levels of edit

happy father's day

2009-06-21T07:07:00.004-05:00

Jerome K.
1933-1996

By your workbench in the basement, I found
your navy blue hooded sweatshirt with its holes
and white paint stains, and I don’t know how
you fit into it; the sleeves are so short my wrists
are exposed and cold. I remember a version of your face,
from pictures, and now your clothes with no body
wanting to keep going, to push along through
the remembered rooms, as if your ghost could uncoil
the tight aching in my chest, as if you could say
don’t dream of saving me, as if you could be saved any longer.

-- from Never

the archer

2009-06-08T08:25:00.043-05:00

The sky was praying to itself in
the glimmering silk of that May night,
sky full of lions and cranes, archers

and doves, all burning the psalms
with no need of God, and I thought:
all this I love will outlive me,

and beside you on the river path I felt
the ache in your slight body as you watched
the stars flash and haze in the prairie

blackness, an ache relentless and jubilant
as if you had touched a new lover: how good that you put
the night on to wear, and I wanted

the stars to be feverish fistfuls of poems
to you, kisses on your flushed eyelids,
the honeyed blur of light flooding

from a screen door you’re approaching
that’s home to you. Nights like these
you know what life is for. You don’t

need to translate the exact point
that the archer’s aiming at, my love.
The arrow’s flight has already made me

silver, made me shimmer like the rain
that soaks you, inconsolable, the
storms you wish would calm so you

could see yourself reflected again
in the endlessness of the shining sky --
hoping to be, this time, the one

unharmed, serene figure in your life
that only wants more life, however
stranded you feel, however unmoored.

i hereby revoke my fuck it.

2009-05-30T11:03:00.002-05:00

Sorry for the tantrum. I think it's over now. Thanks to J & P for being so steady and reminding me of what's really real.

fuck it.

2009-04-30T21:54:00.005-05:00

I'm not a good poet. I'm shutting down the blog.

Thanks to all who read & commented. My gratitude & fondness
to you.

tiny hearts (rev 1)

2009-04-09T08:56:00.065-05:00

You don't want this prayer to ignite.
Not of one who lies on a cardboard bed.
Not of one whose body has turned to hackberry bark.
Every night the red heart in the small glass bird flickers
and I wish to bury the bird on a morning
when its wings are not flapping in me. It is the last
week of warm April and I try not to dream of the incendiary
tulips that flame orange and red and infect my eyes.
My legs drag like thick roots, pulled without artistry,
and I keep giving myself to you as the incorrect yes –
an insect pressed into rainy air, a song for the why not of death.
How did I learn to come back from breathing
the river, that lonely submerged city, watching in
my silty clothes as carp jumped and broke the water's surface
with such unconcerned fluency? I have wanted to be those fish.

I have wanted to live unrehearsed, and not have the sun,
turned up high on the budding maples, make me despair
for its beauty every day. But I am an old fire. My ashes
will bless my own forehead when I die. My father is king
of the underground and I want to kiss the letter of surrender God
placed under his breastbone. Surely his heart defrosted long ago to
spring's rhythmic drip of water from the blind snow above. But
my father only stares at the walls of his coffin and so I wear a
rosemary bloom upon my chest that I cut away to resemble his heart.
I prattle with night prayers. I sleep to get rid of my body.
When this year began, I was sitting under a half-slice
of moon in quiet’s field, my angel for the asking
pinching herself shut in the sky. I needed only a lucky accident,
my numb fingers burrowing in the snow,
tying hearts in the dead clover, as if that would bring me love again.

"it's now after all" ( lyn hejinian )

