Divine

I called to you.
Did you hear me
when you hovered in the oblivion.
That magenta fourth dimension?
Could you talk to me?
Or was the gravity too much?

I feel so unsure of you.
So confused about who you impersonate,
who you claim to calm with
your hazy shoulders.

I know that you are
the force behind the running
leopard that I love to
pretend only wants
good for all.

I know that you are the
esophagus of the latent
whale that causes
sands to thunder with every
calm swallow.
This is the you I can understand.

Not the you that has a sweaty
hand on the small of my back.
Not the you whose syrupy breath
flutters against my eardrums,
rumbling my collarbones from the inside.
Shaking my ribcage with silent meanings.

Not the you that is
with us when our stomachs
are gouged out with the hands
of a person who is
hundreds of miles away
and no longer is breathing.

what
who
when
where
are you?

That is the question
that will kill me.

It's Everybody's

Wrangle on harvest moon,
you're a bit more menacing
than a painting.
Just a little too sharp to be real.
Just a little too real to be comforting.
Just a little too spectacular
to be anything more than
the long awaited
expression of the world's
heavy groaning.

We need you to be.
Your orange blood,
illuminated in our retinas,
your captive caverns
calling to us gently.

Because we are tied down.
Not by gravity,
but by souls.

Souls of people who surrendered
their humanity in pain.
Souls of people who never liked breathing.

We are heavy,
and we wake up each morning,
soothing jazz,
clipping drizzle,
dim seagulls in the fog.
Wrapping our arms around
our coffee and hoping
we can forget why we must
stomp on through life.

But there are moments
when we pick up a sixth sense.
Our past haunts behind us,
our unknown future
the black hole in front.
And we remember evil.
We remember hate.

We remember that time,
when people couldn't see past
their differences,
We are assaulted by the
empty gaze of a stumbling
child with nothing.

We sit down,
because we think of our
grandfather living without
his other half.
Some of his body gone,
and we see his ready eye,
his waiting eye tilted toward
the horizon, coaxing it to end.
Life to stop.
Finish.

We are heavy with injustice,
with bruises, with sickness,
with blood; with misunderstanding,
with lonliness.

Lonliness, that we have felt
scratching at us.
This vague oxymoron,
this feeling
riding on everyone's back,
and aching of simple no one.

You say they can't know,
but they do.
They don't try,
but they could.
You waste away heavy,
and leave a pile of yourself
on the kitchen floor.

I, the heroine,
the addict, I tell you
that I waste away too.
But wake up.

The moon is there,
Your pain is laid
bare in the sky.
And it's everyone's pain.

It's everyone's.
And you can remember,
that even if their
lonliness and their
rememberings are a
different color...

They all pour together
into a giant pot of
blending, churning
race,
status,
knowledge,
gender,
preference,
belief
and they color the moon for you.

They color the moon for us all.

Clarity

Please come to me
long stranded places
of straw and foreign
birds that are the
substitute for the radio.

I will wear my rainboots
every grey day,
and my bare feet
every sunny day.
I will wear my linen dress,
it will dance with the wind,
and my body,
and no one will be there.

My bed will be velvet,
and my floor will be wooden,
and the cliffs will drop down
to greet the great grey sea.

The sea that becomes
one with my aged,
ankle dropped soul.
Quicker, every morning
that I hold my yellow mug
and swallow my coffee
and stare into the
calming expanse of another world.

Somehow, this complicated
heavy world is an elixer
that quenches every bit of fairy made
wanderlust that eats at the corners
of my purple brain.

What is there to find here?
Sea salt mushrooms,
barnacles that are the ambassadors
to our dry world.
Dry and cold, light and airy,
this paper in the wind world,
that borders the expanse of sea.

The eigth dimension
the unexplored oblivion
that clouds our minds,
and stops them.
Why do we look out at it
so goddamn much?

Because it gives us a chance.
A chance to live
without halting, without clarity.

Don't idealize clarity so much.
It is not all that it is.
It is haunting, dirty, baked and brittle.
It's cavernous.

Us Five.

We have been stuck in it.
Us five, can't be much apart.
We are stuck with hazy greatness,
that grows in the airy time
that we spend wasting away together.

We have a premonition that
we will be what we dream.
Only a small thought,
that is locked in the safe of our mind,
too valuable to be truly realized.

