because life does not exist beyond your borders—
because there is beauty and honor and faith in every lifestyle
not just the one in which you are comfortable—
because lack can inspire higher heights than wealth—
because the sliced bread atmosphere
of enough to waste and always the same, the same,
does not breed the art i am seeking,
omits the will and strength and awareness i desire—
the image i seek is one unended sentence,
a fragment reeling into completion
aided by heat and the smell of your post-coital skin—
because dim rooms are a bit brighter when
there is something (the slope of a quiet body) to be seen—
because dark rooms are a bit emptier
when the twin thrust of love surrenders to lack—
and all this being said i can't deny the space
where your body should be,
the sentences your mouth should finish for me.

once a girl wrote a poem
(where is that poem now?)
once a girl sent words
careening through the universe,
and all for hopes
and ego and for the prayer
of never breaking.
it is all paltry,
it is all worthless,
what can be said now
that was not said more eloquently
during the renaissance,
during adolescence or the night
when love was soft like rain
but was not heaven-sent.
once a girl wrote a poem
(where are those words now?)
but the message is so easily lost
and the phrases so easily broken.

because i have been very sick, i've learned to every day love being healthy. because i have been very lonely, i've learned to every day love my family and friends. because i have been very poor, i've learned to every day love being employed. because i have been very scared, i've learned to every day love feeling safe.

there is honesty in learning how to respect the lessons i have earned.

the pictures you leave me with,
when you leave late at night--
the streetlights not quite illuminating
the glow i've sent you away with--
the images i go to bed with,
all love and sex and adoration,
are filled with clasping hands and
catching skin and cradled hearts.
but the pictures, see, are not quite enough
to keep me pacified when you leave me--
late at night, quiet and wide open
and waiting for the world--
not quite enough to keep me from strangling
on muted distrust and dislike.
i should play them back,
should keep them neatly ordered and
stacked from left to right to flip through
at my leisure, at my pleasure--
when the body leaves its warm impression,
the absence is even more palpable.

to know you in all your seasons
whether you are bountiful or bare,
whether you are shaking in the wind
or the firmament that waves dash up upon:
to know you in all your moods
and the multifaceted natures of your soul
is a lifelong project, is an endless goal.

what there is, what there isn't,
and whether there ever was
i am an entire generation unto myself,
a cringing, crawling conglomerate.
escape routes are too blurry
to follow, too steep to step around
and harder to find than love:
with cheap red lips we find the taste
of sex too graphic for our liking,
the blood too bright for our eyes.
whether there might have been
something different, or ever was
even just the hint of a possibility
of a dream from a dreamer:
in a silo now we must build up
the prosperity of the future,
must starve and hoard now
to have hope in the winter.

syllogism:

the body is a dark room
is an empty bed
is a long dark empty highway.

the process of learning
singularity
is more arduous the third time around.

confession:
i've been trying (for days)
to write a poem about my emotions for the occupy movement.
but the truth is that my poetry
can't encompass words like "banks" or "fees"
or "financial institution" or "kickback".
my poetry
holds words like a sleeping infant,
uses adjectives like lanterns on a forest path,
places verbs in careful patterns
to bring you to an emotional point.
at occupy
i cried at others' stories,
cheered for their passion
and their faith in the first amendment.
at occupy i have been forced to confront
some of my own worst flaws,
as well as the fact that my employer is complicit
in what is being protested here.
at occupy i have made friends,
found people whose ideas stretch my own,
met men and women whose very presence
is a risk and an inspiration.

for those who think wars
are only waged with missiles and airplanes,
please consider the following:
more than 900,000 people in the united states of america
are standing, right now, on a street in their city
holding signs and raising hell.
for those who think that revolution
is a term that expired in this country in 1776,
i can only offer the polite rebuttal
that a revolution is whenever the hell 900,000 people
say it will be.
and we say now.

when all the analogies run dry
and there is only the empty space in the bed
and suddenly too much time in the day
(these things are facts):
when all the metaphors refuse to write
a bigger picture than the one
framed of my face,
don't listen to the hissing of the music
and the whisper of traffic in the streets.
you can't come back,
there is only emptiness to be had
and there is no return to full warmth.

like a sigh in the night
the hem of your coat against the sidewalk,
a brush lighter than fingertips
when you think i'm asleep.
noiseless night
getting up toe to toe with the moon,
open to the harvest spotlight
and sneaking creeping slithering
the only sound
is the final catch of the lock, my breath.
the choke rises in my neck
threatening the larynx, the cords
that pull me all together to force out
just a handful of tumbled words:
where do you go,
when you cannot be still on these nights?
you crouch on streetcorners,
light up cloves in doorways blacker than black,
the fire a pinprick of singularity
a light offering no path
no tunnel, no hope, no solidarity.
the grey panic of waking
to realize that you are gone:
where do you go,
what dreams are you walking without me?

on beaches where waves roll in sibilant on the sand
or rooftops where moonlight glistens on miles of land
i'm pressing through shadows, i'm slipping through doors
i'm finding the crossings from city to shore

when we're young we sing novels, walk stories, rent plays
and assume they'll stay with us through nights and long days
in age dramas leave us, comedies will die laughing
and the walks and the songs and the spaces are lacking

so i'm climbing stairwells and swinging through alleys
i'm circling tall mountains and flooding dry valleys
to find the one source where the phrases are fresh,
to bind words to my heart and rend paragraphs with flesh.

forget bile, forget chance, forget fear,
forget all the promises you made and thought
you were capable of keeping—
forget clocks on walls that are telling you
there's no time, there's no time—
forget your mother's sense and your father's shame
and all the friends who forget you now—
forget age, forget money, forgo physicality
and take to the streets with your rage
to arm your brothers.
in words we make new memories, new scenes
that can be remembered and held close,
to keep us strong when we are weak.
new memories to replace the old,
new ideas to help us forget
that we are cold and hungry and oh so young,
to help us forget that we are poor
and lack means of power or force.
remember now
all the faces that came before you,
the struggles in delis and grape fields,
remember now that fate is optional
but the future looms
and brings whatever you brought to the table,
be it reason or weapons or tears.
forget the acid that rises in your chest
and forget how blue are bruises:
let action be your mantle
and break the crown into the hands of the people.

i am not an animal because
i hope, i dream, i create, i predict.
i am sentient:
and in perceiving all the wrongs that are done,
mammalian instinct rises.
there is no work, no food, no warmth
so this winter,
it's time to hibernate.
in the power of subjective consciousness
there is no rescue,
and imagination serves only
to tantalize:
what is it to have promise?
i eat narratives for breakfast,
feast on lies from men whose generation
fought a war and were rewarded.
my generation
wages war for their morals,
fought for resources we can't obtain.
our reward
is to hide like animals
deep in burrows,
seeking tunnels darker and safer
to live out the winter.

"the dirt, you know? how can you not miss the dirt?
the grime of it, like one of those
expensive sugar rubs you can buy at a spa,
the way it climbs up your feet and into your shoes."
on streets named for states the little mice walk
and seek, and stray, and sin gently
against the racing-stripe background.
"the smell, too, so often urine, so often sweat,
because with all the life pressed together here
how can there not be a little excrement around the edges?"
on little mouse feet they rustle towards stairs,
or rumble towards alien doorways to seek a fight
or start a war, or ask someone for spare change.
"and the noise, all these cars, the buses
grumbling up the hill, especially on cathedral,
and the sirens of all the cops, they're all cops,
did you see the motorcade with all the cops?"
the whiskers twitch with single-mindedness
for a chance at food or employment,
the naked little tail belying irritation and impatience
with the whole system and its lack of cheese.
"but i think what i'd miss most
would be the display here, the show we put on,
how public everything can be and still no one
can tell you the whole story."

once
you and i
(a chapter, a story)
were carving a path
at night
we rang bold, singing, precious.
like a wine glass
full of blood-red merlot
and held to the firelight--
and once
smashed,
rebel rubble on the blacktop,
glass shards to pick
out of tender feet.
inarticulate
and full of words
i cast out
(a bet, a lifeline)
for purchase.
i am far from pacified.

where you are, the only place
i'd want to be or could imagine myself--
my whole self, all parts,
all breathing and skin and warmth--
where you are is perhaps all i can ever be
till i outgrow this body, this age.
i realize there's no one waiting,
i realize this place
is empty now, is barren, is moments
away from being forbidden--
where you are, in that dim room
that smells like home and sex,
is it better there?
i am staggering drunk down streets,
finding myself on steep concrete stairs,
waiting to wander or wonder:
where you are, the only place
i can be, and can't find.

the use of the body, so bound
in strings and terror:
is it right, is it moral, is it effective?
can the hands do this, can the mouth?
(will it hurt?)
even in age there are questions.
yet how can there be any doubt when the body
is all you are, is all you can be?
the only earthly thing you are attached to,
kite string, ballast.
take the doubt, dig a hole,
bury it deeper than toes sinking into sand.
gather the fear, sever the string,
let it loose into thinner skies.
the body is all you have,
claim clearance, find physical fealty.

worthless worth can't prove a thing,
can't convince anyone to stay or seek;
the worth of words so helpless
compared to the strike of self-doubt.
when i was younger, did i doubt so
wholeheartedly, unabashedly, vocally?
i thought self-assurance came with age
but all i find is too many years,
the antiquity of grief which has passed.
am i worth, am i worth it? i have
no proof, not even an argument
that might convince you to love me
as you ought, as you should have for years.

