We don’t need nights in Montreal
amid the parties and quick sounds
nor twilights spent beneath
moonlit tryst boughs
that made a ceiling for us.
There are other ways to make you know
how deep it is that my love goes.
So can we step out now?
Though it is dark and wet;
the world like a rainy window
all slick and phosphorescent.
I lived once on a bridge of cabs
from here to Denver.
Across town to your apartment
so like all the others, only
I am not in them tonight.
And none of those
will ever know
how deep it is
that my love goes.
I have all the stale air in the world,
arms that last for days, closing on nothing;
dusty eyes wasted from lack of sleeping forms
to fill their vision.
Untouched by the magic of the stars,
milky in the dreams of lovers
in the calm night torrents
of dear propinquity
and shared dreams.
Staring at the cave the eyelids make,
feeling a breath, unawake,
reeling to the music
of the waterlight’s sweeping gaze,
finding nothing.
Muffled by auburn locks and sighs
and in all this: the warmth of thighs,
the cold cluster of the banished air outside
knocking in its silent, ancient cry.
The fleeting goings of all the soft tones
who made harmony only seconds ago.
The evanescence of the balmy night winds.
This was my prayer
to the twilight clouds,
luminous with unearthly light
and the unheard running water
that flows through the fields
when the sun has gone
and left its shadow behind.
And so the night gave me you
and the space between us, closing fast,
as I draw to you
and move across
from the white
to the creamy glow
of your drowsy light
to match the swaying shadows’ pace
as they make
a home of the space
around your eyes.
The night chills will still find us
and the edges of skin uncovered,
open to the wilderness of a strange room
and free to the wild bright
of a crazed moon.
So we must be together now.
I seal this sooth from greedy eyes
and trying grasps to take
the world makes
at our private nights.
I want you now; I’ll want you when
the world falls apart and begins again
because we were together then
as the night made plays
to take its wonder from our hearts.
I think it’s all how you face the darkness
in all your strange and desparate ways.
My method, for now at least,
is to hide from dark in your embrace.
I sang a song as sweetly as
a song could ever sound from me;
I prayed these suburban nights
might float it toward your window.
So that one afternoon I’d find
you leaning, caring, at your doorframe.
clothed in white, your arms a valley
for me to fall there.
It’s to be expected that
I’d falter in my designs on you.
And these words, as I write them,
already sound not worth the effort.
Somehow, I can’t accept
daydreams are never real,
that all is not lost,
myself unlonlied and forgiven.
When they made you, they made you
parallel a higher heaven,
an angel come to haunt
these winding streets at dusk.
Oh if, and only if, I could make you feel
the way I do, Elisha―
all nights we would lie
captivated by the ceiling
for us, its blankness filled
with happy visions.
I want a quiet love.
I have no need of noise.
I watched, knowingly,
those girls’ blissful running, with
their arms wrapped loudly around boys.
Both genders scuttle in pursuit,
their attraction bright, alive and honeyed.
How fast those duets tire of each other!
As quickly as dewdrops at morning.
And all those happy games they play
are sallowed by the end thereof.
All their laughter ends one day;
it dies and is forgotten.
We metronome, counting silent moments.
Nothing between us save a diagram of breath.
Softness in the windmill fields and hills,
a muted affection, this beauty of rest.
You are a singing sigh, the best alive,
a valley in a sea of mountains
in the still early hours before the earth talks
and no affairs seize concentration.
We encase censored words in glances,
trapped it in hushes and patient embraces,
nurture it slowly like a prized scion,
but must let it go―it becomes too much.
This quietness begins to dissipate,
no moment holding long enough.
Memory? They can take that too.
But I feel permanence, somehow, with you.
So I made you.
I carved you of gleaming marble; it was
as white as the drunken clouds
parading the sky when I looked up.
They were painful memories only, to me now.
They swept above the plow
as I pushed it;
and I must have known you even then,
as unknowable your beauty is,
I must have heard some echo
and felt you in my breast
which until then was a hollow place
because I had not met you yet.
And the way those clouds looked
against the azure sea sunken in the sky!
I took that blue and made your eyes.
I blanched the ivory for your bones
and once pristine, I smoothed them so
I could make you stand, and sit, and roam;
yet be as silent as a mountain reach;
and as silky as fresh ocean foam.
I wove the bowstrings of your throat
so they’d sing the sighs of trees
and hit the lonely, plaintive notes
for with you I want to weep
and be contained by you.
So I made you.
Three times I burned the whitest fires
for you on my altar and awoke
to the morning dew.
I saw six signs from the Cyprian,
she who could breathe life into you.
And I ran home to see.
As the summer burned my lungs,
I hurried home, would not stop,
flug the door to break the hinge,
collapsing at your pedestal,
scared to look above lest
my mind betrayed me.
In the maw of night
I slept not and missed you
in my dreamy wanderings.
My apprehension and anger
at what is left over in the world
when you’re not in it:
a dusty speck.
Iron and blood,
and no song.
No song.
Your face is smooth and soft geometry
fashioned in lapidary harmony.
It’s a realm of perfect shapes, all those
connected by one kind of foundation;
its lineaments more powerful, clear and windswept,
and its planes, the principle guiding its fairness
In glassine arches I found calm conversation
and in your eyes, promises of wealth,
adjacent spaces undulating,
they ripple like molten gold
and then avast
by some remarkable craft
of whatever god
formed you in a spark of genius.
The gentle ways you move your hands
seem beautifully preordained.
Movements like sound waves, finding accord
in the way you walk a street,
or brush your hair,
when you’re quiet
and won’t talk to me.
Not because you tire of it
or because you do not care
but rather, you must find
stillness inside yourself
and forget for a moment
that the world is there.
How many times I wished
those eyes would find my eyes
or reconnoiter my own face,
satisfied even when they wouldn’t,
that I could steal a moment
to study your grace with intent.
So, to whatever lucky someone
whom you grant that permanent gaze,
I wish you as much happy love
as worlds there are throughout space,
or stars there are in alpine skies
where no city lights
glowingly disguise
our course of sight for them,
along all the long and happy days
I hope pass across your flawless face.
Purpose made the womb of nature;
she planted it in my mind at birth.
These thoughts to curse me with
that utopia of bliss and hurt.
The voice I’ve known as long
as time has touched my eyes to sleep;
that long echo of
a better world was mine to keep.
And you’d soften all
the callous lines
that made me heavy
and bring me down from heaven,
where I spend my time.
For the world does bind
me to you too tenuously
and this was worrying.
Abscond to mother,
many galaxies divine
and dine
on ambrosia of the stars’ design,
so be mine,
Danaë.
She is all reds and blues,
swirling in a forever flux of hues,
upward, as if in solitary copy
of Apollo and his object, Daphne.
Appearing on command if dreamed,
gesturing, yet not lifting a finger,
wearing black and looking brighter for it.
To her, he'll bend his knee
for her, he will forsake his taste.
It was a though they were another’s memories,
and they told me only pain.
Of times when she was looked on with smiles,
others’ eyes that smiled a greater truth.
When children ran into rain,
and together we conquered cities
by secret games.
In a private language
known only to us and to them,
they discussed their love, their lives;
they died and were born again.
They talked of how it was the end
of the dying earth and we rejoiced to hear.
Death, cold circles
tinged with red and
storms inside.
Pushed in the miles
(seconds?)
between us.
Years ago (nights ago?),
red curtains, jade,
empty luster.
Morning after.
Upon waking up:
a shame I’d forgotten was there.
Deep and endless, wet shame,
eating like dark termites,
a sparkling black stain
shrinking my organs away,
corroding my brain.
But then, I remember,
when once…
lips curled around the
nape of your neck.
Fingers curled around
strings of fine hair,
long, full and light.
A right arm, hungry,
pulling you towards
around your waist.
Smaller than me
when, eyes locked,
they looked just as
lost to me.
That look
blue and empty,
not in a a bad way;
I see that now.
A scream.
Immediately miles away
and years, echoing.
When was it?
September? October?
It was definitely cold;
I remember that much.
Fresh―we danced
and
then we were together,
just like that,
water flowing underneath
and between us.
From then
to alone.
Jade, jade, jade
I keep thinking of jade.
Pale light―
Or was it filtered that night?
Through rosy curtains?
That would make it red
so I was wrong
I remember now.
They were red.
How many was it?
Only days
only one
only once.
But now I’m plagued
ruined you;
ruined me.
The Atlantic is gray
and endless today.
Between is…
…like the water that night!
Stale in whatever becomes of love in the gray mornings after
How can they name something new
something so old and vile?
Once pink,
filled and flowing calmly
and slowly,
certainly
smiling, saying ‘yes,’
marbled with flowers that looked
like Valentines.
Now gray and
filled with icebergs,
impeding any motion with malignant blankness.
Parading ships, light, colorful,
old fashioned,
flags, denoting everything
in celebration of an ancient,
sleepless thing.
It’s almost like a joke.
It’s turned my food to ashes
and my kisses into dust,
sight replaced with
a gray smear across
my eyes
and an unabiding lust.
My heart now pumps
a black, ferrogamous fluid;
chest pains keep me awake in the vacant early hours
and there is a cloud of locusts in my brain,
eating a golden crop of boyhood
I had no idea had sprouted.
And I can’t focus to bat them away;
when I rally and try this even,
they return hungrier and more numerous.
