*

You left me for the Ozarks
Left me to my own heart

So this is how it's going to feel
When you're really gone...

It's safe to take your picture out now
& I wonder
If there is an unwritten maximum
Of how much wine
Candles pen and papers
A man is allowed
Before something breaks

time wasted working
up to masterpieces
that topple into
anti-climaxes
falling under the excess waking up with half-poems
illegible
and roam into overcast mornings
away from annoyed
deactivated energies

I stand in the strewn mess
of incapability
It's safe to take your picture out now
And
As if mentally ill
Against a voice that assures me
"She never comes
Never has
And never will"
I tell myself
"There is time
to prepare for her presence"
-To the photograph, focused;

"There is time"

Unspecified Pronouns

i think you are cruel
deep inside your deepest words
and if you don't know it
you are a fool

even now
both in our separate worlds
mostly the same
you and i live
but toward each other
differently
than we once did

cluelessly
you came after me in tears
problems with pronouns
defined your whole year
and all of our exchanges
were rendered ridiculous

your cuteness in the end
could not win my mind
turning away from you
I had something so simple
written clearly in my face
a dead give-away
you didn't find
(but still replaced)

i saw your act span across the years
but to tell you what I think now
is too hard for your ears

i chose to step away
from what was unclear

& after all, still, dumbly
you wonder why
the sudden closure

did you even try?

i saw a real you
trapped inside a game
i wonder if you still play
and you never got
that i wanted to get us
beyond where we had gotten
ourselves

i found strings attached to your wisdom
that when i pulled
drew up
a deception 
and I was crushed;
wondering
how long have you known?
how long these strings?

but stopping your dance
you look at my
devastated face
and ask

"What's wrong Mathew? What's wrong?"

As Long as I Look at Thee

To stop is to finick
Her lips hush the infinite
Inspiring what could not exist
Till this minute
Finicking with paper
Gaping at this neighbor
Writing poems
For a limited scope
Of time's labor
Working to sway her...

Unbroken honesty's promising
Why I felt warm by your hues
Accomplishing the true
Organic romantic processing
Of what comes thru
Your eyes,
Everything, energy-
Unconditional love's easy
When unknown
To you
To your angelic prophesy
That tells me
Endlessly
Something lovely
To be
As long as I look at thee.

Dinner Fued

The quiet scraping
Of utencils on plates
When dinner's bombarded
By negative fate
Everyone's face
Drawn down to the chore
Chewing thru bits
With thoughts at their core

(She yearns to undo
The destruction of what
She made with such care)

But the food grows cold
So far from finished
And what started as a debate
Is now love, diminished.

Apologetic Confessions

You're the driving force
For this poetry
So now you know
It's out
I'm guilty
Monuments and ruins
of my heart's busy city
Laid bare
As you dig
With every soft stare
& the ways they speak thru thin air
Put in me the softest care
With what I draw down
For you to alight upon
This confession
Of which you have been unaware...

Yellow Roses

For you it's yellow roses
My affinity poses
Afraid it would ruin us
To give you red
So I lock the love
Inside my head
Giving you what you can use
Instead

Yellow roses!
& it's modest of me
For a girl that turns hearts
Into red rose monopolies
Though since I'm certain
Not to be the one
I forfeit the market
To one who's rose means
A face in her locket

I'm one of the rest
Of these fools, you know
But smarter to guide
My love by a rule:
Be at peace with your love of him
And pray
He treats you like a jewel!

Keeping the Secret

You shouldn't have cried on my shoulder
It's only made me bolder
In approaching you my love;
My love's withholder!

I tried giving this
Up for dead
But knowing you
Means images
Are locked inside my head

This compulsion is
Instinct
Internally led;
Without thinking of you
My heart's underfed,
My steps lose their tread!

I turn to tell you
But look at the stars
Keeping the secret instead

Cognition

Sometimes Stillness forgets
Inside I'm always thrilled
And peers thru narrow slits
And thinks I'm unfulfilled

Everything we've ever had... we have!
Unless there is something we've killed
Even then
Resurrect what you will

Sometimes sitting
I become unsettled
Grabbing some
Complex slab of theory
The kind that makes
People weary

Still in love
With a tendril
A tender
Flower perched
On atoms numbering
A billion-fold
Floating above
The gravity's hold

We could all blow
Like pedals
To soft dust
And disappear

Or we could all
Take this moment
Right now
and right here
To know you, Crystal clear.

secret admiration

Your name has been
On my heart
And when I see your face
I fall apart

Put me back together
Enough
To meet
Your eyes
With my eyes!

Who am I
That leaves messages in disguise?

*

Under the illusion
You are following confusion
Why is there no other gate
For you to walk thru
To realize good fate?
The intrusion
is Hate

The pace of words
Calculates your mind
Initiates a climb
Of thought

When you begin to seek
You are instantly sought
Muted by amazement-
Caught!

Thus I Quit My Life Today (an old man talks to his youth)

It's a long way down into this river,
But who is he to have the last feat?
I'm an old man now
Craving one last passionate heartbeat!

Too often I wonder how
He was so brilliant
With all of those things
He could do
But they say that was me
As they point at me saying,
"Good friend, that was YOU!"

Yet I believe they are wrong
Certain his mistakes
Were bigger ones
Than I could make
But what's more, the dance
Of his existential song
I only wish I could imitate!

