seem to handle the simplest
of rain storms, will spit me out.
that this clumination of water
and electriciy will wash
away everything that is black
and heavy.

wash away everything.

baby blue

2009-04-24T21:59:00.000-07:00

this muffled sound,
this inaudibility,
isn't you. this isn't
how i remember
the way your voice
sounded. a low-
pitched haze. a subtle
feathery sound.

i still see how your
fingers move from
place to place. from
the cup in front of
you to the way they
rest on your knee,
make their way
to the slight
curve in my back.

it was visionary--
the way you finished
my sentences and
never turned your
eyes from mine;
like you had never
looked at blue eyes
before in your life.

cup to your lips.
smoke quickly follows.
and you haven't yet
looked away.

Representation of Beauty

2009-04-24T21:32:00.000-07:00

-A Memoir
(an oldie but a goodie.....)

At the Poplars of Saint Remy you touch the
back of my waist while making a joke about
fire and a certain vegetable--and at the same
time, can't take your eyes off the Van Gough
you have never seen; your hand in its place.

We are becoming part of these paintings,
seeing through the window panes of Monet's
The Red Kerchief--the emptiness and fullness
all in one weighted breath. Viewing colors
we didn't know existed before we felt them,
named them, spoke them.

The heavy beauty of your fingers on my
naked neck forebode like La Vie--a dark
weighted bluegrey. A mouth-gaping knowing;
even in not knowing. One finger held out in pause--
the holding in wait for an end. The panic in her eyes;
in my eyes.

I want to capture you; like Matise or Margritte in
brush strokes on a textured canvas; brilliant,
deliberate, mine. I will give you colors even Picasso
couldn't name, so that with only a glance, passersby
will feel my loyalty, devotion, passion;
surrender.

There is no gallery that could hold, contain, frame
the way your eyes sketch a picture in my hand.
But someday, when even the smallest child has noticed
the nature, the way it feels under the blueprints of his
fingers; i will hang it on the largest, whitest wall,
where never has been found a greater artifice.

a day for Rilke

2009-04-22T09:01:00.000-07:00

came across this poem this morning and remembered how much i love it.

Going Blind
--Rainer Maria Rilke

She sat just like the others at the table.
But on second glance, she seemed to hold her cup
a little differently as she picked it up.
She smiled once. It was almost painful.

And when they finished and it was time to stand
and slowly, as chance selected them, they left
and moved through many rooms (they talked and laughed),
I saw her. She was moving far behind

the others, absorbed, like someone who will soon
have to sing before a large assembly;
upon her eyes, which were radiant with joy,
light played as on the surface of a pool.

She followed slowly, taking a long time,
as though there were some obstacle in the way;
and yet: as though, once it was overcome,
she would be beyond all walking, and would fly.

asleep on my ear...

2009-04-12T00:30:00.000-07:00

you say
you say
you say

but i see that note--
that black heavy handwriting
that is unattractive
and bulky
and not at all interesting.

and for some reason
i try to explain why
why this is
is so right, so perfect
and then i realize
i am having to
explain it

and it becomes cluttered.
ah-ha moment gone.
thou moment vanished.
and it is just a girl
trying to show you
again;
that you haven't really
seen what this could do

and you say
i love you
and you say....

and i almost can't hear you
anymore

and i am terrified of you trailing off....

clarity

2009-03-30T21:52:00.001-07:00

when you asked me how
i knew i loved you,
i didn't hesitate.
i didn't try to convince
you of why or how,
i simply just said
that my moments
were empty when
you weren't in them.

and you understood.

i didn't ask how you
knew you loved me.
that moment was abundant
enough to trust every
word that left your
perfect mouth.
clear and seeable.

i understood everything.

and i wonder some days,
in these collapsed moments,
if you can remember
the bounty we felt then,
the completeness,
the adequecy,
the plentitude,

and understand

the clairty i see
when you fill these
lonely days.
when you are close
enough that i can
simply reach out.

and now there is this
moment, emptied.
and several before it.
days worth of moments
that you can only exist in
your head full of a thick
blackness you can't shake.

and i want to understand.

but you aren't here to
touch or hear or hold.

what should be noted

2009-03-04T14:45:00.000-08:00

i am not mediocre.

i might smile at innaproprate times,
or laugh out of context around
the board table; but the way
light hits my eyes ins't standard.
i fight for lucence in other people.

you choose to place your heart
on a chopping block and ache
to see it writhe in some kind
of desperate attempt at love.
i choose to close mine in,
zip it up, sew it to my ribs--
until someone has catered long
enough to its sound to understand
how to cut through the barricade,
and gently undo the stitching.
i don't need anyone to clamp it
off, take it over, or make it beat.
i don't need someone else to fill
it up because it is already full.

and yours will annihilate itself
over and over and over again
because all you want is an angel
to turn it to gold. all you want
is a heart full of empty passion.
and your right, that isn't me.
because absolute love never takes
over internal organs.

i am too careful with precious
metals.

how to get to philadelphia

2009-02-11T10:06:00.000-08:00

i cross my legs on a plane somewhere
over the midwest—kansas or missouri or
somewhere equally as boring, flat,
unimpressive.

the plastic cup of wine from the small dark
green glass bottle, feels like a business trip
in disguise. a residual sugar that is sweet
and suddenly bitter. sleep feels on the
ends of my lashes, but recreated and
uncirculated.
plastic, like the air
pumping in through the
vents above my head, pouring onto my
neck like a lover’s touch—only in a dream
you wake up from to realize you are
alone at 2:39 in the morning and the
bedroom door is in the wrong place,
because this is the first night you haven’t
slept
in his bed
in days.

