Morning Likeness

You couldn’t stop breathing for me.
On the night I couldn’t sleep
You lay there, and my embittered mouth
Cursed you, flickering lips in the darkness
Hissing, snakelike into the quiet.

When you wake to find me
Hungover from sweating next to you all night,
I hate the redness of your cheeks
And your hair, bed blown into mocking tornadoes
Above your ears.

Oh solvent mystery so probing
Oh you hideous spider!
Anansi, mocking my loathing
In your malicious way.
With a perfect smile
Held between black lips.

Your morning voice,
You unmemorized helplessness,
They plague my heartskin,
And with a virus like sigh,
I am forced to lace you with my love.
Coming from the rising east,
Rushing to my garnet lips
And brushing out your eyebrows with crimson.

Small Regrets

Why is this crafty long shadowed
Deception available to the
open mouth that lives inside our heads
alongside those spongy cerebral pillows?

What a disaster of latent whims
And intact insticts which somehow
Know the perfect moment
To be born.

These babies have no control.
They reproduce into
Evil alter egos and satanic twins.
Turning us into a joke.

And we wonder,
“What made me do that?”

Baby, it was you.
You made you.

You squared that equation
And produced a regret.

This Savory Past

Calm the musty horizons.
The journey is long,
And requires a ready eye,
And a slowly turning wheel.
Carry us away,
Rushing half brained
into the constance of memory.

It’s as if these moments happened
In long forgotten dreams,
In tinsel covered places,
In blurry populous forests.

The country.
The faded roads,
The dirt that coats everything,
The constant state of chaos.
Day old portions of casserole,
A conspicuous number of too old
Vehicles, no longer of any use.

This is familiar too,
Reeking of nostalgia
Causing a creeping viral smile to
Wash me in melancholy.

I will never be back there.
I can never do that again.
Never, never, never.
It echoes like a ghostly pebble
In an abandoned warehouse.

Tell me the answer,
All seeing eyes of trees that have stood
long before I did in this country place.
Savor with me the bygone moments,
Be my haven against the chill of time passing,
Against the ruckus of moments lost.

Teach me to savor the taste in the air
And not to forget its intricacies.
Teach me to remember the look
Of the wind in the water,
Teach me to immortalize
These waking dreams,
And lead me on to Mecca.

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.