No, time divides us infinitely
So I' m barely myself it seems,
He lived so much he's lucky not to have died
And for me? My life's a dream!;
Where birds must keep their appetite
As bread crumbs are my memories
As life is sitting on a bench
And feeding them, -my ecstasy!

No, the day has come where
Too long I have wondered
If there is any meaning left
For me in the summer
Flowers bloom, the world and the
sky are blue
And all of life is doing things
I once used to do

Flashback after flashback
Has sent me reeling,
This is my woe
I'm too weary for appealing.

I want to trade in these
Final dragging days
For a few quick moments
More worthy of my praise
To have made it this far is enough,
I'm amazed!

now somewhere in me
Against me he plays
His beautiful song
His meditation is a deep well of assurance
Reaching into itself for me
Beneath me in glimmering currents

So finally I must end this delay
And like a child to the one's ahead; "make way!"
-Thus I quit my life today.

*

Of late
Moonlight spills
To tell you've escaped
Standing next to
My projected fate

Here is the imprint
A ghost that remains
Till the sun that filled
Your face
With the first calm of life so loved.

*

I tried to find your substance
In the company of friends
It fell far short
And to much shorter ends
A mouthful of liquor
It occurred to me then;
I will die if I don't soon get near you again!

The moon's almost blue
But it wastes and decays
If it's witnessed like this
Far apart from your gaze
The expanse that surrounds it
Chokes and strangles it away!

Everything in me; all feelings collide
Confide in two words; fuck it!
Let poetry die!
Fuck poetry and all the lies that it hides!
There's no substance in waiting
In paling from this plight
In love? With a ghost!
No woman in sight
Nor tears drench the page
Nor words left to write.

Energy

I'm never cheating
Only ingesting
The sweet conflation
Of your words and mine
This pilgrim with conflagrant heart
Continually wraps
Your name around time

Your radiant beams reach deep;
Blaze thru smothering heaps
That bury sight;
Locate bottom where this
Introvert hides;
Paint Byzantine capitals
By mosaic at night

When in self-suffocation
You are grasping my clothes
To inhale in love
What I've left behind
Know that somewhere out there
I am lifting you up
(you are lifting me up with your mind)

Immortality

I dance to forget mortality
Sooner than it brings your life
It wrings it tight

Who will sing for me
When I am dead?
Who will close my eyes
And kiss my forehead?
So turn me to dust, promise me this!
I won't have my body
Stuck back in time
With maggots to kiss
Hissing with slime

Unhand me death, I'm living!
I'm tired of your doom that looms
Over all that I'm giving
And all that I do
You find me unfitting
What's fitting for you!?

Unhand me life I'm dying!
You tease me with flowers
And taunt me with flying
With passion and power
With women and crying
See! I can even love pain
& I'd suffer much more
Just to see you again

In my arms I kiss you, trembling
In the wait to be consumed
Embracing face to face
Hiding from departure and ruin

But wait-
A flash
In your eyes,
-Sudden grace;
The a vision of a place
Gravity can't trace;

Without a mind to cut us in sections
Without any work to resume
Revolving forever in pluperfection
Heart around Heaven like a moon.

*

Even when I want to fall over on myself
You hold me up
Not literally, to be my crutch
But in my heart
To help as much
And more
Or just
As when our skin
Once really touched

Even beat
At the end of each day
My heart stays strong to repeat
Your name with every
Drop of life it greets

Upon waking the only
Requirement I find
Is to remember I've known you
And the day falls into line
The calendar shines, sweet life!
Though all of night was
Nostalgia for your eyes
When you looked at me long
And I realized; "Love"
But you moved on as
Life for you is young
And for me?
I'll still grow
Still be free
As when from heaven above
A baby slips into the world
And exclaims with a cry;
"Beautiful life!... but why?"

*

Sweet litter of cells
To regenerate themselves
Flake death away
And skin to hell
Each cell kind
Growing weaker
Each time
Wrapped around bones
That become the punch-line

*

Leaving for a fraction
Love blinks its cautious eye
Its prey had run away
Then back with some unfitting difference
Subtracting a piece of her perfection
Tracing steps
That I myself would not take
Bruised deeper by denial of that other world
Which is empty of her wants
His shape is not hers
His mind I do not fight
I sin as I dream of a diminishing link
Between them.

*

…enamor of her is what it is
But your hands are on foreign controls
She may pull away when you blink
Or kiss you when you’re down

*

Where do you live?
Of what do you think?
When my eyes stumble upon your smile
It makes me wonder who you really are
Does the rain collect on your windowsill
While your sweet pale hands reach out to it?
So many stories I imagine about you
And… do you dream?
Or at that… do angels dream!?
Where lies your pillow?
Someday I’d like to stay there!
But no-
For when I’d make and leave that stay-
I might not dream another day.

Tommy

I found her at a different age
Our youth upon a different page
The separated numbers rage
When face to face upon the stage
To reality; my eyes dead shut!
Her smiles pierce the open cut
She doesn’t know the pain she brings
I’ve drowned alone in better things!
And now I hate to know a line
That love as bait so much defines
The pain; I cannot back away
The lure of another lifetime  

The Instructor

The rain is dried
The tears are cried
And nothing’s left to say
Save broken lines of indecision
Unanswered from yesterday
I’m looking down at meaningless metal
Forward the trees point skyward
And tell me the answers all fall from above
But silence is all that I’ve heard

What a calming quiet it is though
Its depths are as deep as the moon’s glow

Until a voice
Cuts thru the air like a hawk

*

A shanty in Valdez
I carry in my head
With the deepest bay
For a boat to tread
Listening to the ocean
Pounding
Darkness pervading
Desolate reaches
Endlessly
We could make it
To where the lights slip out of view.

