The Ghosts of Silence

Indivisible

2012-02-08T23:45:00.000-06:00

Zero is indivisible.

You can’t share nothing

with someone else.

Emptiness is a self-contained

affliction, or an all-encompassing

void. How can nothing weigh

so much, when it exists inside you?

His eyes are zeroes.

His mouth is a zero.

His heart is a zero.

His asshole is a zero.

Put your lips to his eyes.

Put your tongue in his mouth.

Put your ear to his heart.

Put your nothing in his nothing.

Johnny Wolf

2012-02-07T22:39:00.000-06:00

His eyes were dark as bullet holes,

bullet holes in the side of a stolen car,

the paint flecked around the edges

of bare metal, like silver hints of madness.

He combed his hair straight

back, slicked with grease and sweat

and whisky, so it shined like vinyl

to match his polished leather coat.

His breath smelled of wet ashes

and cinnamon, a cocktail of sex

and booze that seemed as natural

as blood in the teeth of a lion.

The Wolves followed his lead,

savoring the cries of the vulnerable

sheep, the young who fell prey

to Johnny's charms or his switchblade

knife, driving too fast, howling

at the night, until one curve

unseen, put them all away for life.

Apathy

2012-02-07T22:30:00.004-06:00

Is there a darker place

than the heart of a man

who realizes his life

is pointless?

An overcast sky cuts

like a dull blade stabbed

through the guts of his guts,

muting all colors, diluting

all tastes, numbing all touch.

His goals fade like red pushpins

on an expanding map's edge,

pushing past a foggy horizon

that no road seems to lead to,

his callused bare feet, bruised

from gravel, and dusted like his sky

that holds no stars save one,

shimmering like a coin

at the bottom of a creek,

without enough light to read by,

or to show the way.

How far will he walk before

the sadness overtakes him,

driving him to his knees,

too tired to stand, too afraid

to reach past that veil

and listen for a newborn

child's screams.

10 seconds

2012-02-07T11:00:00.003-06:00

later and his car would have been the one

in the path of the drunk driver. His front end

would be the twisted, smoking ruin of torn metals

and shattered glass, airbags deployed, pools

of liquids gathering amongst the beads

of faux diamonds catching glimpses of passing

headlights. His mouth might be full of blood.

10 seconds, the time it took to remember

where he had set his keys as he was trying

to leave, scouring the living room in a rush

so he wouldn’t be late, finding them under

an envelope on the bar, where his wife

had carelessly dropped the mail.

Heart

2012-02-07T10:36:00.003-06:00

Lying in the bed of a nameless field,

you might twist bunches of grass

between your fingers like a child

fingering locks of their hair,

hands splayed over the sun-warmed

ground, feeling the tickle of life

against your palms and the backs

of your knees. You might realize

that to a gnat, this field

is the universe, and you are a god.

You might marvel at the weight

of blue sky, seeming to hold you

in place, as the planet spins upside-down,

the clouds a feathery pillow begging

you to fall and taste their candy plumes.

On either side of the world, a sea

beats the rhythm of your heart,

things live and die between each breath

you take, while the sun gives and gives.

Hurt

2012-02-06T22:57:00.004-06:00

Every heart is a clenched fist

pounding through the plaster,

broken knuckles and bruises,

cuts clogged with white dust.

Every voice is a mirror,

thrown from the rooftop,

sending out reflections and rays,

a star falling into sound.

Every face is a furnace

burning smiles into ashes,

burying lines of memories

into living epitaphs.

Every muscle is a rope

tied in knots and cinched tight,

cutting off the air to the brain,

numbed to the cold of waking.

The point

2012-02-04T15:01:00.003-06:00

is the end of the knife,

where the blood starts to bead

upon piercing the flesh,

is the tip of the incisor,

the biting, tearing tool

of the carnivorous,

is the name of some peak

where the oxygen grows thin

and men struggle to place their flag,

is the elusive purpose

dangled like a carrot from a stick

that keeps you employed,

is the written word

at the top of this page,

which answers nothing.

Transcending

2012-02-03T22:50:00.003-06:00

Every time the trees speak

in their forgotten language

of wind and leaves and creaking

limb whispers, he wonders

what it all means. He wonders

why at times it feels like

all the air around him hums

like a jar full of angry bees,

his hands begging to be

thrust into the washbasin

of sky and wrung out

like flightless birds’ tears

into a rainstorm. Everyone

is busy getting cancer

and fucking up their lives,

while the crickets continue

to sing their siren song at dusk,

an open invitation to embrace

the nakedness of darkening trees,

to disintegrate into sparks.

Words

2012-02-02T18:13:00.003-06:00

There’s no polite way to say “fucking god-damn it,”

no easy way to say, “your wife didn’t make it.”

No word spoken has stopped a heart from beating,

but brought a hummingbird-like flutter of pain,

bruised the edges of lips held so tight, the chapped

skin cracked and bled. A weightless feeling of flight

trapped in the flesh, like smoke escaping before

the fire ignites, turns the chin back to the left,

waiting for the sticks and stones.

A memory of light

2012-01-27T19:29:00.003-06:00

The flashlight is a scalpel used to autopsy the night,

your arm a satellite beacon, searching for signs of life,

empty eyes digging through space for natural light,

before the stars die, before black holes devour the light,

candle flame ghosts that vanish like promises in the night,

a fading image of the past, a fading hope in the afterlife,

where truth is sacrificed for the value of human life,

a black-spined book used to make heavy hearts light,

and convince closed eyes what was day is night,

this life is an endless night, hope just a memory of light.

Everything and Nothing

2012-01-26T21:59:00.003-06:00

There’s a thunderstorm and the sun is setting,

making the clouds look like they don’t know

who they are anymore, grays twisting into yellows,

twisting into colors that haven’t been named.

I named a color godsblood, because the sky

was an open vein soaking through the bandage

of storm, and I wondered if god killed himself

because the world stopped believing.

I stopped believing because I could see the end

before I could see the beginning, and both were

terrifying enough on their own. Rain softens

the edges of reality as it softens the ground,

the ground is the sky after it shuts its mouth,

leaving us all with a desire to be eaten

and turned into stars, or at least into light,

the one thing we know kills the darkness.

Mysterious Ways

2012-01-21T22:53:00.001-06:00

He stood on a whisper, an eggshell,

a breath fogged from winter’s chill,

balanced on the point of a needle.

The roads were the grooves inside

some giant thumbprint, where every

snowflake that fell had a destiny,

and every accident held a purpose.

The seconds counted as miracles,

as digital dollars adding up and up

while he stood at the gas pump,

listening for the heartbeat from the stars,

and hearing only the highway.

A Portrait of Memories, My Grandfather

2012-01-01T21:12:00.003-06:00

My inner child knows there is

a bone in my leg, where his fingers

would lock above the knee and probe,

triggering my high-pitched giggles.

His hair seemed immortally silver,

brushed back to cover a thinning scalp,

a rosy nose and a smile, flashing

with just a glint of gold, his whiskers

rough on my cheek if he hadn’t shaved,

a face tanned from days spent

tilling the garden and mowing the field,

letting me sit on his lap and steer

that ancient red tractor, its giant black tires

churning up loose grass for the breeze.

His blue eyes shined behind wired bifocals,

floating above a t-shirt inside a gray work shirt

where his initials were embroidered,

red thread into a white patch

over his left breast pocket, for the job

that had him driving trucks millions of miles.

A quiet man, possessed of a tenderness

that’s impossible to capture in words,

he refused to punish us, slapping the bed

with his belt and telling us to scream

so grandma would think we’d been spanked.

He would sit in his chair and cut a fresh plug

of tobacco, spit the juice into a Solo cup,

flip through the latest Reader’s Digest

until his chin drooped to his chest

and his snores joined the chatter

of ambience emitted from the ticks

of the furnace and the grandfather clocks.

To be continued or not

2011-11-12T13:07:00.001-06:00

She doesn’t remember me.

Did I imagine that web of sparks

and glances that danced

between our eyes

like invisible light

on the night we met?

Am I a fool, trying to dredge

up a memory from the pool

of lost time like a man

down a well, hosting conversation

with the echoes, pulling up

that dripping stone from the depths

and asking her to write

my name in the moss?

There’s no answer,

just a gleam of white reflections

cast from the corner of her

windowed inner self,

a smile, that beckons for more

reasons to share seconds,

and a hint of fate’s hands

twisting the dials

on the radio.

Waking up a husband

2011-11-12T10:24:00.001-06:00

The mornings are indifferent to change,

light swallowing the darkness with its yawn,

breaking the tangibility of dreams.

The cats paw at the bedroom door,

alarm clocks skitter across the end table

to avoid being snoozed, while a machine

in the kitchen gargles steam and fills

the air with the black scent of columbian beans.

There’s the comfort of legs entangled,

sharing their warmth, drowsy faces pressed

into pillows and the backs of necks, mussed up

hair tickling the nose or the corner of the mouth,

arms overlapped, fingers intertwined, cherishing

these small moments together when the brain

still clings to its rest, half-reality, half-fantasy,

until that first trip to the bathroom breaks the spell.

There’s no noticeable change, just a weight on one hand,

going to sleep a lover, and waking up a husband.

The perfect moment

2011-11-09T20:20:00.004-06:00

doesn’t want to wait,

doesn’t have the patience

to let a wellspring of confidence

build in the occupants of

these seconds. It doesn’t announce

itself, won’t knock on the door,

won’t illuminate the sky

with a neon sign,

won’t suddenly fill the air

with a crescendo of strings.

You want to wait

until the time feels right,

until all the elements

of a single event

come together for a memory

that will define your lives,

that golden ring with

a chunk of the world

older than gods

burning a hole in your pocket

these past three weeks.

But it’s not perfect,

it’s raining, when the weather man

said it would snow. The spot

where you wanted to do it,

is now under construction,

chain-link fences and mounds

of dirt where there should be

piles of fallen leaves.

Here you are anyway,

standing beneath a green umbrella,

rain falling down the back

your neck, kneeling on a sidewalk

that shimmers with liquid light

cast from a street lamp,

holding your heart out

in your hands

and asking for a miracle.

When it starts snowing

as you’re driving home,

that ring now on her finger,

faces flushed with the blood

rushed excitement of love in the cold,

you realize there’s no such thing

as the perfect moment,

when every moment together

is its own perfection

in the memories you create.

Twelfth Step

2011-11-09T16:24:00.000-06:00

Does she lace her shampoo

with opiates? Imbibing that scent

of lavender and tree blossoms,

flourishes into intoxication,

a need to stay close,

to traverse the scent-scape

along her neck line

like a newborn mammal

searching for nourishment.

Sleepless nights await me

in her absence, withdrawal

manifested in sweat-soaked sheets,

twisted knots of thoughts

that won’t stop tangling

behind my eyes, like vines

of thorny ivy that grow

with supernatural speed.

I need her to feel calm,

to quiet that tide of volcanic magma

that swells beneath my skin,

to speak the words to my hands

that make them still, a soft

brushing of lips against flesh

that kisses away all harm.

Her eyes are the windows

through which I crawl,

to hide away from this world

that wishes for my failure,

a castle with walls of gold

mined from broken promises

and forged into a home

that can never be sold

as long as the door stays open.

The way sunlight breaks

2011-11-09T14:23:00.004-06:00

across ocean waves

into liquid light confetti
around my wife’s feet,
there’s a celebration of simplicity,
a rippling assurance in the whispers
of water against sand that says,
“this is all there is, accept it.”

