it's when you open your mouth, and nothing but dishwater comes swirling out.

everything washed in but nothing came out quite clean enough. water spots and smudgings of unknown substances.

you'll call bluff but the dish washer, he's not to blame. he's just doing his job. the water, it likes to wander, it has a mind of its own. and right now, its mind isn't on doing the dirty work.

i am the unspoken body language you could not understand. i am the white quiltings of morning snow, empty and silent but lasting. i am the memorial balloons that endure the sting of rain. i am all of nothing and nothing of all. i am everything you rage for and everything you turn your back to. i am the nondescript red stain upon your clean clothing. i am the sweaty sheets. i am the burn of tea against the roof of your mouth. i am branding. i am the strange loneliness written off as mere emotional excess. i am the unbound hair that irritates yet frames your vision. i am the hidden dirt road. i am the exhausted dinner dialogue over rapidly downed wine. i am the pitcher of your favorite holiday punch. i am the constant trickling of fish tank mysteries. i am split custody. i am Christmas morning pre-breakfast cookies. i am post script ramblings. i am sodden shower breakdowns. i am steady ache, and i am the absence of ache overall. i am nervous stomach twists. i am war paint. i am your hatred of conflict. i am your addiction to antiguity. i am your wanderlust. i am the hidden pangs. i am your self-cut, jagged bangs. i am the rumble in your thunder. i am the best friend you lost, and the one you thought you had. i am between the lines. i am electrical warmth, gently hypnotized. i am blank. i am full to bursting. i am strength and i am loss of structure. i am echoed and i am straight lined. i am all the stereotypes. i am the golden branches that stretch far and wide. i am the loss of grip. i am the river between two parts of a whole. i am the separation, i am the completion. i am the creeping morning. i am the too-big bed. i am the screaming kettle, too full of steam and hot for release. i am the congregation. i am your childhood haunts. i am your sleepover stories. i am your gleeful laugh and your perfect cry. i am the glue between earth and sky. i am your sigh, i am your settling skin. i am every hole you buried old memories in.

i am rebuilding. i am reaching. see me, feel me, hold close and let go of pride for pride.

Marsh/mellow Mornings

She stayed up late to spite herself.
Obligations and necessities were unnecessary,
and so she stayed up
and instead made cup after cup of tea,
eating chocolate until she felt she might vomit.
She stayed up late,
because she loved the feel of writing just because she could.
She stayed up late,
imagining him fishing in the cold,
maybe with a huge thermos of hot cider,
or the very least a beer and a head clear and writhing
with the cold blue light of moon.


She laid on her stomach to feel grounded to the earth.
She laid down in that stolen favorite fleece coat,
belly to carpet,
to feel solid again.
She laid flat to feel the pressure,
to surface the drifting chasm of uncertainty.
She laid on her stomach, occasionally rising to turn on and off the heat,
absorbing and holding and remembering everything.


She built silence.
She built it all around her in pretty little rows,
built it in his honor and with his name on her chapped lips,
unspoken.
She built silence,
and beneath the sheets of it, found only herself,
listening to the hushed murmurs,
the crafty drafts of energy melding in the next room.
She built silence,
and in the heart she became nothing more.
Simply there and simple quiet.


She was less melancholy and more marshmallow by early morning,
late night,
And the sound of his breathing somewhere
softened.
Around and
somewhere the sound,
then everywhere the curl of purple sparks,
and so she brought him harmonies
in the dead of
livened sleep.
The hush-hush of filmy-shaded dreams.

The center of winter came and she was always wasted. These days, always faded. When the first snowstorm came this year, the flakes were a soggy gray, not the brilliant pearls she remembered dreaming of as a child. They didn't flutter softly, they sputtered and crumbled upon the windowsills and evaporated into the cold emptiness of December. Nothing solid, nothing lasting. Not even some measly ephemeral beauty, light and soft or surreal. Just static. Her mind was blank. She couldn't rely on misery any more than she could joy. Her hair was limp. Spun gold, they liked to call it, back when she was the woman every man craved and chased. She would brush it until it shone blinding in the sun, and hung thick and silky like royalty tapestry. If only she hadn't always been so desirable, maybe then her youth wouldn't have dried up so fast. Tall and curvy timebomb with perky tits and a wit as sharp as a bed of sewing pins. Nearly overnight she woke up and was dead. Blonde bombshell, finally exploded. She blamed her mother.

With the cold living in my extremities,
today home is a strange & familiar distance away
soothing but aching and. Anxious.
Home in the smell of burning cedar
and the whiskey barrel plant in the front,
that threat of death in the first frost
that leaves the taste of youth behind for once.

Shoes on the stone fireplace shone just right, and


We speak of those beloved road trips in the maroon wagon-Chevy
with
So much cactus carsickness,
and the small garden patch of forest remembers me-
Waving as rocks for my melancholy goodbye.
Yet it has moved into a new era
of unlined stillness,
less shrieks and a different breed of peace
beyond
the sizzling blue hour
the wooden tree swing
(stolen for a dream-future)
the advent calendars
the mini Christmas trees
and the scent of Nana's sweater
just like the bed of plush,
head on chest
rocking
rocking.


Today home is long and colder.
Home in the bottle of vodka hidden in the closet,
in an old man's clumsy stumbling grace
and slip of the hand,
that old blood leaking antiquity of love
and the slight sigh of content loneliness.
Loneliness of
Complacency,
of loss and of duty
and of slow,
steady,
restless simplicity.
Repeated tasks and the comfort of nothing.
Fill the need like history's steady thump-beat,
rusting carpenter fingers
that crinkle and bend over the folds of sawdust oceans.
His bones creak while the old house speaks.


The age and streaks of silvered time struck her down overnight
Cigarette after cigarette
so her pores can stretch more and more
...tight.
And in the pair of undecipherable
glass tumblers of bourbon and cognac
there are shared laughs and a yielding awareness,
but sleeping always brings that same loneliness,
all parties alongside the soft isolation.




Papa and his dahlings and some jambalaya stew
The night rolled in and all were sockless in their shoes
Freezer crackers, five, four, two
Solidity smeared and so did you.

merely thoughts in blurbs


Although I am coming ever-closer to graduating with a degree in journalism, sometimes I am utterly torn on my own beliefs about the integrity and values of the media today. Of course, people become journalists for a variety of different reasons, and you will never hear me deny the necessity and power of good journalism. "Giving voice to the voiceless," we call it. However, as I observe so many of the trends in our society today, including mindless television, the growing obsession with technology, and the declining quality of expectations that people hold on what is being reported and what is "news-worthy," I can't help but feel my father come out in me. I can't help questioning my own choice of career and exactly where I hope it may take me. Not that I am opposed to technology, mind you-after all, here I am, typing this on my delightfully sleek Macbook laptop. In fact, I also just joined Twitter, to help me keep up to speed with our so rapidly moving world. However, it really saddens me sometimes to step outside of myself and beyond the comfort zones and crutches that we all so often rely on, and see the sad truth of what society is becoming in this atmosphere of "growth", la sociedad actual.
Sometimes when I open my eyes wide, I don't recognize the skin I'm in, or the ashpalt I walk.