Where there were idle
movements and innocence,
there is now only hesitation
and the regrets of the antiquated.
Where there was once
furious eating with
meaty relish,
now there is crouching
on the edge of a circle,
moving for scraps from a table.
I don’t blame you;
I’ll never blame you.
Maybe there were problems,
but I had problems too.
And we fit into each other
in a brief, milky-white heat.
(Move/mo)ment(s)
that it forgave everything
about us
and made us the same.
I’ll never regret you.
But, I am torn.
Black projections―
a Rohrshach test,
blotted upon my heart.
A nightmare theater,
white and black tincture,
restless sleep, lit by memories,
those yellow,
in pinks, greens and baby blues,
in a succession of feminine colors.
Seeing myself from above,
in pain, as though I had Cholera.
A scream,
silence.
The sharp wail of
a blank wall.
Static.
Then nothing, but
pregnant
and suggesting,
like a TV seconds after
it’s been turned off.
No lions more to stalk these sometime avenues or streets,
made to tigers by the ochre glow of city lamps
which hung then, abundantly, in accorded peace,
as people moved among the paper lights in trance.
Made hardened now by the strange embrace of years
which protect me from that damp morning
my distance makes me think you brave―or good.
But if I’d known you,
I’d be a tree ripped from the earth.
So no lions will claim their territory tonight,
invoking old codes for hunting rights.
But lord knows we will try
to goad them into growling,
while other worlds flicker
on television screens
of vacant lots and shops
all above us.
Intermittent loss
of power in the picture, tears
for all the things me do.
Facing this cheap, fluorescent truth
I make my doleful due.
And I dedicate these thoughts to you.
For a second I thought the mannequins were real.
They hung suspended, twisted heels.
An abrupt tableau of space existing
to advertise the ways of wearing
specific dresses which one could buy
in the store situated behind.
They had no faces, but were impossibly thin,
dress cloth writing deliquescent lines
over pale angelic bones, and back again,
to hover over the floor, like hearts stopped
after missing beats, they took you quickly
and beckoned with obliviousness.
They were built for their poses,
constructed for no other motive
than to dance for us, jauntily anchored
in their defiant frieze.
And their eyes would be cold
if they had any.
Luckily, they were blank plastic.
And they look both bored and interested
and I can’t help thinking
that they represent a better class of human:
tall and unaffected,
both the men and the women.
Most of these were written on trains
sliding quietly along tracks,
snowflakes caressing windowpanes
until violet nightfall dimmed to black.
Alleyways laid with metal bent,
the winter bloom of snow unfurled
as people stepped on and then went
like all the good things in this world
Most of these were written, subject
caught clearly by image in mind
and if not, I would resurrect
her from details she’d left behind.
Her missing pieces were woven
cloth contrived to correspond
to dialog among actors chosen
and known beforehand all along.
Most of these were written not to
just one woman but to many,
though emotions, a certain few
unify them all within me.
Or, they were written in sorrow,
that shadow cast by the twilight,
silently painting the barrows
in indigo and anthracite,
from a depth just beneath my bed,
stared out of in the morning,
not alive, still not quite dead,
not falling apart, not forming,
not anguished, yet ever tangled
between aphotic and alight,
scarred, haggard, pock-marked and mangled,
too sedate, too weakened to revive.
All of these remain unfinished,
because, captured in ink I find,
on paper dull and diminished
what brightly burned behind my eyes.
Most of these I wrote on streetcars,
when, in the last hours of the day,
upward, you first start seeing stars
like diamonds sunk in vivid gray.
Written and again rewritten,
making headway over the chops,
as the tram car jumped now and then
swaying on the rails between stops.
When the doors opened, every time
little caprioles of snow twirled,
shapes appearing to augur signs,
perhaps of good things in my world.
The train moves faster where there lay
straight sections; there, the track uncurls.
Houses slipped by, then slipped away
like all the good things in this world.
Most of these were written on trains
as snow swirled around the Heidelberg streets
and people looked down; I looked around
trying to see a meaning in their flurry
that danced and darted along the lanes.
I knew, even then, the risks at hand,
in huddling over a notebook, aligning the words
so that they struck the chords that rang
from the feelings that came first.
So much has been lost since then
and I’ve abandoned the records that tethered me
to that dim morning when, awaking,
I stumbled onto strings of gold.
Awkwardly handling them,
I caught what I could.
They remain as they were,
and I as I was then.
I like these and have seldom shared them.
They are from a long time ago.
I am now 32 years old,
and arguably still ‘young,’
but I was much younger when I wrote these;
yet, up to this day, they’re still undone.
Most of These, Alt. “The Good Things In this World”
Most of these were written on trains
that jostled through the streets
while the people came and left
like the good things in this world.
OR
Most of these were written
on trains that jostled through the streets
between warmth and snow-bitten
while I tried to write and read.
I thought, often in those days,
“how conspicuous am I?”
all of these people wondering
where this boy would go, and why
I would like to live
In a city, with a daughter.
To read to her and teach her,
give her what I have to offer.
Listening, I would hear,
in her whispers against my ear
something maybe that would make me
see the good things in this world.
I wouldn’t tell her often other
of all the fairies and her mother
I thought if I'd hide it just along
or break in reaching, run to cover,
of all the dawn along, recovered.
And when she’d ask, in splendid pleas
to please hear back, her ended mother
I think I’d lie, at least disguise,
the shame of her, couched in my shudders
We would drink in noonday, after morning
and before the noon had said,
in its portent, or its dour warning,
that the day is one half dead.
watch her straightening her hair
and hide my head within her curls
but it’s morning breaking there
like the good things in this world.
But they begin to break away
like the good things in this world.
Most of these were written on trains
and stop and start.
As people came and went
like the good things in this earth.
I think at times it is misfortune.
I sit and look at myself,
seeing from the outside
the food I eat, the things I dream.
It makes me fall out of myself or cry.
I would like to live
in the city, with a daughter.
I'd love her; and she'd love all of me.
She'd be my life after all of this.
But now all that is drifting away
like the good things in this world.
Most of these were written on trains,
when I was by myself against the glass
fantasies were by me entertained
as people left or stayed
to remain or to evaporate
and float into the sky
away and among
far but not long.
Like the good things in this world.
As I write this, somewhere
there are beauties with blurred mouths talking
around a campfire with wine and beer.
They are lookingeyes are darting
but I’m not thereI am here.
As I write this, somewhere
some boys are out and driving
along Hillsborough Street,
while oak flowers are in bloom,
laughing, and carousing.
As I write this, somewhere
a college class is filled
hands are raised, arguments appraised
futures dreamed;
love and bliss are built.
Pathways walked with eyes glancing
to the brick walls dappled in reds
soon-to-be alma maters
before the echoing halls.
As I write this, somewhere
swatches are evaluated
together by a couple
drunk on love and champagne,
a frustrated pavane.
As I write this, somewhere
a girl is wondering
and thinking
and just as alone as I.
As I write this, somewhere
the weather has changed for the better.
The rains are wrung up to the clouds
the breeze at long last redounds
from west to east.
Can we all rise to the sun
calling out to every one?
All the panes are in place
to catch the light exact.
It will come down in beams
to pirouette across the angles
and halve the distance to heaven.
The light wends golden as to redden
it daubs all with an extra edge of gold.
To compare the light
in time with the soft
curled swallows of the waves,
in rhythm to the sounds
and whispers the trees made,
in one of those points of earth
where the corners of the panorama
come together in a cathedral
the arc of the earth
just right and so
does justice
and the horizon
is nearer now
and it’s as if
all the ships are anchoring
to wave flags in colors
corresponding to the sunset palette
the sun seems not to set, but stills
reluctant to infringe the sea
at least, that’s how it seems to me.
The beauty of the stars,
their icy shine yet to come
unbroken; they shouldn’t be
but for that black
that only night
over the sea
can mask.
Weekends
I am in love with my bed,
with the happiness I find there
and I rarely think ahead
to my dreams or what I’ll find there.
The tundra, but warm, is my oblivion,
too harsh a word that ‘tundra’ seems;
it’s cold but I’m wrapped in blankets.
I want to be there all the time
close my windows forever
make my peace with the voices
buzzing always in my mind
but I cannot lose myself to the sounds
from the party next door.
A bright window, facing south is above me
it’s only a shove of shoulders over the edge
fear creeps in the fire blazed across the sky
and tears me from that fantasy…
O Erin of the tall, wide and hopeful plains
it was there I saw you standing still.
You caught me away from a lighted party
to remember me down to the blue-inked hills.
And of that country young you made a whisper,
a murmur dancing the arc of my ear,
and no grasping time wrung out your eyes’ luster,
though I have not seen you in an endless year.
Your pleading voice could have encinctured death,
so across that wide gulf I have not to fear.
That town is still there, but that time is subject
to processes which tear away memory.
And my Erin of those wide-open midday plains,
drawn like the arms of mothers, once home again.
I could dive into those golden wheat fields, though
they grow in my private meadows only then.
Light makes pellucid notice
of what only was last night.
All the glasses have
fuchsia beds of caked wine.
A touched bottle of bourbon
stands resolutely at attention.
Good morning from
all sides of my room.
Today I leave
to spend Christmas
in another house for the first time.
The trains will cut a straight track
through the morass waste
of the winter palatinate.
And I will find a home
in a castle of a place,
with round edges made soft,
a white lantern hung aloft.