2009-03-13T10:49:00.010-05:00

What stars fall on you? Is your horizon still? What rules do you break? Do creatures in myths live for you? Have you watched Orion sliding westward in the ten o’clock hour? Do you twist your hair as you watch TV? Do your dreams have orchestra scores with violas and contrabassoons resonating like human voices? Do your ghosts glance into the distance for you and name troubles that are barely spectral and flutter harmlessly? Are you haunted by the river, its hurry and eddy and snags, bald eagles unsummoned and pressed against the distance, and the sound of water flowing and fish plopping that you cannot catalog but only be continually surprised by? Do merciless memories visit you at night, mirages looming with awful, distorted faces made of slapping words, and do you sit like the shadow of a bird on a wall as the lamplight keeps the terror at bay? Do your cats pretend they’re in the circus, performing astounding feats of feline grace as they leap to catch super balls in their mouths? Does disarray or revelation come to you unexpectedly? Do you have toys from your childhood hidden in the back of your closet or the basement? Do you lose track of time when you explore the dictionary, page by giddy page? Is your life wondrous? Is your body a map, a color-riot of lines, freedom to see the world openhandedly, or does it inhibit rebellion? When grocery shopping do you write poetry for the squash and apples, the clamor of the floor wax machine, the 40 varieties of tea? Are your thoughts apparitions until you pull them down ravenously in solitude? Would you throw your alarm clocks to the wind if daylight could wake you by softly calling your name?

Will you tell me again? Will you tell me all your stories again? I was curled up in a rocking bed full of broken bottles, talking to what-never-did-exist. Sometimes all I do now is turn from side to side, not knowing my fate, or if I have one. My eyes are full of tears because I’ve just caught my breath, or do I mean I'm trying to set it free?

2009-03-10T18:39:00.008-05:00

Thick: my flailing silent questions, spasmodic breath, longing.
Your laughter: high red bursts, mind's drop of honey, the life ...

a false-spring dream

2009-03-05T19:00:00.065-06:00

1.
Nothing happened. Not when the sound of you walking down the hall so completely fucked me up for two days that I wanted to drink. I missed you and was very lonely. But since when did getting drunk alone ever make me less lonely? I stood behind you in line at the coffee shop and felt myself growing rawly transparent and disappearing when you walked off without a backward glance. This proves we can exist in the same world without being together. (no! all it proves is that life is a burned puzzle, a heart stutter.) Judy Garland sang "Get Happy" all day today (we're heading for the river / wash your sins away in the tide) and the warm air, the inquiry of spring, made me sadder than still feeling how soft the inside of your wrist, the blooms breaking now and no one to tell, remembering the last two Aprils, and how I want to unblacken my betrayal, give you back the love I stole, and how I want to carry you past the hells I made and into prayer. How I want you to write your secret languages in the palms of my hands, walk through me and back like I am the wind in your room, and then hold on.

And nothing will happen. Will you ever read this? I can't take anything back. Only carry myself for a little while and settle my nerves, depend on the river, and lead another life altogether.
(a burned puzzle, a heart stutter ...)

2.
Nothing happened so why not blot it out? I daydream things that are implausible and stupid. I am effacing myself, I have wanted to efface myself. Do you still hate me? I have coveted suicide and tenderness. What self-pity does after an adult life of it. I am nervous with gutter bravado. I fall in between I belong here and there is no place on this earth for me. And yet I am gathering strength even as I don't understand.

I love what I should not love, and cannot see the end of it.

letter from jones street

2009-02-23T10:39:00.020-06:00

January 7, 2001
Dear Philipp,

Forgive me. I’m drunk again.
The whiskey is holding time still.
Even the guitar strings go on thrumming
without the hand.
Where to find you?
You told me you will be singing
in the one red room
in all of pale Germany.
Tonight I stand in my front yard,
wind lifting my scarf like birds’ wings,
and anxiously raise the nets of silence,
listening for your voice to slip through
and bend me down under the branches of the maples.

But I am lonely, Philipp, and cannot
bear all the beauty in this life.
My eyes have been pinched shut by a star,
and there is dark in me. The colors have closed.
You, Philipp, are a bird who can still rise up,
cross oceans, find me in these miles of fields.
Pull me even with the lines of your body.
Fasten me to you.
I, who will never be brave,
who will never be pieced together,
will wait with you for the morning storm
that will blow the burdens off our shoulders.

back home and recouping.

2009-02-19T17:41:00.002-06:00

surgery went smoothly. the two stents that have been in my pancreatic duct since october were removed. i'm taking the knockout prescription pain drugs and am hazy and cozy on the couch, every few hours delicately lumbering to the kitchen for hot spearmint and lemongrass tea.

at mayo clinic ...

2009-02-15T21:07:00.004-06:00

surgery tomorrow on my pancreas.

philipp, play "photonegative" on your guitar?
alice, would you sing?

deep in winter

2009-02-04T09:23:00.015-06:00

You are so deep in winter, the bathroom faucet knob squawks when you turn it on in the morning. Something like your shape in the mirror, but you don’t want to look. Even your body lies to you, hunched shoulders and blackened eyes telling you stories you wouldn’t dare to believe. What you say to yourself as you brush your teeth threads through the mirror frame and gets tangled up in itself, the text snarled in the frame like knots of your hair you haven’t brushed out yet.