...The dictatorship of the single word and the single image, even more devasting that a single party, is imposing a life whose model citizen is a feeble consumer and a passive spectator, built on the production belt according to the US model of commercial television.


Maybe, baby, I'm just not built for speed.

oh yeah, totally turning that into a song

Kansas City Shuffle

The Fence
Part 1

Once upon a time there was a woman-child, and
at the bottom of the dirty water
of a claw-foot bathtub
she found herself
staring back,
alone,
one man deep
in a makeshift mansion in the soft-edged suburbs of Kansas City.
The epitome of alone,
with soft pink florals in the comforter
and the wallpaper
and her soul shaken and broken
stumped and trumped up,
the rose soap and the heavy linen curtains
and the whisper of foxes behind the fences
of black wrought iron
in the backyard at night.



And in the depth of night the wolf-dog would escape
to hunt downy hides,
somehow leaping those privacy fences,
terrific heights of borderlines
and over 50 feet of seemingly impassable wood,
but wood rots and cracks
(the monsters fall silent in the forest)
and even as it stands at its tallest
among the hunch in its splintered back
a secret builds itself

around
and around the mere strength of one sound.
One light,
the light breaks over the hill country clouds
and the wolf-dog is on his side,
bleeding from gun shot wounds.
And in times when his voice is unrecognizable
and the closet seems much more wide-open
than these spaces,
I remember.
All it takes is one angry farmer.
Sometimes freedom is disguised,
make of it what you may
paint it
and take it
take pride in it,
like that fence she slaved over
to keep the wolves at bay.








So maybe his words hold truth,
our only real ancestors are fireflies,
our only connection to the light
the light that both blinds
and drives us forward,
keeps us moving towards the
greener pastures
on the other end of the fence. That fence.
One and the same,
the fear that breaks
and the faith that binds,
sticks and wraps them tightly together
like gorilla glue
and then rips jagged across the sides
like guerilla warfare,
your own and personal-sized.
What is most your own in these moments,
the moments
that own you unexpectedly,
swinging you with strict joy from end to end as if there isn't one,
when only moments before it was
strapped against your neck,
around and around and pulling, choking. black vision.
Stripping your
flesh like bark that's crackling,
now peeling to reveal what lies beneath
such rainbows and colors of ecstasy
(honesty)
that you believed to only be worthy
of those wildest of dreams,
now real, Real.
But-careful, so fragile. Strong and yet so fragile.
Delicate and headstrong and exquisitely unbreakable.
Hold on.
Hold on.



You say you want to walk on the other side
but how can you tell what lies there is what's right?
I do not know much about the mysterious ways of the world
but i know you are beautiful

with every inch of me;

you breathe.
As you breathe,

breathe in
The ways of the world, I don't understand them
but I know that merely by the paper thin folds of
the fawn hands that swirl henna along my palm lines,
trembling lightly,
exist lifelines;
Simply the floating voice like bell jingles
of the Indian girl close at my left
adorning my skin,
those foreign syllables,
alone are enough to draw me to the desire
for the distant lands
of a country I know virtually nothing about.


Please don't ask me
which grass is a more vibrant shade of green
because I will tell you that
my breath catches
when your feet turn slightly in
as you sing near me,
to me and through me
and as your toes curl
and stack upon themselves you just can't see.
You
string me up like your beloved fishing pole.
You roll right through me
and pull yourself through soil
like white rain-flowers
in the damp dream hills alongside
the gravel.
Every stroke of paint is for you.



And sometimes I humor the idea;
it almost slips from my tongue towards
your ears as I graze that winter beard-
admitting out loud that we ended up in Guatemala by default,
when suddenly left was right
and wrong was newly defined,
our right of passage through the other
and the other made all the sense in the world
make sense.


And in the womb of the world he crawls to his feet

the world, the world is all the timing we need.
To get by, is each other and the idea of an anchor
that was really here
all along.









diamonds growing in the mountain
beneath the pressure of all time
they grow in hope and expectation
waiting for your hands to find
cause only you could reach inside me
and figure out the worth





And, oh
the Reverberation
(oh, for the love of you).

Once the realization is accepted
that even between the closest human beings
infinite distances continue,
a wonderful living side by side can grow,
if they succeed in loving the distance
between them which makes it possible
for each to see the other whole against the sky.

Jaundice

The bears and you


Silence is knowledge.
It is when you finally find yourself alone that your demons step out of the shadows,
claws bared and eyes glowing.
And your love is in the dark without a nightlight.
Suddenly you find the scent of the blood under your own
bones
and you smile as you go under.



The emptiness beckons like a gnarled finger in the nightshade
of November
and November is only rightful in itself
when the cold seeps into your flesh from the inside,
not the air.
Blood is crackling and you feel it all right there.
In that moment, you feel it all,
you crumble and the sickness takes hold,
Succumb to the heaviness of
the disquiet,
that disturbing yellow stillness that swallows.
Become the sea of winter at the edge of the night,
just before the sun returns from sleep-
Only this time it remains where it lies
so that you may lie with yourself and the white heat
of renaissance.

I, In Season

Into I go




My hands shook while I lit the candles.

My legs are weak today. I am content even as I am questioning my path. Darkened even as theirs is lit with incense ash and purple, pink, white wax. The sparkle in my step is in the colored foil and the jelly beans and gummy rolls, the trolls and pink hair and little ghosts and bows and stickers and lipstick and glitter. Together we squeal, building our castle kingdom in the gold tree. I can nearly hear her tongue ring click against her teeth as she laughs. That gorgeous close crop of hair, tight against her neck, and so I set out plenty of of my favorite hair clips.
She is in the wind tonight. Reflecting in the silvered skull ring, minty glee in the peppermint schnapps. The wax folds upon itself and evaporates and still they burn, hot and lasting.

Already such a wild child at an age so young and ripe, but her heart was soft and true and right.

She left my life in April of the year I was thirteen, and only a few months prior I found an unexpected counterpart, a sister, the best friend I didn't know I needed, a strange and unprecedented love that I did not, could not find in another. Exit one spirit, enter another.
Sweet blonde bubble of joy and laughter, and through her and our friendship the process began, I very slowly and painfully began learning how to love myself. She was my my brightest lights, my darkest secrets, the ache of the growing pains in web of bones that ached for affinity to infinity. She helped heal through fulfilling, filling, building previously unrecognized and unrealized desires and fears and dreams.

Sometimes I am so taken aback by these beautiful cycles,
when everything seems to wind and twist into labyrinths and then suddenly a moment of awareness pricks your new in season skin and you see it has circled back around and joined with itself.

