POETRY

All Said And Done

Broken toys collecting
and there must
somewhere
be an end. Someplace.
A spot beyond which
this is true, no more.
A limit even I should
recognize. A stopping place.
A sticking point.
A shelf where each is stored,
categorized, evaluated.
Shuffled,
and sorted. Rifled, then dealt.
These - 
the pitch and trill -
are real,
flying at me
as the children ran away.
They stayed the night
but did not last the day.

Almost A Tear

A flower was crushed
along a road
in another world
where it was never meant to be,
yet was.

There
a dark bird,
trusted only by the dangerous,
screeches but can not sing.

I watch jackals 
more at home than angels,
blood caked in their yellow teeth,
freshly fed but ravenous,
always stalking.
Their paws scratch through 
the soft beds
destroying as they,
heedless,
sniff the air
and continue after the tender.

I am broken
and limp along that road,
unable to protect what I love most - 
neither 
gardener or shepherd. 

Antebellum

Before we touch,
lights out,
in the finally cooling breeze

remember,
I was loved once.
I was valued.

Before the chains appeared
to prove me bound
and the fractures appeared 
and gobbled me whole,

you saw me
and liked what you saw.

I was able to reach you
after you'd already turned away
and turn you back, again.

Our waltz was capable of beauty.

I wait on the veranda
as gentlemen do,
hat in hand,
my thoughts gone to the war.

Because There Were Mountains

I was
responsible for nothing,
created nothing,
owed nothing,
earned nothing.

The balance sheet of an awed absence.

The sun rose as it always would,
casting shadows stretched taller
than their masters.

Image outstrips form,
casts over function,
abandoning an infant
capable of lifting the world
to shake it
like a rattle.

We spend the evening huddled 
beside candlelight
searching for a name.
In the dust
I scratch maps of cities,
overridden
and forgotten.

You're laughing,
and I will never know why.

Climbing

Tears torn from the breast
and collected on wires - 
long wires
straight wires
barbed wires,
abducted from family photos,
dissected for sophomore biology
and
levitated only by desire.

If there is anything new here,
we'll read about,
break bread over it,
then gather the stripped leaves.

There must be a season.
One lifetime better than previous.
There must be one step,
one view slightly better than the rest.

Crossed Lines

Failing at the horizon,
almost beyond sight.

Scales
couple with counterweights
and
anchors result from due measure.
 
Science as emotion produces this madness.
Listen...
hear hotel suites collapsing,
our secret lives tumbling to their deaths.

Should we cry
there could be no allowable explanation
so I offer lies.

Concealed, as other heartbreaks,
smothered beneath good taste
or
status quo.
Winked at by frustration.

This is a cute beast
we've made of our hopes;
drawn,
quartered,
and caricatured.

We trust self-denial 
and
worship a lack of faith.
I prove my determination
by giving up

February In Kansas

This remembered new.
A splash of green and glass,
everything oiled and bared flesh
as the man on the boat
writes letters
demanding renewal.
A contemporary messiah
with a voice equalized
in treble and bass.
A phone ringing
once,
twice,
three times
before being answered.
By whom?
The message retrieved,
all promise, all hope,
all hype, all conjecture
contained in this single word:
"California."
Whatever was intended,
it feels like this
and starts here.

Floor Plan

Photographs sleepwalking.
Faint cracks appear,
begging something to finally happen
All ghosts - 
all characters of fiction - 
chartered floor by floor.
Emergencies take the stairs.
Checking each door,
rattling every handle. 

There is nothing
here.
Need proves that.
Nothing stays behind her 
or she never would have gone.

This much is clear:	

a golden calf,
worshipped this morning,
transformed by lunch.  Eaten whole. 
Rejected on principle, later.

She whispers "I love you"
then betrays the mirror.

The Heart Is Gone

We are no different
but the heart is gone.
Another sleepless night.
A strangled scream.
A death with different faces.

Here is resignation
confused with acceptance.
Steps that stumble
as the hungry, heartless buzzards
swarm.
As our stomachs turn
and we do what we must to make
one
more
step.

There is a cockroach
in the seat beside
emboldened
and 
unwilling to flee the light

In all these tears
we mine more sorrow, still
but cry no more.
The heart is gone.

Stone faced,
silently enraged.
Unwilling to hurt more
and might hold, if 
we found our sense of touch.

We are not hands,
not souls,
not birthday cards,
not slumber parties,
not pictures in a frame.

There is,
inside your breast,
a soft warm spot
but the heart is gone.

I Wrote

I wrote about women's hearts and black magic;
poems about the world; poems regarding hands.

