Proximity Politics

You dance and there is that in me
Which wants to stem your steps, I’m sorry
That your legs never find the roots they seek
Stretched out on the carpet like your spine
Won’t speak to them anymore—
Perhaps the blankets you fold between the floor
And your tiny cotton shorts block the water
They need to grow, like the body you won’t feed,

And perhaps I only liked your music for a day
Or two, but I’ll mute
And you’ll blare
And we won’t apologize.

I’ve stolen your pen.

I’ll keep draining your detergent
Into the clothes that I never quite get
All folded, politely stacked,

And you read my books
Without asking, leaving them
Splayed on the rugs you hate
Or comrades sentinel
Behind the mess on my desk.

When I spoke to you of Jesus, sleeping,
I wonder what you said.

I wonder also what you’re running from
On a Wednesday morning at three
With your blankets flat

But you’re not sorry,

And I only asked once,

And we won’t apologize.

A Bookshelf's Sudden Truth

Our dawns cracked
and splintered off
Like the lashes of the eyes that never
Thought to open,
never sought
To play dew-ruined prisms
for these sky births
Or day deaths, missing
the way they pour red
Through the last chance cracks
of doors like the blood we keep
in plastic sacks

Cold, limp and hideous as
the magnolia flush of the palms
in which you hold them,
Sharp hip against the wall
Ever-widening
In this room we’ll never leave,
Under the clouds that never
leave us and you could but don’t,
The carpet too rough
against your soles

You find my eyes sunless
and too eager
For horizon, for release from the lock
Of your mouth which,
keyless, stoppers any sound
I might wish to make

My arrows always
pass their targets,
If there are any, and go
floundering down
With a careful once-upon-a-time
Gravity into the physics
that litters the paper
I wear in my dreams
and burn in yours

Before we drown
in waves of old
I’ll ask a favor of your
face and reach to curve
the bridge of our several absences
Catching in the notch
beneath my smallest
fingernail the puddle you’ll
build out of need.

This October Breeze

We’ve killed it,
Having lost what it was to be twelve—
That terror,
When your red plaid shirt was…
My lungs would prefer to deflate
But this October breeze makes a vegetable out of me
My body a player piano beside the bulk of you
The final offering
You the dream fallen farthest from the truth,
You too hard too big too blank in my head
Dead air hard and narcotic against my desperate ear
A child’s need, its idiot’s offering
Pop-tart thoughts and nail polish insecurity
All the poetry we’ve wasted,
And there are still words we’ll never use
We know that we should, I know that I would
But we never changed faces
Why are you practicing, what are you practicing
My arms useless and embarrassing
The way our tracks never crossed, our every train derailed
Your hand cold on my back
I guess you’re not the only one
A tired wind through the sand of a listless desert
Our hearts sleep when we can’t
Enthusiastic air conditioning finishing for us
Everything our past had not
Nothing sparks
Even your silence won’t touch me
The hair on all of your audience toes
Your hatchet face
Your glow dust-encrusted
Its splinters littering the floor of my mind
Weightless, over
I wondered whether your eyes ever light
A sleep dance, machine exchange
I could cry as easily as kiss
This horrible, inevitable
Our ashes dissolved into the skin I already cannot feel
No space left in it for shame
I watch you sleeping for any flash of prone
Your lips a bruise I cannot feel
Most alone in that moment of most close
Two dying flames clawing into each other for the last match
More alone with you than without you
Our string too taut, without the energy to snap
Apathy, humility
We’ve killed it

Boston

The trees skid in reverse
When it’s dark, when it’s cold—
Every face, every syllable the same;

Snow, cinnamon in my cocoa,
This communion of souls:
I want it, with its lights and pea coats.

Perhaps this is the boredom they really talk about,
When the marrow penetrates you—
I want to make holes in my skin,
Peaceful and bewildered

I can read his code.
I hope all those songs hurt,
My always refrain,
That steady silence of hours, eternal.

My eyes burned the sky
Blue velvet violet viridian vibrant,
Taking up my morning in sheets.

Why am I here, where am I going?

I really seem to like it fresher,
That slick cool slide of squish,
Of nothing, and everything is right;
The wind still soars like needles.

2/17/09

To Trip Over Carpet

Caught midslide against a notch in the thread
Strung oily from thunder to sludge,
Between a grunt and your claim of cry,
This glass bead only cracks,
Never sighs; dust facet finality,

I remember your nerve endings—
Charred, yearning. I wrapped their vines
Tight as twine around my throat trunk,
Let them burn the space between my fingers,
The smooth desperate hills of my diaphragm;

The night my only still unbroken pride,
I flipped through the domino pages of cabinet doors
Looking for more tears, the hook of your need
Eroding my last unsevered vertebra
Like cheese.