So deep in winter
– cats sleep in broken-windowed garages
– you warm yourself running from bar to bar
– the wind is caught in the spaces in fences
– you drank seven cups of hot tea today, all different kinds

You believe in things like picking up the check and true love because they represent God to you. They make you feel better. You can live from day to day with some of your words missing, stuck in the mirror frame along with the river water ghost you leave there each time you study the way you look. Your drafty, windy head blows itself off your shoulders and you're left with the reverb vibrating the springs of your ribs. The winter is so long and at the end of it, we will pull your body from the ground again.

[ Philipp, one for you: I’ll tie some poems to my shoes so when I look down while walking, I’ll think of you and beauty and perfection and derangement. Ten years since I wrote that to you, and finally the poems on my shoes are my own. The text is being threaded through the frames and the story coming out is mine. I'm impatient to find out who I am but I'm just crawling along. Regrets piled high wherever I have been. ]

mom worse.

2009-01-31T13:56:00.000-06:00

please send good thoughts her way.

belief

2009-01-25T10:19:00.022-06:00

I was born and the nurses swaddled me in sterile gauze to soak up the rain. I was born and my mother’s heart went missing. I was born when the Americans claimed the moon. I was born with all the whiskey I would drink sparkling like glass chips in my bloodstream. In this chilly prairie eternity, there’s nowhere to go. Those who are broken press up against death and cry to God, and this slip into belief binds us to one another. It is a murmur of an opened reliquary; all that is left of us is rippling with the river through the city. Certain bells toll and they are never heard, hidden in graves, ringing in coffins, resounding in dirt. Wanting something pretty out of grief, the widow of a radio repairman builds wind chimes from vacuum tubes and roots of grass. She belongs to those who want to hide. She considers disappearing so that she will be declared dead. Let the stars pinch shut your eyes. Be happy that joy is rare, that your name counts for nothing, that your soul adheres to your bones. Be happy, because love conquers all. Our days are relic-filled, and we stare down the long relay of twilight to darkness. Love conquers all, but we break our own hearts every time.

my mother ...

2009-01-14T05:33:00.001-06:00

... has broken her leg and is not well. All best wishes for her.

the television era (rev 3)

2009-01-04T10:10:00.028-06:00

1.
Do you remember when you were five, back in the television era, when you stood in front of the TV screen and switched the picture off and on and off again, watching the reflection of your face magically appear and disappear in the glass with each turn of the knob, while the real story collapsed into a staticky white dot that quickly blinked out into blackness? Do you remember the curled brown backs of fallen leaves crumbling against the curb as the hurry of passing cars whooshed them off dashboards and back seats? Do you remember things slowly getting worse, each season wiped blank, predicate and cause-and-effect rustling like birds’ nests untwining in the maple trees that canopied our street? Barely old enough to tie our shoes, we tried to grab hold of worry swirling in mid-air, the mitten-muffled clap-clap as we chased dying things in the wind, each fragile part of speech I caught broke like cracked ice into a stutter, and you laughed because I was so serious and bedecked my red stocking cap with a sheaf of leaves stripped to their useless stems.

2.
Tonight, I can’t pull the truth through the spaces in between snowflakes. Everything that is not sky turns to sticks and is struck by a wind I can see but not feel. I open the windows and confess what I love but should not love. In such a dusk as this, I don't want to live unadorned. Standing in the yellow light by the back door landing, I tilt my head back, gather a mouthful of snow, and pray, let me swallow magic.