And she was what I subscribed to, the only confidante I surrended myself to and with, and
one day I woke up broken. I woke up and found I had sacrificed myself for the sake of that surrender, I had lost what it meant to be me. I didn't know what was most mine, my own, and no one elses....not hers, and not one of many his. Just mine, mine for me to realize and then share the way it was meant to be shared, not spread too wide and thin or stretched near snapping. Not painted black,
I painted over the colors with black and told myself I was proud of what I had created, that the
smoky charcoal was the truth. I trusted that truth and then the black choked me, morphed overnight into handcuffs that bound me to her bed and my own fear and hatred of myself.

A beloved twin, my altar ego, but it is change that is the oldest of all friends and the most ancient of truths. The spirit took flight and I opened my eyes to a world that did not include her flaxen mystery, her companionship. She was no more in the golden tree, it was only Cody and me, I was back to my roots and with a change of name and a couple choice betrayals (fierce yet blessed), her halo became a stranger. I found forgiveness the second time around, but only through walking away, letting go. Circles may always come back around, but sometimes, when direction is hazy and obscure, forward movment must be forced until you find your own footing.

And around the same time we both bowed out, I began to trust the tide, I allowed change to pull me out to sea; there in the water, in the womb of the world, I swam and swam and swam until my bronchi nearly popped with capacity to love and hurt. I swam deeper until I built up the strength to push past the sting of breath, the fear of depths. There at the bottom, I found not one, but two more soulmates. Two best friends lost, swallowed into the stretch and cold breadth of endlessness, and two much stronger bonds were discovered, forged there in the flowing waters. I found them like treasure on the banks, on the ocean floor, with lungs of life and eyes the likes of sands of time that only exist in dreams.

You will never hear me denying there is a design, everything happens in season, even the ones most seemingly devoid of reason.

It is never long that I question what I am fighting for.











And as I finally blow out the flickering flames, running only on their own fumes of recollection,
I'm curious as to where the stuffed tiger is now- perhaps keeping sweet Seal company in the thereafter. Another life, another time.


But for the grace of God, go I.





Happy Halloween, Feliz November,
Merry Día de los Muertos



for Cody

Hunting Season

Old Mr. Flood



Old man and the sea,
simply for you I flee:
I chase the flailing limbs of sweaty hides
and swallow or graze
the subtleties of these honey nights.

And under
lamp-lighted grill your cowboy shadows,
those brutally sententious features
disheveled and exposed.
tender October moon.

a celebrated time that feels a lot like
When I stain myself with the cinnamon mush
sauce of apples
and I hear your voice in my ear,
or see you in your fall sweaters.
While you read your epic novels
and watch your old vampire films and melodramas
you take on a sort of timelessness
to me
that feels like moist forests of
deep flame
surpassing the most antiquated of ship songs
or the grain
of grandfather clocks.

Gold skin shiny stretched tight
and cracking
in just the right places,
the first kiss
when i felt as though my heart
were nothing but an enormous flower.

The darkness beyond the windows,
the streetlight etchings
of gravel cooling
and blinding those glassy depths
with primal freedom.
Rusty with ragged loss
of control but slick and pliant
with coatings of throbbing frames.

Bubbling threshold of need,
circuits of the present presence of
wooded portals
and crackling brush.

Your margin of power in the wracking waves
of silhouetted contours
beneath the rims of silvery lot,
the peak of picking season.
Ripe fringes of lashes laid
flat across pale plains
of roseate electricity,
the moment of barely grasped periphery
of all that will be undone.







You break upon me,
simultaneous death[drowning] and salvation



I stopped believing
and it was still there.

this is when you know
it is real.

Gem

Even God is Godless



Usually she was busy laughing or praying for her life, but sometimes, at full stretch, she considered sex.




his sickness is back and forth
breaking over them both
she's checking the windows constantly
and fantasizing about progressive muscle relaxation
to keep her mind off old hauntings.
that creep of never quite finishing what you start.



Sometimes I pray for rain,
or for blindness,
for music as a pump that inflates the soul.
And sometimes i sense the burn of drab addictions
I still remember
when i scribbled that only unfulfilled love is truly romantic,
and believed it.
Sometimes I see the 14 year old in me,
sparkly lips and lavender eyes and a salty adoration for the wilderness,
exploration of illumination,
all kinds
of sweet and sticky bitter hot
spice of modulating seasons,
convergence.
Sometimes I find just as much beauty in the creaks of my weakness
as I do
the extremities of my strength.


(not that strong without these open arms)
I am more at ease with lost dances through
the hot glue of me and you.
So real and yet
my capabilities are
old maps of something new,
something shining I am digging to unveil
cracking, blackened fingernails
scratching and peeling and flaking bit by bit
the skin
of hardened soil.
Oil in countries flowing like spilled plasma,
the pretense of war
when really
that's the way we get by,
no amount of strangulation can destroy the lives of rocks.
Those beloved jagged heights.
The symbolization of hearts,
the splatter of rain on your flushed face,
the ache of a thousand lonely nights
magnified then filtered into the pull of the tides
as the clouds begin to roil and you find
Something in nothing.
Heaven is hell.


Sometimes I have these moments when I begin
craving something more real than my measly skin,
when even touch is a lost art
and my insides just keep aching,
stretching,
reaching to touch the breaking point where sun meets ceaseless space.


Sometimes the endlessness feels too enclosed and tight,
maybe it fits just right
or sometimes I need more room to grow.
But sometimes I drive at night and blur my vision so I lose myself in the spin of lights
and sometimes i just know
this fishbowl is big enough if we all just keep swimming.

nobody

belongs anywhere,

even the

Rocky Mountains

are still

moving

-- George Bowering

and after it was all said and done

under blue moon I saw you.

Fluidity

Of Flight


Fair weather for falling
for dirty bare feet propped up on the sleek polished wood of railing
for a gentle lounge across the Indian lands of an old soul's home
for a thin layer of red dog fox hair, graying with graceful age

the same place she claimed as playground as a little girl, bursting with visionary energy,
worlds upon worlds,
wrapping herself in layers and sashes of bright colors,
adorning easy pride for magic carpet rides.

for shared goat cheese and kitchen shenanigans
for a mother's treat of purified water with sliced limes and oranges
for that certain adeptness with language, familiar witticism

you're smug.
you're charged.

falling hard for the simultaneous synchronization of shimmering reflections

for the enchanted lands living in the panes,
portals to the patio world of her childhood castle and the
new realms riddled with the fluidity of rhythms and meaning.

meaning, dance.

for fresh bicycle crash battle scars and
for fresh peppered tomatoes and juices
for beginning to recognize your own squeals of joyful glee
for falling asleep in class to visions of being spanked
(by a cutting board in your mother's kitchen)

background music of Spanish formal and informal commands,
conjugation station.





and just when you thought of the dying honeybees
one flutters to rest upon the crease of your elbow,
mitigating your mess of thoughts to a simple lull of time and days passed.
a ceaseless peace.
like a lover laid bare,
or the knowledge of the loss of existence and the existence of loss.
then shepherding the incoming front and engulfing the circling vultures
the butterflies will stop by on their way to Mexico,
the earth's turning pages fill your open spaces
(flooding the sky's sizzling energy )
with the sweet static of the season.
sticky and lush,
the senses of metamorphosis.
white owls will find you in your dreams and
chase your nightmare terminology to the shadows
until your equations become instinctive
and you move upwards, in the reach of breaching
the promise of relief.
the breadth of your true pitch of breath.
and the heat, God
the heat
outside is warm as unclothed beds
and the scent of release,
the cats are in the window
and the sheets turn over and over again.
in the wind.


such a dazzler
exploitation of exfiltration
wildly spinning nymphet
when


the aeronautics of a life in flight,
the migration is a sign
that it is when the solitude divides
you find yourself in the center.
these golden moments collide
so collect your guileless limbs and go
while there is still time.




