tonight

My mind is like an orchard
Clustered in frozen portraits
Of blossoms that bloomed so fine
Just to drop from the vine
I've seen them all tonight
Could keep it silent and tortured,
Or shove it unto the floorboards
A rusty heart starts to whine
In its tell tale time
So free it up tonight
Life deals a measly portion
Light on good friends and fortune
It's chipped you away inside
And drawn all your blinds
Concealed it all from sight
Could cut that final corner
Charge the void no quarter
Or skip to the final line of some
Suicide note well publicized
Or give it up tonight
Kindly reverse the order
Of the options you've laid before you
The needle, the dirty spoon
The flames and the fumes
Just throw them out
Tonight
The time that you've been afforded
May go unsung, unrewarded
Some nameless you cannot know
May be coming to show you
Unbridled love and light
Should you grow in an orchard
Covered in dusty portraits
Of blossoms that bloomed so fine
Just to drop from the vine
Oh, listen up tonight
Don't keep it silent and tortured
Or shove it unto the floorboards
Your busted heart will be fine
In its tell tale time
So give it up tonight

just a glimmer, they say.
the glimmer of a sledgehammer,
the sharpened and shiny edge of reason
in the meaty middle, the warmth of the season
one and one and one and the same.
on into the heart of it all.
the beginning.
the pulp and core and
fusion of strength and terror.
there with the shaking, the flowers, the aching

once in a blue, full moon
and a mere three moons into the newness.

the day comes
and what was meant and done and right
are all so separated and perfectly interconnected
that you could almost laugh,
but those bells
they toll differently now.
there was never a plan or design that flowed quite right
and now?
it is all strikingly beautiful
yet nothing that fits seems fitting,
beauty that makes you cry out in the night, fists clenched



not alone but far away. but. but.
suddenly is sooner than you think.







inside.
and suddenly, i know nothing else

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.."