As time begins to spin closer and faster,
we will cast our holey nets out
into this sea of a world
and pull them in empty.

The sea is perplexing tonight,
and we don't have much,
to speak of.
But we are stuck in it,
and we stand hand in hand.
Thinking of this small thought,
locked safe in our minds.

Time in the clouds,
rolls by our windless sails,
and we begin to wonder
if we should forget it all.

We are stuck in it,
our circle of hands,
and we call out our
hard to calm faults,
and throw them into the fire
that will keep us warm,
and melt our glue.

And while we do this,
our savior creeps into the middle,
and tells us worldlessly to
cast our nets
on the other side of the boat.

As cold rain falls
and fuels our gloomy discomfort,
we almost stop to ask
what the point is.

But the soft breath of
our strange rescuer
convinces us, harder still.
And resolutely, we throw them out again,
onlt to find them stuck
in the water,
heavy with our dreams.

Palm Readings

Call me out.
You anxious, deceased
mongrels of my past.
Found in the alleys of time.
Hiding in doorways
dingy, and eclipsing
the calloused hands
of the one true
stumbling priest
left in London.

Wash them out of my
tangled curls,
and cut them gone.
Hide them, so that
the secrets, the pages
of not so delightful
happenings will never
walk again.

Didn't the world give you
a fair chance?
Of course it did.
For it does not discriminate.

It calls to us,
to hide our skin,
tack up a smile,
and never look back.

But come on, come out
you sneaking folly.
Break our legs,
and you will find that is all
you've ever wanted
to do.

So we will seep out
hatred for your perfection.
And we will fight you
over,
over
and falling over.

But who will remain
on their feet
in the end?
Who will still have
shoelaces tied and
shirt buttoned with dignity?
Oh, it will be you,
you shining scum.

But we are built
by you, our past.
And although we were
reduced to infants
by your rememberance,
We will grow up again,
to laugh in your face.
Even more handsome
than we were before.

What Remains?

All this comes ravenous at us.

We can't seem to find a word
that is shaped like a circle,
that uses all the letters in the
words that label us,
and sounds half right.

The people shaped like justice
are not all alike in their intricacies.
And I cry out in protest,
me being a person shaped like peace,
and needing all the letters in justice
to squeeze into my body.
And then we didn't forget faith, truth, grace...
we remembered them.
To our dismay,
we realized that these poles
needed to connect
and all they do is fight
through the long days
until their sleepless continuing
is only the rememberance
that time hasn't stopped yet.

And Oh! How we long for
the kingdom when it will.

After this desecration
we ask ourselves
what remains?

Is it our trust in a vague God?
You may not think vague,
but I beg you to see all sides
and then try to tell me it's clear.

Four Years Time

Rags of time,
sit in a pile of mildew
and familiar smells
that creep into my nose,
and cause memories to rise.

Memories that are static
in their vagueness
and never really seem as if
they actually happened.

Memories of foreign affairs.
Salty sweat, less amusement,
offering a look
at a simpler world.

Why do I have this premonition
that it's hard to make
life happen right.
That strongly I know
power is an illusion,
and what can I really do
to stop genocide?
Everyone has its wrong
in this anthropology,
and I am faced with a fact.

I have spent four years
learning to deploy a desruction
of what I knew,
and let something else
become what I know.

The Sun Meets

Beat the long arm of the coke red sun
deep into the place where the sun meets
the sun meets, meets the,
place where the void ends,
and something begins.

When the night hints at its coming.
Its successful foreshadowing
causing me to rejoice
at the passing of a fraying day,
and sometimes leaving me cringing,
and wishing to stay awake
longer and longer.
To keep myself from sleeping away
the time I have free of obligation
and inevitable failure.

But as you all know,
The night passes long or short
for all.
Long Nights! Stay in your resplendent fever!
Keep me in your circle
and never end.
Time can not stop,
but sometimes,
Oh! If morning would just never come.

The Resting

Dusty little chickadees
hop on in your hunt for morsels.
Small writhing dust worms
hidden just for you.

Rangy, audacious racoons,
only intimidating when
you know you're being watched.
Hang in the oaks,
and throw your stones.

Flickering little ones,
stay away from the satanic crows.
They watch you with their blackness,
their haunted feathers reach for you.

