I Am In A Good Place

I won't call it heaven

'cause it's not mine to keep,

but I can see its borders

when I watch her sleep.

avalon

below lies camelot and all that follows
below roams the concrete mammoth that
bellows lies and trumpets oh brass blast
fast track industrial shine you get in my eye

the window's half-notched
air is full cool blast damn
does this cabin get cold

with every plane i board
i get a little bit old

the cars all move at equal speeds
which must be the same trick
that the earth plays on space

i can see clear through the navel
of the sky we bravely plunge
through the wet lint

and feel the falling

i am the ant
my little airborne carapace
glued to my tiny ant-head
sewn by milky threads
of ivory like string cheese
or like silk 

spun by a web of geese

swat

for every bug i squish -
the black, broken ones
the tiny red spiders
the headless junebugs
the ripped moth
like the moon's veil
unsheathed
by my fingers -
i extract a
bean sized
bag of blood
from the vein
of the earth.
i take what
i cannot be punished
for taking.
i kill a fly
to get back at the sky
for always watching me.

Humanid

Lumps of heat roll off the clouds,
falling away at the skirt of the void.
Amarillo heatdrops reconvene
mere inches apart, and fade to smoke.

Tendrils of wind split apart,
smothering altars in gold
and soaking the banks
with their weightless dread.

Independent of the idea
and one with the drive,
they scurry and deposit
and resonate like a hive.

A sandstorm of eggshells
leaving nothing but yoke.

Nothing Comes Out

This is the flavor of failure.
My fucked up arrival
to the ash-gilded street.
A pattern in spite of my attempts
to do away with contempt.
This is my elliptical sorry.
This is my editorialized sorrow.
The ceiling crumbles like snow.
The thick-armed creature
of darkness carries my bones.
It reserves its judgments
and lays them at my bed.
It is no serious threat.
Its dawn-eyed dolls
are just the mess of my mind.
I should hang them
in the doorway
to keep the moths away.
I should turn off the light.
Bottle up a drop of the sun
as if it were a bug.
There are many who own me.
I am simply borrowed property.
This leaves me wanting.
I have been abandoned
by both factions,
the wanted and the wanting.
Deciphering the difference
is better left for the birds.
I envy those bulletproof talons.
Soon I'll have a pair myself.
No one has faith in me,
to become a bird
and one day take off. Yet
talons were built for those
who plummet from the sky.
My business sense is keen
as my attention to my heart:
which sputters
like a mangled engine,
which coughs like
a contractor, and shits itself like a baby.
I am a borrowed somebody.
Who left this in charge?
I have no control over the controls.
I am led by a green light
to a centrifuge of muffled memories.
I see royal black lakes with no bottom.
At night I clutch whatever I can.
Looking backwards,
only the undergrowth is visible,
the tufts of selfish behavior
sticking out like broken thumbs.
The past brews dark with the grounds
of so many ground up fantasies,
and my conscience swirls like a cream.
The more I filter, the more mixed it seems.
Now nothing comes out true or pure.
I have made sure.
I have nodded at the sunrise,
sucked the sweet from the sublime,
and counted every side of the die.
I am every one hundred pounds a lie.

Taken By

The parts of me that feel missing
get blown down the street: the silk hand,
the amber look, the deep green kissing
that keeps me rooted to my feet.

In these kind of badlands one
could go extinct: thirsting for honey
or milk, an apparition of the sun,
warm at night and gone with a blink.

The transient wind in throes
awakens the lake: the bejeweled
waves blinding me as I throw
out my line, waiting for it to take. 

Anchor

Come closer, April, as I seize advantage of you.

I ship my worries through your channels,
watching expectantly the hardened shore,
attempting to gather shells with which
their combined force I might blast open
the one-way wormhole from my ear
to the bottom of the lullaby sea.
The shell evolves into a telephone
just for me. Spanning several summers,
my voice uncoils into melancholy,
a hot whisper knowing not the depth
of the ocean, but plunging deeper still
to the sandy bottom where I left you in my soul.

Soap

So you left the soap in your mouth a little too long.
Big deal. It burns and turns into a bitter creme,
it might make you cry but it's your own damn fault
for being obscene. Your words hold you up
and your words hold you down. Spit it up,
or keep it down. No one is stopping you now.
Go ahead, show us how much you've grown.
Practice your very adult-like tone of voice.
Intonation, detonation. Defuse the youth
in you and pry your priorities from the groove.
It's your move. Say something delicious.
Or say nothing at all, else you lose. 

feast

Like like like
who woulda
thunk it that
the thunder
would be so
mean: that
the prodigal
son would
ever have a
dream beyond
himself, that
he would accept
a feast if it
were brought
to his feet.
Like he
doesn't eat
meat.
So a feast
of carrots
& onions
& celery
might
deliver you
from this
trap of
scarred
celibacy.

Cuisine

If I could eat a word
and chew it like bamboo,
and strip down the absurd
with the flick of my tongue,
I'd ask for more than one.

I could eat soap or sepulcher,
an aplomb, a nexus or fetus,
whatever's not a spider or ogre.
I once had doubt and taboo:
bitter, no doubt, and crumbly too.

Lately I eat more carefully.
That other night when you cried,
I felt that word all over inside.
The drunk hornet harasses the hive.
That word, it eats me alive.