speak to me

speak to me in moonlight
and in moonshine
and in bed; give me
a cataclysmic sentence,
all monosyllables and nonsense.
i want no sweet nothings from you; i want
everything you ever said
and ever thought better than to say
i want your verbal shades of gray;
i want too-pretty death by your too-pretty voice,
i want too-pretty life by your too-pretty lips,
i want long-abandoned, crashing bridges,
i want my skin to marry your fingertips.
i want to take you to the desert,
i want to tell you stories about apple juice and guns,
i want to kiss you like an arsonist,
i want to sing your hallelujah til my sacrilege drowns out the sun
in some divine lightning's apocalypse
and, in the pause, while the record skips,
just speak to me, in silence,
with your eyes and with your lips;
because you speak too much for words
with looks out to sea at the birds,
with mythic nights spent in orchards,
and you know that i was long ago convinced.

old things

we speak in different voices, these days

glass shards, cookie cutters—
cut me up or cut it out.
there are
wild things, here.
drinking, thinking, clinking glasses,
linking rhymes and artful clashes
of everything we know we’re not.
she says he says it’s not worth it;
he says she says go to hell
and leave your fucking car keys here this time;
i’ve got to go to work.

pistol eyes, they say she’s got, and guilty gasoline-tipped fingers,
she is dangerous combinations,
all crescendos and minor chords.
her hands shake, her lion roars
and it is only
a matter
of time
before there is no time, anymore.
she puts the knives back under the bed
and decides today is not the day
she’s got work in half an hour
and he won’t be home til late.

pistol eyes, they say, and loaded, too, by the looks of it.
the audience laughs, nervously.


well, it’s not as if he didn’t have it coming.

to feel

to feel, as in love, as loved we ever were,
we were honest in strings and in mirrors and ceilings
and in conscience
and in confidence.
there were, if seen separately, nevermore birds—
they warned us in the night, but we made as if not to see them
and attributed our fear to the cold.

and so, when all that we loved we had sold,
we were further away than we ever were close,
we were too high for the wings we no longer controlled,
we were in the heart of the caverns we’d always echoed.

and that, i think, was the end of it.

living in america

people pass in front of me, ghosts from other countries, other memories.

visions of places i’ve never been,

memories, moments past, hover like fog

deep, deep in my mind. descend over the sun

and smother the blue paint in white drops.

lion garden

when I was a child, I thought like a child,
I dressed like a child, I ate like a child
A child sees in us no faults, a child tells in us no cold,
But what is untold is not unknown
And so
I slipped into the garden
Between the trees, between me
And whatever else i’m supposed to be
The earth and I like strangers, shoving love notes
Underneath each other’s doors
We planted flowers
Roses, dandelions, lilies—I love the lilies
And in this garden I, one night, took a walk.
With steps that would have mattered, long ago, and now I’m not so sure
Where we are going.
But walk we will, step after step into the dark
Into the dark.
And the roots take over, cover me in earth
And sprouts, tiny sprouts grow from my eyes, my lips,
My fingertips
And tiny petals emerged like fireflies, like stars
In the dark. Between sidewalk stones and under rocks
Living in the shadows,
We all live in shadows, either we admit it or we don’t.
And the tiny white specks of the flowers
Filled my to the brim of
Light and wonder, often of Forgetful
And of remember
And of everything remembering has ever been to me.
And the flowers, long anticipated, long awaited, long forgotten
And served too cold for revenge and too present for forgetful any more,
These days,
These days the garden was remembered, and when it bloomed, it bloomed inconquerable
As I stood there in the lilies, feeling earthquakes deep beneath
In the core of whatever it is I believe myself to be
Until the trees, together, grew to be a lion,
Between myself and what I am
A lion that was fearless, that was fear and that was everything—sometimes fear is everything
Whether we admit it or we don’t
And she was one who would admit it
And one who would live on
In all my broken chains and broken wings
She could fly, you know, but she never did
She found it naïve to watch the clouds
Naïve to count the waves upon the ocean
And I knew what she was, bitter and unflinching, and I said she was wrong
And the lion spoke, in quiet whisper,
Crashing, roaring, human voice
In every moment, gnawing, growling, growing, vindicated,
Shaking, stirring, reaching,
And in eyes of fire newly kindled,
We met between the trees and the roses that rule the east,
We were, we are the wind, invisible, indivisible, invincible
And it blew into us as we blew back,
Shaken, breakable and broken
Living, and dying for it
And in that moment, the sun went out, and we, the two of us, made our own
In a revolution
Of what we ever thought it meant to live
We were immortal,
We were everything, we were, if anything is, alive,
Alone, insatiable, and insecure
Like light from a fading flashlight,
And there, despite all of my misgivings
I drank the air the flowers exhaled,
And, throwing off the veils
I listened, saw, drank, danced, and spoke
And, spinning too fast, lost track of who I was, and what I was,
And where,
And which of us had said the words
The words I didn’t think I had, I didn’t think she had,
They curdled on our tongues before we spoke
But I looked up, and she looked down and me,
While the trees were telling fortunes
And one of us, or both, or maybe neither,
Maybe pieces of us all said, shouted,
Whispered, “I am woman”,
And darkness, vengeful, crashed upon us all.