*

At sunrise
In front of my house
A white cat went
(like a dog after its tail)
In circles

-the cars bypassed

I crossed the lawn
Into the street
Stepping in a pool of blood
Where she fell over,
Face like a murder

Sighing with grief
As she struggled to breath
I kneeled
To touch the soft
White remains
Of her mangled body

Till the sun sank and she was gone

*

Misfit alphabet from hell
Who turned these into words from goblins?
Took my flowers by smoke?
Some
Misfit empire of smiles remote
Dodged
Breeds words by kisses blew
Blue
Remote
Others ambulance
Of Telepathic antigens rush up
And
Oh sirens we sign the cross
Passing you turn death
Into single demonstrations
What is this capacity overbearing
Lounge philosophy?
What is this nothing of letters with which
We counter death
Calling karma down to deal what is ours?
Or leaping from these finite forms
We love that go under
And cause despair
To something most incredible,
Buttons of faith-
The poems we ingest.

*

I do not make a cringing scene
For an invisible audience
Where I cling to your being
With pictures or words
With which I could have dreamed
But I do remember you
In sorrow about your absence
Deserving pardon
One letter after another
That find you.
Is it my fault
That flowers bring your face
Every place they bloom or die?
For I do not decide the muse
A poet never does
And now you have become my art
Seemingly just because.

Cafe Caffeine

10:00 Rainy morning
Poetic lust
Coffee shop comfort
Picture window people
Running to their urban lodges
Only when this
Setting lifts will
A brand new hangover reply
The dawn is gone
And day has spawned
The next monopoly

Alison

We made it so far
In a big highschool world

And learned so much
By it
But now I'm 

Haunted by emotion

Colorado must be some place
(Milwaukee does change)
Your missing fall
Sweat jackets & dreaming
By the lake
You’re missing storm clouds
On cornfields 

To techno driving aimlessly

Those mountains are nothing
Compared to what this was 

*

Dictionary, my
#1 companion
Completes me
Has everything I need
Ex-er-cise, qui-et-ness
Lots of var-i-ous items and…
Supererogation?
What words!
Simple ones also
Sim-ple, re-lax
And
Oh, love-
Love. N. affection; strong liking; goodwill; devoted attachment to one of the opposite sex.
Oh.
Re-lapse.

Love in School Time

Between ever punctual bells
Rooms are chambers
Hallways echo loose voices
Like closing cell doors in prisons
I’m reclined against a yellow wall
That someday won’t exist
So many glorious buildings
For whatever cause will topple
And that is far greater than this
Certain windows linger
Injured by angry fists
That responded in a moment
Making cookie cut breaks
We try to save time that will soon
Be expired

I managed to find love amid

These confining walls
Which is lost now
As I feed my diary
Scribbled in place of homework

Someday I'll read it back
And question youth and

Wasted days at school
When memories were infused by that girl
Till hours vaguely calculated
Got passed pondering the future

And a love that disappears into it.

Elizabeth

Her aquatic eyes sank
Like stones in my mind
A metronome entrancing
Tick by tick
Our hands met
Like a prayer
Her face chasing through dreams
Fading when day broke.
I knew her not for but a day

Destiny slipped Elizabeth,
I know we could have loved.

HIgh School

Marked with the slow death of personality
Who runs the razor thru the wrist?
Who pushes the man from the cliff?
Despair!
Failure to conform correctly
Boredom with constrictive society.
To explore, this is a need!
To have a good love, this is a need!
We wake against will
Sitting in an assembly line
Awaiting the next injection
Of imposed knowledge
From those who came before
Who see us rise while really we fall
Deeper inside
Struggling to meet someone else’s needs.

*

I want to jet plane
To your sleepy cove
Of thinking
The primitive anti-pleasure
Of hangovers
Reaps every thought of you
To cure itself
Every cell in my body
Holds a dream of your skin
And I miss you all over
Again and again

*

Calling the eternal tide
Rise my love
Powered under a moon
Sinking into the sand
Sinking into me
Reach into it
Underneath the heavy warmth
Of your whispering words
Winds from the depths inside you
Create waves
Drifting from this shore
To find the source
Be calm
I saw beauty looking up through you
Be calm
Eyes and the sea
But do not recede.

A Winter Dance

Quiet November
In streets in the morning
Where the air’s ever punctual
In delivering the cold
Someone's always waiting
Perpetually ready
For the first snowflake
From nothing
To unfold
Up in the foreground
Of a neo-gothic tower
Falls lightly a feather from somewhere unknown
Inspired by this I quietly sing
Spinning thru memory, a mind overgrown

I study the meaning, taking the signs

Carry a burden that cannot be said

Fires are burning seeds we've sewn

The moon is the trees' lullaby, living dead

People are crowded in buses and hallways
Shuffling to a bell's ring the classes proceed

All that is held in the walls and the structures

Is far from the truth that a season can free

A feather still falls but surely all things
Are accompanied by more than just instants of show

So as I am witness still too many others

Track a million navigating imitations of snow
As points they are dancing, connecting the lines

An abstract creation 

For winter to raise
Quiet November
Speak your joy;

Anything that dances in the winter should be praised! 

