A couple of haikus

the Axe men lumber
through the primordial pine
slow to remember


screw your rhymes rob frost
paramedics couldn't find
us down that damn path

Brick

Don't let her go
   too,
crazy into the bottle

For want of silken plums
   above the dulcet Mikado
A pitcher full of craziness
   tugging ragged pleas
from a smear of scarlet knuckle
down by poor frisco.

Lost Kiss

I am to you a drop of darkness

Spreading across the holy waters
   of a glittering morning soul
How can one delay the destiny of dawn
By letting slip the translations
Of the stars in my chanced upon part
In the bejeweled constellation
   that prophesies us

I wonder of this curious thing
That lingers in the taste of a kiss

That first gingerly conceived kiss
Sweaty palmed contact of two trembling leaves
Sweetness tainted in nervousness
Glazed with the soft madness of anticipation
Like two roses touching in the breeze
Two fearful hearts starting to believe

Perhaps I seek that bold five-hundredth kiss
Seduced by sweet celebrations of champagne
And difficult to pronounce French dishes
It tastes like two warm hands
Clasped together in a certain prayer
Asking that they part as albatross wings
Beating to the rhythm of one heart

Wandering the raven nights within your hair
Cut from the canvas of elusive dreams
I am so anxious for the freedom in your eyes
Longing to quench a burning noontide life
To pencil the glory of my dawn for her. . .
She of eyes lost upon a sky of gems

To stay a prophet of forgotten suns
   wrapped pretty in crepe 
Bound in mesmerizing twists of fate
Can only keep me from giving. . .
   that fairy tale kiss
And seeing all the seasons
In the perfect creations of two lost souls.

- 1996

I don't hate this poem as much anymore. It used to be oppressive, not it's far enough away to just enjoy. Thanks to Rebecca Paisley for using this in her book.

Every last

When i learned to unplug
it was late,
   or far too early.
There was no sparseness 
left in the markings of my palm

i felt the one,
one boy sulking, stubborn upon steps
the grungy marble pride of old empire
a crumbling patina, vexed with time

i subsumed her next
one startled girl, petulant in herself 
a curtain swaying on divergent sands
with stranger fingers, careless left

we held the last
the actor, the lissome host of legion
nave without parish, 
 night without Polaris;
the abyssal yard which buried our fury.

I have to think about whether I even like this. Still, worth penning for consideration.

For context, I just finished watching Synecdoche, aka "what-can-we-do-to-Philip-Seymour-Hoffman-next!"

Seed of the Nothing Tree

The legend of wings falling endlessly into an emptied sky
I can forever drink vast blueness
from the thin lips of this bottle

Free-basing the river of lifetimes
Into the stench of a ritual vein
Coerced into reluctant being
by the passions of long dead thinkers
Like azure skies and topaz days
Taunted by a glaze of skylines
and lavish diamond fields of night.

Now quit this world of warm carotene smiles
whispered woods of lifted souls
raised high by earthen hearts and hands

Enough of these,
the cloud wreathed crowns of my paramour hopes
life, hugging a fiery thistle
licking hot twists about the tips of my smoking eyes

Like rough scales of forgetful carnage
old photographs immersed in flames
shuddering clumps of life fall from balance
like browned out oatmeal carvings
spilling onto cold linoleum fields of human rust

With an aqueous flicker
of granite partitions and inky land
Let the fingers in my head slip again
falling as sweeping lashes of cindery fogs,
over the brilliant eyes of hungry,
amoral fires.

- 1999

it was a very good year for delusions and poetry. may it never happen again ;)

But the night is far worse

The darkness is always itself, one.
   An unbearable burden of the sun
The slick sliver of tongue
   texturing the tactless light

for is not a bedroom lamp akin 
   to her folding shape, by a sea
The spirit shroud of bold bodies
   ensiform in the fearsome geometry of light

A silver cellar door 
   by the incalculable variability of days
 the shifty droplets lit through rain
  slinking broken insects upon glass

   the passing headlights - guillotines
  a lesion of deadly terminus

   It is in the contrasts of twos
where winsome winnowing leaves one
 i am lonesome by candle light
with a breath I am one

- 2010


I am sick. I am delirious. The cough medicine tastes like ass. Naturally, this appears to be a good time to write.

