Resistance

We all lived in the same house.  Some of us
recuperating the way sand is nudged
towards the brush or the way things
are hardly noticeable.

It didn't matter how we loved
eachother, the nights were always
colder in Kansas.  The voices
of birds frozen in their mouths

like death sentences;

red and black snakes tightening
in their skein the way
a fist tightens.   Father
hunched over the stove

feeding its oval belly, its mouth
vomiting sparks of blood.

Those nights and howling
wind scraping its long sharp
fingernails across the windows

as if it wanted in.

Dark Hands

There is a woman singing
like a bird and a wolf stares
like a wolf will stare.  Incredibly
unnerving.

The power of being hunted
by something creepy, ugly
and eerily powerful, inherently
haunting.

White flesh, dark hands and
admiration.

Box in the Attic

My heart says Princess Doll.  My eyes
say pony.  No wrapping paper just
a package with no name.

A box of baby clothes and mothballs,
a coloring book and a paintbrush.

Sometimes all you need is a red
crayon and a black pencil.

The Settling

As you get older you make the world
what it should be.  You lower the expectations
by just walking in the room.  See how beautiful
the sky is before the mucous in your eyes
falls away?

You're gonna think what you're gonna
think.  Never blame someone else
for that.

Passion.  The settling.  The very morning
you overslept you dreamed you were
a good man in a mask and a grey hoodie.

No residue.  Just a bright white
light traveling in an upward trajectory.

The Shooter

I'm afraid I've damaged everyone
around me.  The gun always had
more answers than questions.

Upon closer examination
I would say:  Fatal

through and through exiting
the chest causing massive
damage to the organs.

This concerns me.

The tearing, the burns, close
contact.  I'm saying the shot
was fired from less than
2 feet away.

If you're going to do some running,
you'd better run fast.  Did you

get a good look at the one
who shot you?

In the Moment

Waiting for the "aha" moment,
good predators always turn
to look.  As if they know

not knowing is dangerous.

Rising up from abnormal, a body
where a body shouldn't be-  a parasitic twin.

Light in the eyes or a tremulous shadow
too dark to trust

or death moments where all things
float to surface speeding
towards unseen.  A bruise

where a bruise shouldn't be
and an enemy.

To Please You

No page goes unturned.  No bird
sings its song without forgetting.
Blackbird, what you bring
is death!

Did you think I had forgotten?

All green things, majestic high
sleeping mountains could not
move you;  who am I

to teach you?

Greater still, how difficult
to please you.

Gambling Man

This was the first time God
woke up with a hangover.  Who
are these creatures that I've made
and how they suffer.

You can bet a gambling man
would've cut his losses.

See what waste the fields,
sapphire waters, the gorgeous woods.

In Las Vegas a man in
in a black suit and Armani tie
leans over the Fire Lounge Bar

and orders another one.

Finding Nefertiti

Her name means beauty.  To a stranger,
effortless. To history, the x rays
showed otherwise. Internal organs
in an ivory box-  liver, kidneys,
abscessed teeth.

You would have waited
in line with the rest of us
to get into the nightclub or
stayed Saturday night alone

watching Desperate Housewife
re-runs with a tub of ice cream
without assessing calories

before popping ambien.

Of course you'd dream of
ruling a country,  becoming
a supermodel, a celebrity

or maybe, just maybe
winning the lottery.

The Melon Scoop-er

Early meets late between now
and then.  A clock's face, a frown,
a stern mockery of how-long-it-is
to wherever you inevitably end.

I'm done with time.  Silly man-made
tool like a metal, melon scoop-  is it really
necessary when all you need is

a fistful of fingers?

No Thunder

If you stand in the middle
of four corners, they say
you can hear the wind blow
even when you're dead.

Some people hear nothing
even when they're sober.

Submerged in water, the sound
of water resembles the sound
of floating or sliding slowly

into silence.

No waterfalls, no screaming
birds, no thunder.

Pray for Wild Things

I like to raise wild things
with their so unclean, justice
without mercy mentality.

You can't be at war
with the world always
but remembering you

continue to dream
in red and black
and royal purple.

Such resonant, beautiful howling.
Like joyful grieving.
O that I could be

that real.

Unnatural Spaces

There is a place in time,
on this planet, in an open field
or hidden deeper, a secret fistula
unnaturally joining one unlike space
to another like a hole in the wall

where someone watches her
undress or the tractor beam
that sucks her into the sky.

How far up or down
will these tunnels take her?

In a hallway as long as
the distance from Mars,
she calculates the speed of light
and divides it by eternity.

Victims

Death, call your first witness.  What stories
will you tell;  how what you bury you bury
forever?  All night the mouths of stones
keep your secrets, the eyeless sky hides
her cries in the folds of her hair.  Even
Earth whose arms are filled with worms
and beetles keeps its silence.  But somewhere,
in a dark, quiet space the size of a jar
there are no victims.

Little Pockets

A brother and sister.  A lake and its wood.
Seldom do they really know the other.
Stones and birds and wolves, darkness
and the joints where its wings unfold
are all fixed inexplicably together.

The rest of the world, its disintegrating
pieces dropping away, shriveling up, shrinking
must attach themselves to others.

Wasn't it God who set the stars into
their little pockets expecting them
to slip and fall?

The Green Spot

Fire, its orange-ness burns
indiscriminately How sweet
the demon has become sitting
at my feet.

If you stare at the young girl
eventually she turns into an old lady.
The green spot sears into the wall,
the star follows all who see it.

When you pretend to be dead long enough
you forget how to breath.

