June 2011
2 posts
2 tags
232
I caught hold of a marvelous moon in my entry level lasso. I wasn’t wearing boots or a hat and hadn’t had much handling. All through April, I dreamed of the creeks rising, birds laying stone eggs, my teeth chattering to the tune of old hymns. By the time May came around, I was a nervous wreck and didn’t dare think of sleep for the trinkets it told me to hold inside my head. ...
2 tags
231
Stunning meadows steal our shadows. Bird beaks break like old bread. Like old words barely said. What greener grass we needed…what empty weather reports we heard and unheeded. I’m remembering a dream of a hawk and some quivering mouse. My scream filled the house. Singing jungles feed our families in old coins buried. Like the time we ate piranha and chuckled alone. Waiting for dawn to...
April 2011
4 posts
2 tags
230
Stealing cannonballs. hungry like cats with dead eyes. hard as tacks, steel, harder, maybe. Stealing spectrums of sound with cupped hands. Pictures taken of bridges breaking, not burning, never burning. Stealing avalanche dreams from my own small self, prairie rain extinguishing the sinister sparks I learned to look for out my own back door. Packing lunches for trips I imagined but never took....
2 tags
229
All the shrapnel of a Thursday night echo embedded in a eulogy whispered. I came apart like carpet, unraveled myself right in front of everyone. Fell away like old stars imploding into dark. Remembered for a moment the dancing in mud, the finger in the vortex, the lightning storms, the old guitar songs on the beach. All the anger that slammed like fists into a steering wheel, breaking the horn...
2 tags
228
All we need is rest. These jumping days, screaming moments have run the ragged flags of our hearts into the ground. These cattle-prod calendars shoving us forward, through to the next named thirtysomething days collected in squares to cross off. All we need is perspective, a trip to the outer atmosphere so we can look down in timeless wonder and regret nothing but our lack of gravity. Sighing...
2 tags
227
All night alabaster dreams, less than authentic. More than fever-fed, a new illness written in fine lines, palms of open hands. As if we made this a ritual, the murmurs and underhanded throws, the music boxes we traded for money. So now I imagine splinters from my childhood, picnic tables, wild white horses. It came upon the forested caving, a new soundtrack full of broken branches and bitter...
June 2010
1 post
226
Maybe I needed your sail, your compass. Beacon leaking my own small speaking. Small and weak and windbroke breathing. All the clocks reset, worn in loud rooms, strapped to stomachs like unplugged bombs. Maybe I needed your floating dreams, arms like snakes to lick my face. Arbitrary angles we drew like flight paths on maps of stamps and hard holes in empty Alps. Justifying the dying light, a...
March 2010
1 post
225
And so this silence makes its own sound, feathery and wild. It has been too long, we think to ourselves. Crumpled down into our borrowed blankets, waiting for a trace of taste to bring our senses alive again. This stillness creeps along the window sills leaving a trail of undisturbed dust. I have been waiting in the wings, wingless for the sound it brings. Flapping remembered hollow bones we...
February 2010
10 posts
224
Another human barometer, faith healing kilometer. Streets too tired for walking, empty pocket friends with wide smiles, highbrow jokes, broken plate piles. Universal theories of orphans and foreclosed notions of oceans. Hillside tirades, fencepost toasts to eloping coasts. Museums of glass and spells cast, feet sunk in mud. Anger above, small miracles like summer feeds, counted out like uneaten...
223
If we sat in bars, grimaced at bad service, napkins on our quivering laps. If we rushed into and out of traffic, rainstorms, apartments, appointments. If no one looked or noticed, cared if we ever unpacked the boxes, hung up pictures on the walls, rode elevators up and down just because. If we played pianos badly, sung off key, went to church half drunk, stumbled home with souvenirs, bled a little...
222
Beneath the still surface of a closely guarded secret, the argument of a biography came to remain a mystery. The time has come to dispel the myth of disappointment in love, of giving up on life. All these lights to show the way, no traps, no lies. Open eyes. The feud of fools unprofound. Eating their way through the blueprints of legends. As if come to drown us, a mandrake mistake. All these...
221
I keep pushing these things out of my body - anger, blood, vengeance, laughter, shrouded secrets. Victories, skin cells, shadows, tears. Heat. Force, speed, light from faulty wrist bones. Voices, fingernails, long strands of sadness. Long spirals of hair, gentle touches. Whispers, answers. Riddles, mysteries, orders and instructions. Attention, knowledge, saliva, absence. Dark matter, unnameable...