We are trying to save a dilapidated movie theater.
A cultural landmark for a certain section
of disparate individuals, old coffee drinkers
who watch all the movies there that have gotten
appropriate reviews, warm comforts, at a certain age.
To younger people, who see something in the place,
a sculpture dedicated to something I am too
apathetic to appreciate, or too much not of them
and everyone in between.
There are rallies, picketsthin, waving a few signs,
shouting no chants, but scattered vitriol, tempered
by being conscious of the passing cars driven
by staid watchers, those other people.
Bring in the lawyers who look like lawyers
or secret agents whom I saw not once
but three times, when the president
Visited Asheville when I was there
like he was coming just for me.
They were inimitable then.
They are terrifying now.
They approach down the aisle in black suits and genius ties.
Law schools offer, demand, courses for this.
Flies for what the situation attracts.
For them, it is a routine uprising in the provinces.
Needing to be subdued in Claudian fashion.
with glee and not so secret gloating,
while plundering this yokel demesne’s
alcohol and modest streets,
With twenty-something rapacity.
She is another sun
and her rays will twist the abeyant
shadows ensconced
in the simple hearts of boys,
suddenly into strange ghost dances,
slowly they develop a pall veil
for their sight
after having known her.
It makes me wonder what evils
will be done in the world
for the love of Lee Diana.
What future evils of the world
will be done for the love
of girls like Lee Diana?
When God said, Let There be Light, that first light must have been the color of those mountains, seen in dark lavender, from very far away. The sky looked like it had folded into the earth; the crease was that distant raise of the earth. The Blue Ridge Mountains.
I look at the sky more in Asheville. It is high in the mountains, and on certain days, nature sees it fit to warp the typical colors of life and distend the tranquility of the day, so they put on a show of spilled paint, shot through with flame. In Asheville, the sun is a kamikaze. It is reckless and has a death wish. Every day it would plunge into the pale wrinkle of the mountains and burn the sky until it was amaranthine. The sun was profoundly unaware of the effect it had all of us down here.
So the sun would die and take heaven with it, shocking it into a tremor of purple and red. It made a sound if you listened closely and realized that there was no sound sound. That it was coming from within you, a rattle of awe. Listening, understanding that this was the apex of life, here at the apex of the world. Then evening would drag the colors of the day down and replace it with the question of night, the one that begs you out of bed to see the new earth and the things in it. I remember the way the night was when I was standing in parking lots, waiting with a friend to get out of the Ingles supermarket, embracing an armload of precious beer, back when it was precious, before we would go swerve from one house party to another.
There are two skies in Asheville.
It was then when I first saw that strange sight peculiar to Asheville: of the lights of the homes dug into the hills falling in around our valley they reflected the cathedral of the dark blue sky, and made a pantomime of the stars for us, but one that still held some charm for me, to know there were people walking and sleeping up in the lights and looking down on us, maybe wondering what we were doing, or maybe looking up at the star and the pit of ink that enveloped us in its endless hands.
But in Asheville, only the beginnings of things are good. Before long, you’ll find something to complain about. No matter what it is you will forget those days when you first arrived, and made your body face the raised earth around us, tall with unassuming might, and profound with otherworldly color. So I want to write to you about that and I want you to understand how beautiful Asheville could be, before it changed or before I grew, before a thoroughfare of depression in my early 20s turned to ice those times when I was happy and real.
II. 2009-2010
Where plans turn to excuses,
excuses into regret
and regret turns into fear of things
that haven’t happened yet,
somewhere 2009,
all this was then.
And that’s where I laid my head.
Asheville, 2009-2010,
before I was myself, which I’ll never be
bnly looking back was I able to
see a mirror reflected in all that gray,
bubbles of television commercials
in a shallow sea of happening.
What could I tell him there?
I see his movements,
walking around the kitchen,
trying to be a laugh here,
an inveigher there,
and to inspire?
What can you say to someone?
They were all so nice to him.
Birthday parties thrown
amid snowdrifts
he was born in December
once when school was out
answered with insistence to stand alone,
halfhearted at that.
This security’s search
ends with fearing to ask forgiveness.
They’d probably grant it, but how can he be sure?
He loves them in his own, anesthetized way.
Drab colors and moments of terror
vast expanses of gnawing boredom.
Paroxysmal huddling throughout rooms,
the kitchen in particular
holding drink in pre-chosen hand,
complementing music suggestions
complimenting their selection.
Glancing at the hardwood floor.
Fingers tighten, release and this you must repeat.
He is peculiar, no doubt about that.
In my days America began to atrophy,
falling off in dead leaves and pieces
bloated and started to die
worse: it was a dangerous joke.
I knew who those were,
who were the pre-shadows dancing
who tilled the earth
before I was thrust to it
(in the very late 1980s).
I knew the golden/red/white/blue
ribbons of my parents,
hung likewise once.
But now we’re on the pavement,
dirtying the parade ground.
People stepped on them.
I could see the footprints
reflected to the rafters,
the outer cornices of the mainstreet fronts
and the bombs, trees and bushes.
What had happened to the festoons
of twirled national colors
and tiered cakes, white,
sticky in the summer gardens?
Was it all to drop?
No adhesive holds infinitely.
If you think I’m being melodramatic,
try living in it.
Plato says that philosophy begins
when one begins to doubt.
Philosophy is the birth of science
because it is the birth of doubt.
To me, doubt is the most
important component
of scientific method,
period.
Doubt is the difference between
scientists and technicians.
What is science and research if not
a cry for understanding?
Real understanding.
To understand, you must fully doubt
never take anything for granted.
Finally, doubt is the first reaction
to anything important
from the person
who thinks for himself.
If no scientist had ever
thought for himself,
then there would
be no science.
Science, reason and intellect
may be the major organs,
but doubt is the blood.
Doubt is the subtle shadow
that gives texture
to the masterpiece.
First, doubt everything.
Slowly, over time, you will see
how to doubt in a more productive way.
You will internalize the trait
of the discerning eye
and guide your life with control.
Most people today like science
because it makes sense
and there is an answer.
You feel as if you
could reach out
and touch it.
It is troublesome to me to try
to explain to them why
it is important to approach life
in a more holistic way.
Possibly, it is because
I myself am always doubting.
Maybe I have it wrong.
Maybe it doesn’t matter.
Maybe they’re right after all.
Also, it is hard to quantify
and present results in a
thoroughly non-subjective format.
Unfortunately, when you succumb to this,
you are speaking a language
that scientists don’t understand
and never will.
I think many scientists
have a sneaking thought
that there is something
to the study of deeper things,
but they either might not
admit it themselves
or simply view it
as abrogation.
Well, when you change yourself,
really change yourself,
you have to be careful
how far you go.
No one is all bad ever
when people change,
they tend to be drastic
and scorch the earth.
I’ve often found myself
remembering I don’t agree
with something I see
or experience and recall
that it is because I
appended it as a rider
from a larger change.
We don’t trust all of ourselves,
that’s why we change
therein lies the flaw.
Some parts of ourselves
are worth holding on to always.
When we forget this,
and not agreeing
becomes a habit
rather than a conviction.
Pick and choose what you change,
what you are, will be and were
and what you believe in;
what you leave and what stays.
That which you take
is that which remains
that which you leave
is that which you gain.
Have piecemeal ideologies.
Well, I tried to tell you how it was like
to be friends with just these other people,
three in all, but these days people aren’t
really friends with so few.
They’ve got a tumescent network
growing out of themselves.
Every new person has some spark
that is new for a while and special.
You hang out with them until
you realize your eyes were wrong
that spark you saw wasn’t really
anything that special at all.
They were just there and
your age and alive or worse.
They duped you into thinking they were.
They get installed into that
gray and out-of-focus legion
of people who are in every way them.
But some kind of nostalgic sentimentality
glows still in that person.
Just in the form of that familiar
safe face they wear,
they’ll always say hi the same way.
They’ll always dip their neck
or distend their attention
just so with the same rhythm
and the same implied thought
that’s impossible to find out.
And you don’t want to, not to mention,
but no one talks to one person anymore.
That is not happening.
This has replaced you and me.
The clang and hum of the group
is as good a replacement as any, I suppose,
for that rare kind of contact
we used to know.
Be that as it may,
if there were
two friends
whom I had,
it was David
and Leon.
Maybe they didn’t
know it, though.
There were times when I’d hear
the pummel of the kick drum
and yearn for Europe again.
The Europe I knew, killed at night,
lying on the operating table,
where we would run through it.
On the canvas of cobblestones
electrified by the rain,
bright as a path of stars
to the neon gilded clubs
where people would breathe a night
of sweat and cigarette smoke
and bodies would buffet you
from tomorrow, where you were
wide-eyed but seeing nothing,
a slave to the drop.
You couldn’t get lost anywhere
like you could at a club,
indeed Europe is forgetting lost.
I have the feeling when I am there
that I am standing on something
very old and very firm
like an ancient stone.
It is the future but it also
is primordial, that place,
for an American at least.
Europe is my world forever now
because it was once
for a handful of nights.
I think Maryjay liked Lee
because she could hold her.
Maryjay is one of those
centers of gravity
and attraction
like is Lee.
Maryjay’s charisma was simply
embrocated with soft compassion.
It made it easy to be by her contained,
to want to be contained by her,
and to not hate yourself
for being contained by her.