The melted crystal sea sparkles
around us, every winking reflection
a camera flash from another plane,
a star exploding in a parallel universe,
a prismatic exchange between
the darkest of blues and the lightest
of whites, erupting like two dimensional
fireworks across a plate glass window,
that begs to be lifted up into the heavens,

so I gather some of the sea into my palms,
where the stillness kills the light,
and throw it into the air, each droplet
becoming a bead of fire
filled with unquenchable freedom
against the backdrop of clouds and blue,
for just an instant soaring,
a thousand diamonds torn from the rings
on mother nature’s hands,
then falling back to the blanket
of endless kisses washing to the shore,
waiting to be turned into rain.

What am I doing here?

2011-11-09T13:19:00.001-06:00

I said never, so, of course,

the universe shifted its weight,

bumping her heart into mine.

It was almost a hit and run,

with an apology left on a post-it,

but love has a way of surviving

self-destruction.

For a year I felt like I discovered

a new species of moth, one

that instead of aimlessly fluttering

around any source of light,

brought new light wherever it went,

warming the surface of anything

it touched, like a tiny star

made from the scattered reflections

of street lamps.

This new life landed in my palm,

and filled me with a sensation

I can only describe as joy,

a tingling warmth of supernova

that threatened to escape my ribcage.

To keep this feeling, I couldn’t let

my discovery fly away, but no jar

with holes in the lid, could contain

such beauty and not kill it.

So, I tied a band of gold

to one of her spindly legs,

just enough weight, to keep her around,

and now here I stand,

in these uncomfortable shoes,

folding my tears into a diamond

and a promise, hoping she never asks me

to give her back her wings.

Sort of Beautiful

2011-11-07T21:06:00.003-06:00

The way the edges of clouds turn pink

just as the sun drops out of sight,

their centers gaining weighty purples

and grays, gaining extra dimensions

like the world just slipped on 3D glasses

waving good-bye to that shimmering yolk

sliding down the blue albumen of sky.

The way she bites on her tongue

when she’s bored and sucks in air

between her teeth, filling the silence

with the whistling noise of concentration,

working a Sudoku with a blue pen,

feet tucked beneath her on the couch

so her toes stay warm.

How it rains every day in the Caribbean,

just long enough to rinse the heat off the breeze,

clouds marching like white and purple freight cars

in an endless train whose engine has vanished

beyond the horizon, where the rainfall darkens

like a bruise on the arm, leaving a humidity

that fogs up windows with a lover’s passion.

When her smile pulls one from my own face,

turning all the lights on in my head,

those twinkling spots of brightness in her eyes

the place where my sadness goes to die,

hooking her pinky finger around my own

in a moment of quiet tenderness that needs no words

to describe the perfection of perfection.

Precursors

2011-11-07T19:04:00.001-06:00

“Behind every beautiful thing, there’s been some kind of pain.”

from “Not Dark Yet,” by Bob Dylan

Before there was love, there was guilt,

there was alcoholism littered about

an empty house in the form of beer cans

left like breadcrumbs to find his way

back to the futon. There was the frustration

only known by those who speak

the magic words stolen from sunset clouds,

having their chests cleaved open

with the unrequited silence.

There was the betrayal of a bottle of wine

smothered into the kisses of broken fists,

pounding against something immovable,

a freight train stopped by a butterfly.

Before there was love, there was anger,

there was rage, there was desperation,

a man clinging to the anchor

dropped from the Titanic, waiting

for either his breath to run out

or the sea to turn to vapor

if she would reveal the star inside her.

The next thing he knew,

it was raining, and he was weightless,

putting a ring on her finger.

The Night Before

2011-11-07T18:31:00.001-06:00

He didn’t write out his vows

until the night before the wedding,

knowing that she had written hers

weeks earlier. He chose to let

his thoughts marinate,

to feel with his senses

the way a blind man might

see sounds in his mind,

as the idea that started

as a single sentence

grew legs and spun itself

into a cocoon, a microscopic

granule of truth that needed

to take on layers of promise

to be whole, to become

that genuine pearl

in the oyster of his language,

to emerge as that rare butterfly

only seen through the eyes of children.

Was it patience, or a fear

that to see his words on paper

might somehow dilute their significance?

Each breath held a pregnant pause,

a heartbeat caught in the throat of desire,

as his fingers let the paragraphs

pour through them onto the page,

an act that seemed effortless

as a rose unfolding in light,

yet demanded to be beautiful,

as only the truth can be.

Jeffrey Lynn

2011-10-11T21:36:00.004-05:00

Small towns are the perfect hiding places

for demons. The spaces in between

those with names on the map,

the places where front doors

remain unlocked all night long

and barking dogs mean

a train is coming.

The first house had roaches

in the kitchen drawers

that scattered like a cloud of black eyes

when exposed to the light. It was close

enough to the school that I could walk,

my breath a transient plume

that followed me through winter.

I would be sent alone to the grocery,

to buy milk with the food stamps

and cigarettes with the cash,

sometimes cheating, and getting myself

a candy bar that I would eat

before I got home,

or some Big League Chew.

I don’t remember him there,

then I remember him there,

my mother’s eyes glossed over

with a lustful romanticism,

telling my sister and I

that they said their own wedding vows

together alone, under a canopy of stars.

Soon after, she started third shift,

and was always asleep or gone, leaving us

in the care of a monster

that wore white t-shirts.

When we were not quiet,

he’d wake us up

in the middle of the night,

make us hold his belt

in our palms at arm’s length,

while staring in the mirror

trying not to fall asleep.

----------

He played an acoustic guitar,

fond of singing “Amy, What You Gonna Do?”

and his eyes looked like faded jeans

seen through a fog of Camel smoke.

He tried to teach me Kung-Fu,

table manners, how to gut a squirrel.

One night he took me frog-gigging,

and a snake swam past our boat,

a little metal thing, painted military green,

that threatened to tip over with any movement,

oars swishing us forward through the water

as lightning flickered overhead.

My memories get clouded after the move

to the trailer park, but I remember him laughing

when he forced me to drink whiskey

for a migraine, and I puked.

Bullies chased me home

every day after school,

he said “stand up for yourself,

be a man,” so I blacked some kid’s eye.

I remember learning to use the word

“motherfucker” and the way

he questioned me after he overheard

me say it when talking to a friend,

but he didn’t punish me,

just stared at me like he wanted

to crush my skull with his heel.

There was a window unit air conditioner

that didn’t have a cover or knobs,

and I liked to shove jacks into the metal grill,

just to watch them frost over with cold.

My step brother and I would stay up late

to watch the adult movies on the pay channels,

cultivating a desire we were too young

to understand. We rode our bikes

during a thunderstorm, knowing

that lightning would never strike us.

The news said a train derailed

somewhere nearby, and warnings

were issued about poisonous gas,

keeping me up all night, staring

out the window by the top bunk,

waiting to see the green vapor

that would kill me,

but it was the dog-kennel screams

that drove us from that trailer.

God, Mother

2011-10-09T10:40:00.004-05:00

A mother’s love should be the infallible gift

that gets attributed to God, should be a truth

so plain it revives the stillborn fetus,

resuscitates that lost sense of wonder

from the hearts of the cynics.

Before the first memory is made,

a mother knows her child by name,

she has given her blood,

given her air to that second heartbeat,

felt the future opening like a mouth

inside her.

The act of birth must feel like a violent

separation, a catharsis that needs rationalization,

losing an essential part of oneself

so that it might live, like severing a hand

to watch it grow a body, always missing

the way warmth felt in that palm,

yet thankful for the loss.

This is a sacrifice that needs to be learned,

inscribed along the gum-lines

of the crying child,

a tattoo inked with sweat

from the mother’s brow

that says, “your teeth are a gift.”

Gerald

2011-10-08T17:30:00.003-05:00

Gave me his name when it wasn’t his to give,

although his paint-stained fingers

must have left some prints in my mind.

There’s a haze of memories smeared

over with vaseline, during a time

some friends still recall with a puzzled look

when they bring up that other name,

that wasn’t ever mine. Children only

know what their parents call them.

During all the memories of those years,

my mother is strangely absent,

appearing in and out of the timeline

like a star from behind the clouds.

My baby sister seemed to never stop screaming,

except in the hushed blue mornings,

when I would crawl under her crib

and drive matchbox cars around the carpet,

the quiet whir of the humidifier

blowing cool mist onto my palms.

He would sit at the table, drenched

in golden light from an overhead lamp,

and he would show me how

an imagination works, turning scribbles

from a pencil on paper, into cartoons,

taking me to see Star Wars for the first time.

That was the year of the great blizzard,

snow drifts piled up the sides of the house,

the unfinished basement an open hole

with a white bottom, the sidewalk

a solid sheet of ice that threatened

to feed me to it, my cowboy boots

betraying me again and again

to bruises on my backside.

I remember my mother’s laughter,

a sound that seems to usher time forward,

wiping away the haziness of the past,

and leaving me with a pair of boots in the closet,

and no idea where that man is

who wanted to give me his name.

Innate actions that make up a day

2011-10-08T15:04:00.000-05:00

There’s the breathing that never stops,

except for those times when he’s asleep,

and he awakes, gasping for breath,

trying to fight out of his skin

that’s smothering him.

Thirty-three years spent two minutes

at a time, deciding which pair of pants go best

with whatever shirt that no one will notice,

a t-shirt or a button up,

the gray slip-ons or the cowboy boots.

Toothpaste gets smeared on the bristles

of the brush, vibrating like

an electric dildo against his teeth,

freshening his breath for five minutes

before he swallows another cup of snot.

There’s the driving to and from,

the music too loud to listen to the car’s

whining belts, singing along out of key,

pounding the snare drum and high-hat

of the steering wheel, while avoiding

the eminent collision with a bitch

who couldn’t wait five minutes

to text her boyfriend.

He counts the body segments of the wasp,

dried up and caught in an abandoned

spider web, wonders if it will hang

there all winter, like a soundless wind chime

by his door. Tiny circles of repeating habits

intertwine to fill in the gaps of monotony

with alcohol, acrylic paint, and pre-semen,

oiling the gears of the machine

that pushes forward through this tunnel

filled with reflections and just enough darkness

that one might confuse them for stars.

Love Letter

2011-10-08T10:46:00.002-05:00

The day he burned his eyes out with a letter opener,

his fingers smelled like oranges. The light festered

in paper lanterns like incandescent moths, trapped

by their own ignorance of invention. A subdued glow

coated the room with its dust, transported it back

in time, before the photographs had color or

a protective gloss preventing the aging process

even human skin knows before death. The sun

is nature’s time machine. The words scarred him,

tattooed his retinas with guilt, the stinging needle

inscribing his name in ink-soaked tears, whilst music

continued its oblivious melody down the hall.

That music filled his stomach with poison,

but if he retched, no sadness would pour

from his mouth, only worms. He ate the letter

to fill his stomach with something else,

something he could taste, not made from the plaque

found between the teeth of alligators,

something he could feel turning into shit

inside him, absorbing the nutrients from the words

before the poison could kill him. His veins

knew the language of the night, but the moon

had started learning Greek behind his back,

passing whispers to the sea while he slept

and dreamed of sex. He found the letter

when he woke, written in the bloody paw prints

of a hyena, and yet, written on the cave wall

of his heart, like a truth that only he could hear.

And in the moment of his blindness,

he began to write his eulogy.

Love Replaced with a Curse Word

2011-10-08T08:51:00.001-05:00

She told me that she niggered me,

that she would always nigger me,

and this type of nigger would never die.

To me, nigger was just another word,

rolled off of the tongue like spit

that found its way onto bed pillows,

dried into white patches on the cheek.

I related nigger to pain, that fist-sized

knot of ache I felt the day I kissed

my dead mother’s cheek, another

manifestation of nigger in water

as the tears made tiny pat noises

on the cloth of my jeans.

I couldn’t remember ever niggering

someone so much that I would crawl

into their coffin and close the lid,

that I would cut my heart out

with a fountain pen if I never

heard their voice again.