220
All you listeners, flat out broke. Back on the tip fixing to repair some of the same old wear and tear. All I say is blackbird words. Wrapping my own dark wounds like some might wrap a newborn baby. To keep it from flying or breaking its own undergrown wings. I called on you last night, wrestling with chest things. Pounding and puzzles, tangles of jangled justice meted out by bones. You knew how I...
219
I am in the chain swing, flying as high as gravity needs. The water looks like the ocean, just a bay. Full of crabs and salt and something unnameable. I’m singing dandelions to sleep. Tiny white daisies and splashing the stream into my skin. I’m running down the trail, wondering what keeps kites in love with the wind that dashes them against the rocks. I am spinning, small arms...
218
Tell me where the gold is you said. I was stilling hanging with the mohawk kids down by the wharf. And the man who paints himself silver and stands still as a stone. Tell me where the gold is you said. As the fog rolled up from the Pacific, resting in the big red cradle. Down at the gate to Chinatown, some tourist from Arkansas took a picture. I drank dull coffee in a worn down room with new age...
217
I dreamed your mother, not your real mother but one I made up for you. If we walked by the ocean I would tell you about it. The glory of your red hair whipping its own waves. I have been choking these days, silently. How many words did we share? So few but somehow I have to say I felt like I knew you. And so I cried that day when he called me to tell me that you had gone. More than I ever had. I...
216
Call me like a body calls to another on long late night drives. Every breath a beacon, that red blinking light on the mountain top under billions of stars that died before we could be born. I am waiting to be taught what need tastes like, what home will make you do. Tonight let’s take the long way through the winding shadows, windows rolled down and hollow songs blasting their way through...
215
Same anger, same pages. Told like riddles, arching over our own fingers clasped. Slings for the arrows, a diary of scars, a way of knowing someone. Keys to young girls’ telephones and typewrites from days gone by. If the awkward letters, uncorrected felt funny on the tips of our tongues, no one would say. No place would deserve its resting. Same thunder, same storm. Flags flown into cruel...
January 2010
10 posts
214
We’d always keep the loose ones hidden from her. The first she’d hear of one, she’d get out a spoon and command us to open wide, get the edge of the spoon under the loose tooth and try to pry it out. She was impatient, wanted it out immediately. Long before those baby teeth wanted to leave our bodies. So we hid our wobbly canines. Secretly pushing around the pearls in our small...
213
Close the door and play the peace song on my skin. A trumpeter’s anthem. Blue notes like bruises laying in shadow. Hum the number I remember. Tell it like you did before, the waiting bait. The long armed listening. We’re in hiding now, unhinging our flickering dim twinned sin. Call the candles like children to a party. Warmth and weathered wood will be witness to the swiftness of this...
212
Capitalize the S in Surrender. My bent fingers to the light switch tonight. The moths to my porchlight. The listless to gravity. Sheets to wet skin. Wolves to hunger, full moons, the howling. Hunting in packs, barks and yips ringing across snow banks, down dry river beds. Feet to frostbite. Lemmings to cliff sides. Motorcycles to oil streaked pavement. Incrementally giving in, sewing the white...
211
Not wanting to be victor or victim or valiant. Tired of the rigmarole of avalanched eyes. Now the blankets hunker down against my fidgeting frame and deep winter sets in. If only there could be a listener, a speaker and a set of hand signals to clap like code. Advantages earned, stars burning like the back of my eyes. Volleyed through hallways, ignored like ants. Visages of great great...
210
I need really need a refill. The medicine tastes just right. Pretty colored pills like little dots of delight. Come on doc, prescribe something to take away the pain. To take away the dreariness of seven months of rain. Sometimes I can’t sleep; sometimes I sleep too deep. I don’t remember my dreams or sometimes I do but I can’t figure out what it means. Surely, there is a cure...
209
I used to sink, to wonder what made things float. Threw sticks in streams and raced them down the banks on little scratched up legs. Stomped through every mud puddle, drank from the hose. Swam to the dock and practiced holding my breath underneath it. Felt my skin grow softer in water. Learned to float on my back, the blue bowl of an upside down sky caving over me, juicy dented blue thick below...
208
the forward motion of virtue has been replaced by itself. by plants that water themselves, feed rivers, dream of snakes. carnivorous wishes and rope red medleys of scarlet fevers. trees defining height as vines fight for a strong hold, a home, a sapping strength of length. counted off like miles, candles on a cake. an abacus of detritus. equal bodies moving and sometimes coming to rest. more and...