the flight attendant brings bottled water
that tastes like recycled material.

the pilot wishes he was as brave, as
culpable, as the one last week,

who successfully landed a 747 jet
plane into the hudson river.

photos of a mother floating in an air raft,
clutching her baby,
rattling in his memory as he thinks…
maybe… just maybe
an engine will fail.
maybe a lost bird, wings crumpled with such
force, that an engine, holding hundreds of
passengers on its back, could just…
stop.

and perhaps in 3 days when I board another
aircraft--one that smells the same and embraces
me the same---you will think of me in the sky
over your head
and for a moment, worry
that the hudson river could engulf me
in a far reaching wave of blue
and hold me there—where your bedroom
door will never open
or close
again.

the things of sand and salt

2009-01-03T14:06:00.000-08:00

the body moves in such a way
that other creatures are envious
of our stature. our opposable
thumbs, our lack of dorsal fins.
somehow we climb the ranks,
making fire, making love,
making shelters that envelop
our paramount; our success.

and yet, our declination;
invisible at times but to ourselves,
is whole-hearted. lifting up
and over the dreams and homes
we have grown into. Our souls
carry out and over, our
ineradicable heaviness. not to
be built or sold or borrowed,
but only to be felt in such a way
that separates us from winged
mammals, cold blooded scales,
or gills for subaquatic breath.

it is our sorrow that magnifies us.

Flood

2008-12-17T14:51:00.000-08:00

I want to hide behind
dark eyes, cloak myself in long
black hair, red lips, pale skin.
Feel something different in my fingers.

The blondness of how I am known
somehow doesn’t seem to fit.
I am something different until I catch a
glimpse—in the mirror, in someone’s
eyes.

I fight to keep this vision of myself
intact, when I continually feel like I am
viewing myself in a puddle during a
rain storm.

Trying to scream over thunder.

Every moment makes me realign my
thoughts. Every person feels
like an old friend and a stranger.
His kiss feels a hundred years old, while
somehow I don’t know it at all.

The familiar is foreign.

It is a want for difference like
a fury building inside me.
A fire—destructive and life giving--
in my throat. Perhaps breathing
it out in a rampage of words might
eliminate the burning behind
my ears,
my eyes.

I need something to douse this heart.

the eleventh hour

2008-12-07T21:14:00.000-08:00

It is always the small things.
The little heartbreaks,
the phone call unanswered,
the passing slanted comment.
a door slammed a little too hard,
perhaps on accident, on the way out.
The kiss that hurts more than
helps or the way your hand
reaches across the table at dinner,
in assurance of your sincerity.

My feet want to move me out
from under this place.
My hands want to pull themselves
away from grasping yours.
My lips can’t help from
curling up, smiling back at you,
while my head is spinning
in balky cynicism.

It is the little things that
are the hardest to push away,
the hardest to get back,
the hardest to recover from.
The slight way you roll
over in the early morning,
your feet overlapping mine
because you can sense they
are cold. You can sense I
want you to pause, hold me
there, just for a small moment
until my eyes softly close again.

Maybe it isn’t such a small
thing. Maybe I am trying to
tell myself it is small so the
hole in my chest feels small.
So that the air I can’t seem
to grasp feels thin, and not
this thick brume that weighs
me down. Maybe, so the city
that just seemed small enough
to hold only us, doesn’t feel so big.
I am swallowed. I am consumed.
…a small bird, falling from
the tallest branch because
flying has been forgotten.

relocation

2008-10-24T15:24:00.000-07:00

This place is already
packed up, boxed into
sections, spaces,
compartments.
-new years eve, 2005--
-july, 2008--
a box bull of scars,
healed over and
still visible.
-a new puppy--
-a piece of jewelry
i thought i'd pass down--
-winter boots that
never quite fit--
i have already moved;
departed from this place.
from the smell of
the factory up the
long road to the highway;
from the sound of a train
engine coming to a halt.

i have boarded up the
window that stayed open
all summer long.

i am folded in newspapers
and set aside, to be opened
again and emptied out.

i needed some rilke lovin

2008-09-30T13:45:00.000-07:00

Blank Joy
-Rainer Maria Rilke

She who did not come, wasn't she determined
nonetheless to organize and decorate my heart?
If we had to exist to become the one we love,
what would the heart have to create?

Lovely joy left blank, perhaps you are
the center of all my labors and my loves.
If I've wept for you so much, it's because
I preferred you among so many outlined joys.

our dialysis

2008-09-03T20:19:00.000-07:00

the house looks different

without you. the air passes

around my skin in a different

circulation. the water hits my

tongue with a different penetration.

how my fingertips felt

on your waist until your

waist is something

that forgot itself, i will

remember.

how your arm dangles

at the edge of the bed when

you are so asleep, the sleep
that could never wake you; I will

remember.

how your eyes struggled to

open on sunday morning--

until i mentioned heading
to brunch; huevos rancheros,
bloody marys. i will
remember.

i can't find you in my walk,

or hear you at my ear or feel
the way my fingers

used to work their way across
your back towards the kitchen sink.

soft and rarely spoken.

lingering; barely on the

outline of something i

tried to grasp. i will be

that part that fought for

what you wanted.