They are both people whom you feel
some tacit need to win over
I think Maryjay saw in Lee
this shared power.
An aspect of her own subtle power
but she knew she could control Lee,
that Lee could be controlled.
Because as many ingredients of charm
and enrapturing féminité sauvage
as held Lee, as many admirants
she could string along with an
elegant toss of her lithe waist
as many people whom she could
thoroughly fascinate complete
driving them to clip and leave
wildflowers snapped on the
windshield of her blue Honda
follow her, leaping nakedly
into deserted rock quarries
filled with only icy water
for the rumor of a promise
of a kiss and a young body
of a beautiful girl
to gather up next to you
in the night.
After all this, in the end
ultimately after all these things,
Lee could not get anyone
actually to like her.
That is a rare kind
of personal power.
That is what Maryjay had.
It is why after all the thrill expired
underneath the multifarious étages sociaux,
dans la pratique des concessions mutuelles,
between Lee and Maryjay,
Lee was only a satellite
turning about Maryjay in circuit
Maybe all of us were.
My dad, he was, to me, a distant light,
I felt his love, his warmth, abstractly,
but from very early on I knew
there was a vast place between us.
I would watch him from far away,
like a shooting star.
I was breathless and in awe of him,
in wonder and terrified.
Though his care was real,
he would launder it through
numerous intermediaries
before it wound up in my lap.
He came and went to work
and sat with us
at the table for dinner.
He took me places.
There must have been some
different connection then,
that is, between my father and me.
He showed us, my brother and me,
that he loved us.
I do think we were easier to love
for him when we were smaller.
I think my brother
was easier to love,
more comprehensible than I.
His way estranged him from us
though he was there enough
That may have been because
foremost, he was a provider.
He could interpret what we wanted,
more easily that way.
It was the way he knew how
to express his true love for his family.
An action figure would make me smile
when I was five. When I was fifteen,
I was contending with other things,
vague monsters, which he could not
chase away and shut the door on.
So he pulled back.
You are rising and rising and being pulled away,
you look down, and the whole world is huddled
around the same bonfire, you can see the light,
hear the crackling, the popping of the logs even.
But you’re being pulled up and away
and the darkness is everything there is.
There’s just this one fire for light,
and it’s the exception to the rule.
Not the rule where death is the exception.
That fire will burn out one day even.
There’ll be nothing left.
I think, though, sometimes, about
the way that light from the campfire
used to push the darkness back sometimes.
Just the margins, of course,
but there’s something to that, I think.
That the penumbra is always retreating.
The end of the light arrayed against the darkness
gaining just a bit of ground every now and then
because people stack more logs and make sure
the fire is going strong and working.
Maybe those little fiery dots that rain out upward
when you stoke a fire, a little bit can catch
on the leaves on the edges of the light,
maybe make the parts of the darkling sea
a little bit brighter, a little bit smaller.
I always liked it when I thought about that,
but maybe I’m just looking for something to like.
Things tend to end poorly at the garage,
no matter what was your particular admixture
of elation, promise and goodwill at the evening’s outset,
it always ended with a girl of your group sobbing on the floor,
or you leaving your best friend behind
in a hurry to get out of there,
departing just as you came in: one boy, no girl,
leaving you to return to another night alone.
But anyway, Bill and I rammed ourselves into
Johnny’s parents’ station wagon
with one of his roommates, Bill,
and Johnny’s girlfriend,
whose name I am always forgetting.
Racing back in the volvo through
the warehouses where the garage is,
we swung among Johnny’s joking
and Bill looking at his phone, distressed:
we’d left Ron there to fight his way in that sweatbox.
Johnny would make fun of his girlfriend,
who was pretty but admittedly not very smart.
She was really nice to me. I was mean to her.
One time she was reading from a book for class
aloud to Johnny and me;
she pronounced the word ‘epitome,’ a-PIE-tome
the tome part was with a short O, like the name ‘Tom’appy Tom.
Johnny laid in with acerbic indictments
of her reading skills, with his hilarious, slow-dripping,
syrupy ooze of a mild and whining nc accent.
“Y’all,” she said, dragging the word out,
and Johnny’s laughter out with it.
I joined in and made fun of her, thinking like I came across
as a guy confident enough to tease,
smart enough to be funny doing it
and smooth enough for that to be appealing.
oh for three on all counts, in retrospect.
I remember with an ache what it
sounded like to hear my mother whisper
with a hinting song in her voice that one
day ██ would dream about me and want me.
She would say how happy I would be.
I loved that world, but one day or
one month or one year I forgot about it.
I didn't misplace it or have something
else catch my eye, stupefying me
into throwing that vision aside. I
think I consciously set it down, carefully
burying it, not too deep, in warm soil
under a twisting tree which I knew I'd
recognize.
I said to myself that I'd come back here.
I'd retrace the steps and dig
up this treasure chest. It would show me
how to live a life of happiness again,
but time has always won out.
I forgot where that tree was
and the thing buried underneath it.
I forgot everything when that
happened.
My life since has been an
elaborate blanket drawn over that
tragedy. Once I forgot that there was
something missing at all, I think soon
I will forget it forever.
On all the books printed
in the salad days of this century
I see low combinations of numerals.
These do not denote date
but have value somehow otherwise.
Or value more than if
they were hergestellt today.
What completes in artisté
other than death?
What edifies him more
than the evacuation
of the final breath?
When the circle is drawn to close
like curtains, apotheos
will make a day of his work
which was once
under confusing shroud
of nights living.
Do not care what others do.
do not read this poem too.
Think all your life from within.
Never ever make a friend.
Absolutely no signs do follow.
Philosophers are dry and hollow
as paper, but no light shines through.
All your days are up to you.
Do not touch or think or write.
Do not contend with inward sight.
Do not eat and do not sleep.
Do not buy and do not keep.
Run away from every love.
Hate any bright from above.
Strike whatever things come close.
And avoid romance the most.
The breaths of the chest of the days there
pairs of walkers, pushing strollers, pulled by dogs dogs
the long little of the day moving in its age
voices remember somewhere
now five minutes then.
the day doesn’t know it is benevolent
but that I am not ready for it.
The air turns cold,
too slow though to notice
until the chill splits the day.
Soon it will be in its nightly grave
All my previous colors went into sedition.
We stayed up long hours
lamenting the human condition,
The shape of nature in flowers,
their buds opened only when we listened.
Raindrops fell on our command from heavenly towers
to seconds and thenonly glisten
in the sunlight, crouched on all fours
the low-hanging hills reflecting the sky
only just so scratched with a patina of clouds,
thin and retreating.
I am dead you are alive.
When the party started to grow tired and comfortably languid in the very early morning hours, I got up to take Ellie home.
She wasn’t the flower of drunkenness she was before, so it was easier to direct her to my car.
Margaret’s house was quiet and still, but punctured with a few wounds of happy light at the windows, where we could hear people dripping around those jokes which were only ever funny at this hour, and laughing about this or that person in the yearbook open on Margaret’s lap or an internet video played on her computer.
Already the cicadas were awake and you would hear them if you concentrated, but mostly you couldn't hear them and there weren’t any stars.
Raleigh was breathing the late summer in.
I took Ellie’s arm and walked her through the foliage, flanking Margaret’s house like the white breaking surf does a ship, and she didn’t say anything until I had her buckled into the car and was about to turn the key.
She seemed sober now, grave and set on something.
Suddenly there was a woman where there was a girl.
You know I always had a crush on you.
I didn’t know what to say, so I was honest and kept quiet for a while.
When I was young I dreamt of an apartment
that whiled away the night with one light on.
It surveyed the movings of the square below
while streetcars, content in idle tracks,
went here and there.
Then the stars came out
and sparkled, cold and alone.
The roving young shouting together
blended into a single ecstatic moan.
Above that, to it all,
nothing laid claim save the sky,
endlessly blacka pool of nocturne dye,
darkness without foundation.
And though a few craned their necks
to apprise momentarily its heights
no one awed so much at the abyss,
buried in its pit of twilight, but I.
It arches resolute and above me unmoving,
the swirling black retreating evening.
I wondered at their world, the young,
but not for longa few brief thoughts,
and then moved on.
I could have maybe tried it again,
escaped my desk and joined them.
Then I turn to take in again the sky
sibylline even across one hundred lives.
The stars seem to whisper and then beckon
I understand it all for a second.
That is all there is to know for now.
My mind disappears above that crowd.
I was young I dreamt.
But now I am old and unkempt.
My desultory thoughts and plans run away
scattering across miles and miles of space.
Who’s to say it won’t be different though?
If things can get worse, they may yet get better.
And I have some timenot muchbut time yet
after all, Iam
young .
OR
And then, some porcelain hope holds me
over from my last panicked moment.
After all, I am
young .
Were I in that place
a dream to chase, then find it,
alight, paused the open moment,
suddenly in slumber
awakened, sit, then welcome.
Tell us of your homeland.
Later by the heart-grasping morning,
their eyes that precious stone
particular to young shadows dancing
upon the bone
of mountains arching in the air.
Marching the horizon mare,
all yellow and pink, in ochre.
The vault in crystal ember floats,
shivering in dew and cold―
fresh never felt fresh ’til now.
Until recently, I was unused.
All of these humans,
they, filled alternating passions,
the loves which wrestle in them
eventually these loves
wind up wrestling in me.
