The Exhibition Hall

Her presence fills the world

She fills the world with her presence 

She fills my sky in with void;

It hangs always over me.

The Void, IN me. 

A vacuum where the small victory

Of her friendship was,

That I'm no longer pretending 

I did not fantasize could bloom into every 

Kind of love. 

The Void;

The absence of everything I forced her to 

Force me to take away from Self,

A mirror of what I should become when 

The dust settles. 

The dust 

Gusting at the doors

Of this exhibit hall where she 

Sometimes plies a trade. 

I can feel by a gnawing dread or lack of, 

If she is inside or else some far away city,

An intuitive anxiety rises over the possibility of

Facing the deep shame that I will project

Onto her achingly emptying oceanic eyes,

-Her gaze that picked up every detail I tried 

Smuggling before her until I crumbled and felt

Compelled to throw every last insatiable need at her feet

And finally

Into her face,

Forcing her to rip up the last thin line of patience that I crossed.

Today I'll throw my tickets down

And push my way inside 

To search from the backs of every booth and shadow 

To determine if I can set this weight down 

Or else, glimpsing her-

Beeline for the bathroom stalls to vomit,

And wait for the world to end. 

Allow Me to Break My Own Heart

After whipping off the last poem

On the back of a roll of yellow raffle tickets

Between handing the tickets out

(trying to give it my all, really),

The exhibition hall went quiet. 

I saw two morning doves 

On a beam beyond the wall of windows

And my idiot brain thought:  

She's the one on the right, and

I'd be happen to be the pigeon on an adjacent beam 

Catching a contact high from the pigeon on the left

Who she is clearly meant to be with. 

Snippets

*

To me you are the only true

Blond on the planet 

But is that even your natural color? 

*

I fantasize a nightmare for the heart;

Someone points at me asking you

"Who's that" 

And like a stone's inscription: 

"I have no idea" 

*

I'll write every last poem out

From under every last poet

Until every last crumb of you is gone

*

Binary Stars

 Maybe you

Are my binary        star

Lately the time

Seems very far       fetched

As a pace

To be set

As a concept 

to "get"

Maybe you

Are my binary        star

Co-pilots 

Far fetched

Like Them

The differences are massive

In the things we stand to win

The space grows wide between us

When you factor history in

Tho alien to each's world 

Our struggles' always been

In fleeting moments,

Locking eyes!-

-A distant sense of kin

And when you break it down 

To bare bones, muscles, blood and skin

And what we truly need in life

The differences grow thin; 

In all the ways that matter

In the end

We're just like them. 

October's Ring

There are things we know
And things we don't know
And there are also

The world is held together but what holds it apart
Forces
Maybe then the hyphen is a force too
Thermal Dynamics
GravityhThe weak and strong force
and, the hyphen!
The hyphen between story and life
The hyphen that holds the theory of relativity apart from quantum mechanics
Stars die all kinds of deaths, and everything in physics has a counterpart metaphor
The mystics have always known the threshold that physicists have only recently come up against but there is certianly no equation that shows what an equation looks like when it's gone.
Still, as the hyphen is the center of dichotomy, hope is at the center of doubt, and poetry, like physis, when applied correctly, explains the mathematics of why life looks and feels the way it does.

I think that the ring the dwarf star casts off (poof) in its final speed of revolution in death is comprised of noble gases; these gases were integral to the life of the star until its balance tipped in a loss of energy and the hyphen of thermal dynamics versus gravity went sliding out of the equation. The magnificient cloudy halo of hues holds at a distance for some time around the corpse, the rock, the bones; a congregation at the death of a star. And then the elements vanish and the corpse floats thru the appaling void like an abandoned ship in a jet black sea of night; one would never guess that this dog tag of a stranger is the relic of fusion.
When I am walking in the fall the awesome color of the leaves in the trees are like that nebula; the loss of chloroform is the dwindling of energy, the loss of life, the unmistakable pageant of death; a celebration of the final collapse of the hyphen that held those leaves together but, as it turns out, simultaneously held them apart; held the carbon from the earth and the oxygen from the sky.
Liberation.
Turning leaves deck the trees that surround us. A burst of flaming colors that circumscribe us from a short distance before fragmenting and disintegrating out of trace. We are stars at the center shining and dying all the while. You can't find us in the bones. You can't find us in the dissipating elements they cast off. Chalk dust and chalk. Numbers knocked from the blackboard equations. These are merely the coverjacket of a story-life about what happens when zero gets divided. It's a story that never was.
I watch the year set and when night falls and winter comes the moon will come into greater focus but only as it seems more distant than ever; it will be the realization of how far away those other stars are that seemed so close when life was burning bright. Before the appaling darkness of winter sentences us to a subzero universe of loneliness we must conjure a cloud of language that first obscures us but finally ushers us out of the consequences of that equation.

Stars die all kinds of deaths. some of them violently explode, exceeding the magnitude of their own galaxies. Some suddenly grow larger than a billion suns combined. But some slowly turn down the power, dim down the lights, cast of an iridescent ring of light and watch their own self set like a sun.

So this is October, and this is October's ring.

Hope

Chinatown on the Bedford Highway

Moon-beamed signals

Shimmering liquid snakes

Uncoil from beneath

It's not what kills

But lives you

Or what aches

But thrills you

We bomb space

Mine the moon

To take

Every giving tree

We find

Every living thing

We shake

We can destroy the moon

Or the world

We can destroy anything

We claim to love

And there is something to love here

And something to hate

Such is the place

Where circumstance makes

A bombardier of words

On a milk-silken lake

A basin of ocean

Framed in the city;

focused by distance

A fountain of the population

A wishing well of the multitude;

The last vocation of belief