But she stood there begging me

with her silence, her shimmering

eyes made from the glossy night,

asking me to drown myself

for the promise of something else,

and I realized that nigger

was more than a word after all.

Scientific Names

2011-10-06T20:26:00.006-05:00

After the tongues forget how to dance

to the music of description,

after the miles of telephone wire

stop humming with the voices

of ghosts, and fail like the worn

out stitches of a frayed jacket

made of grass and trees,

the poets will put down their pens.

Computers will continue to whir and click,

and lights will blink off and on

telling the empty streets

when to let the dust through.

The world will lose its name,

the sea will no longer be the sea,

the clouds will roll and change,

oblivious to their lost identity.

The zeroes and ones of a simple dialect

will continue to rattle off the programs

of lost libraries encoded by the dead,

keeping everything in its place,

the genus and species,

the phylum and class.

The shade of the quercus rubra

will cease to be a respite from the heat,

the scent of the rosa indica

will cease to cull the endorphins

from from glands of the homo sapiens,

whirs and clicks only producing

more whirs and clicks,

never missing the absence

of a scientific name for love.

Nigger, Cunt

2011-10-05T19:31:00.003-05:00

Reclaim those words they would use

to hurt you, to drive nails through

the legs of your shadow, pinning you

under the spotlight on a stage

before faces without eyes.

Wear them like cancer ribbons,

like tattoos of the names of lost loves,

like mirrors that defuse hate

that only seeks different skins,

wear them like armor.

Rob the thunder from their voices

and put it in a jar so it rattles

like one filled with dead butterflies

and teeth, their own mouths

filled with broken glass and blood.

These are the new definitions of love,

a coat of arms handed up from the graves

of the lynched and the oppressed,

fingernails digging into the palms

of the fists, knowing better than to strike.

Unmade

2011-10-02T16:07:00.001-05:00

Bed and blanket chaos,

sheets twisted, crumpled

around the absence of bodies

that wallow and sweat

like ocean currents

rotating the silt

of some gulf.

The convoluted mass

looks like a cross section

of sedimentary rock,

skin cells and hair

hiding like fossils

into the cotton crevices,

but still there’s no proof

of the nightmares.

A Walk in September

2011-10-01T16:11:00.001-05:00

The sheen of her staccato skin

stippled with sweat,

tiny hills of white peeking

from beneath the hairs

of her arms and shoulders,

the chilled glass of winter’s whisper

rolling across the world

like a bead of water

down a pitcher of lemonade.

Bare feet on the sidewalk,

bare feet in the grass,

hushed swishes of flesh

meeting new surfaces

and changing them with weight,

displacing earth, water, insects,

stray cats watching intently from shadows.

A dream, a mountain

2011-09-03T10:19:00.001-05:00

Every man starts with a dream,
a dream spewed forth into the world
like a god through the crack in Zeus’
immeasurable skull.
His dream is a mountain.
It looms large, its peak capped with red snow,
stabbing through the heart of the sky.
It casts its cool shadow on his face,
a comfort at times from the hell
of hard work.
It’s a comfort because he knows
the top of the mountain
is within grasp,
if he can just start to climb.
At the top there is peace of mind,
like a glass of bourbon, served neat.
His hands ache to feel the bite
of that hard rock, to have its gray dust
worked into the crevices between his nails.
His determination sets the pace
of his march toward fate,
welcoming the calluses that armor his skin,
welcoming the nights of slumber
in the blanket of that great shadow.
He walks. He dreams. He walks.
In time, it becomes clear
that the horizon line of sawtooth stone
stays equidistant from his feet,
gray lines breaking through his beard,
cracks forming in his skin,
as if he himself is becoming a statue
made of the very stone he aches to touch,
his pace slowing to an arthritic crawl,
the mountain he thought was his,
just part of an infinite range
spanning the edge of the world,
its shadow no longer a comfort,
now just a cruel reminder of youth,
a reminder of what once seemed easy,
a reminder of the mistake
in thinking a dream could be reached on foot,
when his mind is too old to invent dragons
or the winged horses he’s seen
others fly by on overhead.
But he keeps walking anyway,
because there’s no other way to go.

Big #2

2011-08-28T10:21:00.002-05:00

Even as children, we’ve pulled the wings
off flies, we’ve danced on lines of ants
returning home with food for the colony,
we’ve sealed lightning bugs in jars
with a couple of holes in the lid
and waited for them to die.

Our bodies kill micro-organisms
by the millions that try to infiltrate
our blood streams while we sleep
or touch the hands of strangers,
our daily lives consist of chewing
up the corpses of the dead
like car engines devouring fossil fuels.

But from the perspective of giants
who live thousands of feet in the air,
the streets below are the veins
filled with the puppet-like cells
of individuals marching to the genetic code
of bank account numbers,

zeroes and ones marching like ants
in and out of the mainframe,
the corporate colony with
an androgynous queen made of wood
and bronze, watching the dips and spikes
of a thin red line that decides
which of the ants are workers,
and which of them are a virus,
still pulling the wings off,
still dancing like a laughing child
on the brittle bodies
of the insignificant.

Big

2011-08-27T11:56:00.000-05:00

Bigger is better.
Bigger muscles, bigger dicks,
Bigger breasts, bigger paychecks.
Bigger screens, bigger buildings,
Bigger engines, bigger crowds.
Bigger diamonds, bigger promises,
Bigger ideas, bigger dreams.
Bigger is better, as long as it’s not fat.

The bigger you get,
the less you care about what’s small.
The higher you get,
the less connected you are to the ground.

Only children want ant farms,
while adults want children.
On the top floors of skyscrapers,
the streets below are the ant farms.

When ants get in the kitchen,
no one feels guilty of mass murder,
neither do soldiers dropping bombs,
neither do CEO’s cutting jobs.

They’re just killing ants.

Front Page

2011-08-17T15:55:00.002-05:00

Yesterday’s throaty rasp of song
is today’s corpse wearing black eyeliner,
a front page tragedy of skin stretched
over the bones of birds.
Her pores opened wider like mouths
for a chorus of addictions
all singing different octaves
in the symphony of her flashbulb-
drenched descent.
Her tongue a stranger, a grotesque
betrayal of swollen vowels, slurred
into the garbled gobblety-gook of smeared
whiskey labels passed from hand to hand
over the flame barrel, a bloated slug,
rigid, dry. The tattoos on the arms
of the dead lose all their meaning,
or perhaps they gain more,
like a treasure map
where cliche marks the spot,
the moment where excess eclipses success.
Her last words were a language
the floor didn't speak,
a stage without an audience,
fluttering into microscopic vibrations
the world filters out.
Like the cries of children, silenced
by gunshots without motive. The echoes of nothing
reverberating over a turbulent sea,
tiny hands twitching as the blood pools,
forgotten before it dries,
because no one knew their names.

Whetstone

2011-08-17T15:24:00.001-05:00

Keep the words sharp, the senses dull.
Keep the words sharp.
Start small.
Star skull.
Landfill.
Sphere kill.
Sharper still.
Hand print.
Man scent.
Down sent.
Mansion.
Keep the words sharp. Sharp.
Word shark.
Bird bark.
Sword heart.
Blood art.
The mind is a cave wall,
the palm is a whetstone.
The brain is a rock
that makes music
when thrown.
Color smear.
Fuller beard.
Never clear.
Driver prayer.
Keep the words sharp.
Leave a piece of aching
like a dark spot on the sun.

The problem is

2011-06-20T20:35:00.001-05:00

the analytical mind sees the world
as an elaborate puzzle, a matted complexity
held together by milky glue on the wall
of some blue-eyed genius, his hands
soft as clouds. Continental drift drove
the birds’ beaks through the shells,
each broken piece falling like bones
into the palms of his scrutiny.
The shoulder connects to the arm,
the skull connects to the neck.
The moon in orbit wound the keys
in their backs, clicks racking up
like tumblers falling into place
in a combination safe, its door
as heavy as the night sky
with no promise of light.
When the first man
took his first breath, he wondered
where it came from, wondered
what made his heart beat,
wondered what made the ground speak
like thunder behind his ears as he slept.
He wondered, and he saw his face in the moon.
He waited for his brothers to die
so he could invent the autopsy.

Beauty of the Flood

2011-05-15T11:35:00.002-05:00

Storm clouds obscure the sunset,
turn the sky into yellowed gauze,
a silk curtain fog, washing out the light
of ten thousand candle flames.

This veil of vaporous swirls, tinged
with gray and violet shades, billows against
skin unseen, hides the face of something
disguised as calm, a chaos theory pregnant

with plans. The coat tails of disaster dissipate
and recede into a horizon growing dark,
a hunched figure in a soot-colored cloak,
carrying the sun over the hill like a lantern,

while the ground chokes and swells
with more than it could ever drink.
Clear rivulets trail backward from the glass,
deep pools gathering in the ditches,

threatening the road like a breathing spring,
hungry for concrete. The stars appear
in the wake of silence, an audience to the symphony
of water dripping from eaves and leaves,

while we watch the river’s edge
tasting the tops of the sand bags.

The sniper

2011-05-14T15:57:00.001-05:00

knows the truth about God’s plan.
Crouched in knolls of tall brown grass
or in the penumbra of nameless
crumbling towers, rifle perched
just beyond the lip of a stone window sill
and safe from heaven’s give-away glare,
he waits.

He waits while the line of shadow and light
inches its way across the ground,
waging its endless war.
He knows it doesn’t matter which side
you choose to stand on,
the other will win half the time.

In the village of his last assignment,
they’ve roped off the wall outside the church,
not to retain evidence of the crime,
but to preserve the image of Jesus
that appeared in the spatter of blood and brain,
dried between flakes of white paint and rock,
where the minister’s head exploded
like a lightbulb filled with salsa.

He thought the rorschach pattern
of dark crimson and sun-bleached mud
looked more like Willie Nelson.
What irony that the villagers mourned him,
crossed themselves when passing the site
of his death, prayed with hands up outside the wall,
like a third-world Mecca to martyrdom,
not knowing their lost prophet
was responsible for the beheadings
of countless children in a drug-war
that left no room for new competition.

He doesn’t always know
why he’s pulling the trigger,
he just listens to the voice in his ear.
It’s not the voice of God.
It changes from the throaty rasp
of a cigar-chewing hard ass
to the refined nasal tone
of a Harvard med-school drop out,
coming between the crackles
and pops of static between miles
and miles of whispers.
He is not the angel of Death,
but his manicured hands
know the silence.
His weapon is not a flaming sword,
raining down vengeance for blasphemy.
His weapon is patience.
His weapon is precision.
His weapon is poetry.

He waits through the sounds of breezes
sliced into ribbons of sighs by
the razored edges of weeds,
waits through the mists of rains
that drive the birds from the sky
and push the dust to the earth,
waits through the pains of hunger
and thirst that coil in his guts
like electric springs.

He waits for the next face
to stroll into the crosshairs,
waits for the whisper
that tells him to breathe.

That night, he’s washed his hands,
six shots of whiskey bring
a dreamless sleep.
He knows it doesn’t matter which side
you choose to stand on,
the other will win half the time.

The Ultimate Truth

2011-05-06T19:37:00.001-05:00

The sky is blue, some of the time.
Half the time it’s as black as the socket
where Death’s eye used to go. Sometimes,
it’s a cloudy afterbirth of reds and egg yolks,
and in the turbulent purples of a cumulonimbus,
it can turn as green as hospital walls.

When it’s your time to go, you’re gone.
Except when it’s a four month coma,
voices trailing down empty halls like bats
trapped in houses, echoes of prayers
and please wake ups.
Except when it’s cancer
and needles penetrating bones seem like
a fair trade for a wig and remission.
Except when it’s a teenage boy waist-deep
in shadow, crouched on the floor
with his father’s pistol cupped in his palms.

