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.