I am pleased with my first verse of the year. May you find it so as well.

In the Absence of Darkness

There are night-lights kept up in the heavens
For the little ones frightened by the empty
These sparkle, twitter, glitter to my eyes
But are lost amid the cobwebs of neon
That cover the skies I used to know

The streets are slick, broken as mirrors
Billions of lights shattered upon sidewalks
Shadows now bloom in liquid purple petals
Outstripping the glow of these sickly lights

The sky, an old umbrella with too many holes
We see glimmers, peeks, glimpses, no pictures
I prefer the woodsy, forested spots with their
Proper, honest-to-goodness quilted darkness
Laughing off the lunar end of a firefly.

- 1998

Es Sands

This the tale of fallen sand
Running past my greedy hand
There are so many who themselves
Were fated lives of living shelves
I shift the pile from hand to hand
To better hold a bit of sand
This keep of fingers clutching tight
Could not resist their shifting might
I watch them plummet down to earth
And smother men of higher birth
With fading breath I count for me
From the millions, but only three
"Bring my tale to other lands and
add your grains to another hand."

Hey

Have I told you you're a loser yet?
Did I ever laugh in your pasty face?
Ever tell you that you mean nothing?
Do you believe the words "I hate you"
Linger and play across my lips?
Can you possibly be less than you are?
Could you squirm and writhe like a worm
Being pecked apart by the casual beak?
Would your puppy-dog eyes bleed,
Well-up with undeserved tears
If I told you the esteems of cruelty?
Shouldn't you be shrinking from my touch
Withering under my Sweet 'N Low words of filth?
I know I should love your every part
Or at least be on your side, unwavering . . .
No, I've barely inflicted these lies on you
I'd hate to hurt me with you,
But you make it so hard for a loser.


- pre 1996

Diffidi

1.

i am dyed in silence.
i sit here and drown in the drone and din,
the hurt of curt keystrokes.

worthless conversation,
flatulent reconstructions of nothing into words
elegance of thought,
air sculptures of the tongue. . .


carving inconsequential holes
smiling siege engineers of mind
and calligraphers pen the glyphs
of a make believe mythology
and nothing.

only the dead are blameless

2.

this only hurts in the chest
and out to the finger joints
back when i came into my life
i used to get bad. . .

i couldn't breathe and my joints in my hand on arms
would ache . . and i'd just cry and chew on them
that, was bad.


compared . . this is daisies
the kind we handle with hands full

during the chance reunions
when we gather together
to count.


- 1999

written shortly before graduation and all that ensued.

Slim Grin

I picked flowers grown in the dim breaks of a wall
faltered peaceful over dreaming slinks
like old starlight and broken leaves
smiling through me at old midnight

and when i go mad, the grass will linger over my temples
little Grey lines, all that's left of our world
worship-fully tracing out constellations and other aberrant shapes
distant searchlights, surrounding and hounding our eyes closed

glitching off a red brown tin,
the violent banter of swollen wings fixed with starlight pins
the feeling awful, the missing
the far away sympathy of wind turned dust piles on the floor

amid this frail lattice of adhesion and illusory smoke
hush my dear and use your lips for something else.

Tri

there were five geese en-rapt in dreaming

their dappled browns, and elegant long black gloved necks made for spare faces
they didn't used to fly. .

they would swim about a little green pond, beside an ivy-eyed gazebo
their feet turn storms below, when sunlight cuts deeply through
the glass green water;
little oars, slipping motion onto waves.

they had no need of song.
Braved out the whites of their chests (when rain fell in spirals)
Held their wings broad as the hour of morning

and one day, before the heralds of autumn, the sky emptied of flight.
there were only feathers, tracing the lips of a wake, ripples and wavelets.

i held too tightly onto the last goose.
i feared she'd disappear like the others
unreeled into air, without a trace of reason
they didn't used to fly. .

i wished for the sounding of voices amid her wings,
i could have understood as they did, in silence.

and perhaps fall asleep,
they didn't used to fly. .
but most surely i fell.
she had parted when i awoke. . .

Untitled

When sleep beckons
I want no pillow
but your arm,
and no cover
but your body
wrapped around mine,
and no dreams
lest they should
steal me away from you . . .

