Moving Around

The heart-lights are out,

the windows uncurtained to the

emptiness that tells

callers no one's home.

The feelings have gone

north and taken

the words

there they're

lined along the shelves

by subject. But some are

in boxes marked DO NOT OPEN -

words like anger and pain

and love

and friendship.

I think she thought she would feel happy.

I think she thought too much.

I think she feels nothing.

But I feel she feels a

restlessness

and that she will come home again.

An Old Hate

The moments are few when

a sleeping mountain quakes

but the antique forge, sometimes,

erupts, where words are wrought

red-hot, sweet and true,

to carve a poem of you

against the stone,

and unsteady the steady hillside.

stung

i'm a pungent

flesh-rose flowering

between lips that dreamed

itself nectared by

you, awkward, bumbling,

that forgot it is, too,

a brain strung to a

foot that could

so easily crush

hairy little balls

like bees.

indecisive cursor

poised over
You,
I
haunted the anchor of the
ship, I -

You are wind and water too;
she was driven by You, this ghost-
ship, I

can't won't, but,
don't, I tell
myself: the barrier
reef

but the sea is free
like an arc could never be

to be always incomplete

I go with my ship,
friend,
ship,
wrecked,
i,
w e.

I Have That Feeling

Tomorrow will be one of those days - I
can tell - when I'll wake up with
you churning in my stomach undigested
or burning in my temples,
the incurable migraine

beating beating beating

against my eyes, against my
better judgment, I thought you -
I thought YOU today so

tomorrow I'll wish I couldn't -

at all -

"Think
of all the ink."

dieawkside

I'm not the she we knew who had
aerostat-lungs and a heart
like a broken burner.

My tungsten house admits no wind

for fear of
sense, a hurricane; for fear
of pain, my metal home
sits on a frame of osmium bone. But sometimes

a breath of you will slip between these drapes of stone,

and inspire

the ancient arteries
that make me feel
and feel like me.

Birds in the City

I moved into the city
to let its beauty bruise me,
send me broken to some cell of
madness, spluttering grit.
I wanted to
lick the street's gray,
ingest all the apathy of
so many souls crossed
pointlessly. I wanted to
taste rape
in the smog trickling
down my throat

but then this bird I couldn't see
sang out from some dead tree
and my spirit soared from me

and all that gutter-gold.

Fridays

Friday nights, downtown
detonates with
the laughter of
women wobbling on heels
to fall head over
and there’s something defiant in
their hemlines high up the thigh,
skin glaring over necklines, assertion
in the tipsy stupidity of these
bodies between bodies
ricocheting. How tight
they’ve been wound up, I think,
how desperate their escape
every Friday night
like clockwork
on dynamite.

Thunderstorm

It’s nice
to feel the rain and
know my hair is
frizzy and
ruined. I like to know
my shirt is wet and catch
men gazing, women glaring.
I hate the worms,
and love them. They’re so vile
on sidewalk cracks,
I like to feel like killing them.

After so many floating castles and
silver linings, it’s nice to see
the world for once, torn and
licking its wounds.

Woman Before the Rising Sun

Inspired by Woman Before the Rising Sun by Friedrich (1818-20)

The evening star is
an aphrodisiac of amour
de soi.
In its primal glow, the woman knows
her darkness, and her beauty, and
de-lights,
wings cra
cking through her marble shell, the
breaking of a spell
man-cast. She
lives. But too soon

owls roost; wisdom sleeps.
Today quits the cradle of humanity.
Morning casts its curse anew and
the woman is contorted into

expectation, a grotesque form
encased in stone, her heart

seems not

to beat. But

the woman merely sleeps.

[untitled]

Because you asked, I will try to make it
clear; my love for you was greatly
fear at the thought of
you not in my life. That faced,
I found I love you
because it helps me fall
asleep - nothing too deep
but comfort.

gianduia-toast

Because it was too heavy,
I slashed the tapestry of my brain
and brought out that grain
of galena-love
deposited there so long.

And because its glimmer in the
earthshine startled me,
I thrashed and bashed and beat it
hard
against the bridge between us.

I hoped it would shatter into sand
and sift through my fingers into Lethe

but instead it sparked and flared and has left
me burning before you.

Chilly

My heart is a stone
which sometimes skips
to feel requitement's
caress, those ripples of
nothing.

But always with
a dread does it tread
the surface of
its love for you.

You are my lake and
you are cold and

I so fear submergence.

Frank

Once, I was the
clearest spring;
now trees have sprung
and aged upon my banks.
Where once you sipped
and knew the taste,
is mud and shade of
a tangled wild
that none can navigate. But wait.

Somewhere, there is a diamond with the weight of
all the earth and the light of all the stars.

It is the heart of me;
it is my love for you.

But a warden-wind tells me
"that will do."