The Secret Death Ritual Of The Cherry Pepsi Supernova

pop. clink. i've got to think

that the rhapsodies are out of sync,

that the rabbit's eyes are a bit too pink,

and the cracks in the walls are eavesdropping--

waiting, patient, for the fall.

our eastwind grasses are crackling

our thermostat temples are crumbling

and to make things worse,

like a damn cutpurse

determined to cement our curse,

our straight incomprehensibly pretend

fuckcounterfeit figmental radio friends

have fled, in anticipation of the end

from we who made them first.

my ears have got that particular ring

that screams our bones into breakable,

speaks our words into corners corruptible,

that whispers our doom inevitable,

inevitable,

inevitable.

but there's still a plink plink in the kitchen sink,

there's still life to be lived in the spiderstrings,

and the wind stings hard like a pelicanwing-

flies us higher than it all.

so gimme a wink and let's have a drink,

a drink

to canon desecrating

to dogmatism depreciating

to etiquette abominating

to life accelerating

to love re-re-recreating

to truth and beauty waiting

for us,

but not in the wings,

fucking christ, who makes things like that wait in the wings?

so let's sing, let's have a drink

to circumstance

to unrepentence

to ruthless, undulating chance

to our entangled disaster-dance

to passionate irreverance.

to the letters that keep us coming back for more.

and now i'm running out of ink

so let us leap before we think,

let us feel before we know,

and let us speak before we breathe,

because there's not much time

til our stars align

and our windmill wings resign

themselves to the deathly, ticking seconds

that make us matter hardly, if at all.

hitchhiker

if angels were fishes

and fishes were wishes

and wishes were horses,

beggars would ride.

and i'm sure we could catch a ride with them if we needed;

beggars are really very generous people,

probably because they've got nothing to hide

and

nothing to give;

well, "nothing," that is,

except things real, things uncaptive,

the things you'd expect to find on your way to wherever,

things 

things like dust

and love

and dirty pennies

and boxes of baby clothes nobody wanted to look at after emily died.

elephants

the elephants walk in slow lines
towards maybe graveyards,
maybe schoolyards.
she walks, in slow circles,
through maybe crossroads, maybe through stones
that sing of deities, as promised.
but we walk far enough, there are no roads, here,
only empty fields and singing spheres
that fancy themselves planets,
orbiting around some nothing
they presume to call their sun.

but we, we have no suns--
we laugh with our eyelashes
and dance with bullets in our heads;
eyes gouged out, we see with our bones instead.
and we tell stories in fire circles
of the living, dreaming dead; it seems they are, these days,
the only beings we understand.
so we squeeze our lemon juice
and we write secret messages on our hands
so that when we die
they will know
we are like them.
and we pray, with broken fingers, to our ancestors' gods-
they are gods we don't believe in, but we have nothing else.
so we build them stone temples,
but we sabotage the stones
so that they crumble into ruins of superstitious hopes-
slowly, making our own proof
that we are all there us.

it is sad, maybe. it is absurd.
but it is the only way we are

enough

for each other.

we walk, with the elephants,
toward maybe graveyards,
maybe schoolyards.
either way, we hear children laughing in the east winds,
playing hopscotch,
and, unknowing, we laugh with them,
walking slow into the dark.

chimney sweep rhymes

and i lay hollow in the water,

writing love songs in the dark;

drunken love songs on a train, a train

taking me past watermarks and bloodstains

taking me, slow and steady,

through cross-legged harmonies

and singing, stinging, gallivanting chimney sweep rhymes.

lost

machetes clink together;

blink once,

twice,

and then they're gone.

what and where: we think we saw, we drink, we rob 

our mothers' purses,

go to breakfast, fuck,

and wake up in the middle of it, realize:

wait.

this is preposterous.

we are tiny wooden ducks that fell behind the piano.

"lost" doesn't even begin to describe.