I can feel you
even through the heavy veil
of sleep.



A short piece on the comfortable, sleepy nature of love.

Chalk

And it was on the written hundred feet
of open chalk that i found tears to cry

because my white letters would bleed
with more eloquence than they were shaped

because i could not help eyes to find a quiet
to fully fill their droughts

it was the wet shoulders of an end
attempting to bear another

beginning, new again, to be fogged
with time and evening talks

to hold the glisters of gathering dew
as they bundle loosely again

on the edges of the dreaming world
lashes webbed with oceans

stickling new wholes
in twins and trines.



The best possible thing on a summer night in New York. Just keep a friend on lookout as it's entirely too easy to become lost while writing.

After the rain. . .

Ministers of life grant leaves of peace
So we can watch others bruise their little
paws on mean tempers of steel gilded fleece
Empty needles litter floors like spittle

Voodoo liquids eat like experience
Hot barracudas swim our flesh-waters
to screaming pieces, peaceless, for penance
for bits of data, never for martyrs

When our turn to tumble came, we broke
Flung apart, skin beneath a lashing belt
Scratching bars gilded by tin waves of coke
And all the dreams that ended, torn like felt

embody this night in a cobbled pane,
where two can match one star, after the rain.

- 1997


There was a part of mercer street that I loved in the village. It is where pavement fails and a bit of New York's cobble stone spine peeks through the asphalt, as if to gleefully remind cars that this wasn't their city once upon a time. On this street was a store called the enchanted forest. I'm fairly certain I've only ever gone in there once, but their signage, and wistful window dressing always inspired me, particularly on rainy nights.

BW Life

White sand paper, pueblo walls
Baptized of a moment's wrath
Shingled hands of woven clay
Suns hold grains of sullen white
Days guard the sleeping form
Children couching their flaccid heads

Reaching toward brilliance, a moment
Confused by the theft of mere image
Flourished by cheaply sibilant moments
By artful sharpers of the eye

Limp, lulled limbs of little ones
Holding button-eyed saw-dust dolls
As cooing mothers who first gave eye
to whom on cool hospital sheets do lie.

Less Than A Memory

Times of fools and passions fall
In pace behind a kiss
As tear and time stroll by
I saw these dreams only made me lie

Standing by a tip of pen
Less than a memory. . .

Now I'm less than a broken word
We lay prone to each other
And supine to the world
Oh. . . to taste the tears
upon your skin

Balancing on the edge of my mind
Less than a memory. . .

Can the mind forever remember
While the heart fades and forgets
Losing within the faceted faces
Life in lives and the blood of words

Here at the ends of means
Less than a memory.

This Sonnet Sucketh

Resentment of such stifled craft and crapped,
Can bellow louder in no heart but art.
These terms of wild endeavors roam within
the malcontent of fevered pens entrapped.

We toss our muse upon a flame to start,
And rob the sweetness of a line with twine;
For no words sing imprisoned by cement
and mortar made by dead men, stern and tart.

My pick of tongues but speed a swift decline,
For frames of meaning I had never meant;
lay twisted playthings to a metric bent;
Stealing dreamers' idle and iron spine.

And suffered through this torturous weighing,
We speak, "I don't miss hating my writing."

A Stone's Dream

Sail dream,
Soar upon gossamer hopes
That breathe with every wind

I am wrapped up ever warmer
In wishes of you and I
In a nursery of windows
From the library of sighs

Sweet lilies are like envy
Singing of those storms
Lone raindrops still echo
With my utterance in tone

If sculptors chisel marble to life
Then let these words be chisel and life
And we the beauty they shape.

Tyes

The heavy touch of a sweaty palmed sun
Summer kisses like autumn leaves,
First warming your flesh
Soothing your eyes. . .

They're smoldering, steaming
Hot pouring downs,
Like parachutes of torn, silken ghosts

Confusing your nose.
Battering anger at your lips.

Pouring into your swollen eyes
Engorged rivers of concrete soot,
Flooding your paper clip nostrils
With burning, boiling grass, bark
Sun©dried beers and stale smoke©breaths

Your eyes climbed to the fall
Like stone birds through liquid sky
Fallen on green tufts of shotgun spreads
On the mongrel back of a mangled earth,
Like jade ringlets heralding sickness;
The wasting wit upon dull skin.

