Broken.

Wild crests calling egg shaped heads,
clearing bloody crumbs from
the cream colored tablecloth.

Tension rides over the current
which resides at the top of the room
near the oldest books on the shelf,
off of the air, bouncing.
It spills out of the crack in the
heads just above the ears
ringing like a newly ready teapot.

Just for now, push the top
of your loose head down to hold in
that wavelength which rings
like nails on a hollow chalkboard.

The wraith like demon
floating about this family dinner
is the most disgusting resemblance
clutching onto wrists with the
receptive skin waving
like flags around the bone.

Broken.
Broken.
Broken.

Somehow, through the veins wasting
you couldn't see anything.
You missed those careful notes,
the climbing hopes.
Unusual as water flowing uphill,
Strangely creeping,
this blatant rebellion against gravity,
as if the world would explode any minute.

I sigh into the apocalypse,
placing some gargoyles onto my eves
and making a dusky cup of peppermint tea.
This doomsday like any other,
wintery, red and sleepy,
drowning in apathy.

Portland

Oh arched land of a thousand bridges,
posing many ways
amorous arms reaching like zombies
over the grand expanse.
Calming the heartbeats of
the rooftop dwellers,
the common city folk.

Ruling the states with an
understated quota met easily,
and empty coolness,
frosty, effortless,
quintessentially misunderstood.

Oh city of a thousand memories.
Moments rolling out
like a factory's endless belt.
Newer each second,
pushing at the heels of the last.

Silent dusk drops.
Rain falls on the concrete roses.
People open their doors
to the new wave.

Oh city of a thousand hairs.
Growing longer every unmet hour.
Curling in the damp air.
Waiting on the train,
hiding in the storm drain,
notifying each identity
with a sharp reality
charmed by fate itself.

Oh city of real faces.
Unmasked, unmade,
plain and beautiful,
stark in their openess.

A walking place,
unmapped expanse of dark.
Beckoning doorways,
Only accesible at the
perfect light of noon.
Long fruitful days spent
challenging space itself.
Challenging urban realities.

Oh city of people,
oh city of aged brick,
oh city of travellers passing,
oh city of roses,
carry on home.

Heirlooms

Plaster molds
stretch
caress
the quickly diffusing
arm of the past.

Haunting,
comforting,
as only a knowledge
that other hands held,
and maybe a few
courageous skin cells
are still crying
that it was too soon.

What's the worth?
Worthy weight, wrought from
careful palms,
censoring their fantasies
of mighty beauty.
To please the modern
working woman?

Did that woman's treasure,
held dear
between a toothy smile,
and a sweaty palm,
did it survive the test of time?

You are a rented elegance.
A tub full with harbored planes
of temporary belonging
crashing into my shins.

Making a fool of me
in front of the wise old men
in musty suits
waiting outside the elevator.

Le Secret, waiting like
a half used bottle of perfume,
it's chic taper posting
a high flag to all.

I'm not sure what will become
of my kamikazi strike.

I lost my chance to be neutral
with my only whole heart.
All arteries intact,
beating with the real thing.
Commitment.
It was easy, like breathing.

But each sharp, stilted addition
to my wall of fame
is a new tell.

That may likely be gone forever.

I'm a roamer,
wild, and I hope to
become untamable now that
I've lost my heart
to the windy Sam's town
musical novels of killers long before
whose ghosts are in this very room.

Habits Die Hard

You are flights of fancy.
You are all smokestack curls
and constant climax.
You don't do things halfway.
I think that means
stuck in the primary colors,
that you don't do much.

But when you do things,
they're california crazy,
racy, experimental,
extraordinary.

We are drawn, halting,
to your dynamics,
and you just sit
and watch
with those true eyes.
The only truth in your
whole, lounging body.

You are lethal.
The truth in your eyes
and the lies in your body.
Your body, that was made
for what?
You tell me.

That's how you want it anyway.
You want to tell me.
So do it, and give yourself
something to talk about later.

On Being Extraordinary

It's all relative.
Relativity.
Pulled theories from
scientific maniacs.
All of us forms
walking around with our
mighty opinions.
We hold them close
to our hearts.
Those sordid opinions.
Black, smoky,
the takeover of a
flameless, coalless soot.

Did you forget that when
it was all formed
there was extraordinary heat?
Cripples, mangled and vacant
creating out of their minds
the most perfect
diamond necklace you've ever seen.
Volatile teenagers whipping
a wildly blinding core,
broad shoulders waving.
Baseless supernovas all.
Roaming. Laced with every
hue of the brightest spectrum.

And how do you make
blackness out of that?

I would guess, my readers,
that your wrinkled friends,
your old professor, your nanny,
your slow neighbor,
they will tell you,
that it's orange.
It's yellow, it's blue, it's red, it's purple.
It's different.
But bursting with right answers all.
They're about the work,
and the thought,
and the creation.
Spinning and spinning
and curving itself on a giant
potter's wheel.
Not manned.
Not womanned.
By any hands
I've ever seen before.

