triggers

Sacrator curve
Cold crescent metal
Finger fit
Resistance
A biting edge
Into loops and whorls
Spine-like arches
Cutting age-old scars
Pulling
Holding
Electric casing
Itching
This damn hurricane inside
Brought on by
Tumbled blocks
Twitched
Like a shot
Twisted
Steel cylinder
Holes made bare
The same marks
As before
Without rest

mend

Within a moment
Suspended
Mending in the air
Grinding time
A rainbowed bubble
Swims swimming
•
Through oil lamps
It looks like rain
Tip toed reluctance
I stop
Going at every
Shut-eyed pause
Inside out sleep
Stretched with a breath
Little obsessive drops
Sparkling stars
As round sour pills
Down swift river laps
Shoring up blood thickets
Branches hold debris
Like the fortunes of
New born babies
Rolling in currents
Spinning sticky browns
Middle-life scaled skin
Now a translucent plastic dance
Held by slight wind
This scroll
These words
My desires
Left beneath my skin
Stops with the sound
Of my heart
Mended

red white & blue

Woven spit
Shadows teeth
Silence yells
From waggled tongue
A shout of air
Toxic vomit obscenities
Ignorance of demands
Redden his hot
•
Skinned lemons
Dance in the balance
I add the sugar
Cubed grains cupped
White
Dissolved transparency
To lips licked
Sunburned sweat stains
Bouncing whole
•
Swallowed wet
Dreams pass through
Empty gazes
By the hour
Hours
Washed memories
Steep in a bitter present
Oceaned blue

zero

Counting zero
Sky wires pass
Runway train
This
Hot
Breath
Fright of blood
Red rage
My thighs hurt
From racing
In my dreams
Zero
From window pain
Clouds burst
At a gait's pace
Crumpled papers
Carry asphalt wind
With underscore aroma
Sigh
...
Sigh
Black holed
Zero

41

Mourn of bone
A crisp loss
Beneath leaves
Of melancholy
Her broken
Unbeautiful countenance
Scrapes the plain
Rocky undersides
Lichen-stuffed grubs
Loll and gag
On unexpected light
Sweat aged defiance
An expectancy of alone
Long forgotten
Rotted sinew and hair
Dangles the yellowed skeleton
Pushing on skin
And fat
To unrecognizable mounds
Left alone
By masses
She
Has become
The forest floor

brokens

The plural of broken
In whispered beats
And chambered red
Wallpapered last words
Burnt quaking walls
Calcium edges bleeding shards
¤
All those mornings
Frost on the inside windows
That empty space between sheets
Stoking a fire made bitter cold
Knotted silences
Sky brewed
Every drop sadder than before
¤
Simply every night
Her wrists wrung dry
Waiting for the fill
Her fragile shell
Breaking
More than once

sunset

The bite down
Of noonday sun
Flame red bursts
In dragonfly
Seconds
. Ask me
. I wait
This pool of anticipation
Boils the held crater
Cracked
All
The
Way
Down the side
Curves
The surface
Like skin
Spread thin
Ankle to sky
Ask
Before the moonlight
Licks the horizon dawn
And night
Crushes us
Both

legs

My legs
Miss the mingle
Of shared sleep
I'm a hobo
Falling
To a bus station pew
I drape my limbs
Across unfolded clothes
Feeling taken
But claimed
By no one
The curling
Inching closer
To the chilled wall
To feel unalone

physics

I have a spare composition notebook mixed in with my books and journals and photographs and I keep thinking of writing you every night, writing you like you'll never read a syllable, writing love letters and poems and spinning words as if they were magic, writing to you the old fashioned way with an ink pen and candle light and my thoughts and the cat on my lap, feverishly comparing you to the sun and the moon and lime sherbet and the air I breathe and the beat of my overly imperfect heart, redefining the simplicity of physics and astronomy to equal the crux of you, telling you how you make me laugh when I need to, how you make me think when I have to, and describing the twinkle in your eyes or the perfection of your nose or how when I hear you laugh my stress crumbles to dust and that when I'm with you the world could be flat and the stars are just pencil pokes in black paper because it wouldn't really matter but it would because you would tell me so and every night after I pour my words of adoration to you into earth's pulp I would tuck my pen away in a drawer, blow out the last of my flickering candle flame, and seal my weaknesses in between the marbled black and white, tuck it under my mattress and secretly hope you find it one day when it's full and it's full and you will smile, but instead
I try
every day
to get over you.

