Quiet Things

I sway in a pale blue breeze of evening light
A stirring constellation of leaves
formed in the stillness that bottoms your cup.

I am father to the spaces between finely weaving words
my offering of letters from the hollow circus
of my battered, aching chest.

A silver service of distracted adulation,
strewn sweetly across your little white toes;
the ink with which I will trace our steps

Back to the preface, the one exquisite moment
when our eyes met one dreaming night
with streetlamp chaperons

and every part, ev-ery-thing hums
well-greased gears grind and spin
as we heaved, a drag of old burdens

we two, a hot engine of caresses whose roar,
crescendoed like amorous handprints
against the morning glass

the hot tick
     click
              tick
of quiet things,
dreaming. . .
of wings.

Fables

We are fireflies, you and I
seeking one, the other in twilight

Dancing lightly down hallowed streets
glowing cinders, floating through the nights we make our own
as one idea flowers into another,
petals riding a breeze

We would still our dance and just smile
the kind of smile that  begins... everything


We are burning stars, you and I
encircling heavens with our spiral trail

A starry cotillion blazing all about
They are cinders flowing through the night we make our own
Whorling ribbons of light behind us
As we weave infinities with our star dust tails

We would still our dance and just burn
the kind of burning that frees everything


We are ocean and sand, you and I
Braided lovers, falling. . . one upon the other

Playing by cover of moon and star
We're glimmer cinders, falling through the night we make our own
Our waves, the quiver of a soul-deep kiss
And by your touch, the ocean is ablaze

We would still our lips and say nothing
the kind of nothing that means everything

Uneasy Brevity

Did you just open my eyes?

    with your million kinds of smiles

    they are shells on a dark beach, sparkling

Could the night last forever. . . please?
    then, I'd have the time to remember
    to hold, and how to be bold

But then the city lights touched her hair
    and I forgot the hows. . .
        of everything.

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).