*

So let the liquor unearth
On a bruised plane I speak easy
Of all the things
Of how we chase
From eroding place
To eroding place
Fighting what takes over the Holy Earth
Conforming unorganically in an unholy bind
Dimensional words driven to extinction
Silenced by the robots of time
Take technology out of poetry
Take machinery out of words
But too late
Your eyes are day leaving
In your eyes a sad red setting
Like a sunset we recall
Like the last real thing,
Our largest pain to face
(Our largest face to paint)

*

And I departed from him
Pretending not to know I would return
And that he would still be there
Having gone nowhere since the real me began
Though I had gone off
Sluggishly into my ignorance
My actions falling flat on their face.

Nicky

Only to distant dreamlands
Do I write without intentions
And here lies no obligations, as I write of you
The fantasy… It cheats our promise of space
In not leaving all of you behind,
But what matters fairy tales to promises?
I had a falling out with poetry
Which you have bridged among other things
And now aggression is freed in your name-
The unfreedom of being with you
Has its freedom too!
I look thru you for fantastic visions
Yet somehow you are also a mirror?
Destiny is now two-faced and
A two sided dream wakes me to say “impossible”
Now the voice in my head speaks boldly of metaphors
Has foreign reason and slippery hands
I want to grip and choke this demon in the light
But then the eyes seduce me
And the forrest rushes over us. So I tell lies
With words that are backwards
And the scene of you and I seems backwards too.
In this nothing in neutralized
Our hands are overlapped and match accordingly
But how to understand
Confusion seeming far too true.
And who are you?

Lost and Found

I need my identity
Random static bits presently
Cling to your memory
Where I have been excommunicated from
By moral felony

Remember, however
How we beamed?
-To manifest a redemptive dream,
budding with the ambition of our climb!
-Almost sprouting forth into bine-

But shattered seeds

Grew too slow

I can't take the way that
I lived
From their memory

A piece
Past
Presently

Disconsolate I.D.

*

We eat our own poison

Throw our shit into the air
In defiance of
Common-fucking-sense

Cadmium infiltrates
our sweat as
gods of Science
& Mercury reach
Antarctic terrain
& enter the chain;

Synthetics conceived
mix with
(therefrom)
those same
organic brains.

The Game

We are fools
Who won't admit
We daydream of the perfect love
And sit
Missing instructions
By questions
We submit;
Where are they,
Or do they even exist?

We daydream
Of introductions
With a kiss
That lead to scenes

Of sorrow and bliss

Catching ourselves
Pining in this abyss
We shake our heads

Abruptly

Pretending to

Forget
(In reality never fools to commit)

Visions in the Flag

On the brink of war
But past the brink of eye sore
I am comfortable America
Eye one "I"
Panoptic lie
On the brink of war
Preparing many to die
For the symbol of an eagle
That should be a fly
The size of a man
With the face of a spy
All hail our ability to fly
And cling
Where only the lost
Echo of freedom
Grimly rings
For whom the bell tolls
And doll-drums sing
Of starvation and genetically
Altered things
All hail our ability to fly
At impressive speeds
Humming as we go
Breeding millions of
What we think we know
Throwing up our mucus
On everything we touch
And land upon
Now landing
Perching
Puking
Licking
Our little tendril things
That support us
On the brink of war

War executed by a power I depict
As no more than maggot
And no less than shit.

Highschool

"What's all that banging about?!
(My fingers
Impatiently tap

the desk)
Stop that!"

-but the circle-answer-sheet
Grinds me through hellish mind-states
Into momentary fantasies;

We pull up our handkerchiefs
And solidify!
The absurd armed herd,
the shields and armed vehicles
Can never cross this blockade!

But a cloth on a pole

Snapping in the wind

Keeps breaking the dream-

Friction is in the flag;
Stripes and stars are but

Bullet holes and

Prison bars;

My freedom is trapped by that sheet-

So I sit in this perversion;
My education,

Their deceit.

I feel I could go on forever
But first there was a fret for hands to follow;
Training wheels that allowed
Intentionally for wobble

Connecting ears and sight
Connecting head and heart

Beyond the shattering axis of practice
Along a free line

And when the guiding hand lets go
For the first time
Sailing
Riding
On two wheels like none at all
You realize
It has always been so

Without Him saying it
You have always known
Sailed
Been free-

*

I am waiting somewhere behind my Self
Ready to step out
And clasp your hand
For the miraculous time being
I have forgotten who I am.
October hurdles past
No longer time to laugh
Only love

I'll remember you someday
You, in specific ways

But as of this instant I only see you and love
And know this love;
We are wonderful, and young.

Vast and Alive

Deep within
The inner inn
Infinite angles exist
From which to raise my fist
And proclaim... !

-but banned by Self
I stray to peripheries
Where enormous Life stalls
In crisp
Falling "nows",
In bittersweet beauty
Collapsing
and
Aging

Since perfectly we've aligned
The coldest figures of winter are mine;
Kept warm in you,
Kept completely Vast and Alive.

*

My mind is a creature
Basking in primeval faith
When we're
Thinking thru space
To each other

I watch your hands
In the light
Finding magnificent pictures in the white;
Creation for my eyes to wade in

I pace thru letters
With my mouth
To form words
That say clearly
What cannot be said
& reaching for your beauty
End up swooning instead

Around you
A clumsy step only proves
Dumbfounded
I'm amazed at the way you move
A heart holds within me
These emotions
To be sure;
I see one woman purely
-She is near me
(You are her)

Thick in this collapsing bay
The heavy sun drags stars to day
Let me fade into this gray
And no more trials appear

For Pirate dreams of chaos employ
The tide the way a child wields toys;
There hoping it real to the point of joy-
That scandalous vision; their fear.