evolute

So far away from ourselves
All plastic wrapped
And Painted red
We're still pushing away
The sounds of birds
Quiet

nice

Choosing choice
Nice
Helped hand
To swollen bones
Bleeded path
Nice
Vein split
Toxin pulse
Blur
Nice
Blur
Paralyzed
Thrown dirt
Like roots
Like the squirm
Of earthworms
Still
Nice
Dissected
Eyes open
Watching the cut
In slow breath
Nice
Hide hung
Red rivered
Strips
Then nothing
Nice

my room

An everted helicopter
Drab olive green
Baby huey
Dripped away white
All the sound
Of moving air
Deafening dreamt
Plastic army men
Moan like it's their last
Lungs gasping at dirt
Of barefooted farmers
Sweating heat under
Bubbled up pain t
Looking on red rivers
From this field
And that
Forgotten meadow
Buried secrets
Licked wounds made
Of broken mirror
Spun
Flight blades weave
The smoke braiding
Clouds of jet fuel
Choke arteries
And rescue
Is
Impossible
The ceiling
Fan

morning shower

Down in the tub
A sixth toe
Flipped up tap
Golden shower
Standing on head
Flesh colored vinyl
Ripping nails
On uneven caulk
Steam swallowed
Broken wings
That breath I held
In the palms
Of hands
Seeped every whole
These feet
Shattered and tired
Rubber to stiff
Clean
In the run
Of water

river stones

River stones
Long run dry
Flatten the path
Breath grasped
Into a saddle
Of the moon
Every step
Grinding dirt
Between rubber
And earth
This need
Disappeared among boulders
Picked apart
By snout and beak
Still following the sun
Longed for one
Rest
I can't stop

leavings of man

Her silent thought
An ocean buoy

She's swept
In cold blue
Freezing between
Jaw and stone
Hanged by lefting fingers
Her mermaid
Surfaces spout
As she takes in
Night-dark air
Dawn is naught
She slips again
Again
Every twisted flash
To blind mariners
Every deep blink
Thinker's dissatisfaction
She's still here
In the whites of his eyes
Looking through
A ghost of herself
She wants to float
On the sea
Salted buoyancy
Drift in what's left
Of love and romance
Slipping
To silted shoal
The most beautiful blue
She ever saw
She feels mud
Between her toes
Under her nails
In her lungs

on starting over

On housed freedom
Elementally protected
She snailed away

On peeling paint
Cried off rotted wood
She looks new

On rusted pipes run
Orange tears on board
She ran from the rabbets

On skyed trees
Sheered for warmth
She took longer to die

On last breaths
Nourishing the green
She's buried beneath

she

Aloneness
She chose
She
Destiny felt steel
Wool again

She knew
She
With smooth skin
And arms
That reached miles

Longing
The length
Of six feet
She wanted
She

Skinned undercurrent
Eddied lust
She secreted away
She
Wanting that same skin

She moved
She
Forward toward
The lonely
Clouded daylight

Closing her eyes
She dreamt
She
Lay in blackness hoping
She

Felt too much
Pain
To ever tell
She loved
She

crush

Crush
Of rose petals
Stain
The nooks and crannies
Of clean
Gray cement
•
Crush
Of a ripe
Yellow lemon
Breaking juice
Into droplets
And seed
•
Crush
Of hot apples
And strawberries
Sucking the sugar
Right
From the meat
•
Crush
Of soft skin
On broken glass
Splitting
And separating
Finding the tainted ichor
•
Love
The crush
Of spent knowings
Abbreviated
Into the space
Of these letters