3.
And no, I cannot free the bird trapped underneath my skin even though its wings beat me into speech, these shattered lines, my mouth crackling with static as I burn away the kiss that turned into lover and then other. It is never so quiet as when you pass me by. I press the ellipses of my fingerprints on your shadow. You might pause, feel something, look back. And then turn away.

get happy

2008-12-31T21:47:00.001-06:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QawFBxJMr5E

in the throes of a tragic reversal (rev 1)

2008-12-29T10:20:00.091-06:00

My bedroom is cluttered with film strips of our hearts sliding back and forth on parallel wires running from my sunken chest to yours. Two hearts move in a still frame. I have placed a cloth over my true love's face because desire has taught me my name is futility. I think it's only the truly hopeless that find something brand new in life to save, causing them to repeatedly dream of the counterfeits of heroism. I am looking for a logical idea of what love is all about so I lose my happiness. The last things you said to me are "a wind that bends you over the foundation stone of compulsion and disturbance means you know how to die continually" and "sometimes you must get your ass kicked into being receptive". Your refusal to open a door that you slammed shut turns the rupture into an interruption that gives me ellipses for fingerprints. Why does other always become the analog of love? I will re-plant the trees uprooted by the flood pouring out of the thicket of our bodies. The flood is milk mixed with whiskey. Muddy, with hands drenched in solitary residence, I burrow the quaking aspens deep into warm morning. Looking in your footstep, I saw ideas of consequences. We will talk of other things now. The orange early-morning sun coats the trees in brown sugar. Give me your hands so you can't wave goodbye.

snow

2008-12-16T18:48:00.003-06:00

As she readies
for the meeting
her reverie playing
on the wall
atones
for perfection
unobtained

hold still the bottle

snow on the roads
makes night
more so
she talks rapidly
deconstructing
the collision
or was it just

a drink and a kiss

the king of A.A. part II *

2008-12-11T18:51:00.003-06:00

This morning
when your half-full bottles of Jack Daniels forsake you
for a thirstier, more perfect drunk,
when the white-throated sparrow
sings profanely to you in your borrowed clothing,
when God hands you the Death Baby
instead of rocking you like a father would,
you should be happy with this.

This morning
when you see winter coming
carrying a cross and a star,
when your soul adheres to your bones
like a suicide hugs her gun,
when you tuck away so many lies
that your pockets bulge and rip,
you should be happy with this.

Be happy with this,
as Vermillion’s ten-thousandth
blizzard hides you from God.
Tilt your head back,
gather a mouthful of snow,
and pray, let me swallow magic.

And as your side is slit
by the tight smiles on the lips of poets
who have nailed you, silent, to a cross
that is meant for a thief who has stolen
more than words, be happy. No one else
has had her eyes pinched shut by a star.
----------------------------------------
* for alice, who asked for this back.

stockton gala days

2008-11-26T11:27:00.000-06:00

everything is collapsing

2008-11-05T18:38:00.013-06:00

my room is humming:
the stereo, the lights,
the guitar in its case, bronze strings
in dropped tuning
slightly vibrating
in a holding place.

poems described in paintings.

poems found yesterday in a tin box buried 1979
in the back yard under the hackberry tree.

“what has already been said is not enough”

I keep on calling.

I am a liar. I have been deeply corrupt.

rain falling, cycle turning --

I promise you.

the television era

2008-11-04T10:49:00.045-06:00

1. SISTER
Do you remember when you were five, back in the television era, when you stood in front of the TV screen and switched the picture off and on and off again, watching the reflection of your face magically appear and vanish in the glass with each turn of the knob, while the real story collapsed into a small white dot that finally blinked out into blackness? Do you remember the curled brown backs of fallen leaves crumbling under tires as the hurry of passing cars whooshed them off dashboards and roofs? Do you remember things slowly getting worse, each season wiped blank, predicate and cause-and-effect rustling like birds’ nests untwining in the maple trees that canopied our street? Barely old enough to tie our shoes, we tried to grab hold of worry swirling in mid-air, the mitten-muffled clap-clap as we chased dying things in the wind, each fragile part of speech that I let go was a forgotten line from the best poem I will never write, and you laughed in spite of my grief, adorning my red stocking cap with a sheaf of leaves stripped, crackling, to their useless stems.

2. SEPARATION
Today, I look out the window of my basement apartment and see only the knots of bare branches like tangled hair and a flat block of sky. And today, everything that is not sky turns to sticks and is struck by a wind I can see but not feel. When you and I speak to each other from distant towns, our halting sentences trundle through the stubble of cornfields, amid the round stars of snow shimmering under our porch lights. Nothing is sweet between us. I open my door to you, but every day you pass by and never look in. The wind enters anyway.