*

This haze is a
Sequin dress
Wrapped over you in
Fading blue
In my own world of
Crystal dreams
Reality is
Chandelier,
Ringing in my ears
And fragile-

I wait to see it fall and shatter.

A token of my madness
The nonlinear advice which arises
out of chaotic decisions
Leads to destiny

To feel the sun
Through your smile
I remain unburned on the surface
What happiness is
But an egg inside, cracked open
All these microscopic sticks
[gravitating on gigantic blue-green ball]

I to love the space
That grows and lessons between us
Like rubberbands of oxygen
You to breath us
When every molecule melts from thinking
our territory pinned
By a star
On that blue sheet of sky
Will unfold;
Will eternally unfold.

Bio 101

Stranger!
I want to sweep all of this away
That comes between us;
Papers and podiums!
Delicate pen skater;
My focus!

-Ignoring the rest;
Clock, time... sitting forever!

-Attending to learn your attention.

piece of an old letter

Months never existed to me
Only seasons
And traveling from one pain
To another
In between call
Happiness
Eternal motion
Is my volition
Or just to dance with
The old mask of inebriation
Denying that the spirit of gravity
Is devouring us
Motionless the way seems
Motionless but true
Pale eyes of blue, I still see you
Ghostlike in a web of indecision
What were we waiting for,
Hustling around to no music,
Crying with no tears?

Escape

Euphorically sedated
The pain is penetrated

Tonight's sky is a paper sheet
Delivering its ivory sphere
In a shot of ecstasy

We fight our eyes'
Inclination to close
Nor slaves of time,
Nor sleep's throes.

Vapid

What use am I?
Burning off shells of nausea
Spoiling Saturdays with the clammy face
of Hangovers

Meet coffee girl on 7 cups
She changed and turned over
The stale leaf of weekend airs

Vapid I drink Sunday away
Bach
The Well Tempered Clavier
Where my art too sings
To leave a poem for
Mouths that taste like too much kissing

*

Her friendship is slumber
Alive but unconscious
Beyond this dead society

She succeeds to cross
Abysses in me

Her eyes believe the soul
Shrinking and expanding
Within my contradictions

Those eyes are spheres
Of Saturday velour
That follow me.

Poetry

Emotions
Like planes
On sheets crashing
Empty the sluggish brain

Pens and thoughts tear
Twisting tradition
In anarchy

Thoughts then
Far and close
Like star and sun
Reside in peace-

A still of Oblivion.

Hangover

On the edge and turning
Thru the sky they sink and dry;
Leaves like rueful sunsets burning
Working overtime to die.

Counteracting comedowns in
The residence of feeling
Gardens wilted over
Represent the life I'm living.

*

I knew I'd try in vain
To escape the prison of desire
To deny this unhappiness
Is my fake dumb living

Radio impatience
Scanning for warmth
Freezing in the morning

October,
Is the timing of your arrival
Coincidence,
Evicting the in-between
As I fall and turn from life?

Thru avenues of rain and dew
I drive the nameless burdens...

Succeeding from her eyes
A soft cocoon of dawn
Receding with the tide
The loneliness is gone

I love her
(yet a stranger)
But closer with the sun
This happiness will change her,
And then-
Our time is done.

Graffiti Train

Through gritty windows it seems
(Though as me they are the same)
That your passengers are victims
Hey Graffiti Train

You've got the tag of human decline
Who are we to blame?
Every era has its mark
Hey Graffiti Train

Something's left unsaid here
Words that never came
Think what all could happen
Hey Graffiti Train

Songs will always sing of it
Still you haven't changed
Get out of your tunnel
Hey Graffiti Train

On the wall sunlight shows
Your art is not so strange
Confusion is your lack of love
Hey Graffiti Train

*

I'd make a better doll today
A raggedy Andy, straw & hay,
Then birds would steal my hands away
And deconstruct my face
And save me the ache
Of going thoughtless

*

We adhere ourselves to sunsets
With cigarettes and weed;
The colors then succeed.

Why have we fallen so,
Using a crutch to see the moon?

Madness and Mysterious Men

I feel the slow queer reign of this red night
Creeping over
Catching the deep dark white moon
With bloody walls of light
Leopard shadows in teems descend
Here in the empty hour
Into stone and clay
An electric red bulb burns shapes like coffins
Where the wounded light cannot reach
Phantoms summoned
From old typewriters
And Cuban records
Catch fire in the brain-
Disappear into the world

In curious trials like this excel
Mysteries of a madman

*

In the aesthetic crevice of love she dies
Clowning with masks and playing with knives
How many people die in disguise?
How will they ever regain paradise?

*

We see yards designed
Planted in art
Controlled gardens
Spreading apart

We walk through portraits
On brick patrol
Where flowers rail the way
And fountains talk
And water talks
In drops and words that stray

*

Like sugar hills
Or barley or wheat
Could till the words
And purge our feet

The acid trip
And pupil's tides
In raining wheat
Against our sides

Here drive our life
A field's way
To harvest skies;
(A blue array)

*

Someone has stolen
The image of transgression
The time warden speaks;
Behold the gimmick king
In the castle calamity
-The virtue spring,
A spiraled atlas of
Your brain
Expressions of moral travel
Like the touch of your hand
Have come a long way.