Change is unstoppable, like the tide.
She’s having an abortion.
When the ocean freezes,
there will be no tide.

The sun will rise tomorrow.
But the sun doesn’t ever rise.

Good poems should rhyme.
This is not a good poem.

After hearing the news

2011-04-30T13:21:00.000-05:00

he will wipe his tears away,
he will walk out of this office,
out of this hall, out of this building,
climb into the oven-baked warmth
of his vehicle and roll the windows down,
turn the rock n roll up so the bass drum
rattles the loose CD’s stashed in the door,
while driving fast enough that the wind
ripping though his hair brings back memories
of summer days in cars without air conditioning.
He will not cry again, will not tell a soul
what the man in the white lab coat read
from the sheet of paper in the plastic clip board,
but will go home and hug his wife,
will let his cat curl into his lap and purr
while the television blares out background noise
for serenity. He’ll make plans to visit family,
to visit friends, some near, some forgotten,
to see concerts of bands he has always wanted to see,
but never had the time. He’ll marvel
at just how healthy he feels. He’ll lie down to sleep,
in sheets crowded with scents of nights
before this one, each one seeming new,
and he will wait for his eyes
to adjust to the darkness.

An Ode to Home

2011-04-30T12:13:00.000-05:00

A man driving a white jeep
asked me for my mental road map.
His frustration poured out the hole
of his mouth like invisible molasses.

Are you from around here?
Are you from around here?

I’m not. But I am.

My home town feels like water
cupped into my palm, spilling
over the edges. I lose more
than I can drink.

The streets have become a maze
of new stoplights, new landmarks,
burned down houses. People
moving around like beans
in cheap magic tricks.

In my mother’s house,
collectibles and furniture
survive the moves, pictures
of my sister’s wedding day,
of me with a guitar,
still learning how to smile.

I’m still not used to it,
being a stranger,
looking at photos of those
who are gone for good,
trading stories like long lost pen pals.

Two hundred miles away,
my brother is having his first child.

A starless sky

2011-04-29T00:55:00.001-05:00

is eventual, the black yawn
of an emptiness before dreams,
the moon a dead white eye
that slowly closes
like a coffin lid on the night.

An absence of wonder
suffocates the stillness,
a black void where wishes
go to die and prayers
fumble toward heaven
like blind dogs
following the scent
of a ghost.

The vampires stay inside,
drained of romanticism,
bled like the light
from the Milky Way,
watching re-runs,
falling out of love
with electricity,
counting the days,
until the last sunrise.

In the veins of the Earth

2011-04-28T19:56:00.000-05:00

there are slippery sounds,
where the water gets shallow,
rippling over piles of rocks
and loose dirt, swirling brown.

There are silver flickers of light,
scattering from tails of fish,
hexagonal patterns of rainbow scales,
the blood cells, the tea spoons.

There are banks nested in root and mud,
where the oxygen breathes in and out,
turtles carry their homes in from the flood,
bull frogs singing the current to sleep.

Running down hills, or just before cliffs,
the glass sheen breaks into chaos,
white suds and thunder, careening
into a cascade of prismatic humility.

There is a science that dwells in simplicity,
all things returning to their source,
legs nestled in the soft grass and breeze,
listening to the erosion.

Follower

2011-04-26T12:31:00.002-05:00

I’ve never seen the Leader,
but I know he is there. This path
has been flattened by the steps
of generations before me,
and even now, the thunder
of our march deafens the voices
of any opposition. We sing
to the beat, a rousing unison
of tongues against teeth, that stirs
the nerves between us into a fervor,
raises the goosebumps, erases
the doubt. The Leader is taking
us home, a better one than this,
where our voices will be the only
ones singing, and questions
will cease to crop up in the darkness.
Where that home is, remains to be seen,
but the path is long, be it a straight line,
or a figure eight. Every sunset
has started looking the same,
just another landscape painted
by the Leader to decorate my wall.

Change

2011-04-26T11:47:00.001-05:00

These places are not permanent,
the trees you climbed

are taller, limbs broken by storms,
are picnic tables and firewood.

The creeks you waded are wider,
littered with beer cans and shopping bags,

are dry. The streets you walked
have extra lanes, different cracks

in different concrete, dingy shadows
cast from storefronts with dark windows.

The people who were there,
have stranger’s faces with similar voices,

are not there anymore.
As ice in crevices breaks

apart the surface of stone,
time builds its scars

in the mirror, of everything known.
Even now, it happens to you.

Gravity

2011-04-25T22:19:00.001-05:00

is the cosmic glue
that holds it all together,
keeps the continents and seas
from floating or turning
into globulous amoeba-like
shapes, pulling away,
without a center, without
an attraction.
It’s the architect of diamonds,
the creator of canyons,
the unforgiving mistress,
the humbling parent.
It refuses to let its children
leave, the Earth the ball
at the end of this gravitational chain.
Let the astronauts play
with their toys, hydrogen rockets
propelling them away from her grasp,
into that weightless orbit.
Sooner or later, they all come back,
falling, like a baby bird from the nest,
falling, like a comet that remembers
it needs oxygen for a flame.

The Earthworm's Prayer

2011-04-24T23:36:00.000-05:00

Every time it rains, to the worms
it’s the Great Flood, a punishment
from some angry god, saturating
the known world of cool-damp-darkness
with a liquid vacuum seal,
forcing them to push their frail
boneless bodies out of the ground,
into the air and the light.

They crawl from the contentment
of home, their food source, their shelter,
into the mouth of the abyss,
out of the drowning pool,
and into the desert, where every
minute heightens the risk of death,
onto sidewalks or driveways
that can soon turn into
an endless concrete Sahara,
once the rain stops,
if the birds don’t find them first,
the golden eye of god will burn
straight through their hearts.

Few make it back to safety,
burrowing into freshly warmed
soil, still damp from its soaking.
If they could, they’d thank
the ones lost for their sacrifice,
and ask the gods
for just a little more time

If I Prayed

2011-04-24T11:59:00.000-05:00

I would reach out, with the fingers
of my mind, looking for other thoughts
and hands just seeking that human connection,
with a trepidation of stranger touching stranger,
our fingers would interlock, the other half
seeking another soul just as lost as we,
forming a spiritual chain spanning
the circumference of the globe,
the chain becoming a web
so complex, the surface
of the world slowly
vanishes beneath,
eyes opened,
difference
gone.

Stop

2011-04-24T08:53:00.001-05:00

making excuses for not trying,
like hating the feeling when reading
the latest rejection letter, when even
the editor tells you to keep submitting.
Your best was not acceptable to them,
but maybe you can improve. But years
of habit have settled into your skin
like deep-seeded dust in the cracks
of a canyon, and your tendency for change
has narrowed to such a fine margin,
it’s like the last sliver of pizza
left on the buffet that no one wants.
You have a wide library of selections,
that gets more difficult to sort through
each time. Maybe your idea of the best
is clouded with bias. Every poet
must be a narcissist to think
their tiny words are even worth the effort.

Twins

2011-04-23T23:39:00.001-05:00

What if originality is a myth,
by sheer lack of ingredients,
duplication is eminent. Small
minds focused on knowledge
only a single lifespan can contain,
unable to fathom the larger picture.
You’ve been here before.
You will be again. Might be right now,
growing in another’s womb,
waiting for that head-on collision
to wipe the slate clean.

On My Death Bed

2011-04-23T23:17:00.001-05:00

There will be no second thoughts.
There will be no second thoughts.
There will be no second thoughts.

There will be no second shot.
There will be no second shot.
There will be no second shot.

Message

2011-04-23T14:44:00.000-05:00

There is no bottle. I drank the last
of the wine, overtaken with ghosts,
trying to drown their faces with blurry
light. I awoke and it was gone,
a breath mint for the sea,
that still spits when it talks.
These words will not be read,
written in sand instead of my bones,
but when your feet next touch ocean,
may the sound of water receding from land
carry the whisper of my apology.

Love is a thunderstorm

2011-04-23T13:59:00.001-05:00

gathering moisture from the Earth,
conversations of exhaled breaths
between sets of luminous eyes,
a humidity grows that feeds the clouds.

Layer upon layer builds into a turbulent
static charge, an attraction between
the sky and the ground that must be released,
in a flash of white-hot heat, or a first kiss.

The colors change from deepest blue to
the darkest gray, as the weight of bellies
full of rain swells to blot out the sun,
and down drafts make the trees sway,

a shivering hum of rustling leaves and wind,
as they seek shelter in each other’s arms
and skin, the pregnant heavens explode,
a downpour of sweat, of rain, the thunder

blending into raucous cries of lust,
while the intensity churns, twisted
by a coriolis effect into a cyclonic fury,
an unstoppable force twisting telephone

poles into splinters like toothpicks,
destroying all ties except those to one another,
lying naked and caressed by rain-soaked grass,
as the tempest fades, a soothing drizzle of light.

Like Living

2011-04-23T10:44:00.002-05:00

Fingernails digging into orange peels, will
get juice on the skin, sticky palms smelling
like a truck-stop bathroom, evidence of
the kill, life consumed to keep us breathing.
The slivers of flesh are a broken shell,
white insides like cotton, a puzzle with
no solution, a world without a core.
Chainsaws and bulldozers cutting across
a hill, will get smoke on the skin, a stain
of progress, peeling the Earth like an orange.

Life and Death

2011-04-22T01:45:00.001-05:00

Invisibility is a concept
that scares us to death.
Entire lives are waged
in struggles with that
they cannot see. Whole
days are devoted to
the appeasement of
deities, just in case
they might be listening,
in buildings erected
for that specific purpose.
Camp fires are circled
with stories of haunted houses
or malevolent spirits meant
to make the noises of
the wilderness take on
an alien eeriness. In one
of our oldest films, a man
named Claude Rains succumbs
to madness after being given
this power of the gods.
Hand sanitizer is available
on every other counter,
to kill 99.999 percent
of germs our eyes can’t detect.
None of these things stop
us from becoming
that which we fear in the end.

Bedtime

2011-04-21T22:34:00.001-05:00

This bedside lamp has seen me through
countless transitions from the real world
to the cusp of dreams, its softer hues cast
like an amber quilt over everything light
can touch. The cats curl at the foot of the bed,
their stillness as infectious as yawning,
while my eyes grow heavy and wait
for my body to surrender.

Love Story

2011-04-21T22:18:00.000-05:00

She was the girl suicidal boys fell
in love with. He wasn’t suicidal,
he was a realist, a hopeless sea of
black t-shirts and pornographic girlfriends.
Their ships sailed on opposite hemispheres,
one in darkness, and one in light, never
to cross paths it seemed. But global warming
caused the tides to swell, the currents to shift,
and these two improbable comets were
set to collide, oblivious soul mates.

Boring the Profilers

2011-04-21T18:54:00.000-05:00

Have I been boring the FBI,
all these years I’ve been kept on their list,
since buying a copy of Catcher in the Rye?

No strange purchases of trench coats
or fertilizers, no publishing of communistic rants,
requests for handgun licenses or attending
of protests against government censorship.

I haven’t been arrested for standing on the lawns
of celebrities or on the sidewalks of courthouses
shouting obscenities into the wind. I’ve never
threatened the pope, or set a pile of Bibles to blaze.

Once, I masturbated in a bathroom stall
while thinking about someone else’s girlfriend.
But the FBI doesn’t know about that.