Ben

Life burdens me with these wrong colored eyes
Rusted fire escapes watching city streets cry
Lovers entwined through a stain glass mirror
The mu-shu poultry has a better life than me
"Sail again!" cries my soggy Viking soul
Tethered to a laundry line, longing to be free

Has©been whores beckon,"Pay me. I ain't free"
Visions of pigeons satisfy covetous eyes
Threadbare boxers bind a dirty grey soul
Membranous walls vibrate with an orgasmic cry
O.D.'ed on msg,"Wish it were me..."
Carelessly waltzing razors delight my mirror

Union of vein with vampiric mirror
Tortuous crimson interstates gush forth toll©free
Red armies issue from deep within me
Defiling virginal white fields before my eyes
"Retreat!" I, a fallen general, cry
Dizzying runoff enchants an imprisoned soul

The bottomless pit draws this naive soul
"Squares fit poorly in small, round holes" mocks the mirror
"Quit bleeding on me!" angry floorboards cry
Upsetting a roach motel, setting captives free
Firing skittering forms before my eyes
Broke a scattering mind within this stinking sock

- 1995



This was my first and last try at conforming to a tight format like this. I gave it a shot at my friend Ben's request. This poem was written in collaboration with a friend.

words

What lies in words
but absurdity's turds

grow fence and frieze
round a heart weary poet

despair the first
drowned in dead necrotic days

pity the twin
bound by eons crazed and cursed

abhor the terce
cloaked by laughter dense as sin

Why bear dreams that cannot not scheme
And dream tattered but without sleep
Why keep mine mortal yet so fierce
but to pierce an ache deferred.

a sonnet three lines upon it

Why trifle with this thing of prose
where words are beaten into heart
and weathering, withers to english pose

perhaps it better suit the part
a reign, I meant in poetry
my only musing art

as I am certain lechery
can rattle more than little springs
oh... and suitors bent on butchery

counting pool with finer things
a skill of dead, degenerated time
and angled, pointed dealings

and what indeed can rival rhyme
or image lain in lines that free
decieving ears while hours while and chime

what sinner knows better love than we
when it is ourself that sinner be

One night, I found myself again

One night, I found myself again. I was scouring spidery old crevices of bureaucracies for an outdated treasure. I longed for blue screens and frantic blocky cursor. . . the faithful scalpel of creaky clerks, who scuttle for shade in the belly of governmental dead-letter offices.

I was drawn to the early glimmerings of technology that stealthily, stubbornly persist to this day. Such things are heavily watermarked with sweaty familiarity, an in-bred allergy to progress, and long forgotten sacrifices upon an altar to genuine usefulness, made by long discarded grand-sires.

A writer of a decade ago would have sought an antique typewriter. Something spindly and frail in its architecture, but famously reliable by reputation. He would have accepted the various quirks of such a machine, like adopting an old hound that likes to circle and prowl after the stooped little old ladies walking home from market.

There are the vicious junk peddlers who pretend legal sensibilities when offering these expired baubles for their original list price. Certainly, amazing given that the moment you drive a car off the lot, its value crashes. And yet, software suited to monochrome orangey, greys and greens. . . for this they ask a premium. No matter. I haven't yet cracked my skull enough times to corroborate the tweed day-dreams of software's used car-salesmen.

Then again, there are the delinquents, with their perpetually black places of business. They offer in a breath, the object of your desires, surely obligation free erotica, and a wholly unrelated set of undesirable infections to co-opt, corrupt and kaput your silicon consciousness. I often have trouble getting over the enormity of their hospitality.

But this is the preferable path, to tread among the spare razors of sharks and self-mutilators; that the right bloody trail will float by. . it seems inevitable.

King of the subway

He sat
on his time-eaten,
bring-your-own-beat-up-sofa-throne
eating
Campbell's New
England Clam Chowder with a bent
fork from some Chinese
take-out place,
directly out of the can.

His fork pillaged the contents
from the rusting can,
returning white gobs to his
dainty
sore
cratered lips.


- 1992



The New York City subway was and likely always will be an excellent place for unique character studies that don't lend themselves to repetition. It is a pity the millions who ride the silver dragons every day so rarely ever give a rat's ass.