simple line

The calm
Of a single line
Outlined music
For two
A stringed aria
Curved then
Curve again
Holding weight
Of fingers
In the pour
Dimpled recognition
Her eyes
Closed and
Close again
The calm
Of a single line
Heat distracted
Supernova
Releasing a
Spray of stars
His line
Becomes light
And sighs
And she opens
To calm

wallflower

He looks like
Pierce Brosnan
She thought
In the days of
Remington Steel
The days before
She even knew
The definition of
What she wanted

He's pretty
She thought
With flowers
In her stare
He probably spent his
Whole life
Being pretty
A project
For the serious buyer

She consoled
Her wants with
Made up facts
About how
Pretty boys are
About the time
She did not have
The energy
She did not have

She thought
She knew
She was the wallpaper
That decorated
The dance floor
Where that pretty
Boy knew
Nothing of want

storm

Her storm
She peels paper
From wet paint
Time thickened
Board and braided fiber
Hide beneath an ocean
White caps poke bled
Pages of terminal words
Rippled in color
For a moment
She is the blue
And gray
Kicking the horizon
Slipping across the greens
Aching to release
The crimson stain of sunset
Her trappings lie
Beneath the visible
Embedded in the pulp that
Gives her form
Function
Or dysfunction
The thing about paper
Though
The thing
About paper
Ash
It's ephemeral
Burnt in passioned fire
Dreamt in fleeting simplicity
To the world
She is transparent
Her storm
Surges
Beyond and beneath
His naked eyes

constitution

Thieving words
Leaving dimples
In my pages
Errant golf-ball skin
Shifting leeward
They lose their grasp
Of defining
Moments
And meaningful...
Meaning
Little words
The trickster coyotes
Desert-bound
In toss and tumbles
Of sibling straits
Rhymes
Rhythms and
Undecidables
They escape being
To be
Their own
Rueful constitution

trees

Undefined
I exist

Define me
Find me
In the curves
Beneath your
Fingertips
Redefine me
In the loops and
Whorls and
Arches
Smooth flow of lines
Turning
Churning pulp
Into sighs
Contoured thighs
Undefined
Wind and breath
Sky and depth
I exist

The lonely weight
Gravity pulled
Trees
Arching her back

today

What day is it
My wound time
Shattered sleep
And if the bright
Dims
Sand through fingers
Earth into space
Lost like
Out of air
And the silence of black
The day
Will always be
Today

Naked Lady (amaryllis)

Little violent ticks
As seconds
Tear time apart
Thunder
...Thunder
Of the minute hand
Slapping numbers
From my face
And the longing hours
Slowly unfurl
A spring Naked Lady
Crimson veins
Pulse to a
Purple sunset
This time
This...
Time
Of peeling
And stretching and
Slit
With each tick
Flowered new

gravity

Single string
Suspension
Fine silk
Of spiders
My eight legs
Saw
Serrated closer
Hard hit
Ground
With swift
Undenied
Pull of
Gravity

fish in the sea

I hate this

I hate this
This struggle with love
This mudded tug o' war
My feet slipping out beneath me
Buried rock shards
Stab and rake
Across shadowed skin

I see her
My gut flip flops
A fish out of water
I choke on my own words
Flip...
Flop...
Suffocating on silence

It was like tea
I made
Hot water with dried
"I like yous"
Caught in a net of
"I'm a complete novice at life"
"A fool in a sea of normalcy"
"Never mind me"
But do

It doesn't matter
Every day a new reservation
To stifle the onslaught
To purge the only feelings I have
For new ones
And new ones

I hate this
The wonder of new daisies
Spun like wild gypsy skirts
A green meadowed snow melt
Afraid of the sun