you lie with your teeth, white lies,
trimmed with milkfat and sugar
and baked into pale glowing pies:
the resplendence of virtues!
and your fingertips lie as they move
sneaking and searching for truth,
tracing my body, its lines and grooves
to find a secret i never told.
the body is one sweet masquerade,
a ballroom with candles and syrup
and sconces, a whole dreamscape created
to make me finally open my mouth.

it starts
with a glance
then a question
(words spoken too fast
the mouth stumbles on intent)
what's your name, where you from?
and the tentative decision to touch
fingertips that graze and lips that brush
all to stumble out together, tumble in together
one big bed in a dark, chilly room is all you earned

compulsion shows the truth.
what i seek, between your hands,
in the empty space the flesh can fill,
is less than what is possible.
what i am capable of, between your hands,
the words and actions that can come
from the crush of affection:
call it fire, call it fear, all things
come to an end when confronted
with absolution.
what could hell possibly be,
if not the gradual, witnessed wilting
of love and life?
the fading out of vibrance, color:
where the push of your skin on mine
does not force emotion,
there is no longer any time!
any words we join into sentences
fall by, fall flat,
we must find moments to sequester them,
reorder them and make them live again.
what could hell possibly be
but your specific absence?
the room we create
between the arcs of our fingers
(lasting only moments,
passing like stars in the sky)
decries the common truths.
all love is specific, beautific,
writhing with the work of possibilities.

there is only one dream left
at the end of the road,
one golden gleaming hope
that won't die till you do:
sustenance, sufficience,
the dream of enough, enough.
when all other loves have left
(your face your hands,
dark rooms and loud music
or glasses pouring over with froth)
there is no meaningful loss
until the end of the line.
when the dream of enough
(warmth, food, comfort)
abandons you at last,
the cardinal sins are revised
and maybe god will forgive you
for giving up just a bit.

when the bells begin to chime,
i'll be far away from here:
i'll be somewhere on a beach,
playing hide and seek with time.

when the tower starts its song,
i'll have been gone for days
to a place its sound won't reach,
where the nights are deep and long.

when the clock sings out the hour
i'll be warm on golden sands,
making friends with roaring waves
and preaching patience to the choir.

when the voices raise their call,
i'll be too far gone to listen;
i'll be somewhere in my mind,
and i won't hear them shriek at all.

the hand points to one,
says you stay or you come.
the hand points to two,
says you win or you're through.
the hand points to three,
says stay young or follow me.
the hand points to four,
says you've got your foot in the door.

in the room the hand rotates slowly
ticking by the uneasy minutes,
you are watching and waiting for the door to open.
all night you waited restless
and ready for this day and this meeting.
what can be decided here?
what can be pretended, what might exist
if greater effort is extended?

the hand points to five,
says you could thrive.
the hand points to six,
says you should get in the mix.
the hand points to seven,
says it's time to make a plan.
the hand points to eight,
says you'd better get it straight.

for all the opportunities missed
there is just one more to be had,
one more to make sure you don't miss the moment
and wind up just watching
the world go by, the people walking
on the sidewalks who have places to go,
the cars driving so purposively on the streets.
you could be a part of this,
you could belong to a place and a time
but only if you make this moment count.

the hand points to nine,
says the day could be mine.
the hand points to ten,
says i must break and mend.
the hand points to eleven,
says the future could be heaven.
the hand points to twelve,
says the past has been hell.

one day soon you'll be old,
and what will you have to look back on?
many years, and perhaps not as many memories
as you might have liked.
so make this what it is, a chance,
and savor this chance to be nervous
about being young and free and wild.
seated in this room
there are still possibilities,
there are many paths but
you are waiting for just one door to open.

the need for common warmth can strike at will,
can force the body into others' arms:
ignoring your safety, even seeking harm,
affection gives a chance to get your fill.
you roam when empty, stealing bits and crumbs,
surviving on the need to walk and run
since on these days you always blame the sun
and glare with rays that keep the daylight glum.
you seek the girl who saves a place for you,
who pines and hopes and wilts without your light:
she cannot last another hour, the night
will steal the faithless face who can't stay true.
an orange moon rises, finds your lovely form
stretched out as cold as dead— and keeps you warm.

what exactly is needed, what am i missing,
what is it that i lack that all these other women
seem to have found in great quantity--
to find success, to find love, to find peace,
there must be some keystone that i don't have,
right? since the alternative
is that maybe it's just me, maybe i have not yet
swallowed enough, struggled enough,
can i not blame this on someone else for a change?
i have not been empowered enough, i was not given
the intelligence or the opportunities--
none of these things are true.
maybe all i lack is simple, is easy,
is just some innate quality that i haven't discovered
because i have been too busy building
to bridge the gaps of what i've lost.
i am too young to know real loss,
with the moderate success of the young and tired
that means i do not yet know real lack,
with the wide open aching heart
that means i tried to love and failed.
if all i want is to earn my own way,
find my own love, win my own wars,
is it my intent that is so wrong
or just the effort used to get there?

in secrecy you preen the sadness,
running empty claws through bright plumage:
colored scarlet red, smelling
of roses and salt and all the dreams
you've ever feared.
which scene keeps you running, now?
which circumstance would make you set,
finally, to roost?
in silence you groom the grief,
shedding new growth and burnishing the old
words and old hates,
with oiled talons you separate each strand
and make them gleam with your mourning.
whatever cannot be gained on this perch
was never worth having,
an affirmation with each self-loving stroke.

what you are looking for,
maybe it isn't real, maybe the joy
you sensed was off in the distance
will always be around one more corner:
where do you find another
(insert what you lost here)
that could even come close,
that could approximate what you felt?
what you are looking for,
maybe it's only real when you accept
that all things lost are never found
and what's new isn't always less.

we fight our battles in different ways,
you and i. you lapse, and i sizzle:
your silence indicates discontent,
and i am busy shrieking from an open window.

on a different night i am waging war
against my body, and your hands and your sweat
and your hips on mine are the only force
that keeps me from falling apart.

maybe it is because you brought armor
to this fight, and i come bare-skinned,
open-handed: where fists win,
words fail entirely to make you love me.

for all the listening i do there is always
some new whisper to hear, something creeping
down the hallways that says
your name your name, or maybe nothing at all
just the speaking of my hope:
the words of my faith vocalized
by someone who knows nothing of their mouth.
the volume is of no consequence
if the message speaks of your possibilities,
i am captivated by chance, by fate:
walk a little faster, love, look a little brighter
and help me find out, somewhere in the world
there is a body and a face and a heart
that pulse the same rhythm as mine.
for all the words there are in the world
only one matters, your name, your name.

what i hate most is the dichotomy—
i must love you or i hate you,
i must win you or i've lost.
all the beauty of love is in the uncertainty,
the power of words is in their connotation:
but i speak, you do not hear.
if i am one without the other,
if all that's left is one hand and the other gone
(meandering, wandering, a brook that
twirls down the hillside, a raindrop
clambering down from the clouds)—
if i must walk where i have been running,
the loss is so sure.
i must love you or i've learned nothing,
i must win because my words create the rules.
you are bound by nothing
but my voice and my mouth and my hands,
because with fingertips so light against your wrist,
can you really say no?
you must decline or you have accepted.

girl, so frail and limpid,
working so hard to look as fragile as you do,
how can you not expect the world to break you?
with pride in your porcelain you drop
off the cliff as is expected,
all surprise at the resulting crash and burn.
girl, you've left your gloves on too long,
let them dress you up
in lace and lipstick and pure, easy lack:
what do you have, when your hands are empty?
who do you love, when you're alone?
oh girl, you've let them leave you up so high
and built no ladder for your feet.
maybe you thought that woman would help free you—
woman with her pride, with her sensbility,
with the weight of stored-up sin.
woman cannot even hear you cry,
she is busy roaring her fury, didn't you know?
you've missed the train, lost the ferry,
foundered on the sidewalk.
no, girl. it's up to you to learn the rules
and walk the ropes, to make the hands that placed you
where you are today (high, shivering, cold)
reach for you again, and bring you down.
there are no eyes
that cannot be dazzled, no ears
that can't be charmed. if they built you, sweet one,
then surely they will tear you down as well.

where once i knew your words would shine,
now only silence speaks:
the voice that breaks won't be denied
though swallowed in my sleep.
and nothing you can say today
will suit my needs tomorrow,
though lies and praise are quick to say
that i leave to my sorrow.
in love the pauses aren't this long,
in love poems are easy;
with you the scene plays out all wrong,
the words are limpid, breezy.
my next i think will be a love
all gilded in the stars,
a love that holds the branch and dove
above the heart's base wars.
the script is more important now
than what you might have said,
and i care little for your vow
and more for what's ahead.

dreams come a little dearer, these days.
the cost a little higher to attain,
even the cost of the dreaming
strains the repetition of the daily.
do i dream still of the possibilities,
or merely of what is imminent?
the restriction of dreams to the present
means all the dreams become reality,
keeps the mind in the moment:
your betrayals are expected,
the way you're late or absent
becomes a statement in itself.
it isn't as though i love you, or even
dreamed of your body or words,
you are no lover's feast.
the price of dreaming means that
you are an acceptance or
the manifestation of my needs.