They move to my eyes, they take control;
they make my hands move
while I recite words that rhyme.
My days started to blend together
and I liked that.
It went be beyond forgetting
what day had just passed,
whose sun was setting.
It spilled into misspelling words,
to being unable to tell the time.
I had to look out the window
to see whether it was day or night.
And I remembered
I wanted the world completely still
for one second
So I could lie quiet at the nadir
and then know it was time to begin
the craft of living.
I can’t help thinking that if I had you
Everything would be all right.
Darling, of all the hovels
dotting this city by dying light
And all the empty men in empty houses
forgetting empty lives,
only one of them
refuses to forget,
to hide you from his sight.
Is it weird to have daydreams of you reading these?
Of you calling me because I listed you by name?
No, you weren’t exactly mad
though I had opened up some scars
that had been quiet for some time―
reminded you of sunken things.
And you start to trail off
because the baby’s sleeping
and that’s all you had planned to say
you didn’t think you’d blank
once you had me on the phone
but, now, here talking to me
you just couldn’t put the words together.
I listened as you said that though;
I heard you say them through your smile.
You have a baby?
In joy I’d ask you how and why
you said you’d never have them.
How old is she?
What did you name him?
You are a mother now―
what is that like?
Then I’d say sorry.
I didn’t mean to twist
your person cruelly into verses,
to wring whatever bits of beauty
still floated in our history
until the memories came up dry.
I’d say it would feel weird
with some other name in the poems.
If you wanted I could make a statement―
I’d pause and then, just before you laughed
I’d say Jesus Christ, make a statement?
then while you laughed,
through the music of your laughter:
I mean I’d post it on my site
something like that only by happenstance
might these resemble someone alive.
Then, finally, it would be your turn
I am talking too much just like I used to
but I’m still my old charming self
what was going on with me?
Thinking I were slick I’d drawl
so that’s why you called in the first place
I’d pretend to intend it as a joke.
She has a baby; she must be married
But through my own words, I would hope.
Ha! No, in your dreams that’s why I called.
I just saw you had some poems
and I always knew you wrote them.
Something made me want to call you.
I married Dylan. Do you remember him?
I’d be quiet then.
You are still the only person I have met
who can smirk and I don’t like you less.
In fact, I never want this call to end
this poem is making me fall
in love with you all over again.
Was it that pale figure who,
rising from the angry black,
moved before there was movement
and thought before men dared to?
Who would sing the distance of poetry
before women were muses, of Helicon,
and farmer’s sons would take the night
for muses to speak with their tongues.
And of this mountain still,
he made them and he robed them
and lined them and gave each
a music of their own.
The present.
It came time for me to be alone
with the man without.
But of course, this was a funeral
and before long,
they must come too.
Eyes tracing skyscraper windows,
he was becoming sentimental of late.
He watched as friends drifted away
each enslaved to his own divergent fate.
Like contrails of smoke
separating off a cigarette
lit long ago.
There were gatherings of people,
a latticework of souls spun together
through and throughout him overhead,
to explore someone who had been ripped away.
Somehow, knowing things just before they happen
he could always fit them into a pattern.
He could see far ahead to the destination
of all his own undone affairs.
There was a dead memory, convulsing slightly,
bound by the road in long lost pathways
the thoughts reappearing at inappropriate times
but mostly when he was alone
and couldn’t find the noise
among the silence and then, suddenly…
he could see her again, like she was there.
Two years previous.
She knew exactly what poses to strike
to make the camera flashes, harsh and bright
wash over her like candlelight.
They made eyes in the early days,
the adolescence of their affection
he used to take notice of her list,
her sway in her manner of walking
pursued by golden hair as they talked.
Two days before the funeral.
They listed out the personal effects:
a series of drawings made in ballpoint pen
kind of genius in their economy, like the work of children
framed with taste in all the corners of the room;
they could make optimal use of space and lighting.
He had books about plant morphology
and the half life of iridium.
A small platoon of miniature golden toy soldiers
commissioned by an industrialist
for the birthday of a son who died at ten.
Experts appraised them around $200,000.
There were love letters addressed a famous actress
highly valued by collectors―
she had indeed responded at least twice,
with demarcations by her lilting hand
and coffee rings adding a certain charm.
The eulogy.
The days of plenty are over.
People start to wear black.
Eyeglasses wiped with pocket squares.
They sit at long tables, surrounded by papers
in silence, long into the night.
Thoughts.
They.
The dark clouds that populate my day.
Echoing flickers on a sonogram’s creeping gaze.
We produce these clouds like plants produce
oxygen by photosynthesis.
Like an afterthought or accident.
The dirt which mist collect
in the creases and seams
of the machinery of living.
The present.
The gathering is sleepless
the crowd, this accepting.
Silence hangs over the crowd.
Now is the time.
There is a glow achieved
nowhere in nature else
other than your countenance
or outside of your face.
There are colors unseen
even from those vibrantly
born only to dye
the wildest of dreams
except on your cheek;
entire palettes unknown,
shades and tints, washes, tones
that were hidden from us
until we first saw your blush.
Your voice is a sound
unheard of in the world,
available no other place
apart from the warmth of your mouth
You are something to be discovered.
Where your knees pierce your thighs,
whether calm and serene,
or words and thunderheads all the time.
Clouds overcast of maple supple apricot
Baptized with mocha freckles upon your jaw.
And those eyes, there are always those eyes.
Hooded, suspicious with delineation
that all the boys have seen to.
darkened with concern and wariness well earned
The moon, the white gate
climbed the clouds upward
toward the high place
as still as fate.
Then it was day.
The air is different there.
I think differently when I am there.
The balconies are their own
blackness against the autumn colors,
apart and aloof from words,
inarticulate, unless you’ve been there
and you must see Asheville in the autumn.
The colors the trees use
to mark, to mask their vibrant death
are gorgeous in an ancient way.
One has the sense they existed
before anything else existed
in the world at all.
They are so beautiful you think,
“How can it be that these trees
are unconscious of their splendid picture?”
They must know somehow
how colorfully they touch
the dullness of my usual world.
I am grateful for trees.
I’m thankful for the forests.
Those words from young mouths
with young minds feeling strong
and, in running, were drawing near
to that place left long ago.
Bedecked with years,
but which nostalgia commands
us to never find again, lest it lose its
censure of our happiness
and claim to our souls.
I asked the singer, play the song,
and he played it severn times.
I sat alone in that room and thought
and cried silently for that former life.
The best dream I ever had:
lying tossed among you.
On the floor,
replete with sly glances,
“How like you this?”1
My world overcome with between us,
the outermost seas the small of your back,
the highest clouds your crown of hair.
But as light as memories are at night,
I can never go back there.
I thought for a time that I might be able to live
from dream to dream, wishing you back into my mind,
thinking of you before sleep,
meeting you within it,
darting across the world, tumbling through untouched holographs
and returning each morning
To face the day renewed and patient for our next encounter.
Could I ever doubt it?
Our words and size and moans,
a quivering love, danced us in firelight.
You asked me how it felt.
For the first time it was all
the way it was supposed to be:
naked.
Where all the young girls meet other friends,
I could have had when I was young as well
I could have gone through
the cigarette smoking,
the first time you smelled green grass
the initial kiss
immediate and forgotten,
Within a minute of its occurrence
Watching the sky beyond
spindly branches in filigree,
traceries made by olive trees.
Found out how to my own music
I skipped the step and learned from my parents.
formed a band with friends
and written songs
All along the ends
I wait in debate from a rising star.
Somewhere out of place
in another race
like a Phil Dick novel.
I have been cast out to other seas.
O to what angel do I send this prayer:
to be wrapped in her arms again.
and breathing in her hair.
The sleep-painted smile
touching her mouth, her chin,
locked into shoulders, embracing it
A more perfect curve than time itself,
atrophying into his own black gulf.
Suspended now, time awaits.
And though time grants leave,
it won't be long until he abates.
Pulling us to rise
To the hot day for a while,
To calcify those dreams,
so dear-held into lies.
Up run
you go
with me
with you
blue day
oh oh
oh oh.
Next Tuesday…
too long away.
Shoulders producing sounds
not notes
not fingers
not mouths
not regret, not talking
and not calling to you.
I wish the jutting frequencies were every
paragraph of my discourse.
That speech which waves
in front like awkward joking
like a deflated balloon.
A cartoon dog tongue
were those notes
that were my thoughts,
electricity between us.
But they're not
I pretend
and that's it.
What happened since last night?
What avalanches of meaning
eroded while I was dreaming?
Invited the ached cobwebs of waking
& day looking to pervade
my peaceful pool of sleeping
& the black knife cut of days shifting
made the new sight gripping so hard to swallow.
My, and the stars have ended their segregation
& merged into one gray smear.
I slept horribly last night.
There is an ache in my back
& in my right ear.
No picture of you
resembles ones from last night.
I’d blame the light.
Though they were stored in ghostly stacks,
twilight dusk better framed your face,
the empty throb the day makes:
the single note
of the concrete sky,
rings in discord
with images of you,
implemented in my dreams
& the pictures in my hands.
Wouldn’t you?
We have mutual friends besides,
who would tear your heart from its clasp
& the lungs from your sides, gasp,
air is mucked sanguine in your chest
at the last seismic breaths
shuttled through your throat.
I have seen no land emptier
than that cleared for houses,
in large tracts all at the same time,
especially when the sun is shining.