Wind falls,
cresting the plains
with its soft hand,
hanging just above
the voidless conspiracy of grasses.
Together, they made it impossible
to forget the natural world.

It calls to me,
beautiful, bleak places
of rest.

Splashing

Break me down to the underneath.
I have a soul so black
that bats don't even want to live there.
If you have found
that truth before now,
do me a favor and
grind me under your heel.
Not just my black soul,
but my flesh, my organs, my bones.

You will come up radiant,
blowing up in the water
and scattering the orcas to
all corners of the core.

You will come out finished,
the golden tips of the
sunrise's scalding hem
rising to reveal your kneecaps.

And me, not even fit to lick
the bottom of your shoe.
I am a crazy fool to ask you
to look at the dully lighted
lanterns in my eyes,
even though they flicker
more often than not,
and notice the illusion of light there,
instead of
the shuddering blackness
lodged in the take over of myself.

And somehow,
like I can be sure of the absence
of light in me,
I can be sure of the presence
of light in you,
and your choice to move in with me.

The War Monument

And he overflows
with hearty sentences.
He stands in the public places
on purpose, He knows
that it's the same as
the baseball stadium in Boston,
in Chicago, in New York,
and he always wanted to
hit something really hard.

Ignorance runs its long courses
through impressionable people,
who have not yet begun to age,
and they think, stupidly,
that he is a baseball game.

Entertainment for their sleepy minds,
but wait,
this entertainment feels
it feels
and he reads his crowd like
a badly written book
and the veteran's tears run down.
They gather,
they shuffle closer
and he has his audience.

I am wearing brown,
my darkest hair, white skin and red lips
are sad that this wintery sacred place,
this wishing vacant space,
that is bottling name after name,
of lives now in a burglar's bag,
is being used
for a dirty soap box,
and there are people here
who are falling for it.


So, I take my small face
and my brown boots
away,
and I try
to respect everyone.

Learning

Someone is snoring,
somehow lodged in with
the students, veterans, schoolteachers, and tourists
this unfortunate sleeper
need not feel rejection.
We all looked
peering over our musty books
the corners of our faces turning upward
and the mystery of comedy
turning a light on in our tired souls.
Even though we snicker,
and some of us condemn this ragamuffin dreamer
over our stacks of books
for the distraction when we have to learn,
this careless sleeper
snores on, and slowly
we let ourselves forget it into white noise.
Until tomorrow
when we will turn to our love
and say, "Yesterday, when I was in the library...
someone was sleeping."

A City-Time Gamble

At this delicate beginning,
I expect you to realize
that I often play in the mud.
I just know
you're going to remember
that you hate germs
more than you know why
you slowly grew up to desire
a tall love.

Noble as this knightly day,
chasing butterflies in the city
is a gamble,
and I don't think you realized,
butterflies mean too much to me
to loose this one.

A street smelling sage barks out,
"Excuse me girl, you're too young to gamble."
To that I say,
with a kind of defiance,
"Old enough to love, old enough to gamble mister."

The truth is,
I don't really know, because,
I like to find hidden flowers.
Rare, growing in the impossible places, and
I spend my days
wishing I could fly
and pretending I'm winging the air gracefully
while underwater.

So all I know is chance.
Chance coasting carelessly down.
Ageless, colorless,
but full to the flooding over
with feeling.

Mom

Precisely she writes.
Filling the pages with
each school girl letter.
The letters still carry
a bit of their girlish charm
but they have grown quick
and straight over the solid years.

She has cleaned like she writes,
with precision.
Learning slowly and thoroughly
what she likes,
and in her millions
of tiny and not so tiny discomforts,
discovers more of herself.

She spills over years
of wisdom, first to her own.
Brought into the world
by her pain.
These two people,
with their own ideas,
are slowly learning
to ask her questions,
and to hang on her every word.

She opens her mouth also,
to the world's tiniest questioners,
telling them the basics of life.
Math, letters, history, science.
They will never be the same
because of her.

Today, she looks out
through a fall of tears and cracking red,
and she hunches her small shoulders,
screaming the loss of her own teacher,
her reason why,
the very woman who brought
her into being, in pain.
And she stands short,
reaches out her hands,
and her children come,
their mother's son and daughter,
they stand next to her
and it is right.