How can I confess the light of the world
In your eyes?
-A pagan deception of lawless ritual
Faithless and adamant.
Once I danced in the garden of doubt
Chasing shadows like moon flowers
You claim my faith as fear
Challenging me to nothing
I drew close
Because you too hated systems and sleep
A zombie hypnosis that makes us weep
But your talent talks too much
Glazing the moon with desire and dreams
Witchcraft fantasies; a lack of virtues
I love God
To absorb a silent light
The benediction of grace
The friendship troubles me;

How could you complete me?
How can I love you?

Eighteen

A million poems & poets
A million drops of water
They will never be noticed
We are digging stars from the ground
And bodies from the sky
Taking drugs to remember
And trains to forget
Bodies beaten and aged
Romantic fast flights
Making up for slave-life
McDonald's minds
Dying
Unnoticed and unattended to
Silent and unaccompanied
Begging or bleeding for a piece of fame
To bury a bone we can never call "mine",
Clock strikes;
We're out of time.

Infatuation

Confined to certain words
In restriction I had made
A serenade for springtime
From prisons in the shade...

The mind had long been hampered by
The detriments of cold but
The weight of change in feeling
Is a story to be told...

They dance on the edge of reality
With dreams their eyes grow fond;
Their souls leave room for nothing else,

-Love is a dangerous bond.

My Violet Piece

I took my Violet down
And sat just out of sight
Intrigued the greatest dawn
To deconstruct the night

My fortune was her purchase
I deemed a proudly sale
To cultivate some wisdom
From secrets in a veil

To conquer any habits
Of lagging in the brain
And stop the common matters
To paralyze the pain!

*

New Zealand fatigued
Much less than the rest
Than sweating engines
Moving to profit
From Mexicans

New Zealand as green
As the last inception
Insubordinate
From education
Gorgeous Maori women
Gradually swaying
Toward Calvin Klein
Contracts
Away from ripe fields
And pure dust
Past the last reserve
Past a rat in the sewer
Thru a needle park

New York

The wind makes warriors
Skirts and overly washed hair
Become immune
To dirt and debris
What is sensible
In communities of people
Trying to escape
The prison of their mind
By becoming one
With the prison around them
Everything waterproofed
In some precarious way
To catch a drift of truth
Will take you down
We are like dogs who;
Obey and follow command
To receive
A little bone
A treat
Cash for cars
Unwinding in bars
Reciting old memories
or,
Who nip the master
Enough to draw blood
And get beat
Thrown to the street
Digging in garbage cans for real peace

Faith

I knew a man; myself
Who read to learn each day
To muster all the thoughts
And set the mind to ink.

But distances and seasons
Paused obelisks from pointing
To a sky daily changing;
A soul's likely twin

Such sociology endless
With wisdom so insidious
Overcame the lyrics shot
To a distant didymous

Till a deluge of the Holy
With instinct did return
And wrote with kern to stress
Men sunk among the past

Insomnia's Bird

Strange bird
of 2 a.m.
When the city sleeps
To hear y0u chirping
While the trees keep confidential
Their rustling and blowing
From inside
Is assuring
In this continual consciousness
In the hours of the borderline dead

For at six
An army will sing
From your neighboring tree
Feathers fluttering
In steel blue
Throwing shards of life
At a face
Pale and unrested

April Fool

He's like a little boy
Without much control
First he loved
Then grieved in missing that love
and finally
Missed missing the love
When all was healed!
On the first day of April
He sews himself a sonnet
With ink and the needle of a pen
it reads the name of a year
Etched with meaning
And tricks himself to feel nothing
With these words on his lips

I am a ball of yarn
Black cat death plays around
'Till I unravel and end
Limp in the teeth
Rending the sky
Breeding water drops
Lacerating the haven
Of Society
With realizations
Of selves in servitude
To separate the ashes
From the rain
To invent a new quest for truth
Pretending a different stance
To be the April fool

The Waiter

This is the life
of the waiter
Under duress
of two dozen eyes
Appetites fierce
for every mistake
I never meant to become
a server
Slave-boy moving
too slow for money
Too timid for tips
slave-boy wants his servitude
Indirectly, under the table-
He'd rather be a Host !

*

Here the sun through the blinds
Makes shadow ladders
My eyes do climb

Here ends winter, first warm day
A friendless hour;
The flowers delay

Lovely hemisphere of sun
Split in twain
One is summer, the first is spring

Here the sun does bid me be
Searching ere the winter time
Sunlit ladders of the vine

Knowledge here is tangled
In circles of relativity
Trampled over
In our treadmill disease
Time mocks us
We lag behind
Collectively no dancing feet
But dragging
More slowly each day
Turning a pool a stale
Anxieties

Binary Stars

What has a little astronomy taught us
But that tilt
Not distance
Makes summer or winter
From the sun
Elliptically we have traveled
Around one another
Gravitating with grace
Both of us;
Who is sun? Who travels around who?
You and I judge time
By the sun against the stars
That apparently never move
We learned to lean
However far
As if through light years
Of cross-country difficulty
To the warmth of that first summer
But so soon
Leaves let loose
We cried "Fall! Fall!"
And had forgot
Stars move
The universe expands
Like hands making patterns
Out from the light
They cast shadows
Palming the seasons
At higher speeds
Two brother stars
Began to stretch
Flung far out
Beyond the outer walls
Beyond the last layers and quarks
Two essences
Escalating
Engraving a trail
Of echo in space
With a mutual whisper
Should we never speak;
Everywhere is Summer at the center of what we are

*

El Trueno es fuerte
La hierba es todavia
Descansamos en nuestro casas
y el aire es extrano
Su entrada es lenta
Su beso es suave y mojado
Su mano barre como viento
Amor es un fantasma en el tormento
Palido, misterioso, asustado

Emocion es una lengua en se;
Livid, perplexed, unmitigated.

