the paper ball crumpled in the streets,
i was alone to see the rainbow snowcone melt
through the hollow paper carcass, what now? my arms gray,
the sticky pointer finger reached to pop the blister high in the sky,
to burn on bronze statues of children and a shepherd dog, I was chosen to watch
their shadow cast real humans against the dust.
while my teeth wiggle all hope is still
as the silence over dead and dried cactus,
hollow from within, I am done with the sweat,
I am done.
Cellophane angel
Those bite marks, and cuticle beds, and pulled hairs are piling up
again the snake shedding skin to become itself.
What I used to be like, vanishing in the wind.
What you knew about me
Is not what you know about
Me
or my thorns.
The only time we know the age of a tree is when
the ax becomes part of the stump,
and the edge of a razor becomes the
Godless shrine worshiped in the five o’clock shadow.
These wings
clipped down to sinew and bone, the heavenly light of a cellophane angel
remaking the skin into stained glass windows, seeing through my toothless smile
the versions I ignored, and bit back on.
Once again, the snake swallowing its own tail, its own enemy is its own.
This new version of me, no one to make me small, no one to make me shrink, all of my previous selves survived like tree rings, like
Snake skin veils
This new version of me - has it hit yet?
what am I to do
In this soft survival, clinging onto hope isn’t
just enough, you saw what happened to animals lost to time;
they become perfumed into oil, we pillaged
and cored their bodies from the hot earth.
What will change from gravesites?
Just as we used fingers and
arms and bodies, and disposed and covered up the sweet whistles by hot air and hot bullets, and hot breathe,
we forgot the living seams of nature’s violent machines - time and energy.
How hollow have our promises become, how honest our cruelty.
There are some who have the honor of being forgotten,
You will be there in shame, tread over on paths to
a greater peace. During this summit toward efficiency,
nature will live on, we may not*.
* but i’ll still try my best to help!
Window seat on Amtrak to New York
Calypso and french medallions in her purse, and then there was a summer bleaching which wildly changed my perspective on what color grass could be, there were ripples in a crisp fog, and ripples in a preserved marsh, and ripples in the cyclic threads of a worn denim boot cuff. The rocks evaded the train, simply by staying put as we passed, and there were murmurs of white finches across dead and draped cat tails. It was March and it felt like the edge of May, for no other reason then nostalgia and rationality. How could a month that brought so much rain, so many tears, so few sunny days, suddenly come off as green pastures. I would reckon global warming, however my brain and body are in better spots then they ever have been - all of that just to say I am seeing the world in a different way. White sulking streams of water cascade down iron rock, there are Australian women laughing in the seats in front (I can tell by their accent), and a black poodle sitting on the chair next to mine, staring at me while I write. All I am is an observer to the world set out before me, and all I feel is the created space that I can interact with, it's hard to describe. Part of me feels that this is and will be forever, and another part of me sees the space just as a drying painting, and if I mess with it or touch it too much, I'll smudge the fine details. So I sit back in the metro seat, and dream about the reality in front of me, about elevated platforms, children moving through the car, yellow machinery sat silent like monolithic beasts, the crushing of old brick, the falling of old trees, and those piles of big dirt, gravel, sand, and pebbles. I'm falling over backwards for faces and feelings and people and light! Yes, that's it, there is abundance of light in my life, and I am capturing it. No, I am existing with it, for the light may pass, and if it does, I’ll have my own!
I was undoing bandaids as a kid so I could pick at the scabs my
Mother told me not to touch, I was playing in my cuts and then hiding my
Wounds, the same feeling surrounding the way I talked to women my
Feelings never surfaced because I never received the love I need my
Needs were not met as a child, I never want to hear the same cries my
Voice extended, dry and hoarse, pulled up roots that came from the tree my
Family built on, picking off the bark just like the scabs, just like my
Barriers I had built as a child, just as the wind blew them over my
Love extended and grew, when I started to understand that love came from within, my
Bones began to grow and ache, so much reconciliation I needed to enact, my
Future began with healing from the past, a memory I couldn’t remember my
Brain now vividly recalls the moments I dissociated from, healing two ways my
Soul and my physical shell, tree rings, heavy stones, feet of grief my
Limbs my flesh, my sorrow and guilt, no one sees my father in my
Face, everyone says I look like my mother, everyone says I act like my
Angels, at least within the last two years, and I still haven’t reached out to my
Well, nevermind. But let me say, I’ve forgiven myself for my evil I never knew I grew, my hurt
hurt people, but never again.