I say this:  find what you've lost-
the burning, the green, the tiny
punctured sky, the place at your feet

where someone is waiting..

Speak No More

A mouth of words, a heart filled
with colorful strings knotted, jumbled;
I'm not qualified to unravel them.

Sometimes the sound of bees
makes more sense than poems
or the oration of sciences.

A belly growling for food,
a foot tapping beneath a table,
the sore spot squeaking between

the ribs like loose coils
of a bed-   educate the masses
without certificates of wisdom.

I'm tired of hoping to sound
beautiful while effortlessly silence
and what fills it is far more
handsome.

A Piece of Sadness

Part of this first piece of sadness comes
from a mother's mouth (one can only know
her heart was louder).  How desperate is
the tree whose fruit once ripened falls
to where it soon forgotten rots alone?

Can you hear the river howl, its shifting
rocks and sands bear no sorrow but her
hands incapable of holding what she bore
search for them more often.  Who despairs
of severed love when love is like a door

and opens?  Even I have longing

to be longed for.

The Fibrous Edges

I was made for this:  patience, leaning away,
how the beautiful keep looking for a darker
corner to slip into.  See how the fibrous edges
of the heart become thinner with each struggle,
transparent as a boiled grain of rice-

soon there will be nowhere to hide.

And those who share too much, you know
who you are, will be left with the inverse
proportion of what you gave away. Regardless,
I'm not afraid to die.  I just don't want you
to find me in the darkness like a tired moth

too afraid of light to burn itself up

completely.

Starting Over

The story starts:  in the beginning {Stop}  if I could go there now

in my new garden boots the color of paradise,

a heart in the shape of a shovel with the yellow eyes

of a wolf just as it tires and a pillow that smells like

the perfume of clouds, I could begin again.  {Start}  

There are so many stories about {Life} as for the others

about crossing over, night after night I hear their slow, dark

voices speak of black seeds, deep red flowers and the missing

light.  Something about the big, quiet house and those waiting

to be born inside.  What I meant was "the wind carries those

who love it to the other side."

A room that is not a room.  A bird that can't fly but

burns the wetness of its wings out.  A tear  that never

forgets to slide to the corners of the mouth.

My mother reads to me a book with pages as heavy as shadow,
dense as sleep and it sounds like singing, it sounds like a wild
and strange animal whose throat is filled with a thousand crows
in startled flight. At the end of the story {Stop}  I close
my heart and {start} over again . 

Collision and Its Darkest Hour

No matter what collides, day into night,
God into fear, love into debt, the smallest
particles of secret into its darkest hour-

essence inexplicably survives.

The manner in which things collide: 
dutifully, remorsefully, with resignation 
or fight changes nothing,

no matter how traumatic.

Only this:  the discipline of our world,
the way in which it keeps itself separate from
its obvious beauty and its terrible truths

offers perhaps a sweeter promise.

No matter.  A million particles of light 
in the shape of  a ladder climbs sleepily
into its silver bed, huddles like a child

and falls into sleep.







.

Poetry or Happenstance?

Blindness said to Darkness:  without gravity, it is coincidence
we've met here.  And of sight, forgive me if I say:  not all birds
can sing, some can't even fly.  Do you suppose they know
what they are missing?

When we close our eyes, we know what color
blood is, how warm the sun, how deep the night,
how unfathomable the sky. By chance, we touch
the wings of morning as it's rising only

to mistake its thousand voices as a prayer.

As gift, the light bestows shadow to the body
so it might shade the sweetness of its sorrow
from the world,  repair the scars that burn
its hidden soul.  Is it circumstance

that brings us hope?


And of the dead, their clay-brown eyes
and melting hearts,  each one dreamt
they might be you or you them without
pause or concern or regret.  Not all dreams

are dreams; how can we trust them?

In every unknowable knowing-ness,
what passes ends, what grieves forgets,
what watches helpless learns to lift,
what fails reverts to finishing a thought,

a word, a question, perhaps, a poem.

Stealing Away

Now more often against its nature,
the heart separates itself from light
like a wooded creature black-mane
peppered gray, crooked boned, its head
hinged down looking for that dark place

to rest awhile or die.

Some things of beauty hide themselves
or what is left of beauty-  not to save the eye
or mind but to shame it, to chastise it, to remind it
of what is lost, perhaps of what may come-

always the heart beats soundly
until it stops.

We were made for this:  patience, leaning away,
how the beautiful keep looking for a darker
corner to slip into.  See the fibrous edges
of the heart blur and soften.  See what once

hardened us, strips away.

A Heart-full of Flower

For you, each night the wing-shaped flower
green claws filled with earth, round unblinking
eyes and purple forehead wrinkled veils of kiss-

how they worry you will miss them.

I, too every morning gratitude and fear he is
here beside me still.  Desperately, the heart
swims slowly to its darkened bottom, jagged like

a pebble in the soot.

Let grief remind me of the light-filled surface
when light is gone.  Let me be amazed the world
may touch, admire every flower then turn

its admiration to the stars whose fiery blossoms
illuminate the road to God, thrill and burst, a thousand
tiny fires fall to earth like winged-shaped flowers...

flowers you will miss.

Forgetting the Forgotten

It's not enough to know;  you must tell
the story of unopened boxes stuffed

with unopened treasures.  The smell
of everything new but forgotten like

the secret lives of wolves on some old
mountain.  They have been living there

for years without being seen or known.
I am telling you now because I hear them

crying in foreign tongues-  how fiercely
they love and kill as if their jaws have

tricked them, as if loving and killing
were the same beautiful becoming,

as if their secret desire to be understood
will somehow save them.