you will be that part of me that

tried to forget who i longed to be.

i have a story like everyone

2008-07-02T22:05:00.000-07:00

for as long as it will take,

i willl lock myself in rooms
and try to figure out
what part of me feels
most like me--
at the moment,
at the second,
and then retract everything
in the next breath...
because i am not comfortable.

i am not ever
comfortable.

the quiet overtakes,
and i allow it.
i allow the drifting to
infiltrate all corners;
dark ones that haven't
seen light, that haven't
felt air.

there is something burlesque
about the lineage of my thoughts.
they start aligned and present,
and end in a spacial malformation.
they create the largest duration
and fit into the smallest crevice.

you could fix the depths
of me inside a granule of salt--
but that brine could
taint everything you
take to your lips.

my body is breaking.
falling apart.
crumbling like an
archaic statue that
someone long ago wrote
about and then at once,
forgot.

rooms; all seem a way out.
doors; only an enclosure.
windows; an escape and
a life sentence.

sugar

2008-05-28T20:54:00.000-07:00

dark strung notes that sway
with a low sentence, unheard
by everyone but you.

i am a creature of sound.

from a heavy dusk i whisper
a distance that sometimes
i can not get my head around,
but still, you hear me.

eyes before body.
reflecting color before light.

we are animal eyes, glowing in
the black weight. yellow and gold,
but not that exactly. more crisp
and crimson like a color
we have not seen.

when you breathe,
i hold my breath.
when you see color,
i give new names to light.
when you whisper in my ear,
my search has never
been more considerable.

i touch my cheek and don't
feel what i was expecting.
i interlock my fingers and feel
numb. i hear a song that we
can sing together and
i feel transported.

my fingertips, like snails,
slowly grasp for a remembrance.
cling, like dust, for a scent
of close distance. lay on my hips
like a lover...waiting.

my favorite poem for today....not by chelsea, of course.

2008-05-13T12:13:00.001-07:00

Detroit Annie, hitchhiking

by Judy Grahn

Her words pour out as if her throat were a broken
artery and her mind were cut-glass, carelessly handled.
You imagine her in a huge velvet hat with great
dangling black feathers,
but she shaves her head instead
and goes for three-day midnight walks.
Sometimes she goes down to the dock and dances
off the end of it, simply to prove her belief
that people who cannot walk on water
are phonies, or dead.
When she is cruel, she is very, very
cool and when she is kind she is lavish.
Fisherman think perhaps she's a fish, but they're all
fools. She figured out that the only way
to keep from being frozen was to
stay in motion, and long ago converted
most of her flesh into liquid. Now when she
smells danger, she spills herself all over,
like gasoline, and lights it.
She leaves the taste of salt and iron
under your tongue, but you don't mind.
The common woman is as common
as the reddest wine

coastal body

2008-04-06T17:05:00.000-07:00

this glass of wine, like algae,
rests in the heart, like sea
water and salt. life giving and
life ending all at once.
the sky is clouded like usual
and for some reason, i have
forgotten light.

i have forgotten how it
makes simple things gleam
like stars in the middle of the day.
now, the slightness of the afternoon
is like milky water, overcast
and incapable of anything pure
or pristine.

things are moving forward
as i am being drawn back--
like a string connected to the
middle of my body--pulling at me
as my legs struggle to make distance.
my ear hears a whisper, intent and
lingering, as my heart still screams
for things it does not know.

these eyes are salting over, shuddering
for blackness. widening despite the
colorlessness of milky texture.

i am trying to wade through stiffening sand.
through rough footed waters.
feet breaking on sated rock.
hands clasping around drifting sand.

force majeure

2008-02-26T15:20:00.000-08:00

we are automation.
decomposing in unholy ways.
a cataclysmic force breathing
on thin skin; palms of hands,
winter causalities.
in a like-minded quietness,
we sit in overstated silences
that clasp us together
like magnetic forces.

there is violence in my eyes.
turbulence under my tongue.
i am oxidizing, a hydrogen removal--
an electron you can't hold down.
like a casualty of war, i am an
unruly tangle of unsung words.

it is a sudden toss-up.
a frantic transport.
i am rioting in my hushed turn;
writing a warranty for this
heartbeat; suddenly feeling like
a consumer in the division
of money back guarantees.

i marvel at my luck--at what
i have won, and stand in awe
at what i will let go;
a wondrous loss of light,
an act of god.

Moving Forward

2008-02-26T15:18:00.000-08:00

By Rainer Maria Rilke'

The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
That I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can't reach.
With my senses, as with birds, I climb
into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
in the ponds broken off from the sky,
my falling sinks, as if standing on fishes.

cold war

2008-01-06T17:51:00.000-08:00

the wind blew so muscular
last night, i felt the window panes
pushing back against the current
of air that was coming at them
so furiously. they wanted to break,
from the outside in, crumble into shards
and fall onto the floor beside my bed.

the glass stood intact.

and now the snow hasn't stopped.
it has built itself, concrete like,
around the corners of my windows,
supporting them, as if giving relief
from the forces they had sustained.

i breathe and fog blurs my view.
i wipe away frost with fingertips
and search for color to contrast the
white, grey, and ash that hangs in the air.

i see nothing but colorless hues.
i forget the windows completely.