Green bed
My hand with the amber splinter could always write in forrest tongue,
masquerading as the dark death-rot, sponged and absorbed by the fallen tree,
the crush of a foot crumbling fifty years of tree growth into tree soup,
that is the almanac becoming the wind it sought to record, an animal body
now bones, there are parts of me split up into the meandering stream,
so long and distant, the golden fish with ancient text on their back clamor further
along the river bed, there is not enough algae to feed us all, let alone them, let alone
along the path to unravel a bent phrase
fear is what keeps me alone
what is fear anyway? How about the legless fork toothed garden snake poised up and hissing at predator and prey, Is this just some act to get through his fears?
Here a whisper is a voiceless chant, and a tree makes no noise, only soil.
Meditations on absolute love
Stop for a minute and remind me of the castellated hills I keep seeing blurs of in my mind - was there two or three ridges of mosaic granite fault rock? And did we have sand in our fingernails after hours out at sea? Someone remind me in watercolor words the dreams I captured with spun webs, someone paint me all over again, somebody undress me down to muscle and sinew, somebody strip me to the sheathed nerves again and again - blooming and quelling signals dissolved over myelinated synapses. I’ll fold my lungs into Moby Dick, words spun into veritable engravings on whale skin, and my obsession will destroy completely, just like ishmael. I’ll reduce into carbon branded underneath a smoking pan, over high heat I denature. For you I will become a gothic horror, I will become a tragedy, I will disappear. Just as feathers grew, so were they clipped. Just as the rope was hung, so was I.
Journal Jan 2024
I don’t kiss poorly, that I’m sure of; I can re-seam blue jeans, crush translucent dixie cups, run the blunt spoon across homemade broth to collect boiled hot fat, scream into the canyon where someone jumped, I love too deeply but can’t always accept that I’m worthy of love. Some days I do, days where we part marigold fields with the thick of our soles and I see you like I see willow trees shading beds of clover; we draw shiny toothed monsters, with chalk pieces so small they disappear between my pointer and my thumb, not to mention my hands are from giants, and I’ve done the dance poking bugs and fireflies with these thick catcher’s mitts, but I would rather off-myself then hurt an animal. I’ll sit listening, that’s what I do best, and you on the stump tell me everything that’s happened in your past, and sometimes you’ll make up a story so tall it even makes my dreams feel real. They are to me at least, because all my dreams wind up happening, even the ones where I’m Robin Hood giving help to the poor, even the psychoactive-slushing, duvet-coddled, butterscotch worlds where we pick blackberries with clean fingernails and pop the fruit off the spiked bed, and run around that old cemetery which was never old until I started seeing names on gravestones that I saw in yearbooks.
Which makes me think about you. Since the last time, I created a new version of us, one where none of the strawberries have soft, mushy indents, and one where your your feet are dancing away to lavender coffin by Lionel Hampton, one where we give directions to passengers freighted along under moonlit streets, one where there are tongue depressor towers struck up with glue and twine, and one where we both share small things, like shaking off muddy shoes or turning off the television, or letting out the flies between the window and the screen. And one where you are alive. When that meteor hit and you began dancing as a ghost, I heaved out everything I thought I knew, until my brain was an empty book. There was no drop to the floor, scorch of dry land, or explosion. One day you were here, the next gone - sweat and wind. You evaporated.
What I pray for is patience in decision making, giving up control, walking on Velice beach, returning habits, and forming my own opinions on challenging topics. And that all the foliage I see along the train line from north station to north Manchester, the thin line between tarred streets and watery swamps, swallows me up before I think one more thought about the concrete beneath my feet.
