here's to what you've missed.

the winter’s branches press themselves inside an empty skull, a porcelain washing bowl a guest has just for the night, with his clean sheets, a stranger’s room, a “for rent” sign. twist them into braids, fingers scraping up memories from when you were eight and create nests for birds who are stuck in flight on journeys to find soft peaches rotting on the ground and misty mornings, warm marble-soft nights perfumed with million breaths of heavy humid sighs and expelled words from russian tomes opened and then set aside. their gentle feathers i will tuck into my wilting windblown hair. and with this gesture i turn and face the stairs.

the ground is turning milk and sugar clean inside the pulsing storm, the granules break bones and shatter teeth softly, and cleanly, and leave me worn beyond my years. they gather up basket of tears from my eyes, and let them sleep inside their breath, and howl with unmasked delight. they sweep themselves into the wind with invisible brooms into dustpans made of fire and light. the sight of frozen lakes will wait until you return, safe and dry from roads too long to find the end, and cry, and lay down on the sugar-dusted tar tearing out your heart and offering a beat or two to the gentle children comatose on comforters and couches and cat’s cradles inside. their parents pull the curtain and tell them to hide.

the tongue the earth speaks in is now broken, latin or french or german or words harsh and spoken without parameters or rules, words spilled like bitter wine, words like journeys made in centimeters and swords that shine like a red-hot heaving half-spoken lie.

the dust and dirt we leave inside our shoes after we return to bed, the thoughtless respiration of thoughts that hang above our rooms like clouds of cheap perfume, a cough causing startled cherry veins and the scent of screen doors straining the rain. these are the things that travel across the glossy hills of my vision, they green in their birth and then brown in their repetition. i cannot listen. i must speak until the candle burns to its waxy base and i will take its blood, i will take the water from its veins and place it on the windowsill and wait until the snow’s fingers finds its place. then we will know the quiet of each others bony hands, then we will find our fates within the bumps and lines of one another’s faces.

so i leave my sweater on, i leave my face plain, i leave you a long-winded letter and the better part of the dominant side of my brain, shaking slight in nervousness like a leaf in the wind or a child lost in a cloud of mist. it is just waiting for your hands to hold it, to hoist it into the light, examining its patterns, its muted, delicate pastel-soft signs and find the right parts to paint. please, please, paint me green and blue and a bitten brutish red, transparent freudian analysis swimming like a lily pad on the folds of the core of my head.

please give me that party dress made of your mother’s hair weaved into lace and turn towards me, in the sunken-eyed light making bruised eyes in the night your vineyard eyes and feline fairy face.

in place of a grave i would prefer a pile of snow, a blade of grass so thin it whistles under the weight of gravy, and a bottle of syrup too sticky, just sweet, just too much altogether that flows like rivers chilled and wet from springtime’s lips; in place of a headstone i would prefer a hummingbird, and ribbons where my hips did rest on the ground, my heart grew boiled and full and round only to be throw against the sky on the winter night when i walked down the street to find a place to sleep, to hide.

(as much as i can.)

his mouth opens and it is gigantic
a black pit full of worms
festering frantic flames
I want to stick my hand
down his throat, quiet the beast
pull out the tongue so he will never speak again.

he hisses gibberish.

I swallow my fears into my fist
nod my head enough times
to make me dizzy
wishing it will be enough to bring forth rain
for our paths to diverge to breathe in the water
softly licking my arms, deliciously cold

making me pure again

freedom, I would like to begin by cleaning the words off your skin.
“I came and suffered, this land is mine now.”

overwrought by youth, come by me, patrons.

abandon that which was true when we lived our parents eyes.

let us be led by the albatross. let us make magic in the night. let loose the angry races. become the beast and lose not one more night to it.  come and be undone! recreate the justice of the spiders and bees, undo the prejudice of the stargazers. become, educated. let us intimidate the authority with our sharpness, strike fear with our bare feet and beaten chests.

no longer will we speakeasy in poetry! the crimes have amassed and we will not pass by the sticks and stones any longer! we will take them up and raise our pollen kissed arms well above our heads!
come by me.

bring with you your toothless grins! your loose ended logic and emersion of sun kissed skin. be one with the underbelly. shock the preverbal system. race with me to the strips.

let us save the people. let us plant the trees. we must bring with us our heat and unused ethic, debase the standard norms, screw them to the bottom of old dead ships.