Ischemic Heart

2007-12-13T16:03:00.000-08:00

"For myself, those things that have died, in dying, entered my own heart." Rainer Maria Rilke

In this wash of gray
I can feel a certain vascular
organ electrifying itself-
romanticizing the feeling of
emptiness, a death in which
newness is unsure.
This tenderness boils
and filters out through my
words; words that never
seem to carry the meaning
I intend; words that hollow
themselves out upon air touch,
upon explanation of the very
content they are trying to define.
I watch them, floating out
on streams of breath, and feel
betrayed.

Praha Matka Mest

2007-11-26T10:03:00.000-08:00

A matriarch, the mother city holds
you at the bottom of her cochlear
towers. Glassy and glazed with a color
spectrum that doesn't exist outside of
her streets. This city is like your heart,
vitric and blooming. An expansion of
archaic to nascency;

Stare' Mesto to Nove' Mesto.

Everything changes as you touch it;
rolling fingers over large ancient
castles, vestments, weapons of the old
world. Leaving behind crystals of aurous
honeyed color as your footfalls over
Karluv Most. You create color in
places of grey; light in dark corners.
Like a helix, towers combine and
create images for your eyes to take
in; seeing things in a bacchanalian radiance.

Here, where imperial rulers sat,
insolent and kingly, you are skylarking
and bohemian. Your breath falls,
tendrillar on the face of the city.
And i can feel its heat from here, in
another world, inside my own spiraling
fortress; an Ecclesiarch,

waiting for you to come home.

The Spaces....

2007-11-13T10:52:00.000-08:00

Thinking of My Father

2007-11-08T19:28:00.000-08:00

my father has eyes
like the ocean.
like the ocean
in my eyes, but lighter.
softer.
our eyes look
the same in shape,
color, happiness...
but we see nothing
in the same hue.
except, perhaps
we do.

he looks at me
and sees a girl.
a straight white line.
a soft cheek.
small hand.
a new heart.
a simple mind.
and yet,
a broken light, an
unfinished sentance,
a malnourished complexity.

i look at him and see strength.
a tower of simplicity.
an infinity of knowledge.
a man bursting with emotion--
alway at the surface and yet,
nearly always
calmed, quite, easy.

what we see is irrelevant.
what we feel, beyond sight--
the calmness, the center
of the ocean--
defines us.
being at home amist waves.
in the eye of hurricanes.
a father, a daughter;
remembering life.
loving with each
cell of creation.

Leave

2007-11-06T21:30:00.000-08:00

Soft death has lifted
me up to birds
in sycamores--
brown-red from cold.
Fall creeps in,
snow falls inside my belly;
frost bitten and brittle.
Cracking brows of old
poems rewritten with
envy, falling orange,
lie naked. Wings have
attached themselves
out of pity for
flightless creatures.
Leave fall for rivers
and frozen sculptures.
Flowers blooms
from fingernails.

...and His Voice was Stilled

2007-11-06T21:20:00.000-08:00

"John Hass, speaking out fearlessly against the corruption within the church, was taken outside the city to be burned. He was chained by the neck to a stake and straw and wood were piled around his body up to the chin and sprinkled with resin. Finally, he was asked if he would recant. As the flames arose he sang, but the wind blew the fire into his face, and his voice was stilled."

--Be Your Best Self

Thomas S. Monson

You stood on a block of belief,

sturdy and solid.

Head and heart

preceeding your body.

A prophet, you screamed--

hammered sacred reforms

until you dried up inside yourself.

They held fingers over your lips.

Told you to stop.

Stop.

Your breath, tangled

between their knuckles--

gaining fiber after fiber

until it threaded red

around your own neck.

They baptized you.

Taped your mouth shut and

submerged your open eyes.

Crossed you with their hands.

Vertical.

Horizontal.

Placing Christ lightly in the

palm of your hand,

they made you cling.

Painted you black.

Devotees to man.

You detached. Opened your mouth.

Chains cut into your skin.

Ankles dripping thick on piles

of wood and moistureless straw.

Sulfur mists and fill lungs.

You lift out of yourself,

above dull orange-red strobes,

rising with heat that

silences prayers.

And then, you pry open moalrs

and clenched enamel--

forcing songs from stomach.

And like blue rain it becomes

a fountain of pure religion

amoung voices that continuously

drown out your own.

--Published, Spring 2001

Rape of the Promised

2007-11-06T21:10:00.000-08:00

Insipid movement,
you bend with
fear...
Mute, sullen,
you fight. Fire,
like dreams, engulf
the age old tale of
forgiveness, of
redemption. Falling at
the feet of the crucifix,
rape of the earth,
inviting.
The silhouetted feet,
holes,
now scares,
encapsulate the
degree of colorless blue,
as the architecture
of skylight
moves forward on command.
The pink vacancy of desire,
like pully moon,
soothes as it crawls
out from under you.
You promised
them poems,
promised.
Shame, excuse
for monotony, drips
drips--
from dry cracks
of your argument.
And you say inside,
if you can't read it,
read it again.

--Published, Spring 1999

My Creation

2007-11-06T19:10:00.000-08:00

The way your breath rests upon my lips.
The way a sense of stale and dry
can stick, like tacks, to uncountable
lives, transparent from their
carbon copied claims and
violating all emotion.

If we had found this at different times,
on different days,
I know we would have ignored;
sung different songs, written different poems.
And I know there is a friendship I
have made with a person I thought
I'd never meet.

But it has come to this. The songs you've
now are purer and the poem
on the page has been made sweeter.
The places we've loved are now behind.
The miles between songs and poems
are now smaller.