So many words. Thousands of words.

I was young
and wrote about a million things
I didn't understand.
Books were filled from my ignorance.

I sang the praises of riprap and of deadfall snares,
knowing nothing of either. I longed to return
to an earth I'd never lived on.

I wrote two thousand pages, front and back,
regarding a girl I married 
but never knew.
She came to me exuding the scent of security,
the promise of full bellies and warm beds
heavy with blankets stolen from her sister.

Just twenty-one, she was already older
than I'd ever be.
She built houses from her hours,
with tables and windows for me.
She invited her family in.

I remember now and certainly
must've written it, then.

It was a fiery passionate night of making love,
pulled and distorted
to stretch over several years. 
Neither knew how to turn the light on.
Never learned.
We stayed in the dark, bumping into each other,
colliding with strangers,
slamming into but hardly recognizing
ourselves.
I became bandages and chemistry
as she became tears. 

With each of her houses
we moved farther apart. My tables grew longer
as my windows shrank.

I went home one night to find I wasn't there.
Returned the next
to discover she'd never been.
 
We were over.
What hurt most
shifted like the wind. 
Always something.

I froze in a tepid summer
and bobbed on the surface. 

I added two million words
to what I did not know. 
Different things.
but I wrote,
what she never read.

In A World Of Coincidence

In a world of coincidence
division is not required.
Some believe they connect
and break connections
but I don’t believe it.

I don’t believe god is required.
The mountains would’ve
found us. 

Everything,
even the smallest stitch,
needs more than a gentle
touch.
It takes patience
to weave; a sense of the
warp.

We must require mistakes
or accept nothing.
Must make shoes from leather
and
roads from our dreams.

I think I don’t know
enough;
can’t ask for any more
than this. 
My senses so easily
overwhelmed 
I must trust my fingertips.
Must be guided by 
the height of the sun
and the sound of the 
doves
when opening a window.

I think too much
or too little
but am never sure which
and you 
are all I have to gauge.

Innocent, In A Fashion

No one reads. Our eyes are blinded
by the bright lights,
by the crystals,
by the incredible influx of data.

There is no need to know.
My failings can be left to others.
Printed on billboards.
published in the Tribune
no one reads

It Was Always About Fluid

Your tears, in postscript, cleansing
what can't be washed free;
scrubbing our soiled souls.
Making, of blood, two images.
Both familiar. Each lost on a journey home.
Neither flagging nor likely to falter,
nourished by my carelessness.
Finally absolute.
Finally bigger.
Fully insatiable.

I closed my eyes for a moment
without finding rest.
You were here
and not here,
smelling of pasture grass and parchment,
invisible
even while I watched you walk away.
(Always away.)

Hearing no songs,
I long for a crisp silence.
I am frozen in-between your breaths,
afraid to move, 
knowing the next word spoken will be one
beyond our last
And you'll be gone forever.
Silent in the fashion of ice;
as you warm,
you are slipping through my fingers.

Poignant

Expressions of flint 
and the dances I did not attempt.
Whatever was missed survives
to be destroyed.
What smiles were spared,
lost now.
The moon seeks other partners.
I miss soft caverns
I refused to sink into.

When discussion falters - 
stalling right at the point 
of drawing breath
and
issuing sparks -
shadows haunt with clouded smiles
waiting, 
silent as phantoms,
to spring on us some fine morning,
maybe early in June,
when no one knows
or even cares
that I dreamt of an ocean.

All dreams are suspect
like shale, sheared and split on fine lines,
as the ground opens between us.
I cling to the sound of your voice
beyond the static,
building promises from the silence
to witness them flounder
in the tide. 
The moon beckons.
The waters respond.

You were always the better dancer.

Patience of the Eternal

A sculptor's chisel in shaking hands.
Marble does not sleep.
It waits.
Rising again in a thousand years.
Gazing neither forward 
nor back.

The artist is lost,
made insignificant
as the stone finds its voice,
singing a song
stolen from ancient gods,
vanquished and forgotten.

Lost in the dust.
Choked in some broad canyon
unswept by wind.
Without gasping,
it waits,
untroubled by questions of merit.
Destined to rise again
in a thousand years,
perhaps.

Pause Before Becoming

On the verge of silence
where it seems this might stretch out
forever,

reaching blue before black,
feeling what is startling
as affirming. 

Just as birds are about to sing,
children about to fall and scrape their knees,
machines about to roar

I find the sun highlighting
a single fallen leaf
tumbling slowly past,
bound nowhere,
reaching blue before black.

Pulse

Trying to put the words together
with the intention of confounding.
Nothing,

not blood,
not cash,
not a river
flows like ink.