Normal Life

2011-04-21T18:20:00.001-05:00

He sits in the same seat every day,
glasses perched on the brim of his nose,
angled up so the ear pieces set slightly
raised from the ears, reading a newspaper,
or a magazine if it’s the weekend.
He doesn’t speak, might glance up
on occasion if someone coughs
or brushes his leg on accident
as they shuffle past the aisle way,
lips pursed in a momentary frown
before turning the page with indifference.
I don’t know where he goes, what he does,
if he’s religious or lonely, despite
the plain gold wedding band, or his
drab, monotonous choices for attire,
usually muted button-up shirts, short sleeve,
and khaki pants that expose his pale ankles.
His slip-on loafers tell me nothing
about what roads he has traveled,
or will travel. He could be a serial killer,
or a millionaire clinging to his roots.
Either would make little difference,
in the brief moments we share.

Dusty

2011-04-19T20:14:00.000-05:00

His eyes had the reflective quality of nickels,
a brightness unnatural, with a muted lack of empathy,
like the eyes of a rabid wolf shoved into the face
of a pasty-skinned teenager, all freckles
and unevenly spaced teeth, orange hair disarrayed.

Dried flakes of spit in the corners of his mouth,
he’d lurk for opportunities to pounce on the weak,
his size and farm-boy strength more than menacing
to the younger kids, like myself, who was trapped
each day in the oblong yellow casket with windows
that drove us away from the middle school.

If I was just a skinny boy waiting for puberty
like a child reaching to be picked up,
or a dead opossum in a ditch for kids
to poke with sticks, Dusty would rather
bash my head in with a rock, to see
what my brain looked like.

He would sit behind me on the bus,
throw paper, empty cans, boogers,
flick ears and skull, rabbit punches
to the back and legs, trying to set my
pants on fire with his cigarette lighter.
With each taunt his mad turkey cackle
would beg for retaliation, any excuse
to inflict more pain.

I remember once, on a field trip, he tormented
a friend that shared my seat, slapping him
over and over until his eyes welled with tears
that didn’t dare fall, hocking a loogie into
his thick black hair and asking him to do something
about it, while I watched like a frozen field mouse,
hoping the owl didn’t see me move, and my friend
clutched a sharpened pencil in his fist
until his knuckles turned white, shaking
with a furious desperation, his eyes taking on
the look of a cornered dog, and I wished,
oh how I wished, that he would snap,
and stab Dusty right in the larynx,
his blood spraying over us both
like some kind of baptism.

Before the start of the next school year,
Dusty drowned while cliff diving at night,
and when I heard the news that people
seemed obligated to label a tragedy,
I felt nothing but relief.

An Elegy for Innocence

2011-04-17T21:48:00.000-05:00

When I was six I knew that Santa Claus existed,
and that Christmas, I saw his silhouette
perched on my grandmother’s roof, heard
bells jingle as reindeer shuffled their anxious
hooves against the frozen black shingles.

I knew that God watched my every move,
knew my every thought, twisted my heart
like a blood-soaked rag every time
I felt tempted to do wrong. Every dream
imagined, every wish cast towards the stars,
every truth spoken, was formed from purest
yearning and unblemished perception.

A body in a casket was a person asleep
who wouldn’t wake up, a reason for people
to cry, a reason to whisper and place flowers
over foreign names. Don’t step on graves.

The End were words for bedtime stories,
and words taking a lifetime to learn how to fear.

Maybe not

2011-04-17T19:17:00.001-05:00

Six digits, randomly picked,
or the birth dates and anniversaries
of memorable moments, penciled
into little circles like answers
to a multiple choice test,
between one and forty-five,
and one in 146 million,
a chance at changing everything
taken for granted as normal,
a golden ticket to the eternal
chocolate factory behind
the purple curtain,
to go from ugly to perfect,
from unhappy to ecstatic,
from paralyzed to walking,
but then again...

Never

2011-04-17T11:56:00.001-05:00

been bitten by a jellyfish,
tentacles and barbs injecting venom
into the fascia where the pain hides,
to the point a stranger’s urination
would seem like a comfort on the skin.
Been in a car crash any worse
than a fender-bender, backing into
that parked car the day my dad
had his first heart attack
or getting rear-ended
for paying attention to stop lights,
my neck whipped like a spring,
but not broken.
Seen a desert or a rattlesnake
in the wild, always through panes
of glass or the high gloss sheen
of magazine pages left open
in a doctor’s office.
Had such a moment of clarity
that I felt like God must be real,
clutching his ghost-like fist
around my heart until the joy
burst free, and even murder
had its proper place in the world.

Mid-Day Crisis

2011-04-16T13:43:00.001-05:00

When the sun reaches its apex,
it starts to panic
about its remaining six hours
on this side of the Earth.
It wonders how many
of the girls down below
blow kisses at the moon
while he is away.
He grows self-conscious
of the growing number
of solar flares on his girth,
wonders if he is still as hot
as he was when the planets
were just being born.
He wishes for hands and ears
to adorn with jewelry,
wishes he was cool enough
to not turn all metal into vapor
so he could own a new Corvette.
His mind races with “what if’s,”
what if the world changes while he’s gone,
what if his light isn’t enough,
what if he doesn’t rise again?
He thinks about the past,
about the girl in the white dress
who hides in the moon
on the other side of the world,
wonders if she’s happy,
dreams of their next eclipse,
and what he might say
to make her smile
if he gets another chance.
The hours wane
as he sidesteps the horizon
in their timeless waltz,
relinquishing his light for
her softer spell,
catching just a hint
of her powdered perfume.
Each time he knows
it could be the last,
his nuclear reactor heart
was never meant
to be unbreakable.

Ready

2011-04-13T16:32:00.001-05:00

Grey or green, this one or that one,
do you like this, here or there,
day or night, write a check for this,
do we need that, it’s more expensive,
is the font too fluffy, which song,
which mom, which poem, which friend,
who’s taking the pictures, who’s baking
the cake, did that taste better than this,
chocolate or cherry, Bud or Bud Lite,
tablecloths white or tablecloths black,
did we make the right choice,
did I pick the right dress,
do you think it’s ghetto?
All these questions,
only one I know for sure
what the right answer is.
Do you? I do.

If

2011-04-13T09:49:00.001-05:00

the sound of thunder wasn’t assumed
to be the ghostly grumbles of disapproval,
volcanic eruptions were not believed
to be temper tantrums unleashed,
earthquakes weren’t thought to be shook
by the stamping of giant feet unseen,
and plagues were not caused by curses
uttered from lips hidden behind clouds,
no one would have noticed
that nothing needs a name.

Don't Digitize Me

2011-04-13T09:04:00.000-05:00

My music comes from strings,
from wood, steel, ivory,
hollows meant to amplify sound.
It comes from fingers numbed
and nimble, notes recorded
in the muscle memory
of knuckle and palm,
a whorl pattern of blues.
My music is not programmed,
it is lived, a sing-along diary
of tragedy and triumph,
of excess and regress,
of feelings that still need
words invented for description.
My voice will not be auto-tuned,
will not be perfected by machines
without ears, will not be changed
by robots oblivious to the beauty
of Judy Garland’s sadness.
My voice comes from the raw places,
places without skin, places science
has yet to dissect. It swells and breaks
like an ocean against cliffs
of rib and tongue. Speaks the guttural
truth of rage and agonies
only felt to most like a coat
made of storms.
My song won’t fit on a flash drive,
won’t be available on iTunes,
won’t come up on “shuffle.”
My song has to be heard
in the context of the moment,
has to be consumed
like a breath full of smoke,
has to be pulled from the grooved
wrinkles in the brain
by the needle of experience.
I am not an mp3.
I am not a file.
I, am the lost sound of nuance.

The Body Needs Its Rest

2011-04-12T22:36:00.000-05:00

Falling asleep, I thought my heart stopped,
so I became an insomniac. Fear escaped
through my pores, made my sheets damp,
drew dark circles beneath my eyes,
like warpaint for a battle with the sun.
Eyelids became garage doors,
became avalanches,
became stones that Jesus
wouldn’t roll away for three days.
I’d awake, the television on,
head in a fish bowl
filled with canned laughter,
wondering if sitcoms were made in hell,
wondering if the body needs its sleep,
like life needs its death.

The nobody

2011-04-12T20:04:00.001-05:00

does his job, tries to do it well. Tries to
make his shadow have a face,
tries to grab the corners of his reflection’s mouth
just to give them a tug, but cuts his hand instead.
He slinks along sidewalks, motor ways, halls,
a single blood cell in the vein of a ghost
that doesn’t know it is dead. His clothes change,
his shoes make different sounds on different grounds,
he signs his name until it’s meaningless
for things that truly are. The songs he hums
are wordless, the poems he writes are song-less.
He knows if he falls, the road will just swallow him up,
and someone else will find a use
for the spaces he almost inhabited,
another shadow on the wall,
wishing for light.

Never Here

2011-04-12T19:25:00.001-05:00

Erase all the ripples from the pond.
Clip all the butterflies’ wings.
A lifetime of decisions reversed.

But this world wouldn’t blink for me.
A thimble of water removed,
the surrounding ocean swallows the hole.

Downtown

2011-04-02T14:18:00.001-05:00

If I lose my job, my home, my love,
you can find me downtown by the bars,
strumming my guitar like a blind man
searching for faces in the blackness,
case open on the pavement like a ribcage
without guts to enclose, hoping for
some loose change, some loose smiles,
to pay for the next round of forgetfulness.

What's left

2011-04-02T14:03:00.001-05:00

When I’m gone what will become of my things?
This maze of plastic, metals, and fabrics,
I’ve built around my life like a test
for those to work through, maybe seeking
a chance to see who I really was.
Plaid, pearl buttoned shirts, guitars,
stacks of records and books,
some shoes, some boots,
a collection of films meant
to inspire the kind of nostalgia
someone should feel for lost youth
as much as they feel for lost love.

These things should burn
in the same fire as my flesh,
because neither were a true representation
of the man I came to be,
and unless you were there,
day in, day out, helping to build the maze
like the small hands constructing Floyd’s wall,
you would have never met him
and don’t deserve the chance
to confuse yourself.

Affrilachian

2011-03-20T12:45:00.001-05:00

Your exclusive club of stereotypes
is too exclusive. Pull my teeth.
Stain my skin with the soot
of coal mines and sweat-caked dirt.
Let me in. I know the password.

I’ve been oppressed too.
The NAACP would not consider
me for a scholarship. The NBA
thinks I can’t jump. The Crips
and the Bloods both thought
my colors weren’t dark enough.

The Affrijews told me
I could not get a loan,
the Affritalians said my gun
was too small for the mob,
the Affriwhites were still trying
to figure themselves out.

I should form my own club:
the Affritolerants. It might
catch on. But for more attention,
I’m thinking Whitifican has more
of a ring to it. No matter what I do,
these words will be black and white,
unless I start writing with
a blue ink pen.

Why We Make Families

2011-03-17T23:47:00.002-05:00

The first time the Boy got drunk, the elation
overpowered his senses, like being
bear-hugged by God. Not an experiment,
a communion, a sharing of the blood
of teenage angst, a last rite of brotherhood
between twelve friends who knew that time
was pulling them outward like raindrops
on the spokes of a bicycle wheel
pedaled forward by that unstoppable force.
High school was over.

As the evening waned, they began to beg
for the sun to never rise, they linked arms
in a circle of prayer, Andrew reciting over
and over that they should, “Never forget this.
Never forget this. Never forget.” But daylight
always ignores the pleas from the darkness,
just as the second hands of clocks
can’t be reversed by tears. Years later,
they don’t even remember each other’s voices
over the telephone.

In college the Man-child learned how to procrastinate,
how to drink himself through a heartbreak,
how to sing in a coffee house. His new friends
worked where he worked. They stayed up late,
playing guitars on park benches dampened with dew,
they ran from cops breaking up parties, slinging
themselves over chain link fences and barking dogs,
they had cockroaches in their dorm room and mixed
ramen noodles with colby jack cheese.