Ancient boaters on the
dusted coast
may have fought each other then.
Fists in the air,
gold sweat between the folds
of their fingers.
They may have held
her shoulders with a red piece
of skin on skin.
All of them.

But she was a saint.
Halos adorned her bedroom,
and then it was all the
colors of fire.
The same way the world
looked when it was formed
and not one of them told her
that she wasn't extraordinary.

In the constant dusk,
we get one chance to live
a life belonging to each other.
A life of open richness,
A life trying for heaven on earth.

If you paint by the numbers.
If you don't paint at all.
If you hide your brush
at the bottom of the dusty trunk
in your uncle's attic,
won't you be in a flameless
soot-filled hell?
There is grave danger of being
swallowed by your saber-toothed opinions,
your thoughts that
convince you that you
have done something.

At the sunken lighthouse,
inside the loophole,
you asked me, what about
those extraordinary people?
Don't you want to be one?
Don't you want to burst
like a supernova with the rest?

So, I put on my fortune teller's beads,
and I know that every soul
that has stood on the edge of the world,
and watched the oxygen
crash over the side
in a fall bigger than Niagra,
every soul that has
extraordinary stamped into it,
got there in a magnificent fire.

Could Have Been

Copy the long faded nights
into my pages so as not
to lose a lesson.
You wouldn't want all those sighs
to have been for nothing,
would you?

Where is my older sister,
my nanny, my gram?
Why were they never forged in
the masterful furnace at the
center of the world?
They have never taken a breath,
but they could be.
They could have been.

How many painful thoughts
I waste on could have been.
How many uncharted ideas I
sew together, fusing the
past and the present into
one seam, not quite perfect,
not quite clear.

You could have been
dreadlocked into that rustic operation.
You could have been
you rogue pilot,
matching plaid stripes
and your guitar strings.
And most of all,
the big huge you
that looks out from my eyes sometimes,
that shows up in my body
and startles me
with your existence there.
You parasite.

Why does the evening lag so?
calling long patience into
practice with its greying
teal edged buildings
encasing the sun behind.

I call to my door, posing
a great idea of solitude
to it's massive protection.
I will it to open,
I will my clone to walk in,
my son, my bait, my temptation.
I will anything to slam
through that still quiet frame.

I need to feel something.
And you, mysterious cloth washer,
you linger on your stone step,
patiently scrubbing your
husband's dress shirts clean
of yellowing cigarette burns.

At the magic eight ball,
it's life-size overwhelming,
I always wait for chance
to tip its hat in my direction.
After all, I am a lady,
and winter is cruel.

On that steely morning,
when ice has coated carefully tied
sailor's knots, when chips of it
wake the snoring world,
when dew creeps slowly up the
window, making its eerie
patterns as icy spiders threads,
when the last drop of it is stilled,
the finality of this inevitable hour,
hits everyone, and shakes us.

"Summer is over," it whispers.
Brewing unshed tears
with the capable hands of regret.
"Summer skipped you," it whispers,
skeletal fingers closing
for one final grip around
the furthest horizon.

Now, the skin chaps constantly,
and you must keep your winter eyes on.
There's no protection in this fated season,
no help against
what could have been.

The sleep that silences you,
the feathery pillow that
closes you in its mouth,
it is a small comfort,
and you wish for the end
of what could have been,
and the beginning of what is.

All the Rules

A rule of
humble people
crouching at the
point where their
shoulders meet their
long curving blades.

A rule of
people who breathe
in roaring epiphanies
for breakfast,
coaxing stranded ledgers
from the tips of
mountain cliffs growing
tall behind their ears.

A rule of
quality presiding
sparcely in a
long forgotten tube
rolling under a nondescript
piece of graffiti.

a rule of
thumbs, measuring
all different lengths
pointing all different ways,
freely breaking
to shatter their molds.

A rule that isn't,
lives behind the forgotten
smile of a care
that once cured mortality.

And today, on this
destined day,
I will find it waiting
in my hair
following me everywhere
I happen to go.

Nico

You are like a new embryo,
encased in a uterus,
walking around on the sidewalk,
disguised.

Your feet pushing the
pedals of your bike,
always trying to make them turn
in spheres instead of circles.

It's as if I introduce myself
for the first time, every time.
You have amnesia.
Amnesia you got when
you fell for me.

You fell out a third story window,
and for awhile
that seemed okay.

You're different
is all.
Your skin cells
are not the same ones I met
when I felt your mass
sitting next to mine,
and I didn't know you're name.

I sat down that day,
and a tiny piece of your aura
snuck out of you
from underneath your fingernail,
and landed in my palm.
From then on,
small bits of that
original ionic you
crept out, and added itself to me.

I realized that unknowingly,
my stingy soul had stolen away
the parts of you that are
most like me, and
you have amnesia.

An amnesia of us, and you
smile when you see me.
A blank white fills up
the behind of your eyes.

I remembered this
bursting with color,
but you stick out your hand,
and I realize that it's my eyes
that are bursting, and wait,
is that, there behind your wrist,
a tiny piece of me that
I lost?

