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.