i built this wall.
i have named each brick,
let it symbolize a burden
in hopes the weight might lift.
i built this wall,
a sanctuary of security:
here, i am free again
to hope and dream and breathe.
i built this wall
to walk along, to touch the bricks
and feel the grain
of self-regrets for mortar.
i built this wall,
and intimately i know it:
where it is sound and
where it might wear a bit with age.
i built this wall,
and only i know the places
where a single moment of sensuality
might bring the whole thing down.

in a search for what is beautiful,
i am wandering down a path
lined by oaks, by songbirds, by sunshine.
with my hands i write a duet
of lovely words and loving warmth,
in a search for what is beautiful
i can smell the pansies
growing at the edge of the road:
i think of you, of what you've been through,
my wounded soldier, beat of my heart.
their little red bud heads nodding
up in the summer glow,
agreeing, you have been braver than brave.
in a search for what is beautiful
i hold the sheet music,
the tender pages seeking your voice
as my complement, a duet for the both of us
to sing in a summer forest
while watching birds circle lazy in the sky.
even my two feet beating out their rhythm
on this brown dirt path
make their way towards you musically,
thoughtfully, sweetly.
in a search for what is beautiful
there is the scenery, and increasingly, you.

authentic desire
wells up from deeper trenches, i think;
when you come around,
i am merely interested, affectionate.
the body sets its own course.
in twenty-three hours
or as many years,
i can demonstrate the passage, the waning
of legitimate love,
the creative campaign of craving
launched by a pulsing heart.
in questioning authenticity i have learned
to press my palms against your chest,
seek a heartbeat,
seek an iron ore in your ego.
these things are real enough,
i should doubt you further?

the necessary purge:
a cleansing in the name of sleep,
an emptying of the heaviest burdens.
you weigh on me,
even when unconscious i can feel you burn:
circled around my shoulders
curled up like a python,
and my shame the heat that warms your bones.
the dreams don't come as often now,
the visions stay away.
is it true or is it false,
that some words must be said?
what's written can't be taken back,
self-righteous statements can't be deleted.
here i'm alone,
keeping vigil in the mirror
in my deep dark home:
tracing the slopes of my body,
cooling the surface of my skin.
your words, my words, my heat, your burn,
all symptoms of hearts that
beat too similarly to let each other be.
you are the gravel under my feet,
the inertia that keeps me stable.

the works of humanity,
the things we can build, unreal,
lost in fantasy—
who can say what is real, what is not?
which place exists, which is imaginary—
why not build the imagined,
it will take eighteen months, we can
quote you the cost.
and all the actions of your life
could take place in this building,
in this imagined space,
the events of your reality could
be a little less real here.
whatever it is that you want,
pick your shapes and colors
and the heights of the walls, there is
an arch with a keystone holding up
the entire image:
why not build what is imagined,
and house your life there?
maybe it would be a little more magical,
or a little more comfortable.

made the mistake of erasing your number,
didn't know who you were
when i picked up.
call it lonely, call it curious,
call it fate—
never thought i'd hear your voice again,
especially not saying my name like that.
what our mouths say is not
what is really happening here:
"why did you call"
is really, are you still thinking about me?
"what are you doing right now"
is really, did you replace me yet?
you've got me thinking now
about all those nights we spent just like this,
clinging to phones and voices
that were too far away,
watching the hours tick by.
i have given you hours of my life,
days and weekends and years
and it all comes down to this night:
weeks after the fight,
this is some kind of return to the emotions
that used to keep me safe.
i am not safe any more,
and i embrace that with open arms
and open bottles and car windows down
on the highway at 4am.
but here's your voice again
on the other end of the line—
i cannot listen, i need to drink.
self-destruction can be so delicate.

in peace, we were what some might envy: in lust,
we were just what we could be. walking slowly
late at night, the body's urges growing—
i leave the dishes dirty, i let the dust
pile itself along the ridges. just once,
i cried. and then i left, against your grain,
and built my dream: a scene without a frame,
the stage unset gives nothing away but dust.
the walking begins, a trial of time and pain
to prove the thing i lost is really gone.
my feet may etch the path they will, since you
aren't here to keep me from it. what i gain
in distance is lost in blood: from veins it's drawn
by guilty needles that shriek their own debut.

something simple, something soft
and seeping in around the edges—
like a bruised peach,
like your red lips biting into the flesh,
like the juices dripping down.
something sneaks in along the periphery
when i look at you,
you might be washing dishes or
brushing back your hair or doing nothing at all
but when i look at you—
something like a sleeping silhouette,
the curves of a woman
smooth and firm and inviting.
there can be such honesty in love,
truth-telling like you've never dared anywhere
but here in this bed.

she is a veritable exorcism of words,
a lacking useless vulgar hole
that coerces all the light into its mouth:
and all silence, all silence once the deed is done.
with eyes like portents she stares
and wins the contests against unblinking stars;
they wince, they wink
at her gaze, longer than their lightyears,
packed with more fire than their innermost hearts.
and that vast, secret silence
against which she heaves her body and
her tongue and her breasts, her mouth and the
noiselessness which pours out of it,
that hideous hiding silence keeps her mysteries
under invisible lock and swallowed key.

somewhere beneath the newscasters’ glow
and outside the shrieking political show
somewhere, someplace that has never been seen
continues rotating in darkness.
somewhere in shadows, bent backs uncurl
pick up brown babies and give them a twirl
here parents scrape just to feed every mouth
and rock them to sleep in the darkness.
and under the broadcasters’ glimmering talk
of Fannie and Freddie and Greenspan and Locke
an idyll unfolds in the hungry young minds
of the wealth and the warmth in the light.

in a world of possibilities—
during the years of our youth and the seasons
of mobility, ability, and honesty—
you made these choices,
you brought these ends around.
in a sky of shapes you saw only clouds,
and i went seeking doorways.
on the list of things you can't control,
add me, and i'll add up
all our many faults and the ways
we connived and coerced and conceived.
but this is a story
that i have told many times before
and without results;
in a sky of shapes you saw only weather
when i was dancing in the rain.
you could apologize to me now,
and i'd laugh for the impossibility of it.

hymn for gilead

the bar, the bar, with all the little
helpness notes strung out
in between the strident lines:
you must, you must, keep moving with them
else lose the narrative,
the string of coherence and strain.
today, today, a little song must sing
what ears won't acknowledge
nor eyes raise to meet:
there is, there is, a balm to be had
for all the ills but there is not
enough to go around.
please sing, please sing, since only sound
can keep the notes running,
can give the words power:
there was, there was, a mountain of truth
but now there is rubble
and the tribes run round seeking lack.

i want you for your freedom,
for capturelessness, for capriciousness,
i want you for your opportunities:
give me an inch, i'll grow a mile
and we can walk it together.
if you are a piano,
all black and white keys and holding together
harmonies and melodies all on your own--
if you are two hands working together
and syncopating what you desire
for yourself,
give me the key and i'll create another line
to weave in and around what you lay down.
i am through
with the cringing and the crying,
i am wide open and waiting
for something brighter than what love used to be.
let me inside the gate,
give me the access and i'll give you creation:
from scratch, from sticks, i will build
a new instrument altogether.

if you have ever seen a soldier returning home,
if you have ever seen a mother get her son back—
you have wondered who sent him away.
if you have ever seen someone destitute get a job,
if you have ever seen the accomplishment of earning lower wages—
you have wondered who took opportunity away.
if you have ever seen a family move out of a shelter,
if you have ever seen the father holding new keys—
you have wondered what happened to their home.

the breadth of damage that has been done,
these past years.
who has sentenced my generation
to poverty, to lack, to dependence?
our mothers and fathers can't quite grasp
what it feels like to be young and vigorous and bright
and completely powerless.
we tell stories like our great-grandparents:
we use economics and emotions interchangeably,
we spend hours poring over how we have made ends meet.
the depression, it is more than money.

i am a writer.

i can hear her, quietly mewling in the bathroom, while the cat sits in front of the bookcase and tries to figure out how to dismember it. there is a solitude in the apartment that none of us could tame, broken only by her piteous little whimpers. i wonder if the doctor warned her it would be this bad.
the cat, having figured it out, paws her old copy of the complete Keats off the shelf. it falls open halfway along the spine, and he sinks his claws into the crinkly old paper. i shoo him off the dead lines and replace the book. she is coughing, heaving, crying.
she wrote her thesis on Keats, on the exploits of Endymion and the distance between those who love history and those who create it. academicians have loved her for her entire life, with the inexplicable fondness of rhetoricians who can't be moved for a younger questioner, troublemaker. she always asked why. with Keats it was the purity, the devotion so clear and clean, that attracted her. her own poetry is messy, rampant, explodes onto napkins at restaurants and the margins of her essays. but there is no purity in realism, or in the body—no doubt her next poems will reflect a deep disappointment in the mortality and physical weakness she's experiencing now. i tried to comfort her but, like me, she prefers to weather cheap pain on her own.
it rained all day, keeping her nausea down as she stood pressed against the balcony windows. palms to glass like she always is during the afternoon thunderstorms—she says the rainstorms are why she came here, and why she can never leave. now that it's evening the smells at the open windows are changing, from warm wet asphalt to cold damp grass.
i can hear her quieting down, and then she's standing in the bathroom doorway, backlit and wiping her hand across her mouth. a little moth in overgrown wings she looks like, in her too-large shirt and bare legs. she collapses into a corner of the couch, rubbing her forehead. when the light rain starts to fall again, she and the cat both look out the window and raise inquiring noses to the air.