And while we feel dry inside the distance,
driven to create worlds we haven't seen,
we think of what we may touch
and what emotion will carry us there,
believing that stale and dry will evaporate
with the next finger touch

with the next stroke of a pen,
as if to say--creation without you
is commonplace--is regarded as
nonexistent. Eye to eye, to feel
the walls begin to crumble between
our lives and those we strive to live.

--Published in Touchstones, Fall 1999

Contradiction

2007-11-06T18:55:00.001-08:00

24 hours past and I have forgotten.
Wanting aloneness.
To be safe in these body parts--
to feel blood and not need one thing more
than this mind, these fingertips--
to know my own eyes,
closed and open.

I pause--hold my tongue.

Knowing the touch of prophetic thumbs
and index fingers of your hand will erase,
take over and fill me more than i can fill myself.
That jaw bones, like magnum petals on inner arms,
will scratch my skin,
show muscle, bone, draw blood.

And I will have felt warmth
between eyes, ears, thighs.
You will know me as I lose, shed myself
between your legs and hibernate there until
it is easier to move away than feel--
stomach on stomach,
peel away,
let air breathe between
And open.

--Published in Touchstones, Fall 2000

Desert Water

2007-11-06T18:48:00.001-08:00

You have been digested and
spit up by this city.
Between coming and going--
somehow I can now
smell New Mexico canyons
on your breath, tasting as fresh as the
first day I touched earth between fingers.

Desert wrapping
over your body.
Charcoal sandpaper that scratches
until once again smooth.
Intertwining through thighs and toes.
Fingers grow like flowers through
hardened cracks of mud and rocks.
Eyes lightened by hazel sun and green moons,
oceans have forgotten their way inside.
Your veins, now pumping ground,
leave familiar glances and far between

touch.

Vastness, like rain, has evaporated.

Somewhere in dry brown you are having
a love affair with Fitzgerald.
Pages turning and scribbling heat.
I see you there.

Open, bathing in sunlight
that makes you so brown you
drip honey from your elbows.
Your perfections constant and unreachable.
Inside--
these hills and sand and lack of water
are keeping you alive,
until the next time you're caught
between.

--Published in Touchstones, Fall 2000

The Thought of May

2007-11-06T12:09:00.000-08:00

the earth is receding past
my window, past my shoulders.
this reduction of rayless cold
seems collapsing into itself,
bringing a ripened expansion.

we can see ahead, the flowering
growth--the earth leaving inky
footprints, black like salacious stories;
tangerine like burnt sugar.
i am stretching outward,
as if to tag along with the
markings it leaves behind.

we are mirror-like in our design,
our compulsion to leave behind
this home. this approaching
migration, a horrifying flower;
alluring in its potential and
devastating in its dissolution.

Residual Sugars

2007-11-06T12:06:00.000-08:00

when i touch you i become
hands crossing over glass ivy,
like rotting artifacts, they crumble.
we wait for our particles
to be carried away by -birdwings-
circling forever until the
cold curves itself over the sky.
then, this spanning blue mouth
becomes a necklace of black
words that clog your throat
like wet grapes.

So Many Years Ago

2007-11-06T12:01:00.000-08:00

Mountains rise like a body
from the earth. White against
sand colored people;
camel, tan, landscape.
Dusty lives.

Trying to eat their own tongues;
copper like a pale wall of chalk.
The irony of too many people,
--not enough--
starvation.

Cloudless

2007-11-06T11:58:00.000-08:00

Tonight I find the air

just the right smoothness;

wrapping around skin,

with just enough indulgence

to make my head feel unclouded.

Each movement; step of a foot,

lifting of the chin, bending at

the spine--impresses upon me the

absoluteness of continuance.

This second needs to last. At

least for this memorial of the

second before it. Tomorrow the

air will surface differently; if

not more divine.

Roadtrip

2007-11-06T11:54:00.000-08:00

road
winding, making love
to the river that
swaddles it's side

leaves
barely breaking
out of their
green into
lusty oranges and
tar flavored browns--
sage dipped in caramel

trees
match--almost symmetrical,
although each having
its own glory;
sunburnt and radiating,
like a small forest
fire from each separate
arm, branch, limb.

A Day, Early Fall

2007-11-05T20:32:00.000-08:00

One:

At this moment, all things have overtaken me.
The white words from a friend, gone and walking now
between unknown walls, books.
The way these words evaporate in my head and
condensate from the corners of my eyes--how they
sit at the base of this blue throat, confused as though
my mouth has heard your voice.

Two:

The entire world has fallen in 36 hours--bodies floating
over ashen smoke sheets--how we have captured those
moments on black and white--to remember destruction;
what it was like to crumble--individually inside--every
sensing person. How the glass city in my mind has
morphed into only chards of bent metal and upward hands.
How the city will infiltrate you like your pages.

Three:

I am sitting in a bright orange chair--watching in a daze as
breath walks around me. Closing eyes to concentrate on
how it laces over my arms--how the smell of you is brought
to my nose at certain moments, remembering how life
is a mirage somehow. This isn't real. How wrapping my legs
through yours as the sun broke our sleep this morning
could be stolen. When I listened to my mother's voice
on the phone and all I could do was hold your head to my
chest and realize I didn't have the required strength in my
body to cradle you as though I meant it.

My mother's voice.

The Street Outside is Mine Alone

2007-11-05T20:29:00.000-08:00

Memories of cities,

lit by stars never seen.

