Cobalt majestic, cracking and shivering
Sliding and tumbling, shattered monolithic
Arches in sallow melting glaze
Peaceable giants in the terrible cold
Losing the battle, losing the war
Brought to your doorstep
Belching towers, industrial power
Guardians of our too-set ways
Distance made meaningless, linear
Colossus below the deep, smoothed by endless tide
Movements paced slowly
Deliberate, final dance under the pinpricked no-more sky
Ragged, pamphlet spewing word sayer
Gnomic shuffler of pulp hewn with a saw-toothed grin
Scribbling sentience, making difference
Heed this, the way is open for all to tread
Barging the bleeding Northwest Passage
Commingling ocean current, impossibility made real
The storied century-old miles travelled in furious winter
Made smooth and pleasant, the horrific fact somehow diminished
By a wide-eyed street corner salesman
There will be no more change – reversal is denied
I wake up in the heat of the day
In broiling mid-winter
Paper-pushing monkey in a company t-shirt and jeans
Waving agendas at me from the middle of a city block
And the hole inside me grows and grows
It might be too late for us
This might be how it ends
There is a moment when
The soul in action crazed and permanent
Is confounded by the complexity of the whole
Is in the wave, is the wave, waving sectors of space
And the sun melts away, and goodbyes are forever
Granularity of experience, irreducibility
Of the formation of action: the flame of lost time
That burns without a keeper
Is a pattern descended
Of deterministic unfolding
Mad geniuses cry out and breathe tulips as air
And every breath shortens as roots grow further down
Fancying the end of times
And the end of sensibility
A self-replicating flower that blooms in shards, alphabetically
Supine in a room much like your own
Stretching the spine and staring down the ceiling
At the conclusion of another pitiful chapter
Of an arrangement between word, and thought, and action:
Pages strewn carelessly across a desk
If only there were no separation
And the haze could remain a whole
If only there were some excuse
That would pardon from the dragging seconds
That contain the eon
In the mind of the onlooker
In vast rooms where paradox holds sway
There is a pause and looking past you I see the
Distant thunder head and rouge latte of the clouds.
I feel like spinning around and around while
Colorful powders launch into the air on festival day.
In the distance I’m hearing a low hum like
A speaker wire out of place.
I feel like hiding inside an old jacket
In an antique store.
I painted something delicate and didn’t want
Cat paw prints from the sticky red ink.
I felt like singing in a cave somewhere
Distant and accessible by side roads.
Basso profundo from the neighbors next door
Who are modern day followers of the wine and the harvest.
I feel like stuffing cotton in my ears
And falling into a deep sleep.
The plane is shaking violently on landing and
Our pilot is calmly explaining the normalcy of our situation.
I feel oddly at calm as the shears cut across our
Vessel.
I’m piledrived in the knee-high dirt and
You’re laughing like you’d told the funniest joke.
I feel something in my neck twist the
Wrong way and then snap back.
Here are some facts about the ocean:
– It is both wide and deep
– Ocean water is not potable
– Creatures lurk in dreamless sleep
– Major weather events develop over water
When our vessel capsized, I lost my tongue to those bastards
Now I’m mute, and hell, I pretend to be dumb just for the sympathy
But they left me alive to
Live with the horror.
Now the idol that keeps me safe, keeps me protected from the soul suck
Sits balanced on an infinitely narrow point.
It drives me slightly mad to look upon it —
Its bulging eyes, and fat sculpted body in crackled meteoric stone
And it narrows down to a tip. An impossible, world breaking quanta.
I tell you, friend, there are dangers in the sea
Keep an eye on the clouds
And it’s nice to meet you to, even if the night’s a bit rainy
Out of order drinks, feeling lazy
I can’t understand why my boyfriend’s so crazy
I’ve been waiting for you all my life
And I can’t believe you, even though I try
Whatever fueled your night was something that happened one time
And under my breath I catch you in a lie
I’ve been waiting for you all my life
Flight, flight, things I want to do
I know me like I know you
Want to catch me better play it cool
I’ve been waiting for you all my life
I’ve been waiting.
I don’t get enough of you.
I’m parched without you to slake my thirst.
I bathe with you, and you are in me.
You know me most intimately.
Wherever there’s a depression, there you are,
Flowing through the bottommost crevasses.
Out on the ocean you taunt me.
Out in the jungle you poison me.
But I need you, I need you,
And it goes beyond love.
You are a basic necessity,
An undeniable force.
I know we said
We’d never speak again
Of that night on the plain
Where the thing with the cow happened…
I’m sorry to reveal
I’ve not been entirely truthful
About that night and what transpired
You see, when you left town the cow was found…
On top of the chapel
A hundred feet up
Looking far across the plain
Where the thing with the cow happened.