One spring break, he and Jerry went to Florida
for the weekend, trying to outrun the depression
of being left by first loves. They drove that
rusted out Thunderbird with the imbalanced wheel
shuddering the whole way, windows down, Springsteen
blaring anthems to masculinity. They wrote their names beside
those of lost loves in the darkened sand by the sea,
watched the waves reclaim them. They played guitar
on the beach while the ocean drank the blue from the horizon.
They got a stranger to take their picture. On the way back,
the imbalanced tire blew out in a hiss of sparks and black
smoke. Jerry changed it for the bald one he had in the trunk,
clothes still wet from swimming, shivering in the temperature
change. Now, he lives in Ohio. His best man didn’t even make
it to the bachelor party. Won’t be there when his first child is born.

The Man watched his mother bury her mother over a year ago.
He remembers how her skin yellowed like an old newspaper,
and how, before she got too weak, she would sneak outside
to smoke a cigarette. Stage four cancer doesn’t break habits.
He watched his mother move on, watched her shelves fill
with more and more pictures of would-be angels,
watched her wait for her father to die.
When he visits, her graveyard smoke fills the house
to the point he has trouble sleeping, feeling asphyxiated
by memories and a noose braided by decades of deep breaths.

Just after he turns thirty-three, he will stand before a crowd of people
he once knew, each with their own new family photo album,
and make the promise that seemed so impossible to the Boy,
feeling that tug of unstoppable power ticking in the pit of his guts,
trying to replace that weight of loss with something else,
a friendship that can stand in the shifting sands of the tide,
a friendship capable of filling silence
with the laughter of his innocence reborn.

The poetry sections of book stores are a joke

2011-03-14T00:14:00.001-05:00

If you can find them. Pretend these innumerable books
and shelves are just chunks of limestone or granite
and you’re the archaeologist brushing away dirt
and chiseling away rock to reveal the skeleton
of what could be the very first humanoid life form.

You’ve waited your whole life for this moment,
but all you’re finding are more and more fossilized
bones of clones. This won’t put that sense of wonder
back into your eyes. Are people really buying
enough copies of Decision Points to put 25 of them
on a table? Where is the poetry? You just want to shout
this question to the woman behind the desk wearing
the yellow polo shirt and too many bracelets,
but she might ask you to join their buyer’s club
instead to distract you from the fact that she
doesn’t know how to read.

You’re starting to feel a bit like Neil Young,
mining for that heart of gold,
digging,
digging,
digging,
through the layers of worthless stones,
not really knowing what it is you’re searching for,
but feeling confident that you will know
once you find it.

And finally, there’s that glimmer of something
reflective between the dust and the bristles
of your brush, a winking light of hope that beats
like the muscle made of sunlight at the center
of the world, as your eyes make out the word
“poetry” over a single shelf amidst this maze
of recyclable pulp novels and how to books.

It’s Fool’s Gold though, you can quickly ascertain,
by biting down with your teeth on its surface,
by seeing a familiar list of names that read
like a Cliff’s Notes of observational beauty.
There’s no poetry here, despite the label,
just a few grace notes removed from a grander
symphony that might be enough for some,
but for those who have heard the music,
once you hear it, it’s impossible to forget
that it is there.

My mother’s déjà vu time machine

2011-03-12T00:01:00.003-06:00

The day he left was a day blurred by tears,
a day of hugs good-bye, faces pressed into chests,
a smell of sweat and Old Spice fading into exhaust
and a trail of gravel dust, a day of using children
as guilt-laden bargaining chips, minds unable
to fathom the complex goings on of giants.

It was a day of “I’m sorry” and “how could you”
and as soon as it was over, I stole his Zippo lighter
from the hutch drawer, the one she bought him
for his birthday that he never carried because
he didn’t want to ruin it, and she planned
to have it engraved. Since that day, it’s worn
my pockets thin.

clink-clack, clink-clack
open, closed---open, closed

He gave her a little something to make her feel better,
was what she said, but that Christmas,
the one after the divorce of his replacement,
she behaved like someone best suited for
paper slippers and a hospital gown,
an amnesia patient missing nine years.

That trailer set just beyond the crest of a hill,
out that damned curvy stretch of road
that sliced right through two seas of green weeds,
its brown and white siding a subdued image of normalcy,
like a wall repainted to hide the evidence from new buyers,
still needing its second coat.

The front porch was as inviting as a shark’s mouth,
an obstacle course of shadows and uncertainty,
white chairs waiting to be thrown into the yard,
a silhouette with slouched shoulders
watching through the storm door,
while she hugged us,
all cigarette smoke and glossy eyes.

This was the man she returned to,
this peddler of cherry-picked memories,
this collector of diet soda cans,
this toothless trader of howls,
this grizzled skeleton with yellow-
tipped fingers, missing most its insides,
sunken eyes magnified into tiny skies
behind thick prescription glasses.

His smile was all tongue and gums,
asking us to reminisce.
clink-clack, clink-clack,
open, closed---open, closed

It was unfair to us that he should be
the coin shuffled beneath
these ten wooden cups,
for her to find whenever she pleased,
while she stole every other man’s dollar
who wished to buy a chance
to end the game forever.

She makes the rules up as she goes.

So here we were, back in this haunted double-wide,
the pallid ghost of Christmas Past wrapped in the
threadbare chains of his flannel frailty,
a graveyard fog of second-hand smoke acting like vaseline
rubbed on a camera lens to take us back in time,
down a road littered with rusted detour signs and warnings
written in faded lettering that read “No Exit,”
a path meant to help us forget:

that possible affair with
her brother’s wife,
the job that he just never
could seem to find,
the feud with her parents
and his refusal to seek the Lord,
the woman he left at the hospital
emergency room door,
who nearly OD’d on painkillers.

clink-clack, clink-clack
open, closed---open, closed

I’ve never been so embarrassed to be alive,
to see my mother slurring her words
as she blesses the food, rocking from side to side,
her hand clinching mine like I’m a life raft
and she’s swimming the ocean,
as she thanks “baby Jesus” for bringing us all together,
and I find it hard to restrain my laughter and my rage.

Two months later, and that fog was gone from her eyes,
after she realized his nostalgia was a job that would never
offer medical, while those rectangular discolorations
in my front pockets’ denim seemed more and more
a symbol of useless metal without the fuel
needed to start a fire. So, I threw that weight
from my palm, into the woods behind my house.

Two years later, she’s added two more wooden cups
to her table top con, and I came home to find
his truck parked in her drive.

Clink.

Cheating Time

2011-01-31T18:55:00.001-06:00

If only there was a way to cheat death,
to outsmart the system, to count the cards,
to always come out ahead,
holding the better hand,
leaving with more chips
than what you started with,
the cashier dressed in white robes
giving you a begrudged look
when you decide to cash out for the night.

You could remove the batteries
from all the clocks in your house,
winding all their hands
to a permanent midnight,
never wear a watch,
duct tape all the windows
so you’re not sure if the sun
has risen or set,
ignore the television and the internet,
have people deliver your food or drink,
just leave it by the door,
it’s best to ignore
the rats in their cages
who will want to talk about
world events and weather
and no doubt will be keeping track
of the time on their wrist.

The more time you spend with them
the voices in your head will become
more entertaining company,
you’ll have your records,
your books, your own creativity
to spur along with medication
and inspiring songs,
and it won’t be long,
before you’ve created
your own universe.

Disconnect

2011-01-11T23:57:00.001-06:00

Maybe they have less hair now,
but how could you know,
you only see what they show you.

Their words photoshop their faces,
airbrush them smooth of lines and moles,
bad grammar turns into blackheads and baldness.

The laptop’s glow has replaced the moon,
a pale washing of skin in electric calm,
beer bottles collecting like kisses of light.

You feel the superficial nature of it all,
the emptiness awake inside you,
your palms yawning like lipless mouths.

Words are replacing voices.
Words are replacing voices.
Words are replacing hugs.
Words are replacing laughter.
Words are replacing people.
Abbreviations are replacing words.

This snake skin of a life
stayed behind with the skeletons,
bodies sucked into a four inch vacuum,

trying to breathe digital air,
trying to send an instant message to the past
in the middle of a car crash.

USED BOOKS

2011-01-10T01:15:00.001-06:00

There are places we go now
that are vanishing from the world,
cancer patients that beckon us
to walk inside them,
to touch their decaying guts,
to leave fingerprints
that might perhaps be the last
to exist in certain spaces
before the dust settles
never again to be stirred
by human breaths.

These are the museums
of the post modern,
the used bookstores,
the antique malls,
the flea markets,
the dirt boutiques,
collections of junk
not yet old enough
to be considered irreplaceable,
yet not new enough
to be considered anything
except novelties for eccentrics
or nostalgia hoarders,
heirlooms passed down
from lonely generation
to lonely generation,
the knickknacks gathered
to guard the houses
of the dead,
to prove that they were ever
there at all.

Such places are curiosities,
stabbing victims bleeding
on the side of the street,
that we would rather watch
slowly die
than attempt to help,
because we know
there is nothing to be done,
the wounds are too deep,
yet death holds a strange fascination,
a beautiful vision of an ending
that stirs the chords of fear
and makes us hide our faces
from all reflections
because those eyes that stare back
know the truth of it all.

~

This shop down the street,
it called to me with its quaintness,
its handwritten signage displayed
without apology across
two large front windows:
USED BOOKS,
but for some reason
those bruised eyes
whispered HELP ME instead,
perhaps the last gasp of life
from a dying building,
a heart cleaved open
begging to be filled
with footsteps of the damned.

So, I walked in, chiming the bell
at the top of the door,
and found myself enveloped
by the musty odor
of generation upon generation
of words folded into the delicate
creases of shadows fading
out of time and memory,
mingled with the scents
of thousands of breaths trapped
between the pages and bindings
with smells of previous homes
lodged between the walls and shelves
lining the walls and the irises
of the woman behind the counter,
whose expression was that
of someone grown too accustomed
to the company of ghosts.

The diffused light filtered
through dirty shades
giving the room a reddish hue,
like staring at the sun
through closed eyelids,
reminding me of warmth,
the way summer must feel
to a fetus in a womb,
beside its mother’s heartbeat.

She spoke to me with a conflicted voice,
surprised and glad I entered her establishment,
yet nervous, like she might scare me away,
her brown cardigan and glasses
the bookends of her broken cliche,
the sign on the checkout counter
informing me that hand sanitizer
was available, just in case
becoming obsolete was contagious.

I perused the shelves,
already uncomfortable,
feeling like an outsider
in someone else’s daydream,
feeling like an eye
in someone else’s skull
who’s becoming aware
their eyes are not their own,
and I hurry through the corridors,
not really looking for anything,
just observing the disarray,
the haphazard organization,
post-it notes stuck to shelf-tops
with the word “SALE” in black ink,
books of every sort imaginable
stacked in semi-alphabetical order,
from varying conditions and ages,
like orphaned children trying to look pretty
for the prospective parent in the room.

Twice, the shopkeeper walked around me,
as if she thought I might shoplift,
a cute notion that these dilapidated relics
would be worth the risk of theft,
and she pretended titles had been shuffled
by previous customers,
asking me to put something
back on a top shelf
because her ladder was all the way
in the back of the store,
then I realized she was not afraid
that I was going to steal,
she was just afraid I was going to leave
without buying anything.

So, I selected a book of poetry,
a title that intrigued me
because it seemed I had heard it before,
and the first poem inside it
had a language that appealed to
one side of my brain or the other,
and I paid for it,
five dollars and forty-six cents.
The woman seemed to swell with pride
as she handed me the receipt,
maybe thinking I might be
the start of a new trend,
the first of a fresh batch
of loyal customers
rediscovering a love
for the tactile words of dreamers,
and she said “happy new year,”
so I said “you too,”
even though I knew
there was nothing happy about it,
because the hope I saw in her eyes
was just a band-aid
placed over the hole
of a bullet wound.

