A Meditation in Fire

The beautiful ghosts when I close my eyes
Are a meditation in fire

The old names, written in smoke
I call them, to remember, then to forget

All the pretty worlds a mind can make
They know me in their sleep
But they are the thing that morning will break
So another me, each morning may wake

But you must hold me with your eyes

And touch me, as I touch you with my words
And then might we sleep dreamless,
Beneath the beating wings of birds

Because I never forget the night owns me

Within a shadow, I am her breeze 

So that this flame flows past our lips
Through all the lies we sold ourselves
Round the bind my hands would unmake
While counting a dervish of stars

Would I be clean, but hollowed out
Innocence, hungrily collapsed

A Bargain with Winter

A fog of night air wreathed in fireflies
laced with the nameless wings of song
    only a parent's lips recall

your mother sings of the space in her arms,
    that only ever fit you so
your father tells you stories to lift you in the air,
    twirling your laughter into the sunlight

hummed where words fell on the floor,
    small, hot tattering breaths
    before sleep
where silence rolls in,
a thick tide of brutal moments

Missing

eyes crazed with dreaming
far lights on the river water

found emptiness below bridges
and weeds growing to be bare

arms embracing bodily cold
digging into their shoulders

pens scratching till empty
paper crumpled into monuments

smoke and dim pool hall lights
lonely in sound of a break

carven stone archways gape wide
echoing a pair of boots

breathing slowed to dreaming
the long stem rose at your door

- 1996

Despair

Hide.

Afflicted spine to curdled toes,
  every strand of flesh
  each twig of bone
sought the pity, of burial.

His eyes pricked, broken yolks
  in apoplectic hollows.
His epileptic slaps, pitiably
  ripping unseen leeches from his arms.

His hands, lacerated maps
  of labor, shame and delusion,
  scrambled from his pockets.

Elbows locked to his body's sides
  a hungry seagull's wings,
  diving into the shallows of my ocean.


- written so long ago, I only know it was the previous century (sounds waaay cooler when put that way).

Why don't I recognize you?

New York's faces and
most New Yorkers, redlined
on lease agreements

I'd have forgotten

The street lights they burn. . .
how they travel the night
like our words,
our eyes, they will stare

there were ashes, they were curling,
like the curling of lips

while another day, waiting for light

And I ask you again,
not to tell me your tale
you may find me
but I'd have forgotten

Give me your words
though I've written no tale,
your skin
needs no written, regale

Sweet on through morning
when veisalgia fails
you'd have thrown me
with braved details

You got away
I never once heard you say
I need you
I don't need you
I need you
I don't need you
and all of those stolen refrains

our fingers entangled,
like vines will perchance
my touch's
only dance in your breath

I didn't mean to suggest
that I loved you the best
I can't write odes to each fallen robin

I remember you well, in the sweetness of dreams
But that's all,
I can't even think of you that often





notes:

a moments the madness
losing the flush of your kiss too fast

while hunting, someone caught my breath
  a music I forgot I knew
  we burned away the night in words
  of pleasure: movies and moet

your lips remembered mine, as night
would touch the dawn to brilliant light

you are the music in my mind

the softest marble of her neck
is where i want a moment to rest


how could we help but try again?
the darkness and your tender kiss

Where did you go?

Where did you go?

I looked away for a few years. . .
    the first signs of growing up
    my baby girl
    the quieted pigments of imagination

And then,
   Your coffee shoppe no longer pours
   the spider, weaves in a corner of a gallery
   girded by "art"


What became of the band
   Did their orbits break?   Were they reclined into the outward spiral
   Out past the brown lights


I read the wrong review in the North Texas Daily
   perpetually dated today
   You even play two venues next week!
   The Bar of Soap, gone the way of your cafe, and Moon a shuttered nomad

Have all the pleasures been squeezed from your fingers?
How long before they no longer believed you existed.

Though, it is all the better you stay lost