"Because of the burnished mist through which I peered at the picture, I was slow in reacting to it, and her bare knees rubbed and knocked impatiently against each other.."

Elephant Guns

Daddy's Fireworks

Llovía.

I know October is here when he has lips of packed smoke

and I dream of her olive skin in India,

all so temporarily permanent-

Rome calls me in thick, brisk whispers

while some unknown foreign terrain pulls me from the air

and into its swirl of streets and sweeps and lights

like my body knew its own place and

hurried home through the crowds.

I know the time is drawing near when I feel like the fourth of July

and I remember the pierce of blast as he unloaded into

summer's hot charcoal sparks,

the trembling blue stars spoke volumes as I covered my ears

squealing my protest and youthful fear like

the fly of fur

over the fireworks-

dreaming of a suppertime with no gunpowder and no countermines.

leave the airplanes be, daddy.

even some little black sheep

prefer peace.

I know I am older when the hours stretch tight ache

and the shifting atmosphere invades my knees with divisions of

burning bridges. Rebuilt,

then taken by storm as his old bones sigh,

the children asleep in the submarine,

the faded skin of old flame sets in

and the strength seems to emanate from

an Italian hospital ages away

where I first learned to feel safe within,

alone. Myself.

I know the months creep closer to colder when the turtle pond grows

in my eyes, when the windchimes

harmonize with her German,

those wrinkles draped below her eyes

and I recall the animal talk of another time

upon the peeling sea foam ledge of water's edge,

sad yet yielding pine,

older than me.

Mecci's home now her fountain of heaven.

Daddy's supposed safehouse.

up up and up onto the wet deck, remembering sudden dark eyes under the sweep of infinity,

the stars so sharp, so penetrating

blinding with their watchful beacons of subtle idolatry,

before the fall and yet after they came to earth
as lightning beams of alien
sea towers along the coast of me.

as he alongside the jacuzzi,
the old torn porch swing with jagged, damp stuffing

clammy boardwalk of old faith and new breath.

And years and years ago, the puppies laid under the shelter of stone furnace,

the wolf dog escaping the supposedly most impenetrable of wood

to drag home prizes of slain sheep and

crumpled rags of deer.

In a year's time i would again long to celebrate the Lilliputian villages,

the dark creep of thick beer,

those fraudulent yodeler hats of chintzy yellow.

and I'm in my black slouch boots of last year's faux suede,

recalling that surge of self-anointed appropriate autumn,

still post surgery and craving affirmation,

aching for a tenderness to slough off the small ridged scars, stichless but ruthless

the softness of him brought to me repletion

beneath the snowing leaves,

rivulets of reason in a season of callous change.

and multiple journeys down the line, I apologize,
your young bride
the failure of Tugger a sign, the denial of free spirits,
the solitude of that fateful flight

into the core.

that chasm of vacillation
and the magic school bus game,
the Seattle tequila stroll.
silent betrayal.

on the streets of that chilly Northwest city in her tights and new cantaloupe sweater

she strode past dark-skinned men and imagined the texture of their lips,

lost senses of scattered pieces, a puzzle left behind to simmer in November's dress.

And then the bullets.
the size of stale grudges
and the most simple of celestial deviations,

metal is broken with a click of wrist and shift of hip
one snap of alignment upon the lines
the cycles collide

and once again
intercession of fortuity finds you here,
staring down the barrel and
sliding
like eager beads of sweat
upon your mother's forehead
when she promised herself this was the last time.

Dissemination

Ring Around the Rosie



occasionally the seeds are spread too thin

Sharp and open
Leave me be, this is not sleep
(only sleeping more every night)
The hours become heavier and weighted, bleeding into dawn
Always waiting, hovering between
That cold light
A noise, and then the trembling
The suddenly fragile frame, all wallpaper pants as the figurine tightens its plastic smiles
(spiders inside)
And dust on the lips of this strange vision of hell
.it fell away. back into the

glitter floor, painted earrings. black and white and alone. I laughed in the mirror for the first time in a year. foolish snow.

And me, sometimes it's just me here. I need, need, need need need. Breathe. To feel real.

A hundred other words blind me with indifference, despondence of disbursement

Like an old painted doll in the throes of dance
I think about tomorrow
(please let me sleep soundly)
As I slip down the window
Freshly squashed fly
It means nothing
or is it, I mean nothing?
standby.

I can lose myself in Arabic art and American sex all the time

(Forget my face in the dark)

These streets have too many names for me

I'll get used to this eventually, I know

(Please do it right)
-Run into the night
Because I will find myself again tomorrow, gather and weave it all together
Crimson lines/pumppumpexplosion

/memories in a fire.


You can never say no to anyone but me.

Too many twists,
occasionally robotic, I'll admit
Please make it good this time
...except the same words haunt me
In sequence/ in despair of time.


go on

the lights go off

when things don't feel right
I lie down like a tired dog
licking his wounds in the shade

when I feel alive
I try to imagine a careless life,
a scenic world where the sunsets are all..
breathtaking.

No. I couldn't tell you how the house burned down.
Last night, oh, we were running around.
Midnight surrounds you,
you forget yourself while the full circle moonlight makes you proud.
We were just running around...

Sing for that call, sing for this fall, such was a. Shhh

it was my home, once

and for all.






occasionally the seeds are spread too thin


and then I find that old solitude once again, it's only human.
each and every piece for you,
but maybe one for me-
and when the guard is off duty
i'll be sure my soft shock of broadcast is not too public.



ashes, ashes...

Cimarron Canyon

Memories of New Mexico


Here's to Father Sun and Mother Moon,
embracing me and you

even as we think we are slowly dying
(death is slow life, life's slow death of repression).