Technological advancement

2011-01-07T18:19:00.001-06:00

Lately I’ve been thinking
in terms of status updates and tweets,
truncating my thoughts into sound byte lengths,
catch phrases or humorous quotes,
140 characters or less or maybe more
if I’m feeling facebook loyal.

Listening to songs, certain lyrics stand out
like they never have before, like they belong
in a thought balloon attached to my skull,
or just tattooed on my digital self,
my subliminal wall of graffiti and id,
the universe where everything orbits me,
and every word feels born from my mind.

The way I look at the world has changed,
I feel like I can see so much more,
a galaxy of answers right at my fingertips,
nothing a mystery anymore
thanks to the newest deity
to start with a “G,”

my imagination is much more free
without the weight of my memory
tethering this zeppelin of cerebral me
to the physical gravity of reality,

I can fit the horizon into a four inch screen,
I can take pictures of the sunset
and tag it so it belongs to me,
I can cut together a video
and upload it for the viral feed,

I can fit an entire life into my palm
as long as there are some bars of 3G
for my new 32 gigabyte phone
and its display in AMOLED HD,
but as for the Grand Canyon,
no, I’ve never been there,
but I might like to go,
if they have wifi.

Nashville, Tn #2

2011-01-06T21:18:00.001-06:00

Downtown is for tourists,
people looking for Elvis,
people carrying shopping bags
full of trinkets, shot glasses
inscribed with guitars, shirts
that say “Music City,”
people who might walk onto
a movie set from the sixties,
the faux store fronts and saloons,
and feel like they are actually
in the Old West.

The neon signs hiccup with light
like they’re dying of tuberculosis,
while the sounds of bad karaoke
drool out the doorways of bars,
amid the endless chatter
and clatter of heels on the walk,
flashbulbs flicker for poses
of ghosts beside ghosts,

a blind man plays drums
made of coffee cans
and listens for the jingle
of his next bottle of warmth
hitting the tip jar,
while another man
strums a nameless acoustic
and beats an old cliche to death
with his bearded desperation.

The alleys smell like sewage
and the beer-breath of bums,
the cobblestone streets caked
with the vomit of excess,
foundations made from the sweat
of singers dressed in sequins,
their boots squeaking in time
on the polished hardwood stage,
voices of deceased gospel choirs
ringing like an out of tune
pedal steel left out in the rain,
the whole city’s just a palm
asking for your change.

Happy New Year

2011-01-04T22:03:00.001-06:00

As daylight breaks into familiar voices
singing in my ears, I see white bleed through,
like my ceiling is a drawn shade, only it mocks me,
its stippled paint the spider’s web formed
by my dreams, these blankets a cocoon of death,
yet so warm, begging me to stay
until my blood fills the stomachs of worms,
and my mind struggles with reasons
to fight free of this trap I’ve made.
They come, like tiny thoughts with wings,
fireflies gripping my capillary chains
to raise my shell from its slumber,
to coat my flesh with a costumed skin,
and to place my feet on the path of routine,
a larger cocoon my eyes can almost perceive,
my steps spinning this invisible hamster wheel
to turn the gears of some parasitic machine,
where the blackened blood of the dead
is fed into the mouths without faces,
the gluttonous lie clothed in a suit and tie,
too obese to hold a pen, stamping checks
with an ink blotter molded to its name.
It’s a brand new year, another blank calendar
to put on the fridge, another list of dates
waiting to be filled, another series of chances
waiting to be missed, opportunities crouched
in the dark like leprous whores,
but this staircase never stops,
it just spirals up and up, the lights
growing dimmer and dimmer,
making it harder to see any doors
that may or may not be inscribed
with your name, until you’re just an old man
fumbling through the dark, fingers tracing
along the cold, stone walls searching
for any doorknob that will turn,
any lever that will pull,
any hatch that will raise,
any way off this god damned staircase,
until finally, the stairs just give way to nothing,
and you’re falling into the abyss,
with a long lost smile on your lips,
because it’s been so long
since you actually had any rest.
And daylight breaks into familiar voices
singing in my ears.

The first day of fall

2010-10-06T00:24:00.000-05:00

I watched butterflies panic
the day autumn arrived
unannounced, and with suitcase
in tow, pockets turned inside out,
their frantic and fragile wings
a chaotic flutter of S.O.S. signals,
flying blind into interstate traffic
where moths go to commit suicide
rather than become food for birds.

Two Monarchs tumbled across
my windshield and careened into
the cyclonic undertow of blue sky
and gray speckled road before
being sucked into the grill
of the next Toyota Prius or
Honda Civic hybrid that was invented
with the intention of helping preserve
the environment of these living
things it gets stuck between its teeth
like kernels of corn that might afflict
a movie watcher.

The leaves’ tips are turning red,
as if they stabbed the world
while it wasn’t looking,
and all the hot air got sucked
out through the holes,
making the birds confused at first,
then steadfast with concentration
that some might mistake
for an instinct of survival
as they abandon their homes
for a crude sense of direction
and become specks of black
against the sheet wrapped
around the world made from
the irises of infants
who we tell not to stare at the sun,

but we look up, and see them flying,
their uniform destination as obvious
as the assumption that having life
is “greater than” the alternative
at the end of an equation where
“less than” means zero,
and we put on our jackets,
set our minds to the tedious task
of sharpening knives for the carving
of pumpkins, we set our clocks
to fall back an hour so we seem
to live a bit longer each day,
and we sleep on piles of leaves,
knowing that some day,
we will wake up in the fire.

Nashville, TN

2010-09-06T20:53:00.001-05:00

These hills were meant for
taking long drives, trying to get lost
while the radio sings you songs
about salvation. Out past the city
there are billboards reminding us
there is always a reason to fear
something we don’t understand,
and every few miles there’s a tobacco patch
fading from green to yellow, waiting
to turn into second hand smoke
that might make its way into
your windows, if you keep
your windows down.

The streets smolder like discarded
cigarette butts, and the ghettos
hide like ashes scattered by winds,
but if you look you’ll find them drifted
into the cracks of pavement, a newspaper
caught around the base of a light post,
fluttering like a moth, next to the gray
charred face of someone missing from
a family photo, a scrap piece of cardboard
strung about his neck like the sign
nailed above Jesus’ slumped head.

Somewhere in the distance, a siren wails,
like a baby being born, but in the silence,
someone has exhaled their last smoke
while the cranes slept, the wrought iron
skeleton frames of sarcophagi reaching
towards heaven with arms made of glass,
praying that the rain is only enough
to water the last remaining trees.

Isolationism

2010-09-06T09:39:00.002-05:00

I’m building my house,
I’m building my house
and soon it will be complete,
soon it will be perfect.

I’m building my house,
my castle, my fortress of solitude,
I’m building my tower of Babel,
my cabin in the woods.

I’m holing myself in
like a rat in a wall,
sealing myself off
from the world, from the noise.

You won’t find me,
you won’t see me,
you won’t reach me,
you won’t need me.

My world will be the sounds
of keys typing, of keys wriggling
into the locks, dangling from the rings
of cell guards, protectors of the secrets

and the science of keeping.
This is my nest, where I seal my thoughts
like young into the honeycomb chambers
of saliva and sugar, fructose extracted

from the guts of roses. I surround myself
inside a cloud of monotonous voices,
blended like winds of a hurricane
into the guttural growl of some unknown ghost,

the throaty whisper of forgotten years
a distant wind chime down some mildewed hall,
so many televisions, streaming so many
talking heads, streaming so much loss of intellect

into one pipeline like crude oil and pancake syrup
made from the dead, the walls of my house
built up into layers of zeros and ones,
walls of iPods, of LCD screens, of anti-virus

software and privacy protection. I paste my face
into the frames of every stranger, me me me,
it’s only me, and my voice, and my words,
my time, and my everlasting gobstopper

that no top-hat wearing schmuck could ever pluck
from the trees of commonality, I hope you are praying
for me while I die of cancer, because I will never
acknowledge the existence of music

I didn’t hear for myself, and while your voices
blend into that same hurricane I already built up
shutters to protect against, I’ll be playing my guitar
as I’m lowered into the grave.

Creationism

2010-09-05T13:06:00.000-05:00

The act of creation can be
a destructive force of nature,
a cirrhosis of the liver inside a vision,
a spontaneous cloud of volcanic ash
spewing from the mouths
of singing heroin addicts
that blocks the sun from windows
of teenagers for generations to come.

It’s the razor fine edge of imagination
slicing through the flesh between
the ear and the skull, the dementia
coursing through acid soaked headbands
and out through the fingers of genius
that turned music notes into helium-filled
balloons, the bottle clutched between
the fingers of ravens and black cats
puking up poems while dying.

If god created the universe,
it must have tore him apart,
an idea so great, it pulsed through
the pores of his skin like words
dripping full-formed out of
the tip of a fountain pen,
his body filling with ticky-tack
paper and stars until
he ceased to be there,
and existence was all that was left,
spiraling out of the remains
like foliage on the graves of soldiers,
life a blossom that can never look
down and see its own stem,
though it feels something
must be holding it up.

Hangover

2010-09-05T11:31:00.000-05:00

I’ve never lived on a street that was just a number,
and I like the way that feels, though some parts of me
are drawn to that kind of life, numerals drawn through
the eyes of needles, and the vacuous pupils of passersby
just threads run amok, unravelling the fabric
at the edge of the world, where humanity is the joke
told without a punchline, the dust under the rug
placed to cover up that vomit stain from a New Year’s
party two hundred years ago.

I’ve never felt my brain on drugs turn into an egg
with a bleeding yolk, scrambling into clumps of fried
yellow curds, I’ve felt more or less like a grapefruit
shoved into the skin of a lemon, too much ambition
and not enough air to breathe, my ideas suffocating
before they are born, my mind a room full
of decaying babies and cannibal cockroaches.

You told me once that I could be anything I wanted,
but you didn’t know that what I wanted to be
wasn’t anything like what you wanted me to be,
that my perfect version of myself
more closely resembled a painting Picasso painted
and then slashed with a razor so the world
would never see it than anything you could dress
up in Oxford cloth button-ups and ties.

I put the needle in the groove and fill the room
with scratches, imperfections and warmth,
beautiful noise to replace the emptiness
that I keep trying to steal with my breath.

Nostalgic vinyl

2010-09-01T16:18:00.001-05:00

All those days of my youth
spent throwing baseballs
against the side of the barn,
where the corrugated metal siding
was nailed up over the deteriorating
boards like some kind of last ditch
effort to keep the whole thing
from crumbling into dust and splinters,

where I had spray painted a haphazard
yellow square for my imaginary
strike zone and repeatedly threw pitch
after pitch, striking out invisible batters
left and right, while the summer sun
tried its best to penetrate the bill of my cap
and reflected through the beads of sweat
caught on my eyebrows like miniature stars.

With every fastball thrown, every slider,
every curve ball, I hurled from the grit
of hopes and dreams, I unleashed an adolescent
truth: that I could knock this building down,
the twinges of pain in my shoulder
just sparks landing on the kindling
and dry brush of desire piled high

in the alcoves of places inside myself
I would never discover. How could I know
that these moments were becoming
the faded pages of yellowed notebooks
left high on shelves I would not revisit
until driven by a wanderlust that nostalgia
simply could not satisfy? How could I know

the the smell of oiled leather and dirt,
the feel of red threaded seams gripped
beneath my fingers, the cooling rim of a hat
soaked through with sweat, the stirring blades
of grass caught in a July breeze tickling
the backs of my tanned calves, these things
were all edging closer to the ledge of infinity

that resides in us all, the elusive darkness
of memory and time, every moment a grain of sand
that floats in the abyss of the mind like
translucent butterflies that we reach for
when we are feeling sad, and can never quite grasp,
because our hands move too slow.