Green does not live here,

lives there…from the train I see it.

Though, I sit here…unmoving.

Could this be…

a line in a poem?

Could this be…

The line that feels?

I can feel heat on my face,

under the red sweatshirt

I have pulled over

to hide tearing rain.

Sun isn’t out. Heat comes

from my own radiation.

Roots

2007-11-05T20:28:00.001-08:00

You cultivate this heartburn as if you

know you are the cause.

Your notebook body dramatized

in the paleness—vapors separating—

root colored, like ginger.

I sink into this mudded

baptism—like baby snakes—

materializing before white.

It is eternal failing and I am consumed.

This mediocre vision feels like

arms will explode, as though I am

parasite bones, infected superstition.

Hybrid

2007-11-05T20:25:00.001-08:00

Muzzling between thought and sound,

a striking gentleness. The color behind

your eyes lies. I have often walked

through this limpid circle of transmuted

noise, allowing each step a gazelle-like

landing. You follow behind me, and I

behind you as we become estranged to

faces and akin to backs. In air we circle like

royal hawks, I catch your tail feathers

in my mouth. Ostrich blue, and flamingo.

A piggy backing of dance and pause.

Together we have created a divine vulture.

Rise and we death roll.

Sleep and we can’t scream.

Engel

2007-11-05T20:23:00.001-08:00

--for RMR

You have named me, and now I cannot keep silent.

A letter, a scent, a departure.

This is all it took for you to remember.

Through me, this song moves out and over,

adjusting to shoulders and hips.

In your naming I have found a new

hollowed-out landscape in which to place

budding wings, attach them to my feet, and

in a singular breath begin to feel lighter and lighter.

I am your red dawn hardening with texture

as though your own fingers have grazed

and slid throughout its thick color, like a

child with paint and empty white paper.

The places in which I have already been,

I cannot retrace. Together, a vision seen

through only one set of eyes, now enlarged

by whole experience. In this name you have

made me known, you have seen beyond eyeless

centuries, given to me a hand in which we

barley have touched finger to finger

through endless spaces.

Astigmatism

2007-11-05T20:21:00.001-08:00

grace spins out of windows,

mistakes shadow for light.

mother sees corruption,

mistakes thinking for ignorance.

page sees white,

mistakes overabundance for emptiness .

sunburned eyes angry.

lost something, trying to regain.

sky trapped above,

mistakes June for February.

face hangs above shoulders,

mistakes beauty for courage.

woman singing in ear,

mistakes nothing…

Fire

2007-11-05T19:58:00.001-08:00

This begins at my toes—

the heat. They curl orange

until kneecaps melt.

Skin strikes, like flint

on grass, brown and waiting.

This sweet boil engulfs—

awareness in my throat,

clenches. Warmth can

destroy, char, ruin;

I know this.

I burn different,

in soft, heated scents

that stop seconds.

I am third degree,

rounded, full, open.

I am slender blue and red.

this is the core of life—

Strongest Creation,

Woman Made.

Water

2007-11-05T19:57:00.001-08:00

It rushes and folds,

creating skin as pure as salt.

I am the wave that penetrates

the permeable walls of body.

Beneath my core, like current,

this tongue holds

gallons tasting of blue—

speaking forth a tidal

of new births—

unheard sounds.

This belly; a basin able to

hold ounces upon ounces

of unseen blood and movement.

I cradle, with palms of iodized grain,

an empty sieve, and ponder

the moment it will finally

Flood.

The Humanitarians

2007-11-05T19:55:00.000-08:00

His eyebrows hang like

loose clothes on a hook.

Laughing through dollars.

Hollering through champagne.

Satin envelops her. Strapless.

Her body is a long string of light.

Her eyes, a beam of glossy steel.

Making jokes about

unfortunate circumstances-

to show appreciation.

They peck before you have died.

They can tell no difference.

More bones than skin.

More hands than mouths.

An ocean of black,

steals from death.

A Missed Controversy

2007-11-05T19:54:00.000-08:00

I would dream of of taking trains to

San Remo or Milano.

A café, I could imagine, with

paper-like tablecloths;

wine glasses so old

they are cracking from the

inside out. I thought perhaps,

on my birthday, a ferry or night

out among foreign lighting--trying

strange foods for the first time,

ones that I would never taste

again; ones that don’t have a name in

English, or a flavor I can recognize.

For days, this place would have

belonged to he and I.

Turin, the home of the holy

shroud—Christ’s face embedded,

burned into linen, held in a baroque

chapel. It wouldn’t have been

on display those days, but I would

have known it was there.

Like a kidnapped child, locked

away and waiting for someone

to condemn whomever has

chained him up.

Carrying

2007-11-05T19:48:00.000-08:00

This week, I may have been able to know.

They may have put that cold, hard instrument

on my belly, over a layer of stingingly chilled

white jelly.

This week, someone may have been able

to look inside my body, as though skin and

muscle didn’t exist. As though, my own abdomen

were merely transparent, silken, above a ocean

of life.

Perhaps today, I would have been waiting.

unable to sleep or eat. Anxious to find out how

my life would change; ready to hear what kind

of person I would teach everything I know.

A strong woman.

A dark, intense man.

woman

2007-11-05T15:39:00.000-08:00

can reach through and
beyond sex to find real
affinity; beyond touch
and skin to examine
ourselves--
see what is there,
behind her eyes.
See a reflection that
fastens and fuses
another part of ourselves,
with our self.