Have I found it in you?
Maybe so,
but I have all of you,
and you only have a piece of me.

The problem with our love was this,
you are a teenage soul,
rolling in passion,
floating in smoke and growing in free fall.

And I am a wrinkled soul.
one that has learned to observe,
that is longing for the peace
of an eternal hibernation,
and has reached that time
when the pursuit of beauty
is more important than running wild.

When I am around you,
I feel like the worst of criminals,
and my fat soul,
like a voidfull dictator.

Sometimes I'm startled by the
plain incomprehensible chill
that rocks my hips at the joints,
that surrounds our mouths with pause,
and causes our eyes to remain open
without the need of a slight bath of blink.

Where does this chill come?
When does it land
frosty and helpless
to this common time,
this normal noon?

I can't tell you,
and you, my dear,
you cannot tell me,
but what I find is,
it's something we all wish
lived underneath our ribs,
as if in jail.

Never to be released,
never to be given
any sort of trial, but only
stuck in unsolitary confinement.

It seems this hidden morsel
is a tiny, and confusingly surreptitious thing,
and oddly enough,
too many other beings
are able to dress up like it
at more times than just halloween.

Oh to be jailed in the
smiling wonderland of
this, my portrait!
But it's a dream dear,
only a dream.

Beat It

These masquerades,
the paper trains,
the long hard winters
where our eyes forget
what it's like to feel
warm and dry.

Dry flakes of sour humor
rock the mouths of
the tawny hips,
the tattooed lips,
hipsters, gangsters,
spoon stirs the pot,
rocks the boat,
keeps it flowing
hot, soupy
and dripping,
like the endless rain
on the ferry to Bainbridge.

On a Saturday morning,
finishing my coffee cold
and my scone crumbling
apart like our lives
always are.

Dripping dry pieces
all over the heads
of children that only
wish they were innocent.

Ladies and gentlemen,
boys and girls get ready
for a heart that's
bursting because it's
rotten with misunderstanding.
Get ready for a guillotine
loaded with unrelenting
selfish ideals.

Mark it, set it,
go home, make it
to your bed at night.
Make it comfortable
make it right.
Swing it tighter,
look up higher
from the feet,
to the collar bones.
They are an arrow
to the eyes.

Match your eyes.
Pin them together
on each other, and
let the ringing
lightning flying
colored sameness
collide.

Keep me alive.
Wake me at five.
Before the painter
starts work on the sky.
Bring it round to the morning
and show me
there are still things un-ruined.
Show me there are still
verbal
herbal connections.
Organic,
good for your,
body, soul, mind, heart,
condemned head.

I know they exist.
My divine bones know.
They live in the cracks,
in the rips,
and the single pennies
waiting on the sidewalk
to bring you good luck.

My Interprative 23

Paint me pictures in words
of blinding arms on trees
that disappear into a
palate of paint
so numerous of color,
that it drips opaque into
the dirty palm of a
day old beggar waiting
behind the stars.

Transport me to an ocean of grass.
Sing to me with
the noisy vibration of the bees
and the itching smell
of seed.

Walk me by a diamond encrusted body
flowing with easy grace,
and put your hand on my belly button
to stop the endless spinning
underneath my skin.

I have faith in that,
and I will walk on the forest.
Mourning constantly
that there's no more breeze,
but quietly brushing the
wet drops off my eyebrows
in thanks that I've been given
nothing but beauty to hold close
to my chest, when everything
else is falling.

When I reach the dead end,
that waits quietly and slowly
at the finish of some
grandfather's crab apple lane,
a white porch and a
rocking chair with my initials
carved in the arm.

I will sit there,
in the back and forth,
and the world will drop off
the edge, and roll away,
with the other rotting apples.

This is a daydream that speaks
of my satiated wanderlust.
And many years need to
tick along until it becomes
a reality.

So bring me to the crawling beauty
of the tundra, and feed my mind
with that everlasting air.
Give me a long gulp of it,
so the startling faces
of the caustic masses,
the empty stomachs of
the hurtling commoners,
the moonshine few
that wait for me in the bayou,
and those that stand on the roof
of the world with their carpet of dollars,
can only feel it's cleansing freshness
until it's time to end.

Not Yet

I'm trying to drown it out.
I'm trying to stop feeling the rocks
on the edges of my eyelashes,
dragging down.
Down into the ravine.

Lately that ravine is
someone named sleep.
A jester shaking a
tambourine in my nostrils.

I close my eyes and
a journey to the center
is an acid trip of
suicide attempts and
orgasms.

Breathe the live giving
liquid into my throat.
Wake up my lungs and
allow them to lend
a hand.

We need all the help
we can get to feel.
We need all the hands we
can salvage.

To resurrect my balance,
the balls of my feet,
under which the world
turns the wrong direction.

The noise it makes,
hidden behind the wind is,
"It's not forever,
But not yet."

That caustic and hopeful
"Not yet."