the accoutrements of illness gather
like the flotsam of some grounded voyage
that beached on its own mortality:
the detritus that beckons you back into bed,
assures comfort in the status of being
something less than what you have been,
or could be. and the illness itself
hangs dim around the edges, curtains that blow
in the cool breeze of painkillers and the haze
that opens, sheer and soft, for more
delirium: grounded, floating, nauseous.
eventual health seems so far away
when every object screams handicap,
tells you to lie still and stay quiet.
it becomes easier to believe the landscape
than the body, with its queasy lies
and dead desires: the blood will still rush
when you stand no matter how you hope.

it sleeps like a tide inside the throat,
waiting for dawn or light to pull it from its trenches--
a hibernating creature, fattening on what sleep
and nutrients are provided, threatening
to pull from their home the last salvages of health.
with dirty, crusted claws it wrenches open sleeping sores,
leaves furrows where flesh was whole
and makes its own mocking mark in the recesses of the body.
the stitches begin to tear,
sutures being no match for what has been done here:
what has been ripped away is gone, and the finality of it
leaves no breath to ease the wound.

the body is such a
misunderstood thing, an inchoate message
of froth and desire and sweat—
confronted by the gravitational pull from
anyone else's mess,
we succumb and gain closeness.
all the verbs we espouse can't find traction
on the slope of physicality we build:
to play, to ponder, to touch.
in the dim coolness of a bedroom
there is no equality to be had, only gender
and the roles and rules we perform.
and your body,
with its broadness and solidity,
makes acts of surrender all the more delicious.
i keen for your surety,
that incontrovertible effort of appeal
and design, you make me weak
and feminine and glowing, all in one stroke.

there is rhythm in the city streets,
a beat that struggles up from under concrete
to pick at your veins with dirty fingertips--
and you, dear innocent, wander open-mouthed
wild under the open sky and
hemmed in by the height of the buildings.
all on your own you are stellar, astronomical,
orbiting the many works of men's hands.
with your own footsteps you build a tune
of pounding, searching, a trek
that might be months or minutes long,
letting the city grub its palms on you
till exhaustion and heat stroke threaten too close.
oh but the next day there is still more
to be found, more doorways and cafes and
more streetlights to shelter under,
more images of flesh and stone to store away.
the sun in its path cannot deter you,
can only provide the impetus to get up and out
and the light to see, to search
when two feet and two eyes and sweat
are all you have ever needed to be alive.

in silence we dread
what comes inevitably;
next week, old age, death.

inheritance

on this day in history, what i was is already dead.
an ancient evil rises, poseidon-like,
over my head and swallows all my
wandering waves of hair. the power that i had!
when i sang, the argonauts sank their ship.

evil breaches my doorway, an idea older than chronos:
he seeks my hearth, sits at the kitchen table,
perched like an overfed vulture.

oh, all the things i could have been,
if left to bear only this child and not this pain;
i am old, i am worn, i am grey, and my skin
grows dry with every passing midnight.
(what is it to mourn your own youth?)
i am a raging, sighing daughter of the earth.
when i sang, odysseus tore his flesh for me.

and this day, this morning, when you and i come in together,
is also known as a sunday; a day in cold midwinter that
does nothing, says nothing, is nothing.
your hand on mine, what does it signify?
we cross borders every day, you and i,
and it is in these crossings that i learned to love you.
i wonder where our feet will go tomorrow.

the rocks in the garden walls, holding back the river floods,
the stones building the arch of our gate,
the pebbles falling out of our pockets after we lounge on the beach:
underfoot and in between our toes and
rough against the grain of our skins,

i don't like the colors of the rocks
because they do not mix.

maybe after years of pressure from the earth,
maybe after eons of hot hot heat,
maybe after my inheritance is taken away
(the blood inheritance, the flesh inheritance,
my name, my body, my meaning),
maybe after there exists a brown little boy
who is an anagram of father and mother,
maybe when my narrative is given over to a tired tombstone
or someone else's sweaty palms—

my tired, aching song. all the change is gone.
the words are old, the methods ancient;
i could never sink a modern crew now
the way i sank the argonauts then.
for weeks i have been dousing my vocal cords in
lemon acerbity, alcoholic sting,
the persuasiveness of tasting someone else's mouth.

the old evil rises again, enters my doorway
and sits down for tea. he sits, sycophantic, with
his knees tucked into his chest.
he is all one mind, convinced by his own repetitions.
and this tea, on this sunday, is accompanied by my descant
pleading for reason, pleading for the power of
sight over supposition: because we all run red when injured
and today i am dressed in gore.

and this sunday, next september, every sundown,
these are my witnesses. these, and the song of my son
who is not yet born, and the lyrics that leach
power out of the old evil;
when i sing, history hums in bitter discord.
when i sing, the sinking hopes of sailors keen in the wind.
when i sing, all the granite and phosphate and limestone
and sandstone and obsidian of the world
rise out of the earth and run together
in one great conglomerate feast;
and my little boy kicks in my womb.

incandescent, i pause
in the doorway, just a shadow
outlined by darkness
but shining with the clarity
of midnight--
a perfect proof of shape
and form, with fingertips
just barely brushing
the wooden frame.
and you, for all your grand
great ideas, for the time
you have spent thinking
and pondering
and cogitating and agitating--
you are struck silent
by the figure i present,
by the curves
that disappear into silence
and the bend in my elbows
and the arch of
one mocking eyebrow.
feather-light i brush
just slightly against the air
in the room, spreading scent
and wafting womanhood
over your ego,
then turn and whisper
out the door,
down the hall,
into the night.

oh that slight sidling away from the issue,
the words that run away with my
miscreant mouth-- troublesome tongue--
come find me, find me where i lay and strip
the very marrow from my bones,
let us argue about the meaning of art
and whether god and nature truly exist.
and my fingers, dancing nimbly around yours,
writing circles onto the bare skin of your back
and palms that flash like hummingbirds
against your broad and carefree chest
while my back arches for your touch,
hopeful hips-- lithe legs-- i seek you
early in the morning, or late
at night when it's too quiet for peace.
my body that keens like a seagull
when you're gone, searching empty shores
for your track-- eager eyes-- sunburned skin--
chasing you home or nowhere, to find you
where you would keep me for more than a minute.

so bring me winter,
lay the season at my feet
with all its snow and frostbite--
with its cold acerbity,
dangerous fields of ice,
bring me winter
and make it my wedding gift.
all your words could do
was leave me shivering,
but winter,
winter could kill me
or leave me breathless and shaking
at your door.

the world is such a complicated thing.

you must be willing to get injured.

one day i slunk along a path
that led to whoknowswhere,
forgetting all my mother's wrath
and abandoning her care.
the sun was gold, the roses pink,
the dirt was packed down tight
on a path that traveled to the brink
of a copse immersed in light.
i perched a moment, pausing there
outside the verdant scene,
and breathed in sweetly scented air,
touched grasses, lush and lean.
a few steps more and i could be
part of that peaceful view,
yet something made me wait to see
and contemplate and brood.
as i considered wading in
a movement caught my eye,
a tiny sparrow and her kin
hopped out, leapt up, to fly.
the chicks were still unsteady
on their newly feathered wings
that spread and flapped, unready
to support the new fledglings.
the little sparrows squawked and strained
and struggled to attain
the elegance that was ingrained
in blood and bone and brain.
of six, just five whirled into air
and left one far behind,
and dove upwards without a care
as the sixth rebuked his kind.
the lonely sixth did struggle back
and forth along the trees,
when one missed hop threw him off track
and onto my bent knees.
a shrewd young eye then studied me,
the claws caught on my skin,
and he chirped then looked back to see
what had happened to his kin.
my heart beat hard with eagerness
to touch and know this bird,
the blood was pounding with a stress
and a speed the sparrow heard.
he cocked his head and winked his eye
then spread his fragile wings
and took off to the empty sky
where all his brothers sing.
so i stayed crouched outside the grove
and watched them fly awhile,
a multitude that played in droves
and splayed an aerial mile.

his pulse is firm, his hands insist,
as i mold to his form:
an offering pure in lust and bliss
so even flesh conforms.

the night seeps underneath the door
and into his dark eyes
which prick my skin and start the war
with beauty as its prize.

what he demands i freely cede
and wait for the reprise:
another round of growing need
and asking, gently, please.

a thousand deadly drops of sweat
merge inside our hands,
to seek the beat and make a threat
where pleasure seeks to stand.

and when the battle's all but won
his skin declares the right:
that even when the war is done
it's only for the night.

when the contentedness slips up my spine
like a slide rule
(you are happy once, you are happy twice)
it's time to review the measurement:
the step by step abrasion
that makes me willful and inchoate.
when i was this high
(gesture about hip-height with the hand)
i was buried under prose, line by line the words
came pouring out of gnawed-on pens.
then here
(a little higher now)
the words found order, found reason,
found a logic in illogic that made them rhyme
and gave them rhythm.
and now i wonder, for the height i have now,
what i have given up for this viewpoint:
coordination, fascination,
or even just a grounding of emotions.
but the slide rule keeps sliding,
measuring my mountain of subservience and lust
and counting the times that you come:
i am happy once, i am happy twice.