Movement was just present there,
terror haunting over earth
red and filled now
with that ebbing moisture
we drank not so long ago,
now drying under the August sun,
harrowed earth by metal tongue
and pretermission hangs in the air.
It’s always west of something.
They are our deserts.
A hole dug pierces something, though the trees have long gone.
Its sharp quiet wisps out in a sharp hiss of silence.
The saturnine wail of flattened earth
and foreboding approaching steamy
on the horizon like a ravenous engine.
Hharpies are shrieking in his retinue,
shrill, but indiscernible in the dead air.
Where all the cowboys went when 1900 came
and hid into white-walled cities,
while that old dream
what had been a scourge to the decent,
metastasized, enveloping itself.
More potent now
that it survived on hosts solely,
a shambling wisp golem
of acids and proteins
replicating eastward,
while westward we rose
like the new sun
of a day which
will never fall into twilight,
or so we thought.
Now that is gone,
so people accepted it as alright.
To dream of killing indians
and skinning the
shaggy beasts of the plain.
You cannot cage an animal
without an evil.
The hunting urge
turns somewhere unforeseen.
You can just make out
glimpses of where our arrows point
and where our horses ride
fenced in the something
which occupied our e
She burned sage at the dawn of it.
She said that it was good for them,
good for beginnings.
To see this act reflected about me,
lying sick, staring at the months
is terrifying.
The group says I’m wasting my life.
They noted my lying sick though.
At the time it seemed
neither good nor bad.
I slid across some tundra,
horizontally and numb.
When I say numb,
I mean the most of it.
Dull plains of boredom
pierced by screaming peaks of terror.
So I’m at it again,
birthing myself here
and now for then.
My mother says
she went through pain
but now I am, too,
equal to hers, maybe,
but different,
excruciating nonetheless.
Labor drawn out over months
becoming twenty 1, 2, 3…
This decade will be terrible
and possibly my last.
A sound to it, a quiver
but wrap myself up now
in the many arms and limbs
of hiding.
I remember this with pained sight.
Her cheek chaced a broad track across my cheek,
all to whisper, “I love you.” into my ear.
The words in their soft bite,
her lying next to me in the night,
lit the open space between us
I felt someone for the first time.
The walk, when you came to me,
night air full of heat and cicadas,
they hemmed in on the strings
which ran from me to you.
But for now let’s take some fadeaway and be together.
What a soft arc your face makes,
padded in the warm dark of shadows
when I saw it then.
you leaned a slender shoulder against the edge of the wall
to listen to a reconciliation,
kissed it tender,
watched the open in your eyes
and loved the heat to dance its dells.
When the world was young
and all the karma undistributed,
the sun rose into the first house of the sky.
People stood before thatched huts,
eying one another,
running dirty fingers along pikes.
The two was realized in its lowest incarnate,
black and white were real
With the flick of a wrist,
they started to disperse
flowing on their own volition
to spark a soul’s condition.
When the world grew to high noon
and the sun was in the sixth house of the sky,
a young man threw down his pen
at boredom and blankness first
and anger later.
A heart’s muffled pounding
was thickening the veins
He was tired.
It was night.
And there were curtains over the eyes of his window.
When, then, the world was old,
the sun swam into the twelfth house of the sky.
Should artists no more than point a finger /
show blank space and breathing /
would this become us the 21st century?
The paragon and child of modernism /
these music notes unplayed /
and sheathed in meaning by their being unplayed. /
What then should be their meaning?
We who place fingers on pianos /
who refuse to listen nags of conscience /
who write along anyway /
in the face of death, everything /
should the 21st century belong to anyone else?
Tell me, now.
What then should be the meaning?
All these things, these future bubbles waiting to be filled /
a stasis, land and complete, riding atop circle mounts /
the size of planets /
Who listen and then don’t /
who can contend with this?
I want to scream with completeness!
What then should be this meaning?
I went to Joshua Tree, to fractelize my world /
And stared into the maws of deathI do it every night /
Chains festooned, brain to brain, unending in their bondage /
A slave to someone else inside /
I cannot run, the time is come. /
What now should be the meaning?
The fireworks of a tomorrow so terrible /
Descend in brilliant urgency I see but cannot run /
So read with me. /
A generation grows like viruses and termites /
But dance now, flowers, those things let bring /
thy mind to stained, soft, numbness /
Those things shall be our meaning.
They flicker and rise to life in my touch
like digital echoes of the thunderclouds above,
small and scattered in the orange glow,
the destination tantamount to know.
Caught in the penumbra
between ‘highly evolved’ taste
and vapid titillation
is my search for authenticity.
Trust allows a person to be honest,
and honesty is transparency.
If you can have transparency,
then you can have authenticity.
Ohthere goes a lily pad of a thought
thereat the right side of my brain.
Roots come around it and out
on the bottom back part,
white and blue like veins,
or capillaries?
Do those vessels feed or take?
They make the aliveness,
draw me my world with fine pencil point.
My world takes its mantle idle.
The lazy incandescence,
demure yet dangerous,
like an unfamiliar animal.
Rather my whole wake state
is like a fresh stain of wine.
In other ways, more noxious.
It compels me to chain in name
the clouds fogging my hermitage,
like a harbor at dawn.
Either asleep
or unnoticing of myself.
Maybe this is the brain’s gift.
I wonder sometimes whether I should keep reading
if that makes any sense.
I keep forgetting the bits and pieces
of whatever it is that I read.
I’m just left with a heavy feeling;
I’m in the writers mind;
I come out on the other side,
weighed down with meaning,
with just a little more experience.
My own life doesn’t seem to get any better
I can’t really quote anything
Sometimes I forget I even read a book at all.
Once it seemed that books and their reading
were a shortcut to growing
or to understanding feelings.
Also, why can’t I just sit and read a damn book?
Why am I so obsessed with moving forward?
Why does there need to be a big, profound moment,
fireworks in my mind at the end every book,
or somewhere in its story?
There’s a strange need in me
to collect the canon and the classics.
Then, on my little list, my syllabus,
I can strike them through with a line
once I have conquered them.
I can mount them on my wall
and survey my accomplishments.
You keep spinning around the same track,
You span just gets wider.
You start at the center of the path.
But slowly, you move in ever wider rings.
Farther and farther,
until farther becomes impossible.
You think you’re growing,
realizing things, but in the end,
you’re circling around the same
tract of dirt you always were.
Doubt is that shadow which adds depth and texture to life the way it does the same to paintings. It propels us from a two dimensional world into one where we see more clearly. Doubt was how I began to live again. At first doubt was hate; it was like a death. Then I found life again. It was around the same time I found Lee.
She had one of those faces where soft shadows seemed to gather more than those of other girls. When she walked, they slipped along the hems of her finely boned face like the daytime twilight caught under trees, mocking the summer. So it was, by way of these wells of shadows, that for all her sunny hair and glossy eyes, her countenance gave the impression of looking into something very deep, a pool of water collecting beneath a waterfall far lost in a forest. One would forget to think and see some movement in that water, for a second abandoned by logic and reason and sink lower into her gaze. Here was a world a thrilling distance from our own, filled with fairies and gentle blue light pulsing in languid meter. Far away was music heard so distantly each instrument coalesced into one undulating melody, a melody that sent whispers down your spine like a taunting drip of rainwater; all these and other such thoughts that attended her presence could make stillness bloom on busiest and bitterest street comers in the loudest cities, on days the gray of cinderblocks.
These were the feelings pulling at me when I spoke to her, they of course in conflict with trying to appear normal and composed around her. Being close to Lee tended to make me do things I didn’t want to do and say things which later, alone and sleepless in bed at night, I retraced masochistically over and over again, punishing myself for having done and said them. I ran from her and to her, and if she knew how much I loved to swing between those two, I didn’t care. She had me from the moment I brushed against her atmosphere.
A sentence is the vector of truth. A paragraph is profane, a chapter is too wide, a book is garrulous and bloated. Nothing is lost in a smooth, clean sentence, its facets carved to lagom. It will shine like one of those tiny diamonds that you need delicate forceps to pick up, and be worth a world more. The light will catch in it, refracted and abiding, contained and dancing, in a little world of crystalline filaments, and it will drive the gnawing termite thoughts from your brain just long enough for you to realize for that bleeding iota of time that you are deeply grateful to be alive, watching this flickering gem, or here at all.
It will render you grateful in that high, pure way that doesn’t pander to any articulated religion, trammelled and corrupted by the dust which millions of human hearts will create assuredly, or appeal to any low-down vanity of yours. A private gratitude, felt the way the view from a clean window is seen, bright, alive and unafraid, feeling without fear. For courage is facing a hard truth with clear eyes.
We’d crash through the glassine walls of the night. We were like lab rats trying to embrace each other through the unseen, but not unreal, walls of our little plastic cages. We were dogs whipped by invisible fences when we got too close to the edge. We had walked through the same labyrinth and wound up through circuitous routes right next to each other, only to be separated by a single wall, too thick to broach, too thin not not hear the others’ cries from the deep.
We were all our own stars to burn out, bright for a while, but isolated in the black, we were distances so far apart from one another that we might as well be alone. And constellations were something that humans made to draw us together, of which we were unknowing. We all saw our own skies just the way we saw them, and what business people made of making sense of all of us was both for granted, secure, and horrifying. Society is nothing more than eye-pleasing (attractive; pretty) schizophrenia.
