i am industrialization,
grace of the modern world.
i am all action and all talk,
big words in boastful suits
that reek of condensed time.
i am industry, beautiful
damaging mechanical death
of humanity, since flesh
inevitably bends to the will
of iron and steel.
i am mechanization, the tick
of seconds minutes years
a life that can be counted
in coffee cups and commutes
and songless sighing.
i am a machine, a part of the
big works of other mens' hands,
the rising of the sun
cranked by hands that worked
all night or all their lives.
i am the rusted, broken cogs
the useless creaking joints
the clock whose hands are still
the broken man whose spirit
refused to keep metal company.

everything exists in a mirror
a big shiny pond of nothing and everything
when you raise your hand i am watching your wrist
and its composite water waves wrist
move in a slow descending arc.
you are an image of descent
sliding across blue sheen, an image
of caresses creased in history and space.
i tie your wrists behind your back
with coarse dark twine so that i will never
never see you take that swing
because all surprises are much easier
when you do not see them coming.

the first shooting star i ever saw
was like peace arcing over my shrieking
aching moaning bleeding body.
a bright white burning that saw everything
and took nothing when it went.

in another world we fight nothing,
wade against no overpowering tides.
in this world we are buffered by immobile emotions,
anger and depth crawling inside of our skins
crawling up our spines so that the only option we have left
is the drastic, raging decisions that rake
bright stars out of the blue sky.

the need to forgive you is not so strong.
the need to sleep is waning in favor of a
distinct ennui, a dark blue wave of cold.

because it is words that comprise a person
it is hard to know really who someone is
until you have read everything that they write
and heard all that they will say.
nearing on two years, and i am not so sure
that i even know who you are.

little things mean EVERYTHING
when i lack you i lack everything
distance is a great deal more than miles.

sometimes the silence is greater than me
and my body is not enough to stop the gap.
small fish in a big pond, i stock faith in
the power of rash youthfulness.
unfortunately
impetuousness now fails me, too.

moonlight sunlight starlight
oceanic tides
places we have walked, words we have used
lakes and mountains and cities
and suburban sidewalks,
we have mounted stands against them all
and we fall against
insurmountable weight now.

like brick walls we crumble in old age
the mortar around the edges goes first, yellowing
like parchment, cracking like deserts that have known water
and then the bricks themselves
red but bleached
solid but eroded

in the core of me there is a deep blue fire
with crosshatched emotion in the grate.
from four corners, hate rage fear grief
create a pessimistic plaid from which rises
the flames that keep me moving.
ironically, this blue, this pale playing blue
turns red at the core and preserves close to this
iron grate a blinding spring
of light and love and playfulness.

one day i will walk free against tall wheat
and you'll hold my hand against the length of the field.

broken dry and cracked like
the sands in the deserts
fomented into something solid and
separated by wind and sun
even sand can be worn down
grain by grain the mass averts
tragedy by being mobile
the deserts move south
into what is green and fertile
your heart your heart is
fertile but not yet ripe, is that
sensible or just scared
grain by grain you are
gristled and crushed into
sedimentary unknown and i miss
that thing you used to do
the words aren't all we used to
do have sing say love
my lips are chapped by wind
but the rain is only dropping tears
cracks develop deep as chasms
in the flesh of my mouth
you drop grain by grain
mobile desert love
into my flesh a softer home
for a dehydrated heart
into my flesh you are welcome
the deeper the chasm the less likely
you are to ever leave so
migrating sands from hourglass
to oceanic scene to in between
soft and global humanity and heat
waste me with equatorial burns
conglomerate flesh and glass
a mirror of deserted earth

ecophysicality

all i can smell is salt,
blinding iron accosting my senses.
the tang in my nostrils,
i can't get the taste out of my mouth,
salt injected into every idea and word,
changing me internally
into earth and history and nature.
am i bitter, am i sinful,
am i a pillar of turning back for home,
am i just one more particle in the deep ocean
that a man holier than i might walk upon?
i am impregnated by terra firma,
the biblical proportions of self:
i am a mineral,
i am mined from darker regions,
i am evacuated from a worldwide liquid dream,
i am the taste left in thousands of mouths
after violence, or sex.
a chlorine infection in my blood,
in my spit and in my eyes and underneath my skin,
a connection to the earth.
dark caves with water dripping through the walls
the covert space my bundle of nerves drips through,
a limestone spine.
dry beaches crusted with oceanic leavings,
and when i wake there will be
evidence in my eyes that time and tide were here.
a brackish swamp that swallows sounds,
vocal cords that won't function
as bile rises from deeper trenches.
the salt is a symptom,
and it does not keep me from boiling over.

psychosexuality

all you are is salt.
the syllables of your name,
even wrapped up in cotton,
still carry an acrid tinge.
you are a simple thought,
a complex creation,
bitter and sharp and waiting
for the next moment to strike.
you pounce with sudden
fierce alacrity,
hitting my weak spots
zeroing in on my countless
fault lines.
an open wound, and bleeding,
and iron blood is spilling
like a riptide into the room,
and feet first you jump in
a chlorine dam to break
the will of the body.

the tide is slow to rise inside my chest.
when emotion does gather, it is dark and heavy,
and lays against my heart like a weight.
my heart becomes an iron, needing metallic strength
to combat the crowding stress and sinking time.

alone alone alone, comforting permanence of loneliness
the stark separation of home from world, no signal here
and words only seep in through the cracks, the locked doors
and barred windows keep everything out but my fear—
everything out but the crickets and pond frogs, the wind
and cold little hisses under the sliding glass door.
with you with you with you, and all the time alone
is deeply confusing, is deeply confusing, i am deeply
sunk into a worldly stupor: the times, the post, the globe
all spin the stories without my needing to read them.
alone and kept, alone and a companion, each night
the crickets sing i miss you, i love you, i miss you
and each night i know the words are true but the wind
is late and later, soft and softer, the hiss grows slow.