She
Is...
My fingers know it
As they slip and fiddle and drop
...Beautiful

She
Is...
Oil to my water maybe
Persuasion to my persuasion
Majors to my minors
...Beyond my reach

And every day
I pretend for nothing
Shrinking back in my shell
Counting breaths
Like flower petals
Flip...
Flop...

love song

I'd write you a song
Chicken scratched
In my notebook bound
Every word a fractal pool
Layered deep
What no words say

I'm on the outskirts of this town
It's rain-slicked majesty
Mistaken for rain
In a pyramid of sodium light
The street lamp holds me up
Cool as fog
Every look melted
I'm still on the outskirts
Of this town

I'd write you a song
Scribbled dreams of doodled passings
Flowers in bloom through cracks
Of black asphalt
And for every leavened thought
Words sink bottomwise

I'd write you a love song
Though you'd never know
Disguised as songbird's charm
And children's laughter
A note never to ear
I'll whisper to you
On the breeze come Spring

wounds

Writhe
Squirm
Maggots
Slick over
Dreary wounds
Segmented white
Ocean the red shine
Of rot yet to come

I'm sensitive
It's how I am
I know of no other way to be

my town

Streets rest empty
An anxious turn of wind
Spine stiffened
An upward thrust
With broken windows
Gaping holes into black
Deep sighs of vacant nobodies
Blowing ash to grey my skin
Painted shards
Of some days past
Splinter beneath every step
These tattered work shoes
Never mattered
My slow downhill slide
Of loveless decline
To the blown glass heart
A red center
It's everything
With cracks
Chamber
To chamber
And still transparent
I breath the dry decades
Away
This town could only last
So long
Passed my prime

moving on

Moving on
Worthy of equals
I should be still
Like stone or the Sun
Doing what I do in my own brilliant light
Or my own dense hardness
Or both


"You don't know you are winged, but I do. I see your span unfurl daily." - @Paul_McGovern


But she's perfect.
With and without
Light
With and without
The rotation of Earth
She is the flash of headlights on the wall in the late night wait
And the returning darkness in the sweet night embrace

Professed and confessed
I dangle on this limb
An old tire swing in Southern heat
Waiting to sway
With a returned breeze
But nothing
Scrawled nothing
On note paper dreams

This pen
Runs of ink
Have never enough words
Describing the everything
In one
Or a million vials of blue
Black
From one rainbow's color to the next
And back again

I hear the stretch of life
When she laughs
That early morning glow
Skin blushed sky
And together
It all makes sense

Moving on
But I'll still be here
Skipped solar ties
I'll watch her fly
Not believing
Knowing
She'll find her stars
Knowing
She's perfect

supper

In cooking chicken
Hanged heads and feet
Dry at the door
This once live thing
Lay in a bed
Of its own feathers
Fingers
Peeling skin
And broke bones
Nestled in the pot
It's own liquids
Soften timed roots
My own hands
Blood slicked
The stink of slow
Rotted flesh
Still tracked
For supper
One day
I will be
Such a thing

poetry

I lay in bed
In the dark
Nightly
Writing you poems
[I love you]
Thinly disguised
As poetry

wait

Feeling washed
Color from the glass
Curled skin
Of man-made time
Unexpected
Indecency of wait
Just alone
Capped by slats
Stabbed by finite
Moments
In counting
Wait
I am
Invisible
To you

*Photo is "Untitled (Woman and phone)" from the Kitchen Table Series by Carrie Mae Weems.

scrimshaw

My bones
Scrimshawed
Tied off
At the ends
Dropping off

"What's crackin'?"
He asked
"My bones."
I said
Listening

With tools
Of whalers
Drowning
In the harvest
Of heart's blood
Ornamenting
My bones
Marrow
For sale

tumbled

She
Butterflies
Take flight
Beneath
This
Crushed skin
My offerings
Are naught
Muse
Jester
But still
I'm tumbled
Her laugh
Her hair
Her quiet everything
I exist
She