In the wet. We wait until we've gotten through the twistiest, steepest mountain roads until we allow ourselves to savor the chocolate covered pretzels; we let the rain clamber in. Weakness- pain leaving the body. The little white paper bag from the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory is perched between us, he cracks the windows again and the cold hand of liberation slides inside my lungs. Victorious release. I know I trust him because I'm able to write as he navigates through the treacherous, winding strips; I still remember when I was too terrified to even attempt to drive in abnormal weather, let alone surmise someone else to do so without tearing my eyes off the road.

And we feel solid. Rocks. Real. He told me he doesn't feel lonely anymore.

Occasional map glances for mere reinforcement, he and the land know one another, here. The best smelling air of anywhere. He wants to keep that scent in his nostrils for all time, hands sneaking out to grab droplets of New Mexico's cooling blood ("It doesn't look real"). We always share the best drives- surreal, ethereal spheres of peace. Terrenes like my painting visions; he is my blue tree in what dreams may come. My journey...the night fog creeping in and those hauntingly esoteric flashes of light in the distance. Always to the East. And in this damp paradise, I don't take out my camera, I know the futility: absolutely nothing could record or accurately capture this beauty.

I can see the ghost of fog-writing edging the window (Love)
...to see my own utter elation,
echoed across his face.

He wished for just one kiss while he blew the frost fuzz of the dandelion in the wind
breaking the mountain tide, outside the center of a community not our own (but of our kind).

Great chasm of sky bestows the steeples of earth with invisibility, this never ending solid wall of precipitation. It's just me and you on this road:
"Looks like we're driving into the abyss."
"We are. We always are."

Nihilists enamored.
(I can nearly slap Colorado's left buttcheek from here.)



oceans and grasslands and deserts and forests and mountains and plains and valleys and canyons and rivers and bays and gulfs and marshlands and swamps and pastures and meadows and creeks and lakes roil and meld and blend and meet and then a centerpoint of sudden light...
bursting over me and ciphening the poison out.

and then
a hand on a knee, a head on a chest
breaking (someday the) waves with the most pristine of whitecaps (think pre-sunrise Swiss Alps)



In the mountains I feel as though I understand myself better in my dreams,
like I am more in tune with my most raw subconscious desires. I awake believing that perhaps I had never really been sleeping, merely stepping out of one skin and sliding into another.



My life has finally truly begun
by the language of his movement and
the rhythms of his tongue.

Blood

Generative Capacity


In the parking lot of an oversized, corporate grocery store in a small-standard college town, a chubby nine-year old Hispanic boy was choking on his own blood.

Streamers of it streaked his dirty cheeks and chin, gobs of it coughed down the front of his oversized and now undecipherable T-shirt (quite possibly black with a familiar wrestling logo adorning the fabric front). He did not know where his mother was. His mother, who was more concerned with her grocery selection (quite possibly not the healthiest given her own overweight appearance and casual disregard) left him in the car for "not very long at all" while she chose her poisons from the long shelf lines in Capitalism's clutches.

A kind, middle-aged woman found the boy stumbling deliriously around the cemented plains of the parking lot, where heat waves rose and bounced off the glares of mirrored metals. She spoke to him in soothing tones and pressed a miniscule wad of paper towel against the scarlet; he struggled to recede from hyperventilation and spit fat piles of the thick fluid onto the dusty pavement. It stained the woman's carefully manicured hand, swirled around the edges of her carefully placed gold ring, and threatened the careful floral blends on her blouse, but through calm questions she ignored it.

Another concerned couple caught the scene in passing and found an old red dishtowel in their backseat, rushing it to the boy, who was now surrounded by strangers and sweat and blood but no worried mother or father. The solo napkin drenched with body dahlia:discarded and replaced, as more curious bystanders peaked and briskly turned away. The male measure of the couple, a selfless and wise Capricorn, lowered the bleeding child to the hot asphalt between the cart return and a vague Suburban as the workers were alerted of the parent-less boy's distress. Warm-hearted Cap's inherent quiescence placated the boy slowly, while the girlfriend quietly and gently distracted him.

The milling marketing masses tuned out the loudspeaker like always, and the unfit mother blended into the aisles like the stale frigidity in the meat section (plump with preservatives and mindlessness, the rankness of exploit). While her son had stumbled out of the deserted car in a panic to seek help, unable to manually cease the flow of his blood, she tapped her Target flip-flops and tried to decide between instant rice and potatoes-in-a-pouch (might I add, neglecting to pick up repetitive cell calls).

Uneven pitches of tone and breaths of frantic pants as his chest heaved in beats of two and three; between all these he admitted this bleed was the first with unknown cause and the worst one yet. His grubby white sneakers were now gilded with the cardinal spattering of a day he wasn't soon to forget...hopefully. His mother, on the other hand-
she is lost already.

His sable hair shone slick in the perspired drops of sun, a close cropped sort of flat top, and the blood kept ebbing nimble and sticky beneath the pressure of rag. His own wet, coagulated gurgles brought cries of near terror from his throat; the couple murmured comforts and convinced him to lean, lean and breathe deliberately,
it's okay, it's slowing,
Mom will be here soon.
She'll hear her own voice through the overhead and come running.
He drank the cold water Capricorn brought him and attempted communication through muffled fear.

When Mom came, however, she simply walked to the corner between cart return and car where he was slumped and wedged. With demand to know what had taken place in her innocent absence, annoyance a plenty, her only worry centered on abandoned groceries and the possibility of her car doors left unopened in her son's haste to find a pair of attentive eyes. As she went to check on her vehicle, he spat more wads of red on himself and averted his eyes in shame.

His rescuers patted his sweat stained back and hesitantly took leave with hidden disgust,
sinking into the sanctuary of themselves and trying to fight off the anger and creeps of disquietude.




and on a night that silent sirens swirled with patriotic colors that penetrated fall's new stillness,
and outside the open doors the air smelled of moist, sunken earth,
she almost stepped on dried wax the color of dried blood in the bathroom,
a simple tealight spill after he lined her bath with candles and incense,
turning off harsh fluorescents and opening the window to let the cricket music in.
But now as she studied the clammy, hardened splotches of burgundy and copper,
so oddly reminiscent of mummified plasma
she was no longer thinking of their wedding music,
and instead was remembering the involuntary twitches and visions and impulses
as the energy cross-haired her body and electrified her pore by pore.
She remembered her dreams of harvest,
of strange Indian women lying upon her mother's bed unclothed from the waist-down
in search of healing-
she kneaded the dark skin and dug for the abnormalities she feared in herself,
feeling the entity of her own fertility impale her
with questions and a truth she could not uncover nor deny.
She felt the call, the sting of semiotics,
remembered her own blood being pulled from her core like clockwork
or moon hypnotism,
the red tide,
or return of fruitfulness after las inundaciones y la sequía.

And then, the choking...the painful, heavy inhalations of heady sex in disguise.


He left his roseate juice in disregard and
She imagined the ghost of a teakettle to be a train

but this time, when she fled the bathroom,
she didn't forget to close the door to keep the heat in,
the oxygen out.

Alpha

in the beginning

before Shy died.