we will take to new seas! my beautiful sun kissed California youths, come by me.

speak in my tongues and we will untie, inch by inch, the thick wind blowing.

in 1918 she pretended
to be as old as the century so she
could marry a war-worn boy
who came from the sky.

the incoming roar of the twenties
was too familiar for him, but
she grew wings and cut her hair
and he loved the way she glittered
between smoke-soaked syllables.

he hummed jazz when they made love
and the click of her beads kept time.
they spokeasy in those days.

tuesday was dark, the crash was silent
and the depression swallowed her whole.
music faded and her glitter turned to glass.
she bled out on the kitchen floor.

he left for the sky two days later,
taste of gunpowder on his tongue.

when you really start to take note of the down hill slide. when you really start to notice the change. the wires that cross, the crooked logic, bent sensory nerves. oh no, it’s not slow. you become twisted, cornered, undone, confused. sounds and lights become one. lose time, gain time. fluctuate. names start slipping, faces begin to fade beauty becomes art that becomes ugly.

you lose more time and cravings begin. need becomes your primal center of attention. dreams become more real, balance is lost. promises are broken hearts wither, spirits rot, words are like poison. things only make it to half way points, then stick. new blood flees, marks darken, barren things catch fire.

lose more time you will not move anymore, will not compute any speed faster then the sound of heartbeats (bump bump bump) repeat yourself, fall in love 8 times a day. dream bigger, wreck your hands. lose balance, become permanently uneven. read less, write more spell worse, fear everything.

lose more time scratch walls learn new words forget the old ones.

lose more time stop sleeping dream during the day. make love, lose love, gain, pain (fall fall fall) make speeches

lose more time forget more names scream out advertise profanity, sugar coat truths. fear knowledge, abandon reason and the girl who once had your name.

lose more time build casts, lose track, fear touch. cover everything. stop eating, lose color, become thin, disappear.

lose more time follow the color green take a hit, hit the wall, hit the floor. hide. abandon all hope.

lose more time grow old, peel your skin, commit to a new color. fear love, fear faces. the color green is a boy you once loved. abandon that, too.

lose more time. the sun screams the moon curdles your spine snaps. the floor becomes you, addictions highlighted, attraction grows, a flower blooms

lose more time.

His silverware is cold because he left it in the pasta dish in the refrigerator last night, or the night before, or night before that. The rain started yesterday at 3:14 pm, which I know because sometimes, like yesterday, I sit in my room remembering all of him from the scent on his pillow. Its faded, and I don’t want to wash it, because I am afraid to forget him like he’s forgotten me. He doesn’t remember me, and he forgot about the silverware and the pasta and he’s forgotten about sleep. The rain is reminding me that someone is at the door, someone who can’t ring the door bell. It’s a little kitten, one that I never wanted. Now she is my best friend and she is sitting on the couch and I’m eating from the pasta with his cold silverware and he never came home for bed. And I know he never will be because he packed the suitcase that he kept in the closet in the den and all of his shirts are gone, even the ones with holes.

After the things I’ve seen
the air I’ve breathed with the scent of shore,
I am swimming out to sea
where I know I was born and belong,
and can spend all my days in soft suspended wonder
at the currents and caves and the long ocean song sung here

The moon glinted off my scales until they shone silver,
that night when you first noticed someone was out there
and I watched you for days trying to discern
why your eyes by day so blue reflected so orange bright
when you passed beneath the swinging lanterns at night

You seemed to half-belong out here,
the way you spoke to your ship
with infinite knowledge of each sail and wooden strip,
and how her bones stretched and rolled with your voice
as you coaxed her to swing with gusted sails over the waves in the day
or to laze in a set anchor daze to the water’s slow hull slap at night

But I too have read in the thousand books lost by a thousand lost ships
how these tales have been told and how hearts have turned to burn and drown
each time those before us have tried to meet.
How coin-seeking smooth-talking men of opportunity
have stolen my sisters before me to parade and charade over the land
where their hearts faded slowly the farther they traveled from the sea.
Or what about the soul-wrapping siren song? how could I
bear to send you to a watered lifeless grave,
eternally captivate your imagining sight with eyes that
reflect all the ocean’s moods,
lips like fire coral and in your arms I would shimmer-
the imminent death at the end of these shadowed deeps brings me no joy…