it's so complicated,
this desire to be broken:
to know myself as strong, fearless, confident,
and seeking someone to fault that.
in the moments of my deepest self-awareness,
my heart grinds away
in the mire of success, seeking inspiration
among stones that shouldn't be turned:
what is despair if not tipping the scales,
if not finding myself alone
but as independent as the golden calf?
and what i need is a darker soul,
someone else's grit
to erode my control and careful plans.
it's complicated, even the admitting of it
must be done carefully and silently;
yet this conception of my disgrace,
so well formed in bed at night,
finds its home in your palms
and your teeth
and the way your mouth latches onto mine.
the marks are left for morning,
the selfhood left for dead.

my insides are hollow,
a slender secret that seeks and seeks
and only finds when it finds you.
like some cheap candy,
sticking to the roof of your mouth
but all pleasure on the tongue:
but easy, easy to find.
and when i'm shaking,
when my palms are opening and closing
crying their own cries against your broad back,
will it be enough then
to be exactly what i am and not
one single thing more?
it is the eternal fear of woman, see:
all the secrets of the world cannot conceal
the fact that i am who i am,
straight down to my belly
especially when you're looking at me like that.
so sure, come on and seek,
with your eyes, the heat of your blood and
great rough palms, come seek.
i will be easy enough to find.

the first night stands alone again,
a crux atop the hill:
the slope curves down, ironic grin,
for us to take our fill.

the first night offers just one chance
to feed, to starve, to prove:
one shot to guess the steps to dance
and coordinate with you.

the first night is a lonely peak
that demands as much as gives:
our hands are clasped, the bed will creak,
as sex takes breath to live.

the first night scolds you long and hard
for giving it away:
you slut, you couldn't leave one shard
of dignity for today.

the first night makes the second go
much quicker than before:
he takes his fill and leaves you, though
he leaves you wanting more.

in the dark byways of the world,
sunk inside the glistening bricks of seaside alleys
and conjoined to blank concrete in los angeles,
in the paths where no one thinks to walk
there are secrets, and they hide me from you.
here between the tall brick homes,
where the sidewalk blocks don't connect so square,
i slip between the cracks and against the pebbles
and under the cement, and the roads
bear their burden over my head and do not comment.
along these paths, then, i am free to walk
and wander as i will, against or away
from the sun or the rain, towards heat
or enveloping cold, and the roads don't speak,
they don't even know my name.
i help to push a single blade of grass
into unlikely places, between bricks and blocks,
hoping you see it and wonder of me.
i'm not dead, but these roads don't know my name
and they give me shelter and won't give me away.

she bites the peach,
the juices run
all down her chin
and in the sun
she glistens there
the sticky shine
adorns her mouth,
the tongue that twines
between the lips
to catch the drips
before they fall
onto her lap
to glimmer there
like amber sap.

i don't need an observer to be beautiful,
and you don't have to praise me
for my actions and my words to have worth.
just look, just look-- one pale hand
with five long fingers, manicured prettily,
has more power than your closed fist.
the correct observation to make
is that perhaps i could be fine on my own,
should i choose to be!
i don't choose, i want you, come here
and observe, do you want to see the motions
or just hear the words that bring us together?
tell me what you need, baby, tell me
what it is you think you deserve.

what do you like, can i read your codes?
the game of femininity, to second-guess your wants:
if the curve of my hip was gently in evidence,
if my hand traced the image, would you notice?
or should i instead wear the higher heels,
let my legs feel longer, stretch them out long
and threaten to wrap them around your waist--
if the corner of my mouth indicated that
as a possibility, would you notice? if my breath
were to slowly increase against the hum
of my heart against your rib cage,
if my eyes opened just a little brighter,
would you notice, would you care?
what is there here to keep you, what offering?
the body is such an inchoate mess, wild in motion,
forming ideas in the heat of action and reaction:
what is there here you could want, what could i
put on display to meet your gaze? since my eyes
could never be lifted directly,
i've been taught other ways: with fingertips,
with darkened eyelashes and reddened lips,
with knowing what my hips look like when i walk,
i can meet your gaze only with attributes.
is it enough, will you notice?

when even seatides skirt away
from where you lay your head,
it's time to leave that sullied bay
and follow where you're led.

the path goes on along the shore
away from where you camped,
and you must follow blindly or
risk dying in the damp.

you must go forward, farther on,
to find what you would seek:
a road, a goal, a clearer dawn,
not hidden in the deep.

even unconsciously, the human heart is responsive.
if every rhyme has already been spoken,
your joy has already been encapsulated
by someone else's pen, surely and beautifully.
you doubt the words on the page, though they march
smartly across the space, covering distance:
you doubt the emotions they drag from you
and i'll allow you that separation, for now.

always something so fucked up about poets from the midwest,
like no matter who we want to be all that grain alcohol
from previous generations is just gonna saturate us anyways.
always another cow-tipping joke, always another campfire.
always something a little bit strange, a little bit strained,
something we've got to prove about iowa or indiana—
maybe it goes back to basic america, that westward expansion
which created a whole new breed of nationalists
who broke new earth and their own backs and at this point
just can't be reasoned with, the hurts so sustained.
so born of simple stubborn people and raised inside the fences
and faces all white, the poets start grasping for rhythm,
diction and form, mashing eliot and cummings into don williams
and hoping something interesting comes out of it.
something always a little messed coming out of the midwest,
a little suspiciously skewed as we try to escape the stigma
of beer or amish country or corn fields or something.

the ascension is in my ears,
a rapidly growing pulse--
why should i have to stay inside the lines,
why should i be restricted?
it grows here, seeping down into my heart,
down through the spine and my bones and the marrow
curdles at the touch of it.
i am pounding, beating, throbbing
with its growth.
i am so many images all grown up
and swallowed by one bitter mouth:
the wedding dress,
sacagawea and her shoes and the mountains,
an edifice built specifically for books,
the blooming of a single flower.
like a daytime tv special
i am dramatic, unfolding, virginal and sexual
and seeking always seeking for the beat.
oh, it hurts, and i wish you were here to hold me.
the ascension begins and ends
with you.

if sighing on your chest i laid
and sought the beat of blood beneath,
if seeking solace, sick or afraid,
i crowned you with a thorny wreath--
you would not seek to take it off,
nor take the bond that comes innate?
the choice is clear and in the trough
the feed for hungry minds is bait.
we gather here and seek your hands
to stay the ills of wandering feet,
though common sense denies and bans
the hope that brings us here to meet.
should you be false the story's still good
and keeps us rooted where we stood.

seven hungry heads
maintaining seven hungry mouths
that gape, that cry
that circle in the sky like underfed vultures
and sing, and sing,
with seven separate melodies
a moaning song of need,
of dying and perishing and withering
for lack, for lack, for lack.
seven gaping mouths
singing seven tearful songs,
asking where you are
and how you got there and
lusting for more words,
more sustenance, more ears to hear
and hearts to devour,
for food, for food, for food.
seven eager heads
swivel with fourteen searching eyes
looking for bodies,
for flesh or for motion
or bright colors, anything to catch
at seven starving minds:
there is nothing like the miracle
of ascension to pound
sobriety into a world that used to shine,
where seven hungry dragon heads
mount a guard and do not sleep.

like if i could just be some
brown-skinned green-eyed goddess,
with long legs topped by little else,
i could have everything i want--
like if i could fulfill
someone else's dream or expectation,
i could get what i need from you.
all these pretty lies, stepping in file
from your mouth to my ear,
whose fault is it that i should cling
to such falsehoods?
there is a promise on your lips
for something bigger and better but
i must deserve it, by wearing stilettos
and mascara and one of those chains
winding from my ears to my navel.
like if i could just be something slight
and pretty, it would be enough.
and when you're bored,
when there is something else sugary
and tanned walking by,
what would be left for me? just some dream,
not even an ideal, just a moment
belonging inside a club but never out.
i keep the heels in the closet,
the makeup in its bag,
the loneliness close to my heart.

i am sweet, when you bite
and the juices run down your chin
like a path to righteousness--
sweet like lowered eyelids
on a sunday night, the gentle touch
on your broad back when i tell you
that i'm yours, all yours.
coquettish hands that can't compete,
i am sweet and you are strong
and there is a dark room
waiting to be discovered.

i am cruel, cruel like sex
that calls for corners of bars,
poorly lit bathroom stalls where the hands
grasp for flesh and fear.
cruel with fingernails that leave marks
like daggers in the wood, like arrows
or darts, straight to the mark,
and ten perfect lines down your back.
i am cruel like a winter snow
that freezes, melts, freezes, and leaves
the grass gasping for air
and your heart pleading for room.

you are harsh, violent with words
that tear like thunderstorms on summer nights,
the window ajar and all the babies
with their ears on their pillows
can still hear your hate,
harsh like the strike of hammer,
the blow that foretells a long process
of putting myself back together when
i'm fragile and you're the anvil
and the fire, all at once.