When she was a child of no more than seven, she began to long for traveling rollerskating rinks she was yet to know existed. Circus tents of bright carmine and vivid sapphire pitching above smooth wooden floors that shone in the Texas sun. It was autumn, and she sunk into the season with glee and a soft grace that already spoke of her magic and lined the folds of her imagination. She hung plastic pumpkin buckets in the most modest of the front yard branches, and when the time was ripe she would delve into the scarf collection and cloak herself in labyrinths until she wore thin. In the trees she was at peace. Sometimes the air would get too thick and her throat would tighten, but up there, against the stains and curls of bark, she could see her veins more clearly beneath the youth of her skin.


When she learned how to roller blade, her body taught itself to move.
She slid her callused feet into the pads wedged between the gleaming plastic and streamlined strange driveways, catapulting and churning visions into asphalt battles. Her hours were injected into dimensions of pebbles and crystal mattresses beneath the sharp wooden starburst of home. The backyard forest of nonexistent broken bones and the berries;
the berries, that mystery of eternal clusters of
ever present red planet pomes
and lines and lines and
corners and droves
of...
borders.

trophies and the taciturn

Take me into you.
Take me in like the last lingering beads of heat,
as the remnants of summer cling to the suckling breast of fall,
hang on-
Hold tight to the rush ,
arms clenching veins pushing back, into
the final hoorah of summer's sex.
Self love in the bathroom.
Some sort of plain cubicle with its dusty tile sores,
its reckoning-
Olive ceramic beckoning and backwards light switch,
the splash-splotches of nondescript gray cloud plaster clusters
and the lack of window is still inviting,
however briefly.


Sweat globules seep slowly.
Damp hairline and now bleeding into those chestnut strips of bangs,
stale and somehow still novice-
Unseasoned in this birth of season,
like the chewed bones of sea or grandma carpet
the color of Redwood bark.
Blackberries ripen rapidly in this air.
Stilled breath pocket for old pangs,
pressed roughly against the counter edge and driven like horizontal rain-
His hill country underestimated patience,
as the stormy redhead's ruddy cheeks place in her
an eerie and enigmatic calm,
a beloved echo for her own roots unparalleled
as Red scavenges for cigarettes and
his chipper black-clad form molds itself to the football futon.


Stove-top pot jolts.
Packed tight heat waves,
like familiarity of regularity, the cathartic tea aims to soothe-
The blunt end of those reflections
or maybe it's the feathered fedora curls that simplify,
bulls-eye,
tongue-rub out the stamps of months passed.
Smooth stimulus.
Scratch your coated teeth upon enamel sheen,
watching a certain red-wine stupor stumble to the fridge-
Meteoric dozing and douse of second-round shrimp,
the filtered water tastes like blank slate and mobile home memories
that are not quite your own.


Cool air crispy-creeps.
Suddenly radioless room and the smell of meat,
temperature summoning and reeks of classroom flings-
Old French movies,
black and white and steaming tea mugs of last year
(always the Queen of Selection)
recalling the half stranger with a knack for black humor
and wordplay sliding his cold hands up the steaming curves
of beneath-the-shirt.
Lips flawlessly pushy.
And the not-quite-bedtime memories overpower,
the heated panting and lonely bed smudged with dirt-
Avoided like hush that night the apocryphal shotgun leaned into the corner
and he whispered into your silence,
sweetened the itch of skin.





Tonight muscles bunch around bones
and dreams are side by side
assembly lines of vitamin warriors like movable mountains,
a sort of St. John's wort mood.

shame on

i am black eyes under limp hair. stringy drizzle in the threads of thrift stores clothes-supposedly the best kind- (supposedly, always supposedly, shot in the dark. he says it's all a shot in the dark)-
but easy to come by, already worn thirty-six times. there is vibrancy in the shift of continents but no condolence for those who sponge it up. drop by drop by drop and still faded. still the holes they sink within themselves, into a sheltered veil of safely cultured ignorance. and the blender mind, shallow breath, saggy old bones.
and when you touch my cheek and tread my dirt, the barren land is moist once more, fertile and teeming with ornamental lines of grace. not of this world. i will twist and struggle and thrash and shriek, i will cut my own bruises just to watch the contradiction of processed progress,
but each time i refuse to stamp myself with the destruction of healthy water molecules and trembling bits of jade-shaded hopelessness. the wine of sticks of iron in my organs.
ashes ashes. we all break down. the threshold is a humid piece of chewed gum underneath the sneaker of success. redress and then undress, curl up in your own stagnant fears again. stand tall, every day is Judgement calling. his beard hides grey well but then there is the black, the rivulets and streamers of sky and of black, pure and potent and hard-shell. where is the fallacy? each time I send search teams, instead it finds me. every time. time. every time. illusion, seclusion, delusion, fuck you quantum physics. fuck you organized religion. fuck your science and your truth and your common sense and your metaphysics and your independent ethics and your rationale and your irrational love. in the end, we all fall down. until then, i just want a warm bed and windows open to let fall crawl in.

scathed, it will pass and evaporate like the hover and blink of endless nights.

the moment missed,

dismissed as time blankets the thick of brine in 

double nostril sigh,

choke...don't choke,

i'll gently pull the lever of layers

and peel away the cloaked pressure of

black. black like the minds of so many lives in denial,

table scraps for the monster and its alien claws toughen,

molars harden, eyes darkened,

grows and grows and grows and.

you think I will allow it.

too locked away from light to peel the lids open and meet the eyes 

of dreams. brush of skin against that lightest of feather chamber, 

opening dainty and gulping air like grass. it transfers and lingers

like years of clumped salt and dirty grains. mouthful. mouth full

of torn pockets of exploit. teeth clenched tight around the gnarled, 

decrepit fingers of beat. deadbeat smiles. 

slow rain like soft rockets of discontent. nervous shifting,

sheetless mattress. 

it's ok to sink a little, deep.

vapid and colorless. melted sands of grime and shit like mudsockets,

but keep your fingers stretched high

and wait for that moment the twine wraps tight.

on the other side,

there are no rainbow goblins. 

golden smears of sticky sustenance,

honey windchimes.

the repletion of fall's lullabies stapled into your joints,

droplets sucked up the strings of leafveins until the void is echoing once more,

and the abyss is quite suddenly 

lacking a certain lifelessness.

up and up and.