I thought once that I would die willingly if it meant
that I had the chance to live in the name of love,
some sort of infinite momentary beauty.
Now, having tasted the bitterness of endings
and seen how survival pales and fades when lovers are lost-

Even so; that day you stopped your easy evening labors
to raise your face with the sure knowledge that you were being watched,
and catching sight of me off the starboard side you did not shy away from what you read there
with the same inner eye you use to discern the mood of the water and the sky
and you saw me knew me wanted to hold me the same way
that you live to sail these ocean waters,
wanting to brave the typhoons for a glimpse of smooth green seaside lagoons,
and to limb-rendingly endure each hurricane for a chance to see me again

You, and your sailor eyes, blue
like the beginning of a clear day on open water
where the sky slows to dip into the sea,
call me with intrigue and a slow whistle carrying your song
and it spins over the leagues towards me
but I am swimming far out to sea.

Love may wrap its tendrils through to my heart again
when the summer waters are ripe with warmth
or when autumn currents slowly come wending,
but having heard and been almost lost to your sailor’s song,
I will swim far out to sea so that I may be coaxed by watery caresses
to let the sound of the shoreline and the thought of your blue sunrise eyes
drift away to settle on an island far from here,
where no one ever lands but the palm trees wave gently
and the water stretches up to the sand
as though it was home for the first time.

this pig’s grown as fat as my last birthday lip
i ate his brains but he grows still more up and rounder
bigger and growing fat this hollow pig

a well-oiled plan crashed far east last night, we saw
the vibes crawling up through the spines of thin branches
and lightnings striking the air waves where thought stopped
breathing in
none of us die or died but living beasts we are
and able vehicles and actual zombies with
big, orange, organic fires blazing somewhere on a deep horizon
of that which we know
that which cries for us
and that as round we take and starving are stuck buying
from a distance
that cannot refuse us

oh, can’t i watch
they beat the ground to a pulp
they call a ceremony to take place of passion
in survivors
oh, can’t i but see their end
by late dayglow they plant the means west
toward sunlight
to prepare

for
so cold, night! so deathly
cold, one moon glares morbid
(at harm, no direction
cares to speak).

and as when winds pick up or grass grows
a lingering brown and dry,
i eat and eat and am only more perishable,
living underground of scenes
where electric charged herds run fast from the feasts
through the trees
and the forests moan quietly no escape

My fingers feel like icicles so I put on a couple more shirts and shiver in my skin, hunched over the keyboard because I know that this is the closest I can get to you right now. Maybe somehow you’ll hear something that reaches the real you. in this coldness I act the mechanical stiff and blinking robot, transferring the living thought to the static just trying for that every now and then when I can reach in and find the current and move with it for just a little while. I almost believe the world is at peace and I am at peace and that chaos is not the natural curve of things. I’m wondering how long we’ll hold out against the tides of the world, how long you and I will last as creatures of moonlight and essence, and if we can really hope to exist to have a place somewhere in all of this, a hope for that hour when time is flown away in fleeing shadows. The day will be brighter and I won’t be sad anymore. We won’t have to encounter our fatalistic other-selves anymore. The dialogue of mind and self of thought and page drips on endlessly in me and all I’ve done is dipped in for a handful of the soul and drawn it out in as much color as I can bring forth in this cold silent hour, from the original to the representation. Words, my ally and often my armor, voice and sometimes song- but never quite adequate, never enough. I search out another language seek a voice for it in vain hope of what so many others have tried and few succeeded, blind stumble of mindsense trying to use that which confines such a search, low whispering out along the depth rings of this under-hour.

Bare feet and wrapped in song is how I thought you’d find it easier, to fall for the smaller shades of beauty, for all I have to offer; More similar to stars catching in and out than to the strengths of brazen sunlight, more fleeting songbird across the sky. You have to ask yourself if the whisper you heard was the careful dynamic of wind, of wings and flight - or just a sound you wish you had occurred.

I cloak myself with identity - combined, aligned entwined, truthful and shadowed, showsoul- or maybe heart, measures in case I need to disappear, quickly amidst the fog and the confusion. Sometimes even I don’t know when I’m telling the truth.

I want to be the uncommon beauty stretched to reality with the grace only suffering can impart. If you only saw how common I am, how fallen like all the stars, hurtling towards nonexistence, though it will take eons to put out the lights of this most human of shining. Love.