And almost immediately, the haunt of death comes back to you. Not some cartoon of it, robed in black with skeleton hands and a rasping voice. The real death, played like a single note on a million different instruments at once, crashing into you quietly at first, though the roar becomes deafening moments later. An ocean polluted to a chemical black and ugly browns we are as drawn to as we are to the lighter things of this world.
I’d stare into the penumbra between the sky and earth the mountains made and be high and empty from that. I would wait into their oblivion. I think I’ve heard voices, or Drums, coming from just inside the Smoky powder seal of the clouds. They poured into me runic entelechy from which I could not untrammel my sight. I’d think how close they seemed. But how I could never reach them. Only from this point on the Bluff looked they like this, only from this vantage did they call and grab me from my life and make me forget all the things I want so ardently out of it. To go to those mountains, to actually walk there would devastated me. I stayed on the outcropping for an hour and walked back to where my friends were.
I looked at the sky, black and empty as it was. I saw that emptiness and I saw that black for the first time in my life, I wasn’t afraid of it. Why would I lie to you? It was true. There were the nagging thoughts, admittedly. The ideas I tossed around in my head and the stream of pain and anxiety that I knew where my home, my family of neurosis from which I couldn’t escape, but even this was some strange comfort for me, because in that movement of thought, I was secure and on speaking terms with the things about myself which tormented me
The reflection from my glasses, I saw my night, and the sparkle of the light that was in my eye was a light I had known was there always, had seen in my dreams and images of the day, in my vision of the universe itself. I saw myself seeing the world, and it was nothing at all. I was grateful and a profound and mature way that felt like a pleasant weight in my bosom, anchoring me to the day before and the day that would follow. It was the track upon which the train of my life moved, and I rejoice to find it there, guiding me like a distant light which I knew would descend itself into darkness, but that that darkness could never hurt me. I felt myself and saw myself, and I wasn’t afraid.
I wanted to make sure to write to you in a way that would do justice to that feeling. I will pass it into the next life with nothing but my writing to show that my life was one of profound appreciation for my life and the scheme of things. I wanted to tell you and make you see that I felt these things and the way in which I felt it was worth it in my own, simply because it was my way of seeing and understanding life. We will never understand each other, but if you can admit this, and still find happiness and other people, then you have been honest with yourself and installed in yourself in harmony with the stars which watch all it is that we do, illuminating our happy, invented paths for ourselves and supplying the throbbing, desperate comfort which only stars can throw to earth.
They throw it down as if it were nothing, though we love them all the more for it. How can I write about death? How can I bend the words to make you see? The deepest part of my understanding will never be accessible to you, but, you feeling the distant echoes of my impressions will generate the same warmth against the cold of the outer dark I am sure, and will reveal a foundation upon which we can trust. Maybe then we will be brothers (and sisters) and can jump across the empty awe of our consciousness, hands clasped, into a real feeling of love.
Then there were some days where I’d just open Facebook and just sit, yoking the screen, as if I were waiting for something. I was more listening to the music that I was playing. Always doing at least one more thing than just one thing at once. When you split your mind and spread it thin over a bunch of different locations, the less you feel or care. There were a lot of days where I just didn’t want to care. It would be frustrating if you were totally invested in caring about changing it, but you weren’t. It did more than just turn the volume of the million little voices if you’re worried head down, it made feelings, less pungent, or spun them off into impotency like untied balloons released into an empty room.
But more than that it was the way we needed to be in our time. I think we felt some kind of called to do that as though it were a common dream or vision, which would spring up autochthonously at points when we least expected it. It came from beyond the voices we used to drown out progress were realization. The voice beyond the voice was the song we followed. Maybe it’s guided all generation since the beginning of time. The one thing I do know about is that one is either oblivious to it, or terrified of intimating descants (lilt.).
There’s a high that comes in with that voluntary fracture of our minds, and I don’t think many people will admit this depressed. Now it’s not really a full body high, but just a subtle pressure, or happiness in the brain, that pushes the real thoughts to the corners includes your inner site from March. Even if it’s just listening to music while checking something online, or watching TV while you’re doing homework, you are feeling this.
I am grateful not only with every step I take and every glimpse of the sun that tangles itself in my eyes for flashing seconds, but every time I take off a shoe to address an itch, every time I have to get a chair to access the top parts of cabinets, every time I put on headphones while I fold my laundry, every time I have been bored in bed with nothing to do. In the music of the mundane, I found not only some release, but a wafting sense of identification with the world of humans, and that’s the world we all will face in the end, sooner or later. It just depends on when in your life it happens. The longer you push it back over the next horizon, the harder it will be to realize that simple eloquence of the routines of living are the truest paths of humans, well worn like indian avenues through the thickets of pre-colonial America. The tacit promise in them will act some minor unguent to the crouching, frustrating motes of pain that danced darkling in one like photo negatives of fireflies. They will dart into the wedges and nooks of the house like cockroaches if you seek them, but to combat them, you have boredom.
There is something intoxicating about American air. It is tickling madness, disguised by a vague veneer of “us” that darts behind corners right as you begin to chase it to find out more about what it is. “Us” is it, in america and I couldn’t believe itthat is, how simply it was to come across. This family of people it seemed to me, in the eternal summer of america, with no one pointing to how the cake was melting, and some people ran around in a shadowy, subterranean world, only emerging at infrequent times and unusual places. No one knew how the mosquitoes were blurring air slowly, or how the dog was dead, curled up under the deck. You leave for a month or two and america starts molting its feathers and you see how it really is, whatever that may be to you. But then you return and are almost suddenly caught up in the parade. Bright colors and the thrill of speaking your own language again and the people who share some sense of ideological genealogy with you; it’s almost too good to pass up. America is my family, my brother and my sister. I can hate it with familial, but when it draws me up in its arms, I cannot stay on the ground.
The high white gate of the moon hung over me as still as fate.
I looked out the wide windows to the night and saw the mordents of snow like amillion eyes tossing me in my room softly and violently. A mother trying to smother me. I had been writing,
And the way the lantern light
caught itself in the plied
and fingerprinted-to-sticky
bottle of chardonnay
made it seem as though a candle
was on my desk
I wondered for nuance, what it might be like to have been a student long ago when students had candles on their desks and in their windows and studied the anatomical heart according to aristotle, who thought of it as a flame in the breast.
For a moment it was colder and I think it paused in snowing and I was lonely for home far away as I had never before been, and the aches occluded in the black early hours of the morning bore down upon me. I wanted tears but they didn’t come.
Loneliness is best felt in the solitary hours of the night, when you’re moody and everyone else is wrapped around their beds, while you grope with the nothingness of an open window
Being alone, alone and wanting not to be, is the most profound emptiness I know. From afar, they are everything your gauziest dreams could contain. In beauty formed, they smell nice, and when they laugh that free high laugh of a happy girl, you hear nothing else. They are smaller than you and seem to flow underneath all the things men say and think in a secret set of hidden canals where, though just underneath, you see them from a very long way off, in the own corner of the days we share in the world, one so much better than mine.
Your friends in relationships will say they understand that private hurt of being alone, but they don’t. Even if they do, they don’t feel it now and now is all that matters. Even if they did once feel it, you don’t want them to. Because as bad as it is, you don’t want to be relieved of it. Most of the people I know get with their pain by at least deriving from it. The conviction that they’re paying is their own private and unique pain. That they are their own wounded geniuses and gangsters with hearts of gold. Everyone is misunderstood. Everyone has endless parts of them that no one will ever know. Everyone is mysterious, the main character of their own maudlin drama. That’s not what they say explicitly but it’s their greatest faith.
While all this is happening, sooner or later that loneliness gnarls itself into a subterranean anger as hard as oak in your stomach. Sooner or later, you are too proud to want to change. Or worse, you’ve made unlikely friends with that pain and extracting it from you would be like curing a patient of cancer by guillotining them, or throwing them off a cliff. Entering into conspiracy with your own anger is unequivocally dangerous. That is the end of loneliness and the beginning of damnation.
I desire a composition of elegance.
By hand and ink, sign it all into law.
Everyone would, speaking from a void, say:
“He did not succumb to the fear of death.”
I spent most of my life confused and thinking,
dressed plainly, wearing thin black leather gloves in winter.
Making sense of days
the metal shell of adolescence
throwing elated ideas like kites,
watching them decline, slow or fast.
All I want to do is please you,
and be kept in a gallery,
cast in iron or shown away,
included in the curricula, studied.
A lonely figure in the canon
as certain as a statue
of icy marble with a stern expression.
The sculptor’s address? I don’t remember.
Live with you? I could never.
But watch you I do always.
I’ll cry the tears of an old man
overtop your grave.
Yes, I’d also please myself.
I’d felt it since an early age.
I wanted what I thought they had,
myself achieve it and be in awe then.
She was the earth and he the sun, he shone over all of her and gave definition to her black emptiness, and articulation to the roiling, ineffable urges which pull the women I know in all directions. And I think she saw too much when she explored the cellars of her mind with him, so her heart noticed the nascent love for him and closed the door to that promising hallway quickly, before she understood the true fathoms of evil corroding, at her cellular level, the shining eidolon she pretended truly was herself. The pretty idea, that thing inherited from all of our clean-handed childhoods, where this disease of age would not come for us from the hole between the worlds, and the light of our ideas, our shared boundaries to this universe.
