Saturday, January 7, 2017

Shatter ★★★★

Sometimes the sky is meteoric
Black sheen glossy obsidian dark
And I can see the hands reach down
From trembling inverted mountain peaks
As the framework rafters bow and scream
I see the silver fish
In the sidewalk gutter gardens
As they move the moon carves up their backs
Making empty nests for writhing birds 
That speak warnings in whispers
Of winter upon us
The dark is coming to lay down 
Like a lover at my feet to rest on my body
To pull me under and eat my thoughts 
Until I am empty and hollow and freezing
Until my head is just a radio
Filled in between with the cries
Of the sun and the weaving of the waves
Of the great invisible rivers 
That run through my fingertips 
And point at the north star
Everything is slipping downward 
Some intimate black box hold
Like barbecue lenses and train turntables
Catatonia speaking cotton
Bach and the invisible harmonica dreaming
Quilt weighted beaches 
Remembering wet sheets and drowning
And then you say something
And the world sets back in
Everything clear

Obliviate ★★★

I was going to write a poem
In beautiful words I'd express 
The way your ghost had returned 
The black weight,  the cherished pit
But you aren't worth
Being caressed by silk soft words
To wrap around you in gossamer glory 
Instead I want words
That splinter and rot inside you 
Your existence has become a blight
On my precious memories of you
And it would be distressingly easy
To wrap you in shimmering anamnesis
To see you through a lens turned back
So maybe once you might have been
My summer
My poetry 
But now you're just an asshole

As Intended ★★★★

I wrote a poem on this page
I had addressed it to you 
But I erased it
Line by line 

The only part I kept was the end

It read

We play this game 
Where we never ask questions 
And never get answers

Which was really everything 
That I had wanted to say

And I suppose you could ask
Exactly what I meant

But you see

Miss Connected ★★★★

When our bodies were divided 
It was discovered
that we were full of emptiness 
That there were great gaps inside us
Each of us a vacant night sky
Pinned with particle stars

The only reason I feel 
Your skin under my fingertips
Is because every atom of my being
Yearns to push you away

Some suggest that
Under certain impossible circumstances
We might become unphased
And slip into each other 
Our bodies converging
Into some inextricable complication

Perhaps in some other parallel place
Some ghost of a dream
The strings tied around our fingers
Would have wound a different way
And my hand would have found
The empty spaces in yours

Maybe this is how things happened 
To someone much like me
And a person I could mistake for you 
But as things are
We just brush against each other
Feel the flaring insistent sparks of a current 
That composes the very things that we are
And walk away

Let's Run Away Together ★★★★

Let's run away together
I've grown tired of waking up in these sheets
That smell like the past
Of obligation and complication
Lets slip away under a shroud of night
With only the light from your eyes to guide the way
We'll walk barefoot on dew coated grass
Through hidden mountain passages that take us
To a home that only exists
Bound between thin cardboard leafs
Lets get married
We'll find some small town chapel
Full of well-meaning old hideaways
Who we will beguile with decadent lies
Like fine chocolates and silk from our smiles
We'll set up camp like stalwart explorers
Eat fast food and jars of peaches
We can make blanket forts of the pews
We'll drape honeysuckle from the pulpit
And bells from the windows
We'll open the doors to the moths and fireflies
And anyone else who will come
If they ask what it is
What we're all on about now
We'll tell them it's their high school reunion
A bowling league
The Armistice Day Singers
And we'll smile and say "come in"
You'll wear a key from your neck
And a band of Russian amber
And I'll wear a dress
Lined with baby's breath and butterfly wings
Instead of sharing champagne
We'll put on matching crowns
And raise our hands to the sun triumphant
Conquerors of everything we could be
And owners of everything we couldn't
And as the cold night air settles in
We'll play music on my ipod
With not a single song about love
We'll find a best man and make him toast to the absurd
And the pointlessness of life and loving anything
And everyone will be confused
And nothing will make sense
To anyone at all

Except for you
to me

And me
to you

Untitled ★★★★

I love to watch the way his body moves
I like to see the plates of bone within his back
Flex into a seamless crease above his spine
The shifting of the cords that bind his shape
I like the branches that rest under his neck 
From which he hangs the bell that holds his heart 
When it rings I feel it in my breath 
Because I see it in his eyes
Fluttering like the wings of moths
Shimmers of iridescence and the memory of midnight
It threads through me in a tightening embroidery 
I could feast eternal on that moment
My eyes devouring his 
Without his knowing he has become
the dagger in my breast that severs me
I watch his hands as they shift and tense
The line of his neck, that place I could bury myself 
I watch, waiting for him to break
Give himself away in a glance or a smile
Some unguarded elusive ruptured suture
And he'd shuck his skin like coils of birch bark
Let himself unbind unravel and peel off in layers to rest at my feet
So bare that I can see inside him
Presenting a core of being to which I could press myself 
Like a flower among his pages
A moment where he is nothing but what he is
And I would know it like I know the coursing of my blood
The singing of the spheres
A truth unintentionally and so softly given
Piercing and momentous and tiny and frail
Painted on his body in the way the surf engulfs the shore

Broach ★★★★

The world feels like a day dream
The lights and colors are cutout cardboard
On matte black backing
The city swallows the stars
And my mind diffuses my memory of them 
The images I conjure falter
In disconnected static
Just like how I can't remember
The look on your face
I only recall how it made me feel
The pressure in my throat
Inside me your eyes are a blank void
A curtain to hang the stars
Your hands are fragmented pieces
Like exploding shrapnel
Nothing holds me
Nothing keeps its shape
Nothing is certain 
Other than the feeling of my breath over my lips
The rise and fall of my chest
I can hear the shuddering sound of it 
And I want to fill it with your name
But I know it would just slip away
A dying dislocated notion
Dissipating like fog or a dream upon waking
And I need some small thing to still feel real
I need some way to keep you here