November

The wind is born in gusts across this moor-ish scene,
Where leaves… in crimson and gold… the spring… in silence
And in proud declarations…voyaging Canadian geese…who trumpet… to one another…and to me… that despite,
The warm waters of their equatorial destination,
Will remember me… and this place…
While we wait… their return, and repose… in our moments of hibernation.

Speech-Less

There are no words,

Except those that we are making
These new age rhymes that tell the spirit
To ascend above the brain and the body
That holds you down to the earth
Keeps you in the memory
And the happiest light of day

There are no words,

Except those that we are making
In our old hearts and our weak resolves
Filled with fortune’s idols
And spelled out in our tattoos
Each of our small deaths and our delights
Swarming our skin
And taking stranger’s notes


There are no words…

Except these.

the question posed upon hearing the K.O. bell

What is this flavor,
Soft Earth,
That clings to my face?

That makes me pause and place my hand,
To feel my cheeks, and their parting blush,
That drifting, liquid sense of here and now,
Of places from which I have come, and have not come.

This savoring, the bitterness, and the sweetness,
The copper and the cherry, bubbling in my mouth,
The warm current down my face
That mats my hair and stains my hands,

This unoriginal waking, coming to in the haze of action,
And the dancing of memories,
Jogging forward from the modern-past
That transient time, comes over me in waves of nausea,

And that neon-depth eternal,
Nails me to the floor, mocking solidarity,
Rocking me forward, balancing on river shaken ground,
These thoughts, sentient messages, inborn impulses,
That bring me to know my death-hour dance

And loiter, unhurried…idly… eternally…
Hovering, on my lips,
For the ephemeral moment before we kiss.

GRE Study

Apocryphal intentions
Deigned arbitrary
Are now
Sentenced to drown
In an unsatisfactorily
Assuaging combination of
Opiates and hallucinogens
As delicately
Veiled animus and antipathy
Come dribbling to the fore
With all the force of a knell
Pounded out as a fugue from Bach
Leaving the enduring lachrymose
At the pulchritude wraith
That, at the last breath, escaped.

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Covered

And in love with misery
Easing the feeling
The shallowness of breath
The pain in my lungs
And the reverberations
Of exultation

Hearing the melancholy on the radio
Measure for measure
Singing out my hope and spark
Drenched in lightening and

Sizzling and popping
Of bacon cooking
And humming to the depression
While doing dishes
And crying slowly
For the aching and the tearing
In my soul

Listening to your ghost
Playing in time, with me
With that sad radio
And the water from the faucet
The monsoon rains, beating on the tin roof

And I catch
In the faintest murmur
The fear
Putting my hand
On my belly
Feeling her heartbeat.

Coma Berenices

It is tawny and it is golden
It is brightest in the softest of lights
It holds sultan’s gossamer drapes in angst
And makes fools of loomed silk sleeves

Sitting in regality
Pleated beneath Corna Austalis
Roaring with each bend of her neck
And whispering perfect enticements in gestures of boredom

The perfume sails like jasmine
And wafts carefully, knowingly to me
Causing a stutter, and a stare, and a soft
Long forgotten desire

And I watch her sleep
In summer skies, as searing days blend to temperate nights
For a dreamy moment I reach out and dare to touch
Coma Berenices

Neutral Color Schemes

Struggling to come forward
Chained in invisible caveats
And wrecked by lightning strikes
Stabbing at imperceptible
But lingering pensee
And donnee
These imagined emotions
That play at severed heartstrings
Until all that is heard,
Is the creaking of a worn out bow.

beaches

Silent shores
Quiet moments
Wrapped in seas and anonymity

Some where
Some place
Some time

And nothing matters
Except the you
The me
And this feeling,
In the between.

that old sappy love story

The man is holding his tongue and his cigarette until he cannot bear it any longer. He is quietly watching, and he is quietly seeing life play out, life speed by. He quietly sees everything change.

What he would give, what he would still give, to know. He is thinking of all the things, all the people, he would sacrifice. He is sacrificing while watching.

A young man is loading boxes while two others help a fourth back a couch into the same moving van, and a girl, a young woman rather, dollies out one final load of boxes.

Her smile, the old man knows her smile. He knows how grateful they all are for the momentary distraction.

He remembers a laugh and a pause in a hug. He remembers the welling of tears, and a smile from so many of his own years ago, from when he said his own goodbye.

She had dark brown hair and she always smiled, and his heart always paused, always skipped, everyone’s did.

He knew his smile gave him away, that anyone within any reasonable distance could see what she did to him.

