The Royal We

We will step out of the front door
into a new city, out of the heat
that has become this place;
then past the flickering lights of the skyline,
we will sleep in the hills at some new height
and wait.

What an animal a place can be,
how it can eat at your mind.
We need a place whose heart isn't gluttoneous with control,
and if we can pause this infinite loop of take and take,
perhaps something new will become of us.

This is my most fond hope, to become a new us,
to find a place where our roots may accually thrive.
That's it I guess, I long to thrive with you.

We may change our names or quit drinking coffee,
well maybe you'll quit drinking coffee.
I already gave up cigarettes.

Tutoring/Saving The World

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War Contagious

Land avoids the littered sight
of restless horizons and bitter night.
We remnants of a long-lost race
of Phoenician's blood, sea, talk, and taste.

Would that the old dregs would etch themselves
on an ancient tongue that speaks so well
and soft around the stunted point
which juts about the tenon joint.

We are a sweet sugar wind but dirge-center born.
We know the selves that wage such wars,
but come too slow to judge the haste
of easy motives with most grievous weight.

What a blind form of man we are to forget our crutch
and blend our love with chance regret. We bleed enough.

The Farmer Digging

The exhausted land,
tart with drought
and rough with age,
attempts only a fleeting resistance.

Stomp the spade,
hoist the rubble,
and unload the refuse
until my hands dream of work;
 my nights deny me rest.

I strive to cull my wife’s audible sighs,
to crop her barren assurances.

I am not some new root
that has yet to traverse the seasons;
for I’ve borne them as the land:
One by slowly one.

The breadth of my reign
is but an insignificant plot:
the measure of one hand to the other,
and I must rekindle this calloused will
until I die,
only to fall back to the same tired earth.

No Name #4

:I've seen the worst of me swallow smoke and breathe it out onto believers.

:The heavy ship of man sputters, shakes, then falls into the sea.

:I've felt the itch of death and come away with something else,
reeling in borrowed light.

:Is this some redeemable darkness that has raised its quick finger at the base of my spine?

At Night, Too Close to an Amp.

My ears sound like crickets,
though I'm not in a cabin
somewhere in the woods of Mississippi.
I'm in my apartment, on the third floor,
where I should hear my neighbors fighting
about which of the two doesn't listen when the other yells,
and the creaking of beds from other-room fucking.

This is cabin pressure,
without the popping in your ears when you swallow.
This is a flood of pitch,
not wet,
not the kind you can solve by an unceremonial hop on one foot,
a jerk of the head to one side.
This is losing a pitch, as they say,
but I have missed the sound of the woods.

An Intimacy of Scars

You are wrought with scars,
circumstantial skin that could never find its double.

I drew maps of you
in your month-long absence,
never once getting you right.

You said you were missing
a certain part of your life.
I said I miss it all.

But what could we get back
that couldn't be undone
as before, within a day?

The quick plans return,
our eccentricities,
I believe the silence knows itself,
its chant louder than we:
"What rights have you to bliss?"
We are an intimacy of scars.

No Name #3

We mistook the corner-side musician for a friend,
and you were too drunk to stand in the rain.
I tipped him with a poem and walked you home, so slow.

Old Satellites

You must be one with the moon,
so hard are you to lose.

You chase me through every night.

You are the soft sigh that escapes me
when, finally, I turn around
and admit:
Maybe, it is too late,
or just maybe, too early still. 

Roots Before Branches

I am the stale taste of twice lit smoke;
the reaping of an old land for a new demise,
and this, my breadth of reign,
is but an insignificant plot:
the measure of one hand to the other.
I claim prose here, when time allows.
Here, I've learned to cull my indifference,
to reap my remorse.

No longer am I the ruins
of some old abandoned machine,
strung with weeds and forgotten
in some far removed wood. Though,
some side-eyed glimpse of it remains.

I am stagnation:
some new root that has yet to traverse the seasons,
not yet proved itself alive,
and I know not yet what shape I will take,
or if a change is at all possible.

And what stiff indifference pulls at me-
when possibilities displease?
What odds, that I may find myself abloom some day,
and surprise even the deepest rooted doubt
which steals the very will of life,
and yet, is completely a part of it.

Surely, there is time within the world
to find the perfect bloom
and pull it to me
with long deliberation.

Heat and Perception

She bears the slightest curiosity
and jerks the coal from the fire with her bare hands.
"The trick is to pass it from one hand to the other
without giving it time to burn."

She holds the coal too long,
feeling the shell of her skin harden and crack.
She drops the ember,
surprised by the concentrated tinge of pink-
the pound of her blood next to air.

No Name #2

I seldom forget the wide eyes of my age-
emerald and pierced,
whole-punched and maddened,

but sometimes

I'm painted blue under the sky,

And always looking up,

always whispering

some nothings to a deafened land.

And then I flake,

and no command of language,

no amount of patriotism,

no vessel of God can bring me back;

for I, in the truest sense,

am lost.

I know how not to be a man,

for some threatened bird

has taught me only to dig wells

and let sink my teeth in grief.

What a false revelation:

to toil whole days,
to save and save

till some new fish comes ashore,

holding its breath

like time itself.

No Name #1

We stand on the wall with love,

ruled by proclamations and fear.

Fear the most, of turning into our mothers and fathers,

of repeating their small acts of betrayal, 

which culminate and crumble at the core

and hang there in the corner of our memories.

I imagine them as tiny crabs for some reason, trying to latch on,

to assert themselves, with lives of their own,

jealous of ours.

Beautiful Certainty

We rise and fall, 

to each moment a measurable loss, 

a tolling of the inevitable.

It is this doom that makes us gods, 

very human gods.

And with my flawed godhood I can say:

"I believe in you,"

and it will make all the difference.

The beauty is that we choose to rise and fall together, 

inexorably weaved in on another's doom.