207
Your skin is full of revelations. I know them, biblically. And when we travel through dusty trails, the eyes follow us. The jealousy boils the land. But our eyes are waiting for darkness. For one bright star to show us the way. The wisdom held in withered hands, fragrant dreams. Dancing in scarves, sleeping in straw. Now these common signs have become gifts. We breathe in stolen scents, spend our...
206
Survived and thrived and sometimes connived. Believed, belied, cried, died, spied. Grew new things through old skin. Sank in. Dreamed, schemed, redeemed this ticket for a quick trip through a fairy tale thicket. Wolves and lions followed my trail, my wail, my penchant to fail. Feet moved leaves, smoothed trees, covered my tracks, kept me looking back at my disappearing tail. Like spring, I ran...
205
There is something about a double entendre, about pinning someone down. About sloppy guitar chords and leaky pipes. About being out in a boat, rowing 3 miles to get there. About things that go missing, crows you found out later were the thieves. On an island so remote, you didn’t see another person all week. Bathed naked in the water every morning. Cooked on a fire you built yourself, kept...
December 2009
16 posts
204
I swung and tried to take him out. Her small hand being crushed in his. The dance had ended, he caught up with us in a crowd heading for the door. They had broken up. She wanted to go to the dance but was afraid he might show up. I was in town visiting, offered to go with her. We had a good time, no sign of him all night. Until we were leaving, just inside the front door. Now they were...
203
I drove through L.A. once. On I-5 heading south. Camped in Joshua Tree. Woke up at 5 a.m. and headed east. Left Seattle in June with a U-Haul with all my belongs. Stopped in San Francisco and left everything in storage. Drove through Phoenix at 125 degrees. Walked around K-Mart just to enjoy some AC. Made El Paso by nightfall planning to camp for the night. But decided to drive straight...
202
Stampeding through this zoo, stepping on peanuts. Maybe it’s more of a carnival, big tents and bizarre melodies. Freak show barkers, bearded ladies. Acrobats and aristocrats, elephants and tigers in cages. Looking for the ringleader, fingering my ticket in my pocket. The dust kicking up from the back of my shoes. The smell of sawdust and helium. My mom says she took me when I was two,...
201
80 summers ago, maybe…we washed each other’s clothes in the river. grew. drank dandelion tea. put sleeping pills in hamburger meat that we fed the neighbors’ mean old dogs so we could sneak around while they snored. ate cake, maybe. before we got so old. painted houses for money, sunburned and freckled over. drank up all the earnings before midnight, danced in dive bars, not sure...
200
Your face like a house of cards dealing disaster. Someone holds a pair, a fullhouse, all aces. Someone plays solitaire. Blackjack was always my game, doubling down came naturally. Now we wear these papercuts like badges and bloodlines. Our bones banging around like dice in a cup. Why would anyone play roulette, you asked? Why not, I thought. I really only wanted to ride a rollercoaster from the...
199
The reoccurring theme of animal sheen. Scratched black, old sap from new trees, birds and bees. Bruised honey and dead fleas. Another July without an alibi, more down the throat, more on the skin. Burned, candle lit, mosquito bit. All the oceans overflowing, northern lights still glowing like extinction. All the ways of going away and never coming back. Pebbled teeth, caught minnows,...
198
Discount store stories, as if we needed a river, a new math for adding two and two. All the old stargazers gone blind these days. All the cardboard piled up in obscene ways. Some valley drive-by, all encompassed anti-aging creams the cashier swears by. Perfumed paper, hair, gloss, polish, remover, reliever, discover, deceiver. Who will come with gifts to uncover? Made up make up made from...
197
What’s the use of going to soon, of baring teeth, brandishing weapons? The real battles are born of boredom. Little to agree on, sad at the core. All the stuffed cotton silence, the blind piano players. The small mouthed, the angry, the dirt-caked. Every dire prediction predicted by small cracks in the foundation that flood waters rose up through staining the carpet, toppling chairs. ...
196
lacy light, so much glow to show through branches branching out. like little finger lakes, channels on mars, patterns of frost or neurons. it’s all mathematical, we suppose, geometry refracting, reflecting a new science broken into binary bits. we travel through time back and forth easily now. we fly from place to place. all the winter witnesses stand knee deep in snow and in ecuador...