And as he is holding his tongue, and his cigarette until he cannot bare them any more, he pulls out his wallet, and from within its most inner cavity he pulls out a picture.

The three young men, the ones that have been left, are standing in a lose circle smoking, without knowing what to do next.

He walks over to them, and he singles out the one with the staunchest face, the one who has had the least to say, the one who has the most to bemoan. With a recognizing face, the man extends his hand and the young man notices a piece of paper. The young man takes it, and smiles a cautious smile to which the man returns a wizened grin and a knowing laugh.

And as his friends, laugh at the oddity, the young man looks down at his new treasure, and he sees her dark brown hair. He sees her and he cries.

Piano Sonata #2 in B-flat Minor

Sound laws
Sound waves
Theories and parab-le-tic facts
Our evolutions are endless
And our struggles are mighty
We have come to kill Grendel
We have come to cradle the child
Born from pillaged treasure,
Pillaged wombs
And raised on Ancestor’s tales.

weird night, long nights, hot and strange nights

Slinking past a broken light
Where images dance
And lives stand stagnant

Moments are lost forever
And ages cross our faces
While laughter forces itself out
We feign limitless in our depths
Refusing to acknowledge our triviality

And once we have nothing left
No more passing thoughts that compel us to speak
We try to find a way back
To how something, somewhere where
There was no one to hear
No one to care
Judge and jury, executioner gone by the way
Buried with a name
And the crassest of ceremony

With what cynicism we find our way back home
And crawl beneath our cold sheets
To rest our head on limp pillows
And find our way to sleep
Between exposed springs and broken bottles

the lost city of Z

Water borne maidens
With saliently alluring features
Call out and call calmly
To homebound sailors
Of once fastidious resolve

And while sagacious
And drawn to remembered graces
Verdant hills and incarnadine lips
Do make their odyssey longer
And their resolves weak

As with softly strung syllables
The maidens, do knowledgably seek
To enervate and turn
With impious glee
Diaphanous harmonies
To a last light dirge

canon chain

Books strewn about a room,
Stacked and in single repose,
Cared for in a half-hazardous
Manic kind of way
Organized in a fleeting system
Something sparked in Shelley
And led to Dawkins
Then Hegel came to mind
And a dictionary was needed
Which led to another, more specific book of terms
And a word below Medusa
Made me think of The Decameron
Which will always lead to Chaucer and his Tales of Canterbury
And he turned a phrase that made me think
Of Brian Greene and The Elegant Universe
Which will inevitably call for a visit to The Double Helix
Where an annotation that follows a footnote,
Makes me think of Burroughs
And eventually Hunter Thompson
And then I am onto Thoreau
And Emerson
And then Bierce and a visit must be made to Twain
Which is where the books were last seen
Some with French flashcards as place-markers
Others with a rose’s leaf
And a pencil in one
Where, in the margin, there is scribbled the briefest of notes,
I love nights like these.

i have no idea-r

And here we are, being public with our affections and our effections, with our heavy words lightly thrown, and our ripples on endless seas. Here we are poetic in our anonymity, and violent in our conspicuousness.

We are proud of our convictions. We chant and yell, and scream into a darkness, where we hope someone will read them, and we hope someone will say something, leave their emblazoned icon of submission, approval, or anger on our words, and we will be connecting.

Here we warn you, do your homework, and do not think we have not. We are smarter than you. And you should know this. You depend on us, you see us everyday, and we look, so…. wrecked. With slouching steps, and dragging feet, silent and blank looks as we listen and we try to comprehend what it is you want, even when you do not know what it is you want. And we have bags under our eyes, from sleepless nights, and sleepless days. From doing our best to find a way in this murky, delusional, society. From the hours we spend writing our last papers, to get the A to keep the scholarship, to stay in school, to get away from this job, and be able to do nothing that relates to you. From the children we take care of, whether our own, or our friends, so that they can go work a pole for you for the next six hours. From the houses that we live in, just enough shelter, just enough to keep us reasonably warm, and reasonably dry. From the books we read, and the stories we hear, from the constant prattle of the uninformed.

These are where our tired expressions, and our migraines come from.

And when you talk to me, like I am stupid, when you try to argue with me in the aisle of a bookstore, and tell me about an author whose books I have read, every last one, and when you try to draw me into a debate on healthcare, and when you try to talk to me, using big words in the wrong places, do not think that I do not know, that you are a moron. The thought, that I am thinking, that is making my face go blank, and look slightly like I care, is the question that I want to ask you and all your kind, “What about me, makes you think you can talk to me like this?” and I know the answer, it is not me, it is the position I am in.