i found you on the riverbanks breathing red sand like justice
and when the waters sighed, your hair curled against my skin
and held me there with flower stems.
the latitude of leaves and multiplication surges
depends upon the ability to release the follicles from their
waxy prison. behind the source there burns the sun,
behind the sun there is an efflorescence
an opening, an outstretched network of spiderweb furrows,
the silhouette of truth.
imagine-
truth in the sway of your laughs underneath the shade
these sweet brief rains, tints of shedding and peculiarly crooked change
they fall upon me like the draping of autumn.
and September sings in
saffron ceramic.
I'll make that beloved 5 minute walk,
7 if I linger just right at the muddy roots
imagining you as though you
were truly real and not just some figment of
foreign imagination,
floating on the puddles, purely peppermint-ginger memories
where the souls of our soles are stamped into the wet dirt
like the ash in the lungs of Santa Ana summer in the West.
deep violet stranger;
the companionship of cardinals-
not simply outside the panes but in the trees of reach.
I'm imagining the red that runs like sweet mountain thyme
beneath the paper thin crown of skin
of delicate wrist.
you are, it is,
piercing.
space scalped and then hung up like hot compress towels to
air out,
dehydrate,
rest.
and yes,
I remember the star-winds
I can practically feel the brisk pull of the arteries
the moon-call of the tar-gravel rocks upon the sticky roof tiles of the treehouse,
the bottom of the mug my relief.

unwound,
founded on nothing more than the rush of electric blood and thunder
as my bones greet the season with
new reason to
unfold.
étranger douce , vous remplissez mon cœur.

for those of you that want to follow our travels

here is our travel blog:
http://hummingbirdhighway.blogspot.com

Creaky bones sighed beneath the stretch of stringy, wilting skin that beset her weary body, singing in blind faith as only the most devotional of hymns do, stretching the silences like painstakingly hand-woven quilted blankets. Her handled crutch inched forward languidly, she was in no rush to live, or to remember. Breakfast was a stable subsidy of the not-so -distant future, and the wide, perpetual grin congealing her cracked red-stained lips gave confirmation to this fact: she was not afraid of death.

Genavive moved with the slow reason and humility of forgetful grace, stringy oyster hair giving glimpses of scalp while her gaping, toothless turtle mouth sculpted an inexhaustible smile that seemed to give away her merciful joy. That same jack-o-lantern smile was fixed on the recollections of the sincerity of spring rather than aches and pains, no matter how prevailing or arresting. She held the steaming mug close to her hollowed chest, which was still gently rising, falling beneath her cream blazer; the pantyhose crumpling under her open toed sandals, balling near the pinky toes, seemed to sing of the rings of years past like the innards of the most archaic, judicious of redwoods. Her peach silk shirt rustled in diplomatic complacency as her napkin stippled her face in an effortlessly stately manner, pooling into a lingering and unwavering gaze that emanated contentment.

She sat in the bay window alcove looking out over the neglected yard and once-garden she could no longer afford the strength to sufficiently maintain, no tinge of regret visible in her eyes, all forlorn debris wiped clean by reverence for life and all it brings. Her dry whisper of a cough barely made a ripple in the gentle air of the pea green house with its teal and coral trim, brittle like the trembling age-spotted hands and sunken wrinkles of time etched into the corners of her eyes. There was an immeasurable dignity in her gestures, the clutching of the warm mug with two hands, grasping the cup as if it were a prize, a small treasure in peacefully delicate times. She always drank hot apple cider in the summertime even though it made sweat gather and bead beneath her nylon stockings;it stirred a peaceful familiarity within her that reminded her of years past, cold winters in her old New Jersey home, back when she could still bounce for hours on the oversized trampoline with her eyes closed. Soothing to the soul.

Staring out clasped in dream, she soaked up the scenes of droopy green landscape, with cracked tin watering cans, rustling brass wind chimes, and rusting wrought iron gate lines, posts pointing skywards in silent exalt. The old wooden swing swung and creaked lightly from the unfolding hands of the largest tree branches shadowing the sloping hills of yard, its frayed yellow rope peeling away like slivers shellfish skin and quivering in the humid breeze. Genavive's children lived halfway across the continent and never bothered to visit. The grandchildren they had blessed her with were already too old for swings, but even when they were still ripe with youth and budding with energy, the swing had hung lifeless and empty from the sprawling elm arms, a device she had appealed upon a strapping teen boy in the neighborhood-teeming with moxie and the need to build, move, create-to decorate the lands of her lawn with. She had hoped it would help entice more children to come and play within her viewing distance, so she could watch contentedly from her window, absorbing the purity of ecstasy and echoed staccato bursts of laughter. She was a happy woman. But even the happiest get lonely. Perhaps those that are capable of containing the most powerful of joys are also prone to the the heaviest of isolations.

But of course, it helped to have Erica. Erica had been her saving benefaction for many years now, had shared these long silences bridging tighter and wider as the days grew quieter. Erica had been with her, by her side, for the most lackluster of nights and the most aching of mornings. Erica had faithfully walked beside her every cool evening, down the road to the edge of the the grass knolls above the wide expanse of clearing that Genavive so adored-although not as much as the feel of the soft down of tight chocolate curls of her companion underneath her wizened hand. There was one lone tree that stood strong in the dead center of the valley, a tree of unknown name and breed that proudly shed its sheath of leaves in winter, reveling in self rebirth, and turned fire copper at the onset of autumn's sigh. This tree was very special to her. For this tree, Genavive had a place of the highest veneration perched on the pumpings of her heart, right next to the spot in which her beloved Erica remained.

Before dinner every evening the temperature allowed, she slowly worked her hips specifically to make this walk, for this tree, with Erica traipsing alongside her with no lack of loyalty. She would always stop her journey at the boundaries of the lush precipices bordering the trough, wishing she possessed the same balance, virility, and sturdiness the tree maintained, so that she could venture down the uneven terrain of the hills and cross into the mossy lowlands where the tree lived and breathed the Southern air like sailors inhaled the sea. But she did not lose herself in the wistful longing, she did not burden herself with ruefulness. Instead, she lived through the tree, from a distance- she lived its history, its honor, its growth, its vitality and veins of salted earth. She would remember the feel of another's fingers with her own. She would relish in the tree's whispered secrets, and the way that all existence ceased to exist when she spoke with it, from afar. With Erica always sprawling in the shade near her feet, sometimes panting and squinty eyed when the sun bled just right, but always watching her, Genavive would pray for love to always remain, and for each day she once again opened her eyes to reveal to her the world.

tendrils

my marrow's spiderweb tunnels echo with your walk of life. across the wide red river grains of the Southern Provinces of the Sahara and within the staccato outlines of the museums of Old France, you drive my smallest bits to become something infinitely more powerful than religion.

my pigtails ache for your alternative medicine.
soaring through the high reaches of arches in the dirt crosswalks of the Capri Islands
or building bridges across the muscled bronze contours of a new breed of David-
you were felt in fibrous existence even months before your bang thrust persistence
of entrance.