Though it is a blue-sky, yellow-sun beautiful day
in which the greens of the trees seem full despite their winter.
I have the red curtain pulled fast across my sightline.
It is slightly dull and bleached from ages of use.
This is my horizon,
broken only by one corner,
inhabited by a calm pine,
in a white pot.
Glowing in the sunlight
that I cannot see,
on account of it being blocked
by the tired curtain.
It is enough to see it there,
smiling with its pointed stare.
Though it has no eyes of its own,
it should have a name,
but it has none.
It will at some point in the future.
I have only to dig it out.
When it does,
in the that future time,
when I’m running again
and eating right,
I’ll know, and you’ll know
there could never have been any other name.
Then, at last, this long circle will close.
Though it was so convoluted.
It seemed like some gloomy path
through nighttime underbrush.
I thought it was to new territory,
but it will close,
like an arena round
the final victory lap,
softly deafened with confetti.
I never fell in love.
I persist how
it seems gone, now.
Will it come back?
Experience says a haunting ‘yes.’
something akin to hope
glows maybe.
Two years ago
I did something I shouldn’t have done.
All my friends know
and I don’t.
No one ever really will.
God! He cam up to me
and the party.
Darkthe waves of people parted,
a black and white spotlight
on us, both.
Pointed me in the chest,
“Don’t touch her,” he said.
I remember little
save my acquiescence,
the nods and the yeses.
Thennothing for a while.
And now I’m everything; I’m a child.
Oscillating back to forth
swing then
and tomorrow
I hope I
get lost
somewhere
in between
In the windswept, desolate cold of the heavens
where the stars and planets formed a grid
in a dance lenient enough it gave approval for chaos
granted by whatever swept the cosmos into motion.
Maybe there were no galaxies
nor perhaps were there suns;
all we saw saw the flickers of ourselves
against the pools of the heavens,
whose depths had nothing
not evident in our forms.
Would we only rub the soil enough
to cough the sand off of fossils.
Stardust was dirt, worth nothing,
encompassing a sight
beyond the ropes of flame
coursing through the veins
of the sun.
Avoiding the towering fall of night’s curtain,
in a lighted fury of sex and impulse.
Coarse is the thought of a black universe,
we are only a flash of heat trammeled to no fate.
I see it like a single blue firework,
dead in the distance of no meaning or consequence.
I cannot shake the anchor I cling to
posterity or something like it.
That must be the only God.
All is one, maybe
all is none, or
all is everything
and then of course not.
How can one eat all of it in?
And gnaw on the marrow
to become alive again?
Be fruitful and felicitous to God and fellow man.
To Him, be magnanimous.
Born againI’d like to be.
This heart knows only groping and the mind,
knows only ensuriance.
While we’re here, I could live forever
in the duration of the moment,
or have it clean and clear.
I don’t know which I like better.
When it’s smooth and beautiful
or quick, sharp and sudden.
Now when Becca showed up, as usual,
I didn’t know what to do.
I tended to freeze when she came.
I’m rarely the one speaking out,
and I don’t know that many people.
When she is at the party, she’s like a swerving car:
there’s not really much else you can do
except turn your own car out of her way
or get hit if it’s too late.
With her there never were any limits.
These days, though, it’s mostly only alcohol,
yuengling and red wine, cigarettes occasionally.
I worry about my heart and I worry about the cost,
so I don’t really tend to see her.
When Becca asked me what I thought
I didn’t know what to say,
so I was honest and kept quiet for a while.
Oh how if I could be
armored from thoughts
and away from love,
my alive world here
would be alive, too, there,
in glowing algae heaven,
floating through the night.
Stars absconded by fog,
street lamps made dull and more muted,
computer screens, naked from the waist down
and spent light from a solitary source
gives the room its being and definition.
I wonder what they think,
those who come and go, to and fro,
trace the cobblestone treads
beneath my window,
look up and see the eye of a lone bulb
glowing fiercely south with unseeing life?
But then again, it’s 4:30 AM
and I am rambling again.
The cave of being here on Earth
God is the paint from cuts coming,
drawing faces onto eminences of rock.
It was a clean dayI am and I could be
smashed by cannons
against the ship’s wall.
I was with that nameless terror today.
The kind that thrills you and throws you away.
That darkens your room to an empty gray.
And cups your heart and whispers shame.
Her hair was Pocahontas black,
bound up forever
with those thin,
sequined headbands.
She was long legged
and precipitously tall.
Apps alight with images of her
galavanting across rooftops
in New York City,
like a stylish mare
in bellotade to courbette
from balcony to fire escape
It was one of those days
which one sees in hazy happiness
even while it was happening.
What was that song called
that was furious and blue?
But not the way the blues was;
it was angry and was new.
Krishna debuts the never-molting,
eternal flower-bloom in absolute form.
Death? What death?
Not thoughts of heaven’s accord
& the ringing of the sun,
where we will surely meet again?
Flowers bloom in the crenels of the graveyard,
to take part in the fortress sleeping,
the rumble of the earth breaking,
the sky far away, but close-seeming,
you, inward leaning.
But I just, I just, I
wanted to be
on the inside.
How perfectly my one hands fits to your neck,
sprawled along the beachhead of jaw and flesh.
If I added a glow, then did you?
I trace a heartbeat to where it your chest.
A new thing today:
it seems a package
has arrived which I expected
but was not ready for
it took three weeks to come,
and to open, maybe four.
Now upon the final bow
which grants access to its cargo,
I pause
and wake up here.
She sendeth greeting by way
of the blue Jacaranda tree
and music to my ears
were but dreams to her thoughts
and colors at the corners of her eyes.
To be among the forgotten
and the eager youth.
No one asks you to be born
yet they demand that you live,
that you love and fight and die
and find things to believe in.
The hero is someone who can
participate in it all decently.
I’d go to the night thinking of you,
so that I could dream of you.
You’ll be all disconnected from this
twenty years from now.
A long time from now,
by the greatest distance,
impossible to understand.
She is another sun
and her rays will twist the abeyant
shadows ensconced
The melismatic sounds of them would ooze into my room in the middle of the day and I’d wrap a pillow around my head, but still come up for air to study the sounds when I thought I’d punished myself with silence for a respectable amount of time.
Connected golden chain to golden chain to the one wrapped around her quickening waist. That’s how she had me. I’d bow and nod my head to a flash of refracted light in her eye; I’d be terrified by a minuscule movement of a lip.
We’d crash through the glassine walls of the night.
The stars exhaled the sound of the night, the constant whisper of the trees, the world extended into all directions of primal dark. Inwardly we went into ourselves in the world was simpler for a while.
To me, I am me. To you, I am beautiful, or selfish, or eloquent, or annoying. I see nothing to forgive about me; that is nothing that needs forgiving. I am beyond all that, but it is through you that I need to be forgiven because I’m so reprehensible and myriad waves. We’re blind to ourselves because we only see ourselves through the eyes of others.
They leave me alone, to a nothingness.
This I clasp fast to my breast.
And I thank God;
I am grateful
for every handful of life
I’ve ever held
even as it ran away
down my fingers
like the juice
of a tangerine.
It is something few girls can do.
When they draw up
this sudden mask of womanhood,
ducking back, behind their faces,
the veil swishes, shakes opaque graces
they are, for a rapid minute,
vulnerable and real all at once.
Then I was dying
and blood internal clouded
the order of my insides.
I decided that I liked it.
A spoonful of blood.
I was looking forward
to meeting gods.
Everything smells normal
except the metal-bristling blood.
So I am a happy animal.
Outside are the halls,
the foreign parts of this zoo.
I remember, I remember
I loved you like December.
Cold, now, by the hearth,
warm, then, in our fire’s dying embers.
Where once was an itch are only red marks.
Sooner or later life comes for you.
Suddenly you are who you are and you’re old and real and hurting.
You always feel like you lost a vast divot of time somewhere in the middle of it.
Life is only before and after, that’s the real pain.
All of us here are troubled what makes some successful is the yearning pull that brings them back to life.
It’s usually one or a small number of things.
We are pulled by want, wanting to be alive and the possibility it provides and saved by desire until it pushes us back in its cycle.
Truth was just a big black wave, a single dark bar.
There’s art that just takes you out of this world.
And art that takes you into a better world.
Courage is facing a hard truth with clear eyes.
Tech was formerly was an idea, now it’s a mere gadget.
She was on her father’s side English, but her mother was from one of those exotic coves where people grew tall and o’er it.
Her eyes were that rare gem Catholic to all from those places as though they were waterstones all peering out from the same riverbed.
They were fiery and rutilant and would dare you if you weren’t careful.
Culture is bifurcated into two ideas in the U.S. or two epochs divided into lines along childhood and adulthood.
In childhood one is presented the charade of fairness, equality and brotherly love, compassion at all, and everyone wins.
Although already walked through the door of sleep.
In good art, you get to live someone else's life.
It is easier to break a bone on purpose than it is to break a habit on accident.
The world, between two left behind,
the green hills, crashing away in my mind.
Into that distant blurry blue.
I miss the mountains, and I miss you
Before me only doors open or close.
The path hides itself in the flower groves.
I’d hate to not, but the itch to see
other environs haunts and pushes me.
It is the chemical glow
the guiding lights.
# **Where do we go?**
it is in no sense, and no truth, that I come to you.
i come to you.
nor would it be a