The Man

Who is the man?
-The wicked system
Politicians;
The walking seeds of injury
Educations demanding bell;
The empty pulse of history
A country's secrets
In our blind spot
Government
Intervening in prayer
Crashing our stars
We the people
Blindly buying faith with tax dollars
For an easier life,
A busier God.

No frame of reference needed
No outside the lines existent
All awareness has succeeded
To shed what is resistant

All territories open for receiving
All impressions collected
No inanimate parts of believing
To bar us from virtues erected

To gather with vision and breath what is real
To sense with our instinct our destiny's track
No bombardment can crush it
No artifice steal it
Our art;
Inherent,
Intact

*

Poor man-boy's heart
I must cut me from it
Lest I forget
To tell the body
Walk! Talk! Sit!
Surviving, these things I must impart!
-True,
I am at fault
For drinking myself into proximity of you
Driving heart half-mad
Flooding reality with your face
Touch my lips
As if you had
As if slipping through some abyss
in your kiss
I am fault
Creating tales like this,
Dreaming up for these eyes
Your skin like a carriage
That takes me through
Heart's painted halls of your image
And who but I
Could comprehend
Or have a clue
This is you in my veins
That enclose them with blue?
But alas and well-a-way
One thing I cannot do,
When all's said and done
Heart beats for you.

*

Thru shudders
Cigarette smoke rides the beams and bars
Of sunlight come so far
Thru eyes
Actions ride in and over
The long traveled moral
And out of sigh, vanish.

Unspeakable

When I slip into my silences
And you are silent too
Though unslipped as for you
It's something regular
I want those eyes
To undo the thoughts
Kept and caught
I wish you were I
And I you
So striving to search me out
In mourning my mouth postpones forever
Until the words don't relate
And a season of thought can't try
In mourning...
While tables ache with trays
Balloons with pity
And the week with days
(soul, eyes, heart, mouth
whatever the background is flinging about)
a teary mood descends heavily
Like a child into the water
And would it that you chanced to see thru me
(a sadness now surreal
by way of wishing this for you)
would tell you to ask
And would it that you asked
Of what burdens me thus
I could not tell you
But fall weeping upon you.

*

a good thing
into the cramping slur
of a tired mind
darkness lodged before it
to stumble into a bedroom of sharp edges
and remember that movement
is time
So I climb back under the sheets with Eternity
(vividly we dream of you)

Stain Glass Lover

I love you like stain glass
But will never find myself
Clutching small mounds of you
Until my heart's hands bleed
If made of glass
Perhaps
Nudity would matter
Certainly if clothed
Struck by some smashing death
Adam and Eve's original state
Would leak out in fragments
Like rugged marbles
In piles throughout
Pockets and Creases
Just as
Or more glorious than
When in tact
and that consistency
Would surely save the grace of our bodies
From the prostitution of corrupting minds
A mangled body though
Is no crumbling statue
And minds beg for the beauty
Of a smooth and rounded living meat
To smother beneath their thinking sheets
For sizes and
A few certain parts apiece

I dreamt of a women
All glass and no clothes
And sinned to dream much less
Than a door to her soul
I kissed her body and she blushed
By the small smudge where I had touched
And burried her face in her hands
I could still see her face
So could not understand
What it was she was hiding
Then she said;
What you don't see now when you're looking through me
What you wouldn't miss if you kissed me truly
You will never see if this is how you see beauty
Then she threw herself upon the ground
My heart came apart with the shattering sound
I grasped for the pieces and shards that were skin
Till my hands bled freely and my life grew dim
But before death could take me from upon the floor
I awoke wanting love as I never had before.

*

This pen love comes too late
For alphabet figures that used to create
The father of these things innate;
A sensual voice
Tied off into dry tourniquets
Hovers over desperation
Watching drops move
Crawl sadly
In a cracked sink
Like some widows of ink
For blooded limbs
We let dabble
Our mad selves in Hymn,
-Approach novel faces;
We must draw the madness
once again.

Sparta

A wild nature throws itself
Into the monumental posture of a god
With the aching force of failures unstuck
The haste of accelerating bodies crashed
Breaking off the stiff style of a manic cold

Wax takes the wick
Time into death
One lies down in the other
A worm in the mud
Turning dry
Unmoving ever on

All things collect themselves
Back into a neat single file
We wait for the sign;
The thin gown of a shadow
Leading us back to the town.

*

I remember scenes that seemed so clever
(but really just picturesque)
And I swore with oaths
Stamped "I will never..."
But straight jackets are made of "unless"

'O to be free
From what we've grown into,
The mind bogged down by its own attire
All anti-vivid creations have become me,
This is is despair, not desire!

A ghost is sheathed
In invisible elements we breath
A ghost is only romantic
When we believe

There I am
Wandering though not lost
Not diluted
Only the nature
Of what a ghost must be;
Check your eyes vague friends, it's me.