(in Rome we walked the alleys of rippled drumbeat breath circles,
i sensed you growing wild in the distant reaches of my secret Arcadia,
in every shadowed brick crevice.
moonlight illumination.
between the book bars and coaxed cafe Campari hushes,
i taste a real woman's soft whisper meditation,
her chocolate serenity,
and watch her shoulders curve just the right way on the stairway:
and already an effortlessly blinding birthing of light grew on my pixie rings of peace,
my self salvation germinating.
we push our approbation through the lands of search-
barbarian bus stations and Jesus sandals that wrap our ankles and break our bread,
and somewhere a slice of my head is simmering
in the juices of your pre-bliss preparation;
beard saturation &
rainbow recollections
that lead me to believe every step was one in accordance with the laws of
Lot.)

pigment

there are times I feel it wash over me like the crests of distant oceans,
when corrosion is nothing more than a few days worth of eager impatience-
waiting to stack the waning wood piles high with gasoline coatings as the
old foreigner blue jays sing,
vicious, soaring libertines-
supposedly spiritual symbolism that sometimes spontaneously
chokes you:
distant and mocking.
Yet a resonance of your stretched taut smile,
under the history of darkened Southern lit streets, in the feared fluorescent grocery aisle,
morphs the memories of false whimsies
into shades of future paintings-lights in the mountain villages and trees,
trains that only flee onward into the invisible cities of blue hour vagaries:
suddenly-
it is rather unthreatening,
recalling
the reminders of days you felt the sting
of ambivalence shake your roots like an unrecognizable pair of eyes
in a red lipped smudged mirror
after night mist
(set in and settled in your calcium-deficient bones).
Only now they creep upon you like the reposed recognition of happiness,
outpourings of admittance and proliferation like spring showers
in the beckoning field light
of morning,
when the drought is at its weakest
and the terrors crouching belly-flat beneath the floorboards of home
are only quivers of earth, now
like miniscule, mysterious seeds of delight,
meant to rattle the lungs and flat land plains of familiar territory
with new fight evident in their book-end fringed eyes,
(pages upon pages of beautiful, poised artifacts, now alive)
becoming echoes of folk tales around fires,
succumbing,
when everyone knows exactly when the bean stalk begins its growth,
can sense the dirt shaking beneath their curled toes.





(like water for chocolate),
i will be
your carefully contemplated ambivalence towards technology,
your favorite instilled and installed gift of ideology,
your specialty ingredient, fresh-baked cakewalk reward,
your sexually explicit diving board,
your 1000 years of solitude,
your pre and post creation music mood,
your freedom river waterfall walk,
your bedroom artwork stolen chalk,
your everything free-falling, flying, and flowing,
the children you raise beyond candlelit autumn sowing,
the movement of your point to point,
the oil that heals each premature creaking joint,
the learning that blossom-feeds your large cowboy-hatted head from every (forgiven) ego driven instance,
the conquering and delivering of every new country's distance,
the softly inhaled dust of your centuries birthing ancestry and crossing blood lines,
the building of villas and vine-strewn gardens that embody the beginnings of family wines,
the seeping of your silent stillness,
the raging of your self nemesis.




(like connect the dot chakras in mediation),
you are
my canopy of zipline refuge alongside fresh mango strewn leaves,
my shifting season-weather skin metamorphoses,
my pureed purified water pancakes (not flawless in shape but perfect in taste) upon waking,
my gleeful, leaping jump into epic leaf piles after heaven sent sweaty afternoons of raking,
my homemade salsa, immaculate enchilada cravings fulfilled,
my mid-winter hot spring dip sigh of relief involuntarily spilled,
my inexplainable, irreversible "chemical reaction,"
my sunburned headrush of simple, pacific satisfaction,
my home brightening houseplant leaves and blooms, purified oxygen,
the foreign sunbeams & moonrays coaxing my eyelids open upon the lands of every place i've been,
the hand constructed bridge for Mecci's pond,
the unexplained lightshow through the glowing horizon fog,
the magical realism growing wild,
the triumph attained with each unpaved mile,
the dictionary of favorite nursery rhymes,
the rocks that pull me skywards on solitary and shared mountain climbs,
the gleam in my masked eyes above naked flesh deep within November wood,
the absorbent petal protection, my goblin Robin-hood.





the most organic, timeless phenomenon
has lit the wicks of my life.
and around every corner i find
more reason.

el tramposo [parte uno]

The day the news was spread like squealing lightning siren fire, from eave to eave like dangling, dripping, darkened happenings beneath moist autumn streetlights, a woman came home to her husband. She found him lying naked on the cambric couch, drowning in his dreams, where dew gathered in his throat and children with eager eyes sucked the ends of honeysuckle blooms and stood nearby, leering. The steel kettle was feverish and whistling deliriously, reminiscent of the wailing of winds and whistle warning alarms as she pulled her tornado tennis shoes on and tried not to think about the threat of sickness, tried not to float away.


Sometimes in his subconscious he would play with fire trucks- not minuscule plastic trinkets, but bright red monsters with ladders like claws, swinging and swooping and soaring. But on this particular afternoon, with its tightly wound coating of humidity that kept the mosquitoes plump and greedy, his soul was trying to escape-and in its valiant thrash of struggle it was choking him, floundering legs kicking at his throat and licking him with flame like Midwest field grass fires.


In another life, at another time, he would wake up startled and soaked in his own sweat, and his wife would sit next to him in the darkening light of the living room and rest her hand on his stomach in concern. She knew what it felt like, sleep that strangles, and she would murmur into his ear, nose nestled into the coarse curls of sideburns there, and tell him,
"Sometimes I forget I'm looking at another person."


He would twist his position and realign himself with her, breathing beginning to recycle, and ask her in a voice guttural with extinction,
"What do you think you're looking at?"


"Myself."


But on this day, he would not awake yet, would keep himself suspended in the sludge of detox as he slept, slept restlessly like a child on the bright blue nap mats after recess and apple juice, and she padded quietly past to the kitchen to check the voice messages, feeling the mounting pressure of trepidation swarm her skin in prickles like something was beyond not right in the world. The birds weren't chirping. There was a deep and thickening silence like the static weight of underground, but with a barely concealed current of menace like the hot wired charge rumbling through the hollows of tall ceiling rods.


The air outside was boiling in such a way that made people forget, momentarily, their own names, and stumble through the darkness of the day.


And the woman found no red blinking light amidst the black plastic, but she found a hastily scribbled note on the purple sticky pad resting on the dining room table,


Call Joe


it read.


The woman felt a strangeness wash over her, and she picked up the cold cordless phone receiver and walked to the patio door window, drawing the blinds high and peering outside as the storm rolled in quicker like the unfurling spindly fingers lining God's palms. She hated the sound of dial tones and dialed the familiar number quickly; next door the new neighbors were watching a Wonder Years marathon, and the screen flickered across the grey outpourings of bloodclotted clouds, beckoning to her from the twilight zone of Janurary's dim.


Rain pellets suddenly blossomed across the clear panes before her eyes, picking up shards of shattered light like CMWK rainbow droplets of saliva on a computer screen, and she fell to her knees and screamed. Her despair was shrill and careening as the telephone slipped from her hand and hit the chilly, indifferent marble tiles with a crack and a snap, breaking apart and eviscerating itself instantaneously.