i am strong like a back that won't break
under sunburn, labor, endless treks
without a hint of water, sweet water--
you are a breath of cool air
and the mint leaves at the bottom of the glass,
i am strong and you are sweet
and there is a world that needs knowing.

the illness spreads:
the platelets push, like dainty fingertips,
along the walls of my veins.
my skin bursts here, reflecting pain there,
all wrapped up and tied
with an apex of mortality, ring
around my restless soul.

when i am dead i suspect
there will be relief, though there is no way
to tell for sure.
when i am dead there might be stars
in the sky, or just stairs
endless stairs
leading upwards, nowhere, slowly.

the aches make me shudder, bring skin and joint
and muscle together in a tight little jig.
why aren't you here to hold me?
i shake with grief,
for the loss of a body and the birth of
a new pain, one that rises like bile
and feasts on my throat.
here, the doctor says, placing it gently in my arms,
here is your long-awaited child.
it twists on my chest, howls tunelessly.

from a bar across my shoulders,
the vertical strength in my spine, i have hands now
that do not hesitate to kill.
the weight of that choice is heated and heavy
and sits in my heart,
waiting for attention but patient for consequence.
i pick up the yoke to dance gaily on the deathbed,
to seek retention for humanity.
where there is none left,
i leave a little of myself behind.

where i was born the breakers strike
and seaward winds disguise
the rising up of clay red dikes
against the southern skies

where i come from the water groans
and sings along the streets
"why hold me back when your soul moans
to dip your hands, your feet?"

where i grew up the streets are dark
and dry for lack of rain
and trees lift up their dusty bark
towards water they can't obtain

when i was old a storm came through
and left the city drenched
then dike walls broke and rivers grew
till streets and trees were quenched

you manage to predate me in my own home,
my dread overriding any sense
of sensibility, swamping
my ability to think, act, normally.
all the voices in my head,
they get louder
he'll never understand you, don't you know?
he never has.
and yet just the thought of your body
within miles, inches, feet of my body
sets me reeling,
scares me senseless to slink to the bedroom
and under the covers,
like a child waiting for the monster.
don't come in, don't come in, don't come in.

the night is young, the stars are soft,
and you are stiff in bed;
so come with me, come soft and young,
and play and sing instead.

the fields lie damp, covered in dew
and call for your bare feet;
so come with me, come lithe and bare,
and in the fields we'll meet.

on summer nights the moon shines here,
on copse and grove and stand;
so come with me, come swift and bright,
and let's explore the land.

the birds in nests, the rabbits holed,
won't wonder at our noise;
so come with me, come hushed and sweet,
to seek the secret joys.

the night is deep but won't betray
our feet along the way;
so come with me, come sound and whole,
to leave the hurts of day.

no changing, she said.
she sighed and said, no changing what you are.
what you do, oh sure, there's always
another choice to make, some other flood
to let loose. but no changing.

this is after i have found her
on some park bench,
almost shivering for having forgot a coat,
shying away from streetlights
and lurking along the paths like a fugitive.

no changing, i repeat.

the past is so irrevocable, she says,
some choices are so irretrievable.
she is silent then, and i notice the tears
filing into position along her lashes.
i let the moment lie, counting
the number of pulled threads in her sweater
then open my mouth and inhale,

no changing! she repeats,
glaring at me to defy her.
even if i had it to do over, it's a path
and it's mine and i walked down it,
and what is there to change about that?
insistent she continues, when i am reborn
(and at least there is some possibility of that)
i will make this choice again.
no changing.

and that moment, that moment stands still
and stares hard at both of us.
she can't make eye contact, i am silent
and trying not to be judgmental.
the moment joins us on the bench, curls up
next to her and tucks its feet under.
the red red tongue appears, and laps its own wounds
and hers. the moon glows.

if it's security you can't live without
then be secure in this:
youth is a gift you can't get back,
and passion a lifelong emotion.
you caught me glowing, exuberant, exulting,
and remained joyless.
so stay home at night and don't search,
don't look for stars in the sky.
time will tell who learns more, loves more,
lives more.

skeletal:
i am what i am.
dried down to marrow,
with nothing left
but dreams
and fear and anger.
all that i want
gets wrapped around circumstance,
like dust, like water, like wine.
this time is sacred,
these words are borrowed.
in blood we are all the same,
crawling through
the veins of the world,
our whitened knuckles and
broken joints clanking
against concrete,
stretching for the sky.
but i,
i am what i am,
skeletal:
i dodge your bullets,
escape your flesh wounds
and sound the retreat
to jesus and mary,
communed or not,
my soul will seek there
(not there)
far longer than my body.

and in a world that has no name
how am i to face my shame
close it, let it hide my grace
and place my hate in the face
in the love that i know best
accuse, and put the blame at rest
refuse to cry these tears for you
be tested, and be tried and true
to live my life like all the rest
and start to wane under your crest
that will not let my shoulders fall
nor let me drop to knees and crawl
yet you were always there for me
to pick me up, to set me free,
till pleasure let you strike me down
and now i sink beneath the ground
once looped, i sweet around you curled
now overused, your hand will hurl
my trust away from blessed lands
and i am left with only stance
to save me from old dreams again
my doubts, no doubt, will rise in sin
unloved, unwed, and shedding skin
tired beyond life, i tire of this
and flee to memories of the kiss.

i would list your attributes
but my words are tainted, stained by rhythm
from someone else's pockets.
the promises you make to me come false--
the brave new web of lies you spin.
prettily you invite them in,
while i admire your penmanship, your decor
and your tall-spun sugar, as you desire.
or if it merits, you allow
the gracious hand to rule, the rice
sprinkled tomorrow by the gardener, birds descending.
the world is just your wedding
all blinded and frothy in white and
ready to be destroyed by words.
you dye your skin, i pierce your soul
and together we'll prune the awkwardness
out of telling this story
to someone else's children, nephews, grandsons,
assembled at your knee and ready to cry.
wide-eyed i hunt you out
(your invisibility in a crowd is hard to mistake)
and claim the static, harsh and clinging, as an answer.
a half-flag dawn invites the truth
and you open your mouth to sing, and swallow.

because all i want to do
is sleep with the scent of you on my skin,
to feel you ache inside me
to hush in the heat of the moment
and tell you i love you

but who's gonna learn to see me in the way
i want to be seen
who's gonna save me from the way you light me up
and throw me down

these paths are long and unlit and most days
i am afraid they will wind too close together
and i will backtrack

because all i want to do
is sleep with the scent of you on my skin,
to feel you breathe beside me
to scream in the heat of the moment
and tell you i love you

the way your lifeline disappears into shadow
and how your eyes never dim, though your smile may fall-
to watch you in your moment of insistence, pushing
even when you don't know i need you...
and everything you ever gave to me gradually disappears
but i will never feel alone again, not after
the triumphant climax of too many hours spent
plotting to gain placement in your mind and in your life.
you are a closing act, a one-man scene,
the curtain falls and i am alone, but not lonely.

how do you draw what music feels?
how do you write what your heart dictates?
do you let it leave you breathless and
leave the elation to be expressed through
less sure pens and tongues? let it
thrive solely in shuddering minds and
shaky intellectuality? such ideas which deserve
so much more and receive so much less,
they remind me of you, and your hands
reaching through miles and years
and my own, searching for that which is
good, strong, and true! shall we really
come out stronger in the end, or will
we allow life to leave us empty, wordless?
i never wanted to abandon you there,
in midnight fields to be hopelessly lost-
but rather, i wanted to curl up
inside of you and touch you in ways
you'd never felt and i'd never dared.
i loved the way you let me in and closed me up
each and every time it rained.

november

music will harbor your breathless fear and leave you parallel lines on the staff, with nothing to support your eyes but my hands.
time will tear your hope from your chest and burn it, mash it into the harsh rhythm of heartbeats and the clock in the hallway, give you everything but the all-important chance to return.
love will snatch the tears from your eyes and replace them with fury, to force the passion of your love from its early grave.
all of this i see in the look in your eyes, every time you pull away from a kiss.
and all i have to do is read you, like the open book you are,
to understand that you have never needed me and will never love me.

you
analyze everything
make up names for things that aren't there,
challenge the stars
to a nightly waltz
under the skeptical eye of the moon.
you
smiling gently
in your dreaming trance,
seeing a world in which sunset follows sunrise
or the tides come in on schedule
or any other logic subsists.
you
offering substance to an
insubstantial motive,
gracefully lacking
as it saps your bones with greed.
you
are a lover's poem,
to be sure.

the loss, what does it mean?
these things require analyzation, consideration,
chewing over what it has meant to your heart,
to your past and your psyche
or at least to the development of your future.
the loss, it spills over at the fringe,
pulses hot and bloody
and demanding, seeking attention,
tapping at the periphery and crying for focus.
the image of the body
so malformed, so malfunctioning,
you can hardly breathe for the picture of it.
the loss, it yanks the faculties into
emotional response, sensibility in suspense.
the image of the spinal cord
or the synapses firing all at once
and the limbs jerking in response, the joints
snapping from here to there like a marionette.
and the voice, the voice that reaches
deep from within the lungs
and the stomach to say,
oh help.
the loss, what does it mean?
a startling sense of being earthbound, bodybound,
fleshly and weak, cringing and foolish--
and while the response is grace,
the loss means everything.