Ministers ministered,
Lawyers milled,
Insurance salesman calculated the damage.
I stood there shuffling, and my hands kept going to my jacket pockets in the cold dim dawn.
The newspaper men were rustling through the crowd.
Someone shouted, but it was only the fruit man.
A halo ascended from the east, and some of us sat and waited.
The cow, at this delicate point, had been agitated.
Moo. Mooo. Moooo. Mooooo!
“Move! Move!”
Firemen surround the perimeter,
Everyone is told to stand back,
They are bringing a crane.
And I know we said we’d never speak of it again, but:
I’m not sure we did the right thing,
Giving the poor thing the brunt of our brutal spell,
Even if it was just a test of our craft,
I feel as bad as all the blessèd rest.
And the cow, now pacified and not being ridden by the Santería
Lowers slowly to the dirt where she’ll stay.
I don’t know my shapes or colors
I like to paint with my fingers
A trapezoid is not important to me.
I don’t know my numbers or letters
I like bananas and naps
Your struggle is not important to me.
I guess when I get older
I’ll give more figurative shits
About you, bacon-home-bringers.
I’m always right — la, la, la, la
I can’t hear you
The passing of time is not important to me.
I know you pretty well
I’m making life choices
Not a whole lot is important to me.
You made me laugh the other day
And when I remembered it again
I laughed again, but quietly to myself.
The consonants and vowels you form
Fall to me in movement and shape
I whistle a joyous offbeat tune without realizing.
Balance is difficult but you’ve taught me
You taught me how to be a better person for you
A trapezoid is not important to me.
Reach final form, race against blindness
Splayed fingers grasping, twist suspense
Algorithmic pattern, sallow face glaring
The brightly colored cube, the aching second
In which the sweat builds like dew
And a slip is fatal, and nothing adds up
To what was promised to us when we
Scrambled the signal and dissipated reason
And you said “twist it, not that way”
While I fumbled to reverse the entropy we imposed
When the expert showed up, I slowly slid upward
And met his eye, judging him immediately
The stream of movement, and shuffling clicking sounds
Made no sense to me, even as I closely watched
He smacked the button down, I felt lost
“Twist,” he declared in his mousy voice, “to solve.”
Wouldn’t it be terrible
And terrible and horrible
To never sleep again
And it would drag down
And you would claw at the sheets
Until like a rabies victim you contract
Into an infinitely dense point of
Muscle and bone
And within that moment the tension
Would disappear
And there would be a release
But not a dream
La La La — I’m an effin’ DINOSAUR!
Ra Ra RAAA — I’m an effin’ DINOSAUR!
I go where I like
I eat what I like
I poop where I like
Cause I’m the biggest.
D.s. Al coda
Oh he’s a big ol’
DI NO SAUR
Yes she’s a big ol’
DI NO SAUR
A shame about that
ME TE OR
I’m an effin’ DINOSAUR!!!
You are content, I pause to think
To pounce, and stretch, and lope, and slink.
Sloping arc of matted fur,
Green and gold your eyes that stare,
And slightly close, while drifting by –
Dreams of passing clouds in sky.
You are content, in this brief nap
To purr gently, demurest cat.
Batting at some unknown prey,
Twitching paws that reach and play,
Or tucked between, in ancient pose –
Leisure done, and you arose.
You are content, and I know well
To beg, and worry, and nudge the bowl.
Feeding time occasions this,
Performance of pathetic-ness,
Or as I tend to think, instinct –
Your stomach full, now time to drink.
I am content, adopted life
To lead you through your too-short time.
As your whetted claws I clip,
Where you once buried, now I dig,
And looking me straight in the eye –
Cough up a hairball and some bile.
For all these moments, time well spent,
I pause to think, I am content.
A measure of the flakes could not amount
To much beyond the drifts beyond the pane.
These points of measured snow in tactless grasp
Of shovels, plows and mathematics’ reign.
There isn’t an equation for the breeze,
And in the solace of a cloudy day,
Chaotic streams of frozen melodies,
Under the ageless silence do they play.
I spent a portion of my younger life
In digging through the snow to find the earth.
And though my hands were thin and I was shy,
I built a man; a condensed drifting birth.
A song on Winter, creeping through the glass,
And one who sleeps will never see it pass.
Twin marigold blossoms under tread and worn
Through a valley, a cavern –
Much has been written on flowers;
Much less about soil – loam –
I wish a verse into cognizance.
I find difficulty in snow drifts.
I find facetiousness at my most
honest points.
I search and am defeated by
subtle texts.
no truer poet; insufficiency.
A span of seconds (or minutes),
It’s possible to focus this
way, but only –
My hand carries so far against
a page – but lonely, forward streams –
morphemes, combining, dissolute –
Thank you for this, my timeless day.