Reaching

Reaching for the moment before it
is passed. Filed and perfectly refined.

You are the sound
of a door locking;
of a setting sun.

This secret of perfectly human -
your body without perfume,
my hands without gloves,
the sidewalk leading nowhere
when the gate is latched.

Watching the poplar trees
surviving another winter,
encouraging me to
remember nothing.

Summer, 1966

My surrender is flatware, 
slicing pointlessly through this thin air.
I starve on cherished memory.
feeding nickels into dime store ponies,
painted brown and white.

Aged stairs creaking beneath an old man
(I am rushing towards,
and meant to be.) 
shopping for Raleigh bikes
he will neither buy
nor ride. 

There is a bracelet, 
never engraved,
dangling endlessly above the scratched
glass counter,
tirelessly hinting at fulfillment
made anonymous. 

I bought exactly that
for love, first.
Secreted to protect. Saved for ridicule.
Grateful for one disappointment or another
releasing me.
Malleable as plated brass,
twisted to the shape of an exclamation point,
begging her question.

Confused more by fulfillment
than desire - frightened equally
by clenched fist 
or
complicity. 

She was the first to terrify 
with the value of what I wanted.
I learned to ask for less
and lean,
avoiding delivery. 

Forgotten jangling keys, 
clasped on a retractable chain,
lock doors at closing - 
trapping me on neither side.
Missing her as she skips into the past
to live her future.

Should you lose me,
I have lots of bars. 
My next cell is guaranteed more pliant.
My isolation more precise.

I erase myself in studied,
tender strokes
till even I have lost my place.

Summer Will Not Hunger

Waiting on the balcony
where branches sweep the eaves.
Not near enough the stairs
to feel the railing,
I am guided by the braille of history.

Here, the fissures
feel identical to lifelines
and
I breathe
the deeper breath of sighs.

Here, the sound of my voice is foreign
while the creak of floors belong.

Today Is Not The Day

There is a green wave
swamped in a cove
near the coast.

A lizard breeze 
blowing through the tan sunlight
dances 
in the folds of the Mexican girl's skirt
but her raven hair,
matted with sweat,
lies still. 

Everything,
even her smile,
is brown
and prone to dust devil tears.

I am unsettled
and near to the border
with mescal,
my broken watch,
and two crows

but today is not the day.

Voices Echo In A Quiet Place

I live 1,000 reasonable lives,
counting backwards like a space shot
threatening to rise.
Vapor.
Static on the radio.
Familiar 
with an endless
lack of preparation
when
beneath the suit
I stiffen, stalled
by any human touch;
enflamed by any warmth.
Hungry
beyond gravity.

What I'll Miss

Among the words unspoken
near the walls
as building commenced
with transit and level,
devoid of heart - 

names of the lost,
images of the missing,
bundled together with 
forgotten songs, 
sung as I fell asleep.

You,
had you been here,
would've bound them all with ribbon.
This, your sensibility:
order, with elegance.

But your eyes were not there to oversee;
you hands were absent
and I was mute.

There was a beautiful sunset in your honor
and the hungry gulls 
complained for hours,

then left, unfed.

When I Think About You

It is not apt to sail.
And, float or swim,
it must tread water still.
It will always be damp,
as a garment worker's 
shoulders are.
There must be vision.
Another sense of the possible,
if unlikely. We
must wave
from both sides of the door.
Must miss it less while here
than when it's gone.
We'll call this law.
Consider it sacrosanct.
We'll build shrines
and practice sacrifice. 
Tomorrow,
we'll be done
leaving nothing
except questions
and watermarks.
It might be funny
were the future prone to 
laughter.
It will, at least,
be moist and there is 
that
to feel thankful for.

Where The Boys Are

So much a product of everything else,
even the most original 
recognized in comparison.
Who the girls saw 
through their windows,
waiting on the stoop,
clutching wilted bouquets,
discussing previous loves
with other liars,
could be the one.

She was shades of lipstick,
he was shoe polish.
She bathed in milk and sassafras
while he drank
long-necked bottles of ale
and saltwater.

Father was wise
as the oak is wise
and solid
as the forearm and the fist.
He was fertile;
had carried his salt
until she was ripe
and ready to appear.

He would rock her
and hold her,
walking through sleepless nights.

Had he sired a princess for this?
For breeding dogs and soiled panties?
Was he reduced to delivery man
and little else?

Dad can do more;
build higher walls,
dig deeper motes
to keep her ever safe,
ever remote.

She will be cold
and unable to hear this,
or smell their flowers.