3. CARTOONS
And no, I cannot fall too soon on these leaf-piles and hide myself. My lover has traced my lips with honey but she wants nothing from me now, and this is a poem described in a movie only by peeling the colors slowly from the film, those framed momentums, where at last the pencil animation of the real story is uncovered. I drag my fingertips along the graphite lines and swirled ovals that fill me in, and throw the ellipses of my fingerprints on your passing shadow. You might pause, look back, feel something. And then turn away.

life is sweet | maria mckee

2008-10-23T17:02:00.002-05:00

Brightly ruled lines.

2008-10-17T17:05:00.008-05:00

Ransom, remoteness, remorse, here on the curved world.

“I am defeated all the time; yet to victory I am born.” (Emerson)

Mimeographs of semaphores.

Now that you've got a part of me, will you keep me?

Astringent persimmons are shaped like your heart.

The rupture of hope in the autumn. A southeast wind blows your voice into mine.

The repeat of the letters in our names.

Rain, 1:28 AM. My steady breakdown, my everupturned face.

The phone rings, and I let it go. Or it doesn’t ring, no matter how much I want you to call me by my name and whisper to me, I am still here, I am still shy. Tell me by your breath that you miss me.

sometimes an anguished voice is enough

2008-10-17T11:23:00.001-05:00

jeff buckley | hallelujah (live)

hi, kids

2008-10-10T09:46:00.002-05:00

Thanks, to the five of you who read my blog, for checking in. I've not been writing much lately, so that's why there's a drought of new stuff. I'm working on a few pieces that will hopefully show up here soon.

As a friend of mine says, instead of saying goodbye: Peace and Love!

bound

2008-09-13T12:21:00.005-05:00

I try not to question anything. That way if something goes wrong, I can’t be held responsible for knowing better. But electricity runs fastest the more miles it has to cross. You can follow the dip and glide of roadside power lines with your eyes as you drive east to Minneapolis and be certain, when night comes, that light will shout from poles into the shadowed yards of farm houses along Highway 13.

If the sky is there for us, why not look at it? Why not throw our heads back and laugh and suddenly notice that we are free?

I plan to discover God in the strangest places. My father’s heart, for example, is made of a million batteries powering an expanse of light over the Jim River valley, cutting the land into spindles that we gather into sheaves and scatter from planes. We are happy, we are busy making the world, you are never so beautiful as when you think no one is looking. Push me hard out of the cargo hold. I’m laughing, falling, and turning like a record on a spindle. I wake up before I hit the ground.

.

2008-09-12T15:01:00.001-05:00

and every now and then a bird would not fly by
and someone would look up and say:
huh, what wasn't that?

http://www.sendspace.com/file/mzactd

click below

2008-09-11T20:09:00.002-05:00

untitled

2008-09-04T11:52:00.002-05:00

“The last leaf that is going to fall has fallen.” – Wallace Stevens

For ninety-nine days the fires burned. There is no
symmetry to anything now, but the reconstruction
has begun, one solitary steel beam raised upright
yesterday. See how rickety the blue sky is, our cold,
helium gusts of speech pushing up and up from the sidewalks,
the streets, the crowded corners, arching the wind over us,
the molten stories of six summers cooling finally into myth.
We have sewn shut the horizon line, built a network of nerves
threaded through with red, pulled so tight by planes bellowing
into buildings that even hanging out the windows for air,
one last phone call to those you love, could not save your life,
this thread of feathers torn from the skyline billowing hotly
from the 104th floor, into the consolation of space, saying
hold hands, jump into the sky, in ten seconds I will catch you there.

the king of A.A.

2008-08-07T09:27:00.011-05:00

Anyone drowning wants to crawl inside a net, or simply float to the ice floes with thousands of empty bottles, their labels bleached white by the sun, voyagers into the synthetic wilderness of childhood. My father’s goal was to not get hit by a single snowflake, so in March he curled up in the garage and waited there for summer to come. She decided to banish all garments from her life, even if it meant she would feel winter’s frosty stiletto on her bare sternum. The backs of wind-blown leaves flash in a code I can’t break. An irregularly formed history is necessary if two lovers are destined to collide, and voyeurism dictates that it happen in slow motion. When I was five I was only as tall as my mother’s knee and paid for it by having to fix all the broken appliances at my eye level, such as the crispers in the refrigerator that slid off their tracks or the stove drawer that got stuck on a frying pan handle. The most you can hope for from this life is that the final scene will not take place on a dance floor. Songs may save you but only if you can tune them in on a thirty-year-old red plastic transistor radio, staticky under tented sheets, dark. Is it the curse or the cure that will kill you? In other words, what will be most helpful to Death, a rapidly spoken lie about how much you have to live for, or the slow drawl of the friendless truth? For once in my life I will think twice. The loneliest sound in the world is a traffic light clicking from red to green on an empty street. Oftentimes each one of us calls to God, and that slip binds us to one another. It's a Disney ending, Snow White kissing me awake deep in the forest, pressing love's first words against my lips, the Magic Kingdom only a limp and a sip away.