These are the feelings that wash through me,
as I place an old record on a turntable found
at a yard sale, I can feel myself walking through
the doorway, the light warming the skin on my face
and arms, that barn etched into the scenery like some
crude giant hunched over for a drink of water,
its doors thrown open to reveal a pile
of tobacco sticks ready to be made into swords,

that yellow square a mouth craving the cheers
of ninth inning showdowns, my baseball glove
still mended with an old piece of wire from where
the dog chewed it up, ready to drink the dampness
from my palm and the whispers from my lips,
but then the record skips, and slows to a stop,
as the lifespan of the player comes to a halt,
and the memories fade back out of focus,

the butterfly of lost time that had landed
like a dandelion seed on my shirt, now gone
with the breeze, leaving me with a longing
for second chances of success, at ignoring voices
of doubt that said I was never good enough,
I’m grasping at scents, at feelings, at lights,
vanishing like effects pulled out of a flashback scene,
as reality sets in and I’m left with my thoughts,
my brain a record player that needs to be repaired.

Tossing and turning

2010-08-26T21:24:00.000-05:00

Lately my rest has been restless,
nights of sweat and faceless dreams,
in and out of sleep like glimpses of light
shining off and on through the windows,
cast from automated security lamps
and headlights of cars turning
down or up the street,
sometimes accompanied by
the thumping pulse and vibrating trunks
of music played loud enough
for the gods of noise to listen
and take heed of the blasphemy
of ignoring the sanctity of sound.

The cats are always up and about,
chasing ghosts in the shadows
or rediscovering their own tails,
nuzzling their faces under my hands
as if I will pet them on command,
and I will, because it’s either that
or I wake up to being groomed,
and my scalp kneaded by claws
no doubt laced with traces
of urine and shit from the litter box.

Between flashes of darkness
and digital numbers giving
off their green ambient glow,
I am suddenly conscious,
and have to check my phone
for messages, for email, for info-stimuli,
and my bladder is full,
which means wiping the sleep
from my eyes before it had time
to really set in,
and after the brightness
of the bathroom’s 60 watt bulbs,
I’m trekking back to bed
surrounded by halos
and the stuttering specters
of incandescent mosquitos,
ready to start this ritual
all over again.

Evolution of a tweet

2010-08-25T21:47:00.000-05:00

I can’t fit this thought
into 140 characters,
I can’t mortar these words
like bricks into a wall
of certain dimensions.

This thought wants room to grow,
to elaborate on itself, to spiral out,
like arms of a giant squid
reaching to drag down a ship
filled with screaming sailors.

You hate these thoughts of mine,
because they won’t fit in your head,
and you’ve lost the combination
to the lock you sealed yourself up with
a long time ago.

Your eyes spray paint words
onto the foreheads
of every one you see,
before they have a chance to speak,
and change your mind
about what you are going to write.

You label them nigger.
You label them fag.
You label them terrorist.
You label them sinner.
You label them.

But no one sees these words except you,
not even people like you,
who are too busy
putting their own words on things,
and no one sees the words you put
on your own face
each night before bed
that makes you feel
so fucking special.

A difference of inches

2010-06-19T14:36:00.000-05:00

He says he would have died
if the blade hadn’t bent
as it penetrated the calcium-rich
marrow of the back of his skull.
The scar runs nearly ear-to-ear,
a bright pink river of thickened flesh
that traverses the tropical jungle
of his course brown hair like
some kind of alien slug
that attaches and probes
for mental symbiosis
in science fiction films.

The story he tells
is his dad didn’t tighten
the bolt quite enough
when changing the blade
to their red Murray lawnmower,
so while he cut the grass,
it slung the sharpened steel
one hundred miles an hour,
off the ground and it ricocheted
off the side of the house,
where it hit him
with enough force
to erase memories.

Had the blade stayed true,
his brain stem would have been cut,
severed like an electrical cord
to a bedside lamp, lights out.

The story I heard was different,
one his warbled speech and eyes
seemed to convey just behind
the silk curtains of his words.
I saw a father, drunk and mad,
with hands caked in grease
and smeared black in the quicks
of his fingernails, smelling
of beer and sweat and something
akin to rage soaked in the repression
of years wasted on trivialities,
staggering into his bedroom,
the blade gripped into his fist
like ropes of steel wrapped around steel,
searching for a way out
of the shadow his father
cast over the highway of his life,
searching for answers
much more important
than why the yard
hasn’t yet been mowed.

Things by the road

2010-06-05T18:16:00.001-05:00

That might have once been a couch,
or maybe a love seat,
but it looks like something hit it,
yellow foam jutting from its girth
in broken, jagged chunks
like the beginnings of mountains
or the guts of Freddy Krueger’s
latest unfortunate victim.

Pieces of tires that have broken down
and blown out lay here and there
like used condoms or the deflated bodies
of strange black lizards,
buffalo tongues that liked
the taste of the road
just a little too much,
and ate it until they died.

There’s a dirty diaper,
turned to frayed papery erosion
by the weather and the rain,
its contents incubated
like the yolk of death,
tossed carelessly next
to someone’s lost shoe,
or maybe their foot
is still in it,
a different kind
of a pig in a blanket.

A long line of clothes
rolled in black dirt like soot
by wind and undertow
of so many passing cars,
colors ranging from white
to pink to red to blue,
and I wonder what shirt
could have been their son’s
or daughter’s favorite to wear
when they knew pictures
were going to be taken
and if they cried when dad
said it wasn’t worth going back
when the suitcase made its escape
from the roof of the toyota
before it realized
it didn’t know how to fly.

Black garbage bags set in the grass
make me paranoid
that there’s a serial killer
disposing of bodies
the same way
roadside crews leave
their collected litter trash,
and he will never be caught
just like most litterers
never pay a fine
for killing beauty.

He's in the ground, and I am not

2010-04-30T18:43:00.000-05:00

Because he’s in the ground and I am not,
I should see the beauty this life can bring,
and put those thoughts in the earth to rot.

The dead stay with us like cold blood clots,
their memory comes like winter’s cruel sting,
but still, he’s in the ground and I am not.

The things he did to us might still haunt
my thoughts like scars and wake me from dreams,
but I’ve put those thoughts in the earth to rot.

Time has changed me, but I’ve not forgot
the broken mirrors, the knives, the nightly screams,
but still, he’s in the ground and I am not.

He forged my anger with the words he taught
through hot fists of fear his demons would sing
but I’ve put those thoughts in the earth to rot.

The devil inside him would have fought
to turn me against myself, to make my heart mean,
but since he’s in the ground and I am not,
I’ve placed those thoughts in the earth to rot.

And suddenly the ideas stopped

2010-04-30T18:00:00.001-05:00

Art became a distant memory,
museums locked their doors
and fell victim to arson,
dust gathering like thick blankets
of snow made from the dead
who once gave a damn.

Libraries recycled their books
through shredders and furnaces
using the ash to fill bag chairs
for the extremely obese
and the paper pulp
to make celebrity gossip
magazines reduced to just pictures
with less than witty captions,
while the buildings were converted
into churches that worshipped
french fries and high fructose
corn syrup.

Theaters stopped showing films
and started hosting television rerun
marathons of reality programming
and videos of people fucking,
in 3-D, with seats made to recline
and tubes meant to mainline
liquid butter directly into
viewers’ mouths.

Schools became places parents sent kids
to learn how to play video games,
since all of life has been reduced
to the pushing of buttons,
green for yes, red for no,
yellow for cheeseburger.

Corporations became the government,
the President of the United States
was the CEO of Apple-AT&T-Pepsi,
religion became consumerism,
God became the television,
and the computer became the prophet.

Just one second.
Let me check my text messages.
Let me check my e-mail.
What were we talking about?

Difference in punctuation

2010-04-28T19:52:00.001-05:00

She was a question mark
and I was an exclamation point,
together we added drama
to the confusion of our lives,

but it was exciting to wonder
what would happen next,
to build our story
into a grammatical context,

sentences becoming paragraphs,
paragraphs becoming pages,
pages becoming a novel,
and our novel a series,

time changing our expressions,
adding parenthetical phrases,
commas, quotations, hyphens,
and the occasional abbreviation,

we’ve written so many chapters,
but still no end in sight,
my only question is,
when we reach that last line,

will the story conclude
with the finality of a period,
or be left up for sequels
with an open-ended ellipses.

Optimistic diamonds

2010-04-28T19:19:00.001-05:00

Are what we give to the ones
we want to have by our side
on the day we first learn
the tumor is malignant,

such unbridled optimism,
to think someone could smile
through the tragedy,
holding back the tears

with memories spanning years
stacked up like layers of rock
in the Hoover Dam, fingers
laced through your own

like the threads stitched
into the seams of your clothes,
a smile that can exist because
so long ago, there was that first kiss,

an exchange of atoms
fluctuating in the pulse
of music played on levels
more than just sonic,

a connection woven between
our molecular hearts
that said we were a new element
formed in the fabric of seconds

that planets hold their breaths,
and in this moment we knew
that our minds would one day
escape these prisons of skin

and join to form a star
on the far side of the galaxy
where life is just beginning
to learn of its eyes.

Alive in Five

2010-04-26T19:22:00.000-05:00

Five times five is twenty-five
and if I’ve told you once
I’ve told you five thousand times
that you are the only one for me,

I’ve masturbated more than five times
in one day before, eight to be exact,
when the thought of a woman’s touch
could only be a thought or a porno

played on my television screen
that did the thinking for me,
my first job only paid me five bucks
an hour, standing in the hot sun,

lifting rocks out of the dirt
of a field to be plowed, shuffling pigs
through shafts and getting their shit
in my clothes and my hair, standing

in the shower watching the brown water
pool at my feet, as if I were a statue
made of mud and clay who prayed
five times a day for clouds

to blow the other way, my mother
has been married more times
than my fingers, which means
a number at least divisible by five

and men without faces in my memory
who wanted me to call them “dad,”
multiply that by a thousand
and that might be the number

of movies I have seen that gave me hope
someday my life would end with music
swelling and a passionate kiss
set against the backdrop of a sunrise,

the number five, less than the number
of heartbreaks I’ve had, more than I’ve given,
the average length of a male penis in inches,
and exactly how many minutes I took

thinking of that sentence, the number
of years this world has aged in billions,
on my hands, my feet, the number of years
it takes for love to fade away.

Time in a Bottle

2010-04-25T13:18:00.002-05:00

"If I could make days last forever,
if words could make wished come true"
---Jim Croce

There is a past somewhere in this room,
somewhere
hidden from view, but breathing
maybe playing dead,
but if you could see it
look closely,
and see its chest still moves

It’s an onion layered ghost
of pain and lies and love
that tastes like the bitter sweet
tinge of blood and wine
a whole bottle emptied
and tangled up in bed sheets,
clothes thrown in the floor
like lizard skins shed
so raw muscles can touch
and colors can mingle
like nerves and emotions
found under the bed
as lost toys
covered in dust
and the fingerprints
of children

I put that ghost in a box
and buried it by the road
I drive by every day
hoping I dug the grave
deep enough
to not be washed free
by the rain,
his face found in pictures
tucked in mirrors
or 8x10 frames
like the one my face
resides in today

There are feelings tied to me
that I thought I let go
strings tracing back from my fingers
and disappearing into the air,
their ends wrapped around
helium balloons shaped like daggers,
broken knuckles, moons,
chains and manacles clasped
around my ankles,
dragging memories, dead bodies,
an entire house filled with junk
and sweat and empty beer cans
that used to live
on the dark side of my heart

My garden was tilled
by the teeth of my anger,
and the bruised hands of my love,
damaged from holding
your cinder block decision
and gripping it tight enough
to make concrete bleed,
the blood the only water
these flowers have used to grow