Never-the-less...

I start analyzing myself, trying to find what it is about my appearance, about my mannerisms, about the courtesy I show in speaking with you, anything that is telling you that you should and will, and then my thoughts trail off, and I think about people from the past who never knew me, but act like you. The people who have met me once, who looked at my bookcases never, who thought enough to speak with forked tongues and malicious intents, people who only think, they never know, people who scrap together their own meager existence from feeding on rumors, and who will never ask anyone face-to-face what is true and what is not. And the irony always is that I never heard the same back. I never had a thing to say, or an idea about you. I heard about you, but I never knew you, so I never had anything to say. And I know that people made words out of my silences, and out of my non-shows, and my turned down invites. And this isn’t about a specific person, it is about a whole group, it is about all of us and how we somehow operate. And you and I, and we are all liars. We are all told and we are all tellers of stories, and we are all formers of opinions, and we are all so fired up when we should just be trying to get to know each other, and if we do not know we should endeavor to say so, to say that we have only had that one bad run in, and that it doesn’t count because of the substances. And we should try to figure out what we have in common, and we should be chill, we should be really chill….

And so that was where my head was when the guy in the dockers and the button-up shirt, with the blazer with the stitches coming out in the sleeves, was standing over me, with a look of bitter victory because I had nothing to say. And I stood, in that most pivotal of moments, and I looked at him, and I reached down and I handed him his book, without ever leaving his face, and I stood there for a moment, and then I walked away. And I realized that is what I always do, when the prattle starts, when the idiotic comes out to illustrate, and when all I can do, is turn my brain off and imagine a distant field and a euphoric notion of childhood, I walk away. It is not worth blows, and the sneaking in corners, and the silent stabs at backs we do not recognize.

And it is your loss, and it is all our losses, and it is very sad, that I have never hit back.

Bouquet

With heads ablaze
And bursting blooms
They sit in a silent grace
Collected in an ethereal way

Turning heads slowly towards
An emerging sun
And the diurnal course

Balanced most precariously
In their near decay

In reverence
I give pause
Stopping
In a mourning way
To note
The driest petals
To which once clung the sweetest dew.

My Skull

A misshapen orb
Hollow but not cavernous

Sits silently on my desk

Blankly brooding

Disfigured by an extrusion
Where starkly white blades
Mock the fleshy covers they once had

And I imagine
The movement
Lucid and languid movement

Of these elements

Adding volumes to the creases
And layers to the folds

And we converse
This yellowy orb and I

We talk about the novel
We talk about the ancient
We talk about the never, the forever

And when I think we have run out of things to say

We talk about
How I will look
When reduced
To a misshapen orb.

reading list

i am blogging... there i said it... i openly admit it...

she sits with her back to me, flipping long red curls from her face as if their impetuous nature can be curbed by her actions, as if anyone's actions can be curbed by her actions. She is thin and pretty enough, but still eats a fat free muffin, and her coffee was all lite soy and caffeine, just the goods, no frills. But that doesn't make me like her any more than the horribly obese people who insist on ordering a diet coke while shoveling big-macs into their mouth. I hate all their ilk, all, and I try to tell them so, but I cannot seem to get the voice together, to get the muster in my throat to yell. So I keep watching the woman with the wily red hair and I keep smoking, compulsively sucking until the filter catches and makes an awful smell. I am surprised I can still smell. She is moving but there is a man in a dark blue peacoat between me and her. He has a briefcase that he keeps gesturing with while he is talking on his phone. Up and down like some casino monkey he waves it, takes out a patron and still he blocks my view. What is she doing? What is she reading? Is she reading? This man has made my well planned location lost. Finally he moves, and while trying to look less frantic than I am, while trying to look more suave than I have ever been, I am jumping up and down. Is she there? The window which I am now considerably closer to, too closer gauged by the wary eye I am getting from the women seated at its edge. One woman starts pointing at me while the other, I think, calls for a barista. To be certain she is waving her arms and screaming as if I had a knife. And as I think such I see myself trying to stab through the glass window, a Red Crosse wouldn't have made it. I cannot be bothered with this, I lever myself up using the trim as a platform and I stand. My body has now encompassed the window. I am like a large awkward spider, but horribly off balance. This is not going to plan.