It isn’t something you
see in him; your lover,
your father, your son.
It isn’t from opposition
we are cultivated,
but rather the counterpart.
This is apperception given
to only us; in her dark hair
and her brackish eyes;
the way they outline
our breath and give to us
words.

Forecast

2007-11-05T15:38:00.002-08:00

With no difficulty,

your fingers coast along

my neckline like a cloud

across atmosphere.

And surprisingly,

I sink in heavy vapor—

like rain from blue sky; unexpected.

I am pinned in the air.

Wind

2007-11-05T15:38:00.001-08:00

From inside this locked body,
it can fly, holding all of me
in broadness—weightless—
my carrier of words.
Hear it seeping under windows,
it lifts hair from shoulders.
it is my own.
I am only transparencies
of thought in motion.
Longing resides here and
I am breakthrough.
I blow ochre leaves and
cradle them to earth—
storing their movement
inside a space with no doors.
This soul is the
lockbox of myself—
the testimony of my color.
It is how you know me;
Through quiet breezes,
Raging Storms.

Stuck in My Head

2007-11-05T15:37:00.001-08:00

Imagine this is a song,
with a melody you have
never heard; a tone that hangs
in the air like a bell high above
your head, lingering in your ear
—a pulse, a weighted glitter.
…a string of notes that you can’t shake…
playing in your mind over and over
until every thought intertwines with
cadency, stringing itself along a measure
of nerve endings and sensation.

Imagine I am a song,
with a chorus screaming
from my skin, like a tantric
force of noise; singing at you
to howl back, to pick up a separate
accent, hold, interval, joining in
with a salty taste of overtone.
…your lyric with my lyric, my consonance…
encasing a rhythm in your eyes I have
never heard in anyone else.

Stabilize

2007-11-05T15:36:00.003-08:00

The backdrop was phosphorescent,
as though lights had been expelling
their best colors; orchid, lemon, deep orange.

I had been here so many times before,
but fervency was refreshing. My skin,
looking blanched in the unnatural light,
was being saturated in modulation.
The moments of static, were perpetual.

Through each movement, each measure,
we were tarnished further; blurred more
and more together, until the room became
only backdrop and no one was a player; no
one was a listener. We were all color.

Our impurities became our emblems.

Revision

2007-11-05T15:36:00.001-08:00

Prosaic with colorless
dimness, I am backlog.
I am just waiting
to get around…
I overhang between
myself and protocol
in this olive-drab air.

I have no tolerance for
commonplace;
no leniency
for ordinance.

In this head I speak
canary yellow—
florid and terra cotta,
until this muse, this convoy
—aurous and ablaze—
overtakes this umbrage.

Here, I am foreshadow;
directive in my awakening.

Possibility

2007-11-05T15:35:00.002-08:00

I have looked upon
the dark drink
of a mouth, narrow
as a long hall where
the only end is black.
I have watched
as the pulp of your
tongue became thick
and shadowy, as though
each word was hiding
from the next
word to follow.
I have looked upon
the features that beam
transparent as the
curve of your jaw
or neck are shown
in the absence of light.
The exploding scents
of your bones are a
vision behind blood
cells floating
in eyelids—closed.
I have looked upon
light that drips
oil glazed songs
that sludge from the corner
of your lips. Darkness
that is avoided
becomes the subtlety
of real; the distant tower
where fulfillment may
be pulsing.
I have looked upon
the gaze I cannot see.
I have felt the eye whispering
in the palm of my hand.

One Deep Breath

2007-11-05T15:35:00.001-08:00

The world is on tip toes, sneaking around
my shoulders and never quite settling in. Heavy
and allegoric; forgetting its rotational responsibilities--
standing still in moments when it should be
spinning.

In an instant I become a flood--pure
blue and insistent upon destruction;
metaphorical in my downpour as I create
a bounty of elements you are powerless
against.

As temperamental as autumn, alluring to
all your senses and drenching you with
unforeseen sleet when you expected sun—
a soft sell of pressure that can barely impact
surface.

There isn’t a word that will suffice. All sentences
are unqualified; a string of whispers that should
be shouts; an ornate assembly of paragraphs
trying to say something simple; an indifferent
applause.

I am grief stricken for the magical; somberly
requesting the hysterical. I can’t remember the
extraordinary in moments and in others, feel
nothing but peculiar, spellbound, fascinated,
Broken.

Things are becoming too literal. The symbols
hard to find, the figurative language stuck
at the back of my throat. I can’t write you into
a poem they way time has written you into
my skin.

Observance

2007-11-05T15:34:00.003-08:00

Like a ritual washing you are
far removed from;
your voice is comatose.
Whispers—dragonflies that
fall like scalded bullets.
Ordinary insects burning
holes beneath feet, like small
cups of sun. Standing over
obligation, overwritten-overdrawn,
I see clearly. This is my rescue
fantasy. Erase my arms and slip
over me, like light blue—
shoulder exposed, shoulder covered.

Indecipherable

2007-11-05T15:34:00.001-08:00

I can measure the time it takes
for a thought to reach your tongue
by the way it hits my ear. Your mouth
cradles the sound like my fingers
cradle yours. Intensely, magnetically,
unforgettable.

I can spell you out—drip you onto pages
like writers block never existed. Heavily
inked words and textured paper—a spine
of electricity, bound comfortably and falling
open between my hands--
fingers grazing the edge of each page,
turning them with the same gentleness
that I would grasp the small of your back.