195
Here’s the truth laid out like a plate of food, he said. Here’s the scratch and dent you caused when you crashed into a stationary object. I’m still sleepwalking, naming things. Stifled like a laugh in a silent room. I’m still writing the novel where the whole thing unravels easily but ends up tangled on the floor. I’m still coloring in the skin like one big...
194
The times were different, he said. Things made sense if you were an insider. Shells cracked predictably along their hinges. The sky was bright and blue and the air singed with cold. Trees were a diary of circles, seasons. New planets were birthing their own moons, dusty and distant. The buzz of byzantine brawls. Flapping famous fathers bringing down the decades like an old book to look...
193
Now I’ll tell you what really happened. The snap of twig that gave away the approach, hands over the eyes. “Guess who?” Then music from a mysterious source, a blanket on the ground. A basket full of food. An idea to transform the lakes into a new residue. Ankles tripping, full moon, mountains as a background, a sky bruised purple-black. Hands that stripped bark, built a...
192
Buy like a brother. Tiny nations of ants lining up to march away. Nightfall treats our skin like licked envelopes closing. Now clock faces on walls wait it out. Found like a place where bridges once burned, the landscape leaping into dry clouds, formed like our own fickle tirades. Mountains and valleys veering into temples and twisted wrists, divided like two sides of a coin. Places shown, traded,...
191
Cigarette genie from lamp unstamped. All oil painting and panting. My own private gestures made manic by moving milliseconds faster. Crowned hills, no frills, garden thrills. Wet hands, more glass than sand. Living like a floor, creaking and cold. Wondrous maw of many mouthed murmurs. A voice taught to murder. A mother still smothered by mistakes. Shining diamonds that cut these mirrors down to...
190
I am remembering sand. like an empty hourglass. trees flushed green dreaming of days they will shudder in gold. afraid of the days they will sit dour and bare. old crows in the branches and the sound of breaking. the smell of firewood burning through chimneys. I am remembering like roots, wet and damp. An old ancient carol of caves and the drafts of december. candles, cold coffee, messages...
189
fasting will clear your mind, she said. and i wanted to finish the story. i wanted to close my eyes and watch it all unravel like a loose thread in a red sweater. styled and swift, a river fish, i imagined, flexing and leaping straight out of the water. bold and behemoth in my own mind, i grew new skin overnight. eyes shining, hair tumbling forth before me. all this grass carpet under my winter...
November 2009
3 posts
188
All around these mulberry bushes, my words ran like gravel fountains. Panic set in like a shot of straight gin and the juniper berries stained colorless thin. If it’s an art, I’ll make it a craft, build a log raft for the long journey down. A river that rides the edge of the town. Logs limp and waiting to drown and the fathers on the levy afraid of the sound. Concrete floors in...
187
We will be reading each other’s palms by candlelight again. The yellow light of bedside lamp to see the cracks and crevices folded over and over with each grasp, fist, slow bending. The down blanket will fall in its own folds. Feet rubbing together as the four-poster bed frame boxes us into a shadow on the wall. We will be falling asleep slowly to the sound of rain and music. Pillows...
186
These two horses jump over this fence every night, while inside I wile away hours with you, laughing. Sometimes the moon spills on their backs, grown sweaty from running, rearing up and stomping the ground. Sometimes they remember being tied to posts. Sometimes their insides are like machines, every move mechanical. They have wild spotted ancestors, and spirit dancers to sing them home. Still...
October 2009
2 posts
185
Drinking from bowls, our lives are unchanged. Animals howling, scratching, searching, hunting. No literature or gestures. Only heat and cold, scent and darkness. The instinct to roam, rivaling restlessness. Swallowed like swallows, nesting near nighttime. All the brightness to forget, discover, forget again. All the flaming nonsense, the judges and gavels banging for order amidst ever...
184
Your ghost should have words and be able to fly. I’m telling you this while you sleep. Your dreams should be more muscle than ether, more wood than wind. How about music? Dresses and doorways, things you can move through, effortlessly. Mockingbirds, field mice, pretty fortune cookies on china plates. Sand and seashells calling like a telephone. A tripwire in time that is hard to step...
August 2009
24 posts
183
swank the sneer of hollow ghost, born beside the riverbank, set afloat in an abandoned moat. now burning bushes become your birthright, auctioned like a poor man’s vote. reflections of the men of old. bled until they creeped like stone. your own statue still uncarved. upset the balance and etch out loud the sounds that never could come out. and dine if you are able at the head of...