Depth of all this restlessness - that swamp carved from years of punic wars, while you were in Carthage I was battling my own slew of melodramatic (and sometimes truthfully somber) moments. Fire caught in the winds, we could see a torch pass through valley’s like a forest firefly, or like a steel tip arrow. Men were hush and spoke about the color of their lover’s hair, it brought them comfort thinking they would return to normal - this was not a return, this was terminal. Do you wonder about the sweat and dirt and mud caked on these warriors' tense brow, akin to a small wild hog jumping from mud puddle to mud puddle, and then mud dried and cracking like the end of a whip - I mean these soldiers were real soldiers! If they felt empowered, then it meant something… it wasn’t the kind of techno-kinetic, miles away, drone-bombing wars we’ve had now where undergraduates hold power to destroying the lives of civilians (groped and pulled and stuffed up by war contractors mind you), but one where men betrothed (I found this word hanging out of a “quick summary of old english” book) themselves to the war they were put up against! These were flesh of the spirit men! By words and spirit alone they hacked through garden’s of Eden and ate dense bread, they drew blood from the tips of their fingers by creating friction knots, and sung slow hums across miles and miles of un-trekked forests just to keep their sanity within check. And then there were the itches and scratches that had no name at the time, although today a doctor at Beth Israel might claim it as Eczema or Dermatitis Neglecta, but these warriors donned the bruises, scrapes, blood welts and rashes all the same - as badges of honor. Quickly the fuel would thin out of a lamp and these men would be held captive by the same land they were taking control of. Nature’s quiet voice became large (and scary) in the focused twilight, in the veneer of dusk’s savagery. Big animals cornered a third of men (especially those who wore fur pelts - as if to get payback), dysentery dehydrated another quarter, and the raging water made quick work of men with soft skin. An army turned into a crowd, and then a group, and suddenly, a single file line of five men. There was an understanding that only by holding together would they defeat their enemy, not the opposing army, but nature itself. While the moon still crept through foliage, the group would huddle together in their strength that they would live to see another day. That day came, and as quick as the sun rose, the five dropped dead of fatal insomnia.
There are white birds coming out of windswept heaths,
Carried by a southern gust, shallow wings tucked and folded
Into pages of information, knowledge hidden like the glowing pool of water
At the center of a jungle cave. I’ve always wondered what
those bioluminescent bacteria taste like, or if they taste at all.
Across the equator, a child has seen light for the first time,
And specks of floating dust, illuminated through empty space in a tin roof.
Down here, and up there, we keep on glimmering.
Januarys after losing my front teeth
Into the absences of enamel, wind struck tunnel becoming white noise, and crescendo into blooming hot whistles - I am reminded of simpler times with the steel kettle drum. Only the essentials propagated and hybridized (I’ve been on a plant genomics kick recently), a memory once with daffodil and citrine and goldenrod can only now distinguish yellow, yet I see mom’s bitten cuticles and her pulled back hair, and blue blouse, I see vividly the irrelevant details that would have otherwise dried and curled up. Mom has brightened the tea with hot white sugar and honey and the larger half of a lemon, of which I steal the seeds and hide in tin boxes (I was holding onto things that made noise when shaken). I have found a forever memory on the late sunday morning I can blink in and out of. There is a china tea set that shrinks as I grow, a stubbed toe against the outstretched porch steps, antiseptic wipes and a warm towel - my mother’s care crystallizing into rare gems - she holds pressed gently against my forehead. Januarys after losing my front teeth, mom and I would take the tea set out and listen to stories I made up about the sun’s beautiful smile. There must have been a muse for my made-up images - the love I needed most right on time.
Privately we cope
Still, I was asking for protection from sharp things, But what about soft things:
the beating hearts, the bodies, the fragrant words that slip under my skin -
They were far too cruel once they left, nothing mattered except your words
pressed softly around flowers, and I was not minutes into adulthood
When I realized my prayers could do more than fog a cold car window. Just as much as I
wanted everything, I wanted invisibility. All of those eyes pressed on me, ten or twelve or
Or fourteen headlights crashing towards a limping deer. They were asking for water from a stone,
at that time anyway. I had created a world that challenged love, I was living opposite the work
God had began in me, individualized faith is not faith, it was the absence of community, the absence
of unconditional love, of thinking I am capable of all things - of which I am not. So I talked, and
later we gathered, and I can tell you the place where it all started to fall:
Overtop the frail cedar beams, where almost all mosquitoes gather, right below
the crux of the log cabin’s thinning roof, we lit a fire, it was hard to tell beauty
from danger, until the cabin burnt down, and maybe that was beautiful too,
The house I grew up in was burning, the horsehair walls collapsed in on themselves, I was
Starting with a new set of rules. The pale face returns its colors. I was just beginning
To cope with a new set of feelings, a hot august day with grape soda, a child’s smile.
A nose-dive into music I had never thought about listening too, until you asked kindly.