I look at you and I am calmed in a way
I don’t know—it is unfamiliar, yet comfortable.
Intense and yet accustomed—like I have seen
you day after day after day after…

Muted Fire Talk

2007-11-05T15:33:00.000-08:00

In the corner I can
hear a small squeak, perhaps
your voice—annoyingly
requesting me to remember.
The burning page under your
cage is beginning to smell—
it seems to be coming from
underneath me, somehow.
A clean burn slowly turning
-yellow-brindle-copper-
alleviating into a fine silt
of smoke. And then,
I remember.
The dim lighting,
the open book,
yellowing pages,
Chianti and a
poem.

Generation

2007-11-05T15:31:00.000-08:00

I hold to the difficult—
and as I am changing
the way it feels to wrap
my fingers around its
insurmountable size,
the sinking in my palm
leaves an imprint the
size of life.
Then, above the walls
of my thin veins,
it sprouts a tree.

Fifty Sixth Day

2007-11-05T15:30:00.002-08:00

--For Blake

Fifty Sixth Day

Last night I had a dream.
You were floating in a pool,
a shallow one, fabricated with
sapphire and copper tile. We were
all there with you. You seemed in a rush,
uncomfortable and turning over and over in
the water. Back, Front,
back, front.
Then, we synchronized. My arm lifted with yours
and everyone else’s moved with mine. We stretched our
arms over our heads, reaching for you, pulling the heaviness
through our bodies and bringing it to settle over our chests. Sinking
ourselves, like thick black rocks, while your body lifted out and over and
finally separated from any water at all. Then we tried to wash the obese black
rocks from our skin only to realize they had settled in our bellies, making the washing
exhausting. Now it is us at the bottom, watching through underwater eyes, this haze of you
lifting
lifting
lifting.

Fashion Masterpiece

2007-11-05T15:30:00.001-08:00

Black rhythm mounts empty harmony,
Suffocating color—
Greens allude to purples
And then to blacks—all ranges.
Broken colors.
An aesthetic picture deep in
Electric balance.

Evening

2007-11-05T15:29:00.004-08:00

The night is pepper green
in this resurrection of
gusting earth.

With gothic clarity
this picture is improvised:

buildup over silk mountains,

proud silence in air,

and blissful anxiety of a
golden surrender.

This decorative blaze is home.
Shy, with rich silence.

Sun nesting at the edge
of rooftops, blooming yellow

in a rich exit.

Earth

2007-11-05T15:29:00.003-08:00

My eyes, colorless before evolution,
enhance with fused reds, like
books, like laughter.
I smell of fall. I learn of growth,
of death. Death; when my mind
will rise up like sun and surround
this body, bathing it in orange scent.

Thunder passes.
Looking up, my mind
grows from the heart of
this ground. Blue reflects
water falling through
seasons changing.
Brown, like boiling sugar.
Yellow, like light from this mouth.
I smell words more green
than plush—they soften
me into growth, and
I enlarge.

Devil

2007-11-05T15:29:00.001-08:00

There is a color for each part of you.

You insinuate erotic hues in brilliant purple
and pale blue that grip me like sticky animals.

Insinuations of androgyny,
hooded in the obesity of darkness,
repel from chest to thigh as
captured steam hums
a veil of opaque milk around your body.

Your eyes fall in recession.

This elocution is a mild current oxidizing
between teeth and lips—pudding
rusty orange on your mouth and finally
turning pasty cracks into moist particles.

An orchestration as beautiful
as obsidian, smooth and glassy,
Gaudy enough to decorate with.

Crescendo

2007-11-05T15:24:00.001-08:00

She always kept fruit
in her coat pocket.
She liked the texture
on her fingers in
the cold and how when
she put it to her
lips it was like child-
hood on her tongue or
running a hot bath.
The smell would linger
until it simply
broke away, like smoke
leaving a body,
hidden in the faint
subtraction of sun.
This was the apex
of her distinctness.
Sitting, pink as an
orphan, in loyal
dark; standing out like
a frozen feather
in the muscular
trees.

Just Like Coming Home

2007-11-05T15:23:00.004-08:00

You grabbed hold of my leg,
like a cloud, hovering above my head
and sinking me in heavy vapor when
I least expect it. Out of context and yet
a natural gesture. I felt like I belonged
somewhere. Not to you, but to a moment
that no one else owned. There is a place
that hangs in the air… and I don’t fear it.
It is mine, and not yours, because you were
somewhere else in a conversation,
for a moment…but the second
your fingers grazed on my calf—you were present.
And that moment, was your gift to me.

I breathe it in, like electric air is giving me life.

Perhaps I am perversely fascinated; bellowing
with expectations and implementations yet to be seen.
This is growing on me, like a blister ripe in the sun.
Its fierce originality.

Hands are always the hardest
thing to draw, capture, tell, picture. And yet,
I can see yours with vivid soundness.
This recalcitrance is not becoming because
I can’t pretend to pretend. I can’t forget
the way your southern accent hits my ear, like
a song—or the way your eyes are still illuminated
into the palms of my hands. I can feel their gaze.
I am lost in the light that penetrates from your
lips—are you dancing yet?

I am in orbit.
I am stars.

Come here, honey, what shall we dance to?
What will move us? What will change us?
What will inspire us? What will call us home?

Rain and thunder we must
sometimes carry in our belly.