falling down again, ask me if I care

2008-08-06T17:19:00.000-05:00

http://www.sendspace.com/file/3klckj

waiting for someone to notice that i rise each morning

2008-07-26T17:18:00.001-05:00

Do you have doubts about life? Are you unsure if it is worth the trouble? Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person's face as you pass on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself and the ground under the street, and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you. They are as much for you as they are for other people. Remember this when you wake up in the morning and think you have nothing. Stand up and face the east. Now praise the sky and praise the light within each person under the sky. It's okay to be unsure. But praise, praise, praise.

-- Miranda July, "No one belongs here more than you."

you will find someone not lost in sleep

2008-07-21T15:55:00.003-05:00

http://www.sendspace.com/file/gbtb47

--

2008-07-16T19:06:00.004-05:00

"I feel invisible, and to be quite honest, my love grows stronger coinciding with my desperate loneliness."

don't forget that I'm alone when you're away
http://www.sendspace.com/file/dqpto x

como park

2008-07-13T14:45:00.011-05:00

Sunday morning and the windows
in my house of cards look
out onto bare, stripped branches and air
so cold between buildings
that even flight is stolen from birds,
but it’s not winter,
and it’s not the city.
At the bar on Friday,
I realized partway through the night
that when I forgot to talk,
I was making the people and the music,
the spinning lights and your face
that I watched when you weren’t looking
into a poem, writing lines in my head
that I've mostly forgotten.
I remember thinking how odd
it was to be caught in a stranger’s
photograph, the camera flash
on the dance floor pinning
me forever in the picture’s background,
an accidental, incidental
extra in a reality that was not mine,
and I wonder now if I became a part
of your life even for a second, because I wanted
so badly the shine of the sky
and the orange of the koi
and the spilled cranberry juice
to not be fugitive memories to you
but part of a remembered day
made more perfect in its simplicity
because your face is already fading
in between one hit of lightning and another,
the tornadoes swarming above us
that will not funnel down to Nicollet Avenue
just because you told me so,
and the kiss that never happened
a secret thought to both of us, what
I needed the most when your daughter took my hand
as she walked between us outside the monkey house.
And in here today, the bittersweet
blurs my quiet breathing
and these unanswerable words that must fill
the distance between your house and mine,
your hands and mine, because I am not there
to give you anything else.

--

2008-07-12T01:42:00.001-05:00

. . . because desire is always embarrassing.

paradise

2008-07-11T07:00:00.011-05:00

The summer chill at the beginning of day is dark and humid, caught in a second of disorder, the mourning doves drinking from muddy alley puddles as the rain bores little holes in their bodies, the mathematics of flight leaking from them onto the soaked gravel. An hour ago in the mirror I was falling into my own arms, listening to a Billy Joel record I bought when I was 12. Don’t try to save me from this knotted past, listen: songs echo down memory corridors, shoulders are pressed into stone, shadows fall around doorways. If you touch me your fingers will break. One of us will crack. I am the undeniable result of inaction, but when the thief comes in the night, I will cheerfully load him up with everything you ever gave to me: the Rothko dish, the coasters with the floating circles, the skeleton watch, the glass bird with a tiny red heart that will never beat.

Yesterday was the time in-between, today is the during, tomorrow will be a neat progression of tenses with no end of verbs in sight. I too was created in eternal haste. Black brackish coffee and pancreatic enzyme tablets, the results of inaction on a partly cloudy day, the dehumidifier chugging in the bedroom. Now that I'm the object of your contempt, I sleep much better. You tell me that I cannot be depicted and you cannot be claimed. You will never be mine and because of this, my voice goes from one end of the earth to the other but is not heard. In this forged paradise, the angel of death eats cherries from the tree of life and becomes a hallucination of himself, spitting the pits into the hole to heaven where my name sounds like something I can't spell. I take in chestfuls of chilly summer air from 1982, so clotted by a future of eternal love that I can’t breathe out.

nothing

2008-07-06T19:06:00.003-05:00

nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing it never even got started

.