the tires on the road
hum busy, noiseless and moaning,
waiting for respite.
what can be found there,
they argue,
that could not be found here
where you already are?
and then there could be rest, maybe,
or a nice long nap.
in the sunshine.
the wheels revolve, the road
stretches in front
a big black snake that defines the future.
no turning back now, i try to explain;
we've crossed the highest peak,
no turning back now.

there is a garden,
and in the garden a pool,
where you used to go and dip your long limbs
in slowly, one inch at a time.
and i would go and watch you there,
the bronze skin and the blue water,
and think of your name.
the lapping of the water at your thighs,
and the dripping of the droplets down your arms
and i would think of your name,
your name which kept promises
and stayed faith.
your body was a promise, then,
dipped in sunshine as you were on those afternoons:
a promise of womanhood and creation
and sexuality and uncontained enjoyment.
and your name was a promise
that crept into my heart, with the vision of your hands
and your lowered eyelids, the way you scooped
the tiny tides across your skin.
there was a garden,
and in the garden there was a pool,
and all the acts of man are excused
because of the promise of a woman.

if i can't be a sunrise,
then i'd rather not be at all--
if i can't be a story or a song or a truth.
the music doesn't lie, it climbs
right up into my heart and sets the motions moving:
you are history,
i am trying to progress.
and each step that i take is a promise
to myself and to the path
that i'll continue, that i'll make this
someplace worth going, something worth seeing.
if i can't be a sunrise,
then there is nothing to be at all
and the path was not worth taking
and the strides were not worth making.

if you leave me

i imagine the blood moving
shaking like a pedal drum being beaten for all its worth.
thump, thump, each beat an inch further
from the heart, an inch closer to the edges
of the body's natural environment.
external forces throw rhythm to the wind, my body
caught breathless and struggling to keep up:
there is suddenly such a great need
for blood in the body,
to feed the fingertips and
quench the famished cells of the skin,
and the veins scramble to keep up.
expansion, explosion of the pathways to shove
ever greater amounts of life through,
rhythm running off with consequence and building walls
of brick to make the platelets stumble.
each day is such a struggle,
each beat that comes in time such a surprise.

i've never doubted fire before
but there is a yearning to be clean now,
a desire for that stark bright skin--
when i set it all up in flames
i thought i could wipe myself clear of you,
thought the flicker of my hatred
would purge my heart and body.
i guess the burning was incomplete,
left you too many handholds and stairsteps
to climb back inside of me,
roost or perch there like some vulture,
and when i love you again,
maybe i will call you a phoenix instead.

new growth on top of stunted vines,
taking strides where yesterday's work was retracted:
it is a long road, i cannot see the end.
in my heart
there is a bramble lying dead,
with grey and brittle branches reaching
towards the pulse,
seeking life and spitting out buds
while i debate if the little green leaves
should be snipped back, pruned up,
should live or die.
while i debate, you are steady working now,
an iron forged progress that tastes like salt
(because i have cried too much)
and runs like water
(because the pipes burst with the frost).
new growth that threatens the equilibrium of
letting dead things lie:
you reach tentacles around my wrists,
keep me from pruning that which will kill itself.

there's this little pinch at the end of the day,
the end of a day which includes your eyes
and arms and breadth, again.
a little reminder that tries to surface,
who are you? and where do you belong?
as if it isn't enough to be content, or comfortable,
i must also analyze where the comfort comes from.
you are, you are, you are,
something i have remembered since i was small,
the contents of a room left undisturbed for years
and a break in the beat of my heart.

once upon a time, there was quiet
and that distinct smell of bodies,
which have been perfumed but have sweated it off.
there were pillows to share,
a gasp of breath that was mutual
and gaps between the blinds
that let in little bits of world, one at a time.
you were simple, i was softer,
and the love we made was like sap
that dripped slowly down the face of a clock.
now we are older, we bear burns
from volcanic fights and arsons
born from fear and loneliness.
now we are older, will i be able to find you still
sitting by the side of a lake
with sunshine in your eyes and
sand between the folds of your hands?

a bird among the bushes
hops close and sings to me,
a body in the grass:
you don't belong,
you don't belong.

because maybe this is what it is to be dead,
i lay still,
and wish violent things for the songbird.

a bird among the rushes
hops close, dares, hopes,
close enough for me to see the frail wings
and wiry feet.

and in my turn, i stretch out arms
long and burdensome
which frighten away the little bird,
flatten out a pool of grass
into a circle of green around my form.

because maybe this is what it is to be dead,
i stop breathing,
and will my heart to quiet so the bird will return.

love, eve

adam, you fuck up so perpetually,
i am at a loss to keep you from it.
so what if i am an apple,
ripe with contempt for your sincerity?
sincere is not the same as honest,
and i am ripe for the picking
but have no illusions about what happens next.
(consume, consummation, get it?
it's a good allegory for the way you swallow me whole.)
and you, adam, you are all possibilities,
a million paths and directions all open
and unable to choose a single one.
your broad shoulders slumped with discontent,
and i, an offering of the body,
cannot compete with your spirituality.
from the outset i was struck
with the deepest ennui for your love,
so your abandonment is not a surprise
just a disappointment.
you've learned to be something new
here, adam, than ever you have been before:
a war of sexuality and intellectuality,
a star shining bright in the heavens
that offers direction
but no answers: why wouldn't you walk
to see, why wouldn't you seek to find?
always a failure, and here i am,
the apple rife with blood on the tree
with no eye or hand or mouth to please.

in a dream you were an airplane,
all sleek and metal and modernity
that flies past
and seeks the ground unknowing,
floating in the sky like seaweed on the sand.
in a dream you were the body incarnate
and thought only of the dirt,
in a dream you flew like iron being forged
from viscous possibility
into caged strength.
and i was all the things that you were not:
soft and simple,
a shape melded together with love
and all the things the past can mean,
a guitar chord softly strung
by someone who knows the words to the song.
in a dream i was your opposition
and left inside the earth,
unmined, unwarranted, i learned the path
up amongst the caves to find the surface
and dig you up too,
the way to the surface that let dirty hands
mire you and mesh you into a machine
that flew and groaned and did not return,
and i was what you are not.

in a dream i was a lioness,
in a sterling silver dream i had golden webs
weaving themselves, streaming themselves
out of my fingertips:
and i pointed you out, i drew you out
and up from the crowd and there you stood
all shining like a wave on verge of breaking
and said to me:
it is not enough, it will never be enough
and you will not learn to be still until
time and death and stairsteps force you
down into the dirt.
and from this dream i was slow to wake
yet when i did your face swam silent,
slow inside my mind, a vision staring out
at me your dark eyes:
and i said to you it is always enough
to be always in motion, the constancy of
activity it is enough to be convincing
and this love,
it is a cobweb in the corner, it is a strand
of moonlight that drips down onto beaches
when we weren't there, when we were standing
on streetcorners shouting and pretending
there was something to save,
there was something to save.
in a dream i was a lioness and built houses
with gigantic paws,
in a dream i was a spider and spun webs
out of sunshine.

all the signs of the world
could not convince me
(thunderstorms in winter,
the peaks cascading off of mountains)
to give you up
no matter how they shriek
(waking terrified from dreams,
hearing sounds in silence)
there will always be your body
and these memories
(a word unwittingly spoken,
eavesdropped relevances)
to keep me from walking away
from this semblance of home
(a door off its hinges,
new floorboards which creak)
as long as you are offering
i will accept
(a glimpse around the corner,
your body in the corner of my eye)

oh, i am tired. an exhaustion born of grief
and born out in silence, solitude.
someone else's voice reads out instructions, now:
someone else directs the feet along the path.
but maybe loss of power does not mean
loss of self, maybe it indicates nothing at all—
a mere change in circumstances.
and that, as a whole, is an apt description
of my living life anyway, a constant flux
of comfort, or not, of what home and
the language of money might signify.
there is power enough in touching you now,
a potency in the heat and mire
that makes me willing to give up the solitude
and the pleasure of self-determinacy.

at some point you have to be willing
to break the rules,
to have a little come-what-may.
if you can't even tell me your destination,
how can you decide
what steps you'll take to get there?
or what i will mean to you
when you arrive.

the seeking of danger
is a side effect of the same poison
that kept me burning for weeks:
your words, your words,
they are still embers glowing in the dark.
so take the curve at 70 mph,
bet on another round of shots,
since the words
are all that remains of the path.

we find the will to keep walking,
you and i,
and whether that source is each other
or nothing and everything
is up to us, and no one else.
there are only two sides to this story,
the things i want to take from you
and your willingness
to give them up:
a little sanity, love,
and another road to walk down.

oh come ON, aren't we supposed to be
young and easy, something simpler,
something less likely to be sober??
aren't we young, aren't we young enough
to still play and still find toys
in the junk drawer, out in the gutter?
be a little easier, love, be a little
more likely to find rhythm in a day
lived without expectations, find
a peace with chaos, make friends
with the fact that you cannot stay calm
and stay alive at the same time!
there is no excuse, let your bloodstream
pound a beat that makes you quick,
let your heart push the sounds that
will make you run to open doors.
announce your presence, love, and then
swing those hips my way. yes,
you can shake your head as much as
you'd like, carry that sweet scorn around
in your pocket like a charm-- like
it works at all, like i will allow that--
bring your lips over here, bring your
fingertips and that little dance you do
when it's late and you're drunk.
you know, no one has ever regretted
playfulness in the way that sitting still
might be regretted; no one has ever
regretted finding treasures along the way.