2/17/09

Our Grey Tongues Tired

I’d fall into this like leaves
Sleeping long against the slick glass of windows
Down to the ledges, their happy cemeteries,
But do it with more smiles
And fewer arthritic wrinkles.

No one really flies anymore
We birds scream into the wind all night
And begin again at dawn,
Our beaks cracking at their edges,
Our grey tongues tired of too many seeds.

The snow drops a shell of silence
Over that one last perfect swansong
We spend our whole lives not singing,
Blocks that one last jab at infinity
From our dying lungs.

Bees who have lost all their yellow sit quiet
Whistling cold down my phoenix fingers;
Slowly we dive into the wings
We never thought we’d want,
And they fit.

2/06/09

One

To live for ashes, the gold
Ferris wheel inevitability of phoenix feathers
Glittering red from any least
Curl of the toe, every progressively
Less significant thought
She’s ever had, will ever have,
And yet to live.

For some there is no present.
Her library of faces, built to bend
Around a cross whose arms go nowhere
Squared, shelved to the absence
Of a breaking point with books meticulous,
No back covers, no conclusion—age,
The yellow of their oft-thumbed pages, the way
One story blends and echoes
With another until all are simply smaller
Pockets in the cloth of a single tale
Tucked into the cracks of a world
Only her owl-necked mind can create—

Every face for her distinct, yet
All gleaming with the same iron scaffolding
Shine of fairy tale she has burnt
With desperation into every chalk facet
Of every torquing cheekbone,
Whispered like horror into the basin shallows
Of each leant temple in turn;
She writes the stories,
And they become one in a way
That she will never be.

Here is madness,
Every moment perfect
And alone, crystallized
Into rock candy fire
Obsession; to dwell, to return,
To move always in reverse.
In this there is no forward march.

2/03/09

Sweet Stasis

There is a harsh magnolia hush
Between the branches of these trees
I haven't heard before,
A shiver in the silence
I wear around my shoulders--
A pearling scarf to block that wintry chill,
That frost that is continuation.

It has become the time for
A strict transparency of fingertips,
A trembling of long-bitten tongues
Beneath eyes thrown wide at the corners
Of rooms never visited
Behind glass never seen.

Cherry Chapstick

You have a certain
Bubblegum nailpolish dandelion stem aspect
About you, a hint of the wind and white
Of tomorrow night in every shift of glance;
With every focus switch there falls again
Another drift of snow over your each surprised swallow.

Your next boxy flick of the apple juice tongue
Nestles sharp against the inky edge of delusion;
Tempted into dreaming a palm's incoherent fantasy,
You stand like you sit, dwindling through millenia
Drawn like a moth to the water of salvation,
Wings wet, eyes sour, your shoulders cold.

This is the dawn of dearth for you
Your private sun bronzing silent coastal curves
Ankles dancing to replace the pale blue space of yesterday,
You trip like chocolate into today's bucket of rain
One arm caught in the ivy net of self-protection
Before your every clock begins to chime Cinderella.

6/18/08

Playing Defense

The sudden helpless impact
Of knees on tile,
Mind twisted into two clasped hands
Of ask,
Is to a heart
More used to flying golden,
To tasting the glitter of life
In the curves of creviced hope,
A crash to crumble the foundations
Of every crash that has come before.
Finally
The translation of need
Made visible:
The physicality
Of I want
Of please
Presented in pixelated,
Anatomical clarity of grasp
Under the sterile apathy of fluorescence
For an audience of one.

6/15/08

String Theory

With this thin unsure renouncement of link
I hold myself suspended, vigilant of shift
Words stopped preformed in the sharp suppressant
Agar of too soft, too reaching, unmirrored,
My very speech a solicitation, a supplication
That goes too timidly unheard. I hurt
In silence, for to voice this pull is to announce
Its seeming continuation into a void of nonresponse,
Of echoes unfamiliar, auditory collisions against the spheres
And filed bounds of space, of a nothingness
That fills me, in its insipient nonexistence,
With the urging inability to hold, my hands
Rivalling only the desperate emptiness of eyes
(, lips, time, arms, confidence in the reciprocation of need).

Left to hold frozen everything that beats within me
As immobilizing compensation for that which I once found
In a steadying reliance on the comforts of an infinity revoked,
I fear only this descent into cloistered camaraderie
With the amber drip of negation
Crystallized in prefix.

6/15/08

Empty Apartment

Confusion
In a bubble bath
My answer to boredom,
Intensity, chill--
Transience in soap,
Eternal discontent
Willing victims to no silent
Grabs for cover
Peace, distraction,
Pearlescence,
Insufficient perquisites
Leaving wet unseemly
Skin racing mind
Poetry
Balanced precarious
On slipsliding knees
And thought,
The inescapable
Censure of self.

6/12/08