There is no mystery to time

Tonight I will fondly remember this afternoon
and tomorrow I will recall only the outlines.

My legs throb from the long bike ride
and my wings throb from the hot sun…

I’m confusing myself with the black bird
again. The one that dances in the dirt

while I sit and confuse myself for a tree
desperately trying to pull life from the ground.

These are the days I will tell my children about –
the ones spent balancing on fallen trunks

trying to romance a turtle into coming closer.
She knows better than to trust her heart with me.

The brook is a safer place to store her love –
it lost its teeth a long time ago, before we’d met.

I will tell them how I brought my harmonica
(that part is a lie, I only wished I had)

and let it wine until the egret begged me to stop.
How he offered me a fish and a tale for silence.

I obliged, but I ate the fish and forgot the tale
and so I have no proof. They will think I’m crazy.

That’s fine, I’ll say, I think I’m crazy too.

Where do the shadows go in the face of light: An homage

In a parallel world,

everything is the same

except, we are lovers

and ducks are made of stone

and the sun never rises

and in the darkness we collide

and I seize your stomach

and pull from it a light

that will eat our skin.

A story behind a sunset

I heard the Lion lost his life.
I heard he gave it to the Sun
and the Sun wasted it on us.

He burned our unneeded thoughts
but ignored our swollen skulls.
And we don’t talk much anymore,

the Sky and I, blaming the clouds
and the long distance between us.
Blaming the Sun’s endless hunger,

the way he consumes souls and sets
and wakes again without remorse.
Once I fell in love with a Wolf,

sold all my bones to the River
for her secrets on cleaning stones
despite their being filthy Earth,

wanting to give the Wolf the world
in small servings and gentle notes.
Wanting to win her from the trees.

The Lion disapproved of us,
and bought my bones from the River
for the price of his raging mane.

He slid them back into my skin
and asked the sun to seal the seam.
I heard the Lion died for me.

The Wolf ran back into the woods.
The Lion’s dead, my bones are in
and I sit, awaiting morning.

Ground rules

We were unraveling then.
                                  The threads of DNA
                                                          and the steamy cabin,
and the drunken captain
                                  dancing to the sound
                                                                      of rain on the bow.

I tossed my anchor
                         into the sky,
                                  into the heaving clouds of May.

I tore the tissue from my heart
                                  and spread it over
                                                          the long shadows
between the wooden planks,
                                  between the rusted nails.

We were half sunk by then.
                         The water seeped in
                                                  the spaces between our cells.
                                                  The plankton became our organs.

And even if you’d said it,
                                                  we were dead already.

Our lungs had gone to coral.

Your eyes had turned to urchins
                                  and crawled themselves away.
                                                          Your heart reduced to pearl
                                                          and burrowed into the sand.

I was little more
                         than the waves
                                                  aiming for shore, aching for the moon.

It just works that way sometimes

Afternoon or dawn. Pick one. I rather like the sounds of afternoon:
the word and the birds in congress. A contrail splits the sky in two –
consider the world a long math equation, so many variables,
we’ve given up on the alphabet. The setting is in. Solid. Immovable.

The young man sits on a bench overlooking the water.
The seabird descends, black and nameless. Splashes down
without a sound outside of the breeze. These are the characters.
They are both horrible actors. There are only gentle ways to say this,
only small words that leave the lips quickly: The world is ending.

These are the tired years. These are the hallowed roads with Alice on
my mind. Her rabbit hole. Her long hair caught in the entrance.
Her yellowed bones jutting from the soil, disturbing the dewberries.
The dirt beneath his fingernails while he contemplates life as a seabird
with little concern for the land. And the seabird contemplates life as a fish
and the fish makes an uncredited appearance in his mouth. Slides down.

The mist takes the stage. Slowly. The curtain collapses on itself.

As I lie to support the overflow

Actually, I happily reminisce on the nights
and redundant short stretches of white lines
and ink stains blue as the sky never is,
that ill-fated bastard child of clouds.
My doctor interjects “Why do it, then?”
There’s any reason. Whatever reason
will never hope to change the growth of grass
or the leaves of the vine choking the tree.

* * * * *

Actually, I’d like to die beneath a tree somewhere,
a tired side-effect of the sunlight.
Provide an easier trip for the worms
who will feast on bits I never cared for,
who, mistaking me for soil, argue
with people that mistook me for a man
and I will remain lying there… cold bones
against the cold ground and the hollow sounds
of Venus bouncing off the evening walls.

Why can’t it just be untitled?

Knowing what we do,
we must forgive the story

its course to distort itself, to grow
unrecognizable and unhindered

like a tumor. We must forgive
the princess, in her viridian dress

and her guarded smile and her
bitten fingertips. We might forgive

the thief, were he not already
the valves in our heart,
the flow of our blood.

* * * * *

Quiet mornings; stagnant waters
rising, swirling with streaks

of grease from the discord
of our joints. Knowing what we do,

we can only consider train-rides
the conclusion. The closing sentence.

The middle is the walk, the banter,
the proximity of water molecules.

The start is less clear, the ink smears,
the poets hand turns blue.