Break

My mind has four legs like a table. On top, in center, sits a lamp that is you, but earthquakes could upset the simple balance. Brains plates could shift and pieces of heart could crash into a thoughtless sea like pieces of a crumbling coast so I will put you in a boat and we'll break from the land. We'll lie face to face, two oars, complete.

A Job For A Bird No branch would ever sway for you. You make them impervious to wind. Private infinities are weighting my tongue. Why won't you be for me like that bird, collecting twigs for his nest, and bring me what I need to say one piece at a time. With all these words, that are not words but stones, I have waited and can wait a bit longer. It would be better if you swooped in to take it out with a peck than to let it rust away beneath your unknowing. If either of us is unsearchable then we're both dead. My mouth is dead but can be remade like a nest that falls from a branch that shakes.

Analogies

Love is an enzyme building and breaking in a small world of its own. It's a passive hibernation, a shell to climb into, an oyster, lined with warm soft fabric. Claustrophobic: sweating in itchy polyester.

Record Skips Drop the needle onto the record and it crackles like a burning campfire, or a piece of paper crinkled in a fist. And I do crinkle the paper into a ball and aim for the wastebasket, which is a dreadful mess. I criticize it's contents. The paper is spread out, owning four kingdom corners - then, what sounds is not a lie - CRINKLE paper in fist, and be what I am that is not expressed compressed, folded tertiary upon itself, I mean quaternary, over and over, that the smallness is an illusion.

Fluttering VS Flying my mind grew like a shadow to meet yours, fluttering, elusive, your guesses were gold where truth was penny told but I'm at a bow bent in an archers hand ready to fly in exhilarating will at first beautiful command

Insulate if I love you I must first trust you like an arrow, see innocent blood on the snow before I know suppose you loved me would we turn thin pages together, or in over-sized winter coats alone? do you know? or is the distinction blanketed in snow?

Domestic The steak slides off the table, food for dogs. The tilted offering crystal clear, broken china. You think I'm a crumbling building with drywall hanging in place of eyes just like the structure surrounding our lives. Thats because you don't really see me, you look right through me. But I'm more like a windmill, on a distant hill, with brick hands as a punishment, never waving as you go by. You think this whole world is a city of sidewalks that care where your feet go. Tall buildings full of window-eyes watching you. My mouth folds, a crushed November leaf on the sidewalk pavement under the shuffle of feet. There was an apology lost in hearts chamber.

Untitled Don't hurt me hide me away in the rich embryo of nutrient living. I am an essay looking for the easy way. A busy day of tumbling things to say, stocked visions on layaway. And I can't identify the substance I am, whether I snap back into place resilient, or whether I bend.

Winter The snow amasses in wild additions before my eyes. Perception, weak at the creases, collapses into a plane of flat non-involvement, silent hibernation, sleep for the winter. In the weather we must tread carefully. A blade of grass framed by the winter eye can collapse life.

Essence Epileptic

I successive blink on and off like a yellow light bulb in a leaky dark basement. I saw the patterns of the wandering will naked as infinite fractures in a flash of light splitting the cavernous moment. The slippery blink of the present was pin-pointed, and its face revealed a terrible metal which caught the bolt, sent it surging through all the circuits to electrocute the core, and then out.

Paths Pass Away

I come from a closed corner narrow as a blade. My birth is the space that separates everything from everything. My mind shakes, making whiteness, clean spaces in chrome cranium, as all the confined probabilities are unfurled into the blissful anger of deconstruction trainspeed. Each moment exterminates its infinite peers in quantum genocide. I can feel the press of limitations. Indecision variety expands to fill time like a colony filling an incubated petri dish. From the wall I came, now diffused before these possible fast suns setting on myriad untrodden paths.

Like Jacob

Stalemate. Your stillness flows from this life. Stillness not to the world but in my anticipation. There's a paradise in the lapse of time between a question and your answer. Beyond the movements and gestures there are movements of contemplation, symphonies alien to sound. Your god-mind is a prism flexing light. But where are the assurances to fall across my mind like curtains? Now, tangled in willed absence of foresight, we wrestle with angels til their wings touch the earth. We knew the world was disarming but we thought there would be a ladder.

Q&A We're inferior tokens awaiting the slot machine. For now we jingle in a pocket and know nothing. Habits find us, habits in stencil and we struggle for a principle to hang our coats on. You bring your loneliness to me like a gift in a basket. In denied sadness you ask me do I love you? Yes so we surrender to a double-body question and answer.

In Favor of Permanence One piece of life wants to touch another and we suffer the remaining distance. Inevitability, in all of its passive aggression, jumps forward feverishly, like a last option. A ghost might whisper or howl but that noise is our silence and deaf eternity waits with unfathomable arms. Time falls apart like a vocalization in a ghost's throat. So I reach out to touch you. With the flutter of your sleeping eyelashes my heart casts a ballot for the permanence of this monument to meaning.

No Sparks I would like to purchase you and push myself through you like fire burning through a dry field instead of all this rain. Sometimes love means to damage, melt and weld. When there's no picnic because of the rain I fold up the sheets and tuck them away.

Blue Wheelbarrow So much rests on so little. So much burden comes unexpectedly. Our desires skipping a beat to get ahead or falling behind in exhaustion. If that pain is to be discredited, which now it must, then all the world, too.