Beneath the Realms of Sleep

Dear friend
If I can evade the sun
Then you can create the rain
I promise my motive is not pain
Just shelter to bar me in
Until I can conclude on how to begin

I want to feel the hand
Of your gentle city

Soon we will trace the window
And feign our death against the frame
Surrounded by hollow chants of Christmas

Always we walk alone
Stamping snow for no reason why
Panning for abstract gems of personality
Fetching memory for where to go

I know, the feeling for water in October
Hitting sticks against the trees
I'm used to a shadow
But time and death are the same in a day
Mangled up with waiting
Walking astray
Dreaming in piano

I feel forever awake
And how could I remember now
The infinite bedrooms
Of that slow winter dream?
How could you lead me back
Into such queer memories
With no hands to bury my head in,
Grieving characters that no one else knows?

Beneath the realms of sleep
Inhabiting a dead forest
Waiting for eyes to shut
Continuing as if you cannot return

Beneath the realms of sleep
Beneath the last pillows of sunlight
I need only your ghost to guide me...

Eugene

I am trapped in synonyms
of below
Forward the process I need
but no
Tobacco
and sweatshirts
And pulses that slow
(the garden is failing)

Milwauke Depature

swimming in fountains
scaling the museum
breaking the last
shreds of tension

To Belong

They were so numerous
The parties, the people
But I never liked them
And they never liked me

Something about going soft
Too many voices
Too much noise
Causing me to turn off

In a city so busy
With people and
Whatever they're getting
In a section so small
With her incredibly timid song
In a soft corner where she's sitting
I could fit

Among water drops storming
A singular glass
Among leftover napkins
And ponds where swans pass
I among speeches
To appease
Her quiet chamber
Of song
That's where I belong

*

This pirate urge pushes me
To the end of my stale plank
Wearily, nervously I plunge down
Into the tear infested water
(salt preserves me)
It was a knife against my back
Metal benches and beds'
All that sells
The stagnant ticket to nowhere.

The Silent Betrayal

This ivory composure precedes all action
All episodes of touch
An abstract mission; -to understand oblivion
Proceeds, intelligently numb.
We wade thru undercover
Chin to the water
The momentum of our words
Slowed and delivered to the alter;

'O net of stars
Tainted by the atmosphere
With yellowed response
Sing and play dream strings
In a black desert beyond
Drape our thoughts here
Shimmering with perception
Movements embrace
All gravity with question
Reflections dance
-Escape prisons to show;
The light of the moon is a costume of woe.

*

To lose my pens
All missions feel empty
Attached to the monkey wire
Relenting

But I won't lose the energy to love

Shells of broken bontinents
Jittering legs of protection
Fallen back away from form
Heading in random directions

In the paranoid century of metal
Real people grieve over broken statues
Loosely sliding on a bus to maintain art
To indulge in a world that has fallen apart

The Lie of Bloodline History

I'm done with the fallacy
Of bloodline histories...

(upcoming poem in The New Mythologies series)

October Train

The month you love the most
Is the one that slips away...

-

October pain
It will subside
Into the fields
Roamed time to time

One last road
Left to unravel
One last pathway
Left to travel

Summer leaves
Drifting songs
Scarecrow couples
Here and gone
Awaiting fall
To intervene
Dying lovers
In between

Leaves blow down
Faded grass
Listen to
The silent past

October pain
It will subside
Into the fields
Roamed time to time

1846

This is not the earth

That I'm remembering now

Scattered sticks by
My fire

Behind me

Canvas

Tepee

Hide in the moon
Once Elk

Radiating power;

A monolithic statue

In the meadow

So my people cherished
and mourned

Taking you

Elk

As one of our greatest gifts

Great Spirit

Led you out of 

The world in the sunset

This humble fire of mourning

Is the heart of my ritual alone

Some of my brothers

Are in the forest

Some of my sisters

Are together in Solidarity

With one who brings forth
A child into the world

Others tend fires of their own

For we have known our grief now

A grief we never used to know

Here

Edge of the woods

Expanse

Clear before me

Rolling into the distances

Red Earth

Black Hills

Breath of the

Great Spirit

Rushing over it

This was our world

Fall

Falling leaves

Great plains

Things we knew

Not perceiving them as "known"

Our family was our home

Laughter

Love-Making

Meaning-Making

We had it made

There before
My sacred Fire

Heart in pieces
Sank like stones
Thru clouding rivers
Alone

Still praising

Great Spirit
For all things given

And all things known
That now seem
Disappeared

But
One
Fleeting
Memory
Set
In
One
Stone
Falling
Past
Me
Stood still;

Several of us

in our tepees
lost the light of
the little torches
we'd kept
Before sleeping
-an unexpected dampness
in the wood

We laughed
In Darkness
Strong as light

One of our sisters came in
with fire;
Our faces lit
In a warm flickering glow

This is what I remember most;
Our beautiful warm blessed faces
In the firelight

But Memory
Flickering
Out
Across
The earth
Leaves me looking thru the plains

Fire still burning
Tears in my eyes.

early morning rainy cafe

Water drops beat the glass

protesting for poetry

for the destiny & passion

of a high school elegy-

in steel configurations

his eyes pace endlessly

merging invisible things

wading in global empathy

tumultuous clouds beckon

as to an inmate in for treason

out from disenchanting frameworks

& hegemonic sessions

that arrogantly keep him

out into the dawn

meaning-making in gardens

of sleeplessness and wine;

trains wind thru

mindscapes of webbing-

interstitial bedding

for Brains,

for Hearts,

for restless breaths inside

fusing letters

that precipitate

a message carefully plied;

From a mind to a Heart

with immanent expanses

thru a world that sways my reply;

I send you emergent landscapes that dance-

I immerse them in fragments of sky-