Somedays are Spiritual

Between
The roles
and roses
That show without seeking
The sudden worships
That leave without speaking

And when you are alone
Under that skin
Under that mask
Beneath your façade

What is in your heart
Your soul
That puddle of ether
The dreaming
The way you wish you were

The faithful at your alter
Drinking your blood
Eating your body
Waiting for revelations
Impossible miracles

The maid
The mother
The demon I will be
All the truth
All real, below the skin
Beneath
From side to side
From bone to sinew

The truth is on my sleeve
In every fiber with which I breathe
On each wrinkle of my smile
Every blush of my cheeks

I hope the same for you someday.

Imaginary Beasts & my little demon

Soft

Soft

Worn out eyes

Dried-up eyes

Blackened & subversive

Lingering far too long

On your passive form

While autonomous hands

Work their way over that same frame




Casual,

At play

At rest

On a reactionary muscle




Soft

Soft

Electric eyes

That want for nothing

More than what is outside

Soft light, warm night, roses, and wine

Thorns and carefully placed pricks




Soft

Soft

But where was she going?

Into hinter nights

And imaginary lands

With glowing beacons

Cast off from idle hands?




And quickly

Violently

In a soft sudden rage

There she is

With her hand above his

Holding sway in a proverbial court

With the image of fears

Burning behind her tears




Ecclesiastical skins

Torn from diatribing flesh

Listen

The siren says

Listen

The serpent says

Listen

The drug says

Listen

And lie for me

The little girl says

Eh, it was a rough monday

With relative ease
With quiet calm
Found in the thunderous words of a hushed master
An ancient, wise master

With smallish lenses through which I see
His lenses
His words
Making me believe
In the rhythm
In the language
Of this nation

Making me know something
Of the easy, subtle flow
Of energy and power
Passed between men
Between women
Between lovers and tutors

Diligent pupil that I am
Listening to the grit of the words
As they work their way
Out of his pen, out of his mouth
And I am sure he is making half of this up
Letting it be recorded as he thought It up
Never minding who will clean it up

Naked, raw, proverbial words
Silky, sultry, illustrious words
That make me fall in love all over again
That make me melt, make me sweat all over again

Trembling,
Shivering,
Dripping,
Anticipation,
I turn the page
And I read aloud
“Come, said my Soul
Such verses for my Body let us write”

Angor Wat

My head is pounding & my heart is racing. Nausea for the last ten minutes. Rotation. The room is spinning, spinning, spinning while I am standing still& I am feeling like death warmed over. A corpse microwaved to a semi-animate state. I cannot make myself calm. Down. There is a depression pulsing, quickly, ironically coming over me. Forcing its’ anti way into my system & I want to take revenge, take advantage of others of myself. Food in the room is making me sick. I can feel my body tensing, tightening. Bullet ants. I am hyper & bored. Sick & sane. The pounding in my right temple will not stop. But I cannot remember when this began. Has it always been there? Like the ringing in my ears? Like the well repressed southern drawl? Is this a physical retribution? Have my body and brain finally come to such odds that I am betrayed? Too much sleep? Not enough sleep? Too much clean food? Not enough clean food? Too much exercise? Not enough exercise? My body is disconnected. My body is heavy and puffy. Nothing fits. Nothing is right. Nothing is comfortable. I am sick from something. & I am sick from everything. & all at once the cliché is overwhelming. . . I am sick from nothing.

This is How I Sing the Body Electric

red faced dreams
come now to listen
come now to my side
swiftly, cautiously, with fleet treaded interest
come

sit silent in the moment
in the breeze of well spent dreams
silent in the pages
of ancient rhyme
and come well versed
to the bridges
to the ending of the ought

soft thought, well thought
second sight moments
aft Ovid
aft Virgil

aft and yet ere
here we are
in new spent money
in new spent dawn
drinking slowly brewing honey

fresh, new, spirit, of the moment
spirit of the now
nouveau, vogue, novel
this original
this impetus
this, this, this, and that.

A Question of Time

overcome,
partial to the feeling
between realms, waiting for moments of epiphany
as breezes turn to torpid winds
that whip round the corners of my frame
with hints of snow the air chills all that it touches
and still my sun-warmed face,
begs me to close my eyes
and sit for a moment longer
towards the coming
towards the speaking
towards the stripping
towards the morning.

Bring Your Chains

Here we pitter
Here we pat,
Here we turn our steps to dance
And here we dreamt of that

We stepped once
We stepped twice
We turned our lives about
And with steps as fleet as vice

Down the hall
Down the lane
Down to the hollow ground
And down to the river once again

Slowly pounding
Slowly growing
Slowly edged together
And slowly we are coming

And swiftly
We
Are
Dying.