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."