2008-07-05T18:24:00.002-05:00

they got a name for the winners in the world
I want a name when I lose
http://www.sendspace.com/file/qx5n49

forgery

2008-07-04T11:32:00.007-05:00

The dryer running in the kitchen fogs up the window in the living room. The dusk deepens until it’s the color of a hole. What if I could hear the weight that burrows all the trees down into rain? What if I could hear every time you close your back door, each instance when something is suddenly complete? But my hands are over my ears and there is no later beyond what has already ended. Across the street, rain rolls off car roofs. And yes, it's nice in here, the blur and the eternal fatigue, the facts of loss, the delay becoming an emblem I sew on my shirtsleeve. Must I forgive you and pretend that nothing's been won or lost? My alibis are tired. My promises are tired. Nothing but the highest full moon of winter will relieve this worry. It will make time stop, we can go back.

.

2008-07-03T20:51:00.001-05:00

dumbstruck and diving for cover
http://www.sendspace.com/file/4x7ze3

.

2008-07-03T20:14:00.001-05:00

even you, yesterday / you had to ask me where it was at
http://www.sendspace.com/file/qxfptw

.

2008-07-01T12:26:00.002-05:00

if I keep walking towards forgiveness / will I find you there?
http://www.sendspace.com/file/2g9why

.

2008-06-28T21:33:00.000-05:00

the love you don't give words to / the love you give away
http://www.sendspace.com/file/tlwbtb

laughingstock theater (rev 1)

2008-06-25T11:54:00.020-05:00

ACT I. AN UNFORTUNATE ACCIDENT BROUGHT US HERE
From the memoirs of a flooded river, I steal the words that mean death and drown all the lovers who broke my heart. Suddenly my life is pilfered by a dramatic production of itself. I walk through my front door and find that my house has been remodeled into a minimalist theater by a crew of aphasic postmodernists. The script is etched on the insides of thousands of light bulbs pulverized on the stage by unruly set decorators. The plot coughs nervously from the wings.

ACT II. ANY EXPLOSION BIRTHS A NEW LANGUAGE
You are spectral, adding to the unique spectacle, and you split my spine with one word, and a look, and then a look away. You told me that appearing breathless was a sure way to win your heart, but I don’t want your heart, I want your monosyllables, those murmurings that you let fall to the floor and I collect and order into sentences about how much you love me. What do you think all my kneeling’s about? If I did not make myself so laughable, maybe I could stand up now, and, with uncharacteristic directness, disappear into a hasty generalization.

INTERMISSION
I’m not drunk but maybe I should be.

ACT III. NOTHING CAN EVER BE SAID ALOUD
Then, in an act of existential nostalgia, night falls. The theater abruptly goes dark, and the red glow of the EXIT signs trails across our faces. The silver moon hangs on a black cord, discothequeing our dreamland. I sugar the plastic trees for moths; fireflies flash their arcane conversations. The telephone semaphores its voicemail.

ACT IV. A BIG MESS LEAVES US HERE
Day breaks. The sky above is flood-lit with blue. The breakfast table is laid with a cool lake. I try to sneak out of my life at last, but my shaky hands blur the map. Did you whisper stay awhile? Or was it weigh your lies? I cannot even go back to bed, the bed hops and hops like it’s jumping rope. Why not let exorcisms burn in the sun with the rest of us? The lake on the table is gin-clear and glinting. This is no kind of conclusion. I can’t turn away from you. Give me your hands so you can’t wave goodbye.

oblation #2 (rev 2)

2008-06-24T10:29:00.003-05:00

The April rain you wake to puts a chill in everything, the cold red brick and the concrete, the windowpanes and coffee cups, and memory’s residence where we exist as if our crimes didn’t matter, all of our theories saying this is not what I bargained for, the heart stopping for entire moments out of love for another, the bells at sundown calling the Angelus as we sat on the dock when everything seemed possible, and I understand now that plainly I have held you, and plainly I have let go, while my days, fully examined in efficient self-hatred, release their tall echo. I am so lightly here but so acutely there. Where do we continue living now? What if this is the place, not a chosen place but one we blundered into? Nothing can stem the steady acceleration of the past, not even sleep that draws the restless, dissatisfied body into fall and winter, not even the distance between the new moon above and the text below, not even that we are as still as glass in the picture my sister took of us, a yesterday we find almost impossible to lift.