what you could be for me,
some sort of daydream lost for better wakings--
a plot left behind for character development.
a word, these days,
meaning something and signifying little,
squalling its way across time and space
to find your ears,
to find your fingers and your heart.
what can i be, here and now, what is there left
to accomplish?
there is only the dreaming,
and what it means to the soul.
there is only the heart and what it demands,
something solid
or only just half-waking, starting up
at outside sounds,
the heart a moment from lucidity that decides
to let you in and let you stay.
what is there in forgetting that cannot be found
during the art of staying awake, during the time
spent saving,
spent keeping the body from its own blood--
because the body runs on dreams,
runs on possibilities,
will not be denied.

i suppose it is a sort of testament
to human spirit, or stupidity, either one,
that i cannot help but feel for you.

you compile all my possibilities and
limit me to only one: what i can be for you,
only for you, for the remainder of my days.

during a summer sunset, you are everything
i can imagine, a sort of staring contest
with the lowered gaze of the sun.

the most beautiful face i have ever had
i had with you, i don't forget
it is your hands that made me shine.

you have given me an entrance into
my own heat, a doorway into the anger
and the sadness i should never have found.

so one time, darling, let me just say
it has been enough to know you, it has been
enough to have survived those days.

we narrow down our possibilities,
one by one,
and that's what age is.
the process of maturation,
a whittling down of desires until
one single opportunity
whether golden or not
is left.

i am still young, so many doors
remain open for me:
and although you have flung open
this opportunity to me,
i must have age enough
to refuse.
you make me break my own heart,
in the process of breaking yours--
but none of this is my fault,
and that
i think
is where your tears come from.

you act like
you never get tired of the blood
and the fire that comes after.
all you can see
is the bright colors and
flickering light,
proofs of action and emotion.
is this what it takes, to feel?
you act like
you can't even see what gets destroyed,
the carcass that was love
is something less than dead.

invisible bruises,
the body letting loose under the skin
to try to remind you that
i still exist,
and i don't need your fire to feel.
there is enough stimulation
in memories,
it is enough to remember
what the burning looked like last time.

it is easy to say
that it is hard to be a woman;
it is harder still to look at that mountain
of cultural shame and societal rules,
to see man perched on top,
and still be able to offer you my heart.
that is a woman's real strength,
and the source of her real shame:
she can offer up
the same parts of her soul,
time after time,
and let you make a mess of her,
all the while believing
you are capable of loving her.

it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter,
there's no one i can't be
when i'm alone,
there's no one i won't love
where i'm on my own.
there aren't any numbers left to dial,
you know?
there aren't any dreams left to me.
a vibrant childhood,
i have dreamt them all already:
have stood them all up in a line,
and toppled them like dominoes.
it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter,
there is always another game to play.

it doesn't make sense
that i should work this hard
to become all these things:
and i can be many things, have many faces,
be sweet when you think i should be
and soft when femininity is impressed upon me
and hard like steel when
you force my hand, words like daggers
when you make me mad.
it doesn't make sense, then,
that there is nothing here that is attractive
but i cannot seem to keep you,
i cannot keep my hands on you,
i cannot keep you in sight.

i suppose it matters less when
there is enough money to go around,
or enough love--
aren't they the same?--
but it is nice to feel cared for.
and what i am capable of becoming,
the woman i am capable of being,
doesn't know how to be cared for any more,
doesn't know how to take your
outstretched hand
as well as i'd know how to take
an upraised fist.
isn't it sad, isn't it sad,
it doesn't matter.

somewhere far away there is a home
and it is mine.
on weary feet i move towards it now,
stepping into uncertainty for the hope
and the fear that there will be something
on the other side when i arrive.

i used to hear these opening chords,
and put down whatever was in my hands--
i used to recognize the beginnings of the melody,
and stop to listen.
for a few short weeks,
this song was all i needed to be calm
and all i wanted to be happy.
when the drum track stepped in,
i would roll with the rhythm
and step inside the lyrics:
let love set you free.
i used to hear these opening chords,
and my heart would stop for the sheer pleasure
of having silence instead of beating.
i used to look at your face and know
that my world was better for you.
i used to hear your voice, more than your words--
used to keep you close at night
and all during the day.
i used to hear these opening chords
and imagine your body close to mine.

it should be so simple,
some dark room, a stranger's hands,
a story written in wine.
it should be so easy,
finding you late one night,
sometime underneath a harvest moon.
there is nothing solid about it,
this malleable future
of love shaped by alcohol:
except maybe one night,
you learn to find me where i roam,
to seek me where i stray,
and then it becomes complicated again.
it should be so simple,
replacing one man with another.
you are each need and heat anyways,
and all i can do is provide.

this too shall pass.
sooner or later, everything ends,
and the only thing you get to decide
is how much of yourself
will be bound up in that ending.

as winter lapses into spring,
i know my thoughts will turn to you.
you ought to have been a beginning:
something smooth and pretty,
a flower opening to the sunshine
or a wind just sweeping in from the south.

you too shall pass.
though here, in the winter of my discontent,
you are all power and ice and movement,
in a few months you will be gone
and i will be alive,
i will be wandering around a world
gone verdant with youth.

do you know what the story of Ruth is,
have you ever heard of the woman Naomi?
it is a story of destitution, of lack,
and of providing for your mother, your sister,
your aunt, your cousin, your friend, and yourself.

maybe in the next telling,
the wheat will be toxic, the chaff
unknowing and silent.
maybe in the next telling,
the earth is not benevolent,
removes herself from the circle of women.

maybe in the next telling,
Ruth will stop wondering what love is
and find it in kindred hearts
instead of the heated knock or heavy steps
of adam, prone to failure.

it's cute you think i matter,
that i am part of some cosmic neutrality
that still finds the will to exist--
or, part of some orbiting nebulus,
some glowing seahorse of pastels
that finds you as its nucleus.

it shouldn't be anger, it should be some
maladjusted beauty, some night terror
that found you when you were a baby.
you shook your tiny fist, and the terror
loosed dreams of love into your blood.

i matter, you matter, we are all matter
except the dreams. your narrative is
carbon-based, swamp-dwelling,
born of men and to a man it was told.
so take the organic terror with you now,
hold it dear along your path,
and find a way to force the phantasm
to bend its will for iron, for salt, for blood.

when the heart has closed,
it is always your own fingers
that must pry at cracks
to win a widening seam.

he is a dream,
a fantasy that walks now
daily steps towards me:
and i am a wall, a door,
a fortress of never loving
again, or ever.

when the heart has closed,
it is always your own fingers
that must pluck the right melody
so that the heart may sing.

and in the night a new love breathes
and learns to seek the heat
that means a second heart will strain
and build inside the beat.
the night is deep, his hands are firm
as i forget my fears
and, grateful, cede control to him
whom i have sought for years.
in pleasure do we two cocoon
and dread the rising dawn
which brings with it the cold, the light,
and sees that lines are drawn.
but here there are no worries yet
and i glow from his lust,
a borrowed shine that suits me well
and earns some of his trust.
so keep away from clocks, my dear,
and shy away from doors
that seek to drag you from my bed--
give me one moment more.

well i tried to tell you
that i can't be left alone,
but where are you now,
some leftover planet with sunshine
and women and winter?
i tried to tell you
that you can't leave me alone
and expect me to remain,
or remain the same, but--
where have you gone?
what dream are you living out
now, elsewhere, without me
and my stress and sex?
well i tried to be constant,
but it feels like stagnance to me
and i cannot endure without
your body or your words.

the memory of a place,
held in faces and scenery and
just walking on old paths:
and a clear recall, now,
of why i had to leave.

of all the emotions
capable of being argumentatively
and clearly communicated,
nothing shuts me down faster
than shame.

you lay it on my heart
like it's nothing,
like you can't even hear the words
or their meanings and
wouldn't hear my response anyways.

i can build walls again,
i suppose;
i would prefer not to, but
when my hand is forced,
granite is the best way to go.

astra, whose voice could save thousands,
whose table served literal life:
astra, you never warned me what work would do
to a man's shoulders, what wear might do
to the words a man would direct at me.
astra, whose faith moved mountains,
whose grace provided a path:
astra, you kept the knowledge to yourself
of a man's steps in the doorway
and the keening for his broad back.
astra, whose hands wrought peace,
whose beauty bought civilization:
astra, you left me on my own to sense
what a man could take from me,
and what a man could provide.
astra, whose face shone like heaven,
whose presence filled a room:
astra, i do not have your hands
or your peace, or your presence of mind
and i do not seek your charity;
only a place to view you from the earth,
to contemplate your groundings,
only a place to study history
or, astra, dare i whisper it--
a place to sink roots.

feels like home is a myth,
a fog i try to shape into something firm.
some uninterpretable desire,
something i can't tame or even seek
without destroying something of myself first.
is a home with you,
is a home locked up in my heart
or public and open?
do i search for it, or does it find me,
does home sneak up on you when you settle
for something less than perfect?
feels like home is a myth,
one i can't dispel or disprove,
one i read again and again
till my eyes and soul are tired.