The No Channel static white and black muffling the senses frozen numb pinnacle, white noise, pain-free, the nothing zone, nonsense pixels ruffling against the darkness, quiet, quiet house with no one home

Summers, Then

So meticulously and earnestly I was careful never to lean on her, hoping to prove myself, that I loved her. Mother, King of Castrators, would crash around like a great Tyrannosaur, bellowing, or else she would lean forward into the crease of her brow, seam of all her inward folding. At those times she would drop into some turbulent river. On land, all actions were hands that wielded knives to cut through the dark of the violent wilderness. In the summer my sister and I would catch lightening bugs. Mother would let us keep them in a mason jar in our room at night. Glowing dots of frustration, their wide dusky flights were reduced to cramped slopes and faint rises. Each blinking light was a morse-code plea to set them free. We shared some secret winks when I let them out the window, but even still, the days and nights brushed gently against our sandstone selves while all the weeds and green things grew.

Family Preserved, a bundle of tensions that voyages into unknown waters. What I would give to see us untouched by hurt, unchanged by time. Instead of living to be a shepherd's rod, gathering and tending to the untended details, the pieces of life that would hold us together if they didn't slip by. Home is a journey and I long for simplicity, greater simplicity.

Safe

You and I I try to pack this forward in time. All of my life I'm a foreigner arriving I don't want to go. So hold my hand and ground me it's a balloon string. Softly open vaults of promise close me inside and out. When the danger is gone the day won't have to pass as a hesitation.

Ebb and Flow of Neural Circuitry

That I am my own police yes, to tell myself finally to ultimately tell myself who I am or when to stop this sharp, brooding distance, where I keep myself, the distance should I never say it, the thing I can't find in my heart or should I find it and arrest it and bring it back home?

Ocean What else could rival emotion? Vast and calm or furious there is no passivity. There is no real giving up. The tide tries but is contained. We all move in our ways.

Untitled how easily I am hurt by you, too easily how can I know you and know you and not know this that and so much you mean to me and perhaps even more I could proceed without a hand or an eye or a foot how could you tell me what you think, too easily

Here Hands submerged in dishwater, never thought of themselves in terms of faithfulness, but here. Scraps of food gather at the drain, hands remedy this, called on the brain.

Of Memory the details that hurt to forget reminders that nothing is kept

Xmas

In the Garden of Gethsemane It's true that Jesus wept But he never died for your sins He slit his wrists and bled Empty the confessionals and burn the clergymen alive Empty the mangers nestled in your minds Zeitgeist!

Pinned Specimen Wings

The liturgy is a poem on the pulse. It shoots you through with needle dreams the absurd unseen.

Apparent Causation Nothing in these utterances given to purpose, if I say she kicked light-heartedness around like a soccer ball can you give it a context of meaning because I can't. The cat sleeping on the chair in context, when all the world shifts into sadness without apparent causation.

Next I'm not as smart as my calculator or as clean as my soap and the future is at the tip of a cone. Nothing is pertinent in fact has (slowed down) to undetectable movement. Could have found a better wireless plan, could have done any number of things, yet decisions made are inane. Flight was an idea. Of mine? No, before my time.

Lonesome Skull With the Chatterbrain All Boxed Up Ego rounds, have a cup. The incessant mystery of our island minds, what kind of bridges can stand the storms of time? Like this one, a rickety gallop across the clumsy hiccup of our communion?

Proposition

If you want me to give you reasonable wings of feverish doubt, follow me. If you want a if you want to rearrange, allow me. Let the tithe and emotion come open. A reckless course of devotion a prolonged sensitivity to my time and space.

The Leaves and Sunlight I can't describe this morning fast aching and stretching for you who are not here and the thoughts of you stretching like leaves towards the sun Look, see us distended in time like decimal fingers Here everything comes together, here the sun mixes with dirt The stillness of the station, put my arms around you Yes I'm talking to you in the fluid movement of time present memory forming It's time that overwhelms us, you that holds the station steady

Art Museum Stranger What do you take from it? I take I like white and machine and angles without seams and whatever light is shining on it to make me unseen. It's the exhibit in an art gallery, it's the point in space and time where we meet and contemplate together, even though we do not know one another. Do you like the obscenity? Do you feel obscene? Are you beast or machine? I like the spaces between the shapes where I could hide. I like how someone said fluorescent light tubes were beautiful and arranged them. Like you, like flowers in a vase, I say, and I want to be arranged like a tube of light or paint in lines going straight. And the studies of the past, well I don't know, I have to say. They were they, but I want to know what we are. So, antennas out.

Does It Bleed?

empty laundromat on a wet Thursday night coupons scattered on the table impersonal fluorescent lights, the warm hum of machines human picks a scab and wipes the blood on the back of the hand like indian war paint, glad and alive in the sensuous reality of imperfection

Limbo

the handshake, the steady iris of the eye and the rush of the eventual surprise I'll crawl into your shoe like a spider, wait for the bite and the crush, the manlove we'll each sleep under the other's thumb and call it warm love

time is the wristwatch we can't shake off it cuffs every action to the anxious hourglass

Part I: Fatigue intended slumber is undone by unreasonable impulses grasping, grappling with the steering wheel and too many things at once why can't we let time pass as it was meant to flow without our muscle over it? Part II: Lost All Along the Way there is no beauty that doesn't crush my heart with unreasonable pressures or sicken me with emptiness and in retrospection I'm hollowed by my passing enthusiasms

I, the Animator your talismen are spirits that rise up from my memory; corporeal they were dangling ornaments of your superstitious existence now inanimate but for the pulse given to them by my mind i remember your complexion of toothpaste and peroxide when your face drained, that the truth wouldn't hide your eyes were strange glyphs, the language of extravagant tombs, and the presence therein recessed like your desires - spidery strands capable of miring the insect who might be eaten or break you with escape