.

2008-06-23T09:31:00.001-05:00

call me a lover / tell me another
http://www.sendspace.com/file/6icshe

oblation #2

2008-06-22T09:39:00.018-05:00

The April rain you wake to puts a chill in everything, the cold red brick and the concrete, the bustling leaves and memory’s residence where we exist as if our crimes didn't matter, all of our theories saying this is not what I bargained for, the heart stopping for entire moments out of love for another, the flowers pointing to themselves when everything seemed possible, and I understand now that plainly I have held you, the careful lettering of purple notes telling me so. I am so lightly here but so acutely there. Nothing can stem the steady acceleration of the past, not even sleep that draws the restless, dissatisfied body into fall and winter, not even the hot, tense dreams we wake from to find that we're still just past the world's edge, jumbled and directionless.

the translation of static (rev 3)

2008-06-20T10:11:00.010-05:00

There are stars in cornfields called fireflies. The moon is ventriloquial for the sun. There are love affairs that are like a wind caught between roofs. The trunk of a Russian olive tree is wrapped in chicken wire so it won't sag. A white rain falls into your eyes and eventually your face becomes more like your own. I speak in the language of parrots. These are my contents, wrapped in clean linens: the fortissimo of your voice caught in a feedback knot, a benediction said for me in code, a body broken into many countries, a heart that is nothing but a small fist of agonies. The mute pressure of dusk rises. These are the sedimentary years, when who I am drifts down into the rusty wreck of who I used to be.

the translation of static (rev 2)

2008-06-19T09:58:00.030-05:00

There are stars in cornfields called fireflies. The moon is ventriloquial for the sun. There are love affairs that are like a wind caught between roofs. The trunk of a Russian olive tree is wrapped in chicken wire so it won't sag. Any explosion births a new language, although it can never be said aloud. In London, there is a hypothetical museum with a curator who is a horse in fairy tales. These are my contents, wrapped in clean linens: the fortissimo of your voice caught in a feedback knot, a benediction said for me in code, a body broken into many countries, a heart that is nothing but a small fist of agonies. The mute pressure of dusk rises. These are the sedimentary years, when who I am drifts down into the rusty wreck of who I used to be.

the translation of static (rev 1)

2008-06-16T07:29:00.005-05:00

There are stars in cornfields called fireflies. The moon is ventriloquial for the sun. Even open screened windows keep tigers out. There are love affairs that are like a wind caught between roofs. The trunk of a Russian olive tree is wrapped in chicken wire so it won't sag. Any explosion births a new language, although it can never be said aloud. In London, there is a hypothetical museum with a curator who is a horse in fairy tales. These are my contents, wrapped in clean linens: your voice caught in a feedback knot, a collapsed map of a cemetery of suicides, a body broken into many countries, a fistful of sugar that I pour in your mouth. The mute pressure of dusk rises. These are the sedimentary years, when who I am drifts down into the rusty wreck of who I used to be.

.

2008-06-13T08:54:00.003-05:00

baby see how I been living / velvet curtains on the windows too
http://www.sendspace.com/file/mogs10

the neighborhood

2008-06-12T15:28:00.002-05:00

the translation of static

2008-06-11T14:16:00.003-05:00

1.
There are stars in cornfields called fireflies.

2.
The moon is ventriloquial for the sun.

3.
Even open screened windows keep tigers out.

4.
There are love affairs that are like a wind caught between roofs.

5.
The trunk of a Russian olive tree is wrapped in chicken wire so it won't sag.

6.
Any explosion births a new language, although it can never be said aloud.

7.
In London, there is a hypothetical museum with a curator who is a horse in fairy tales.

8.
A movie wobbles on the reel, causing distracted actors.

9.
These are my contents, wrapped in clean linens: voices collected from disrupted sleep, a folded map of clouds on a lake, a body broken into many countries, a fistful of sugar.

10.
Years are spent eloping from the same barstool. Jackalopian dancing is forbidden.