Month: February 2015

I blame it on your kiss
That pressed my lips, burst me
Like a bubble.

I blame it on your love
That transformed my body,
Left it a bed only for you.

My mother is at the kitchen sink in a beige quilt housecoat,
“Oh, the hummingbirds.” She says eating a peach and struggling with the juice,
“They fight.”
Burning bright,
eucalyptus half wing into the bushes.

at this time of the morning the downtown streets and alleys are
hung with curtains of darkness, lonely sounds probe their depths

outside the window, this diner’s relentless fluorescents chafe the walls, sidewalks outside with a bloodless methamphetamine heat that chars everything but I haven’t the time to look

I race to finish my work on this giant pad of gridded paper
a matrix of time I search for the correction
factors realized during these
long empty
nights

sleeplessness is evaporating my life
my eyes burn but I can not close them and I hurt

the night this damn night fills the streets outside this window with toxic black and it will not go away
the correction factors will let me see the sun again bring you back to me
but they are so complex

but there is no escape for me unless I solve this abominable enigma

and I must get out of this eternal bitter coffee black night it is the only way
no bluing morning come to save me no sweet breeze no birds to rend the weak light no cicada to chatter start the day

no hope

Listen to Katya
hear her words hover near her heart
cup sorrow to her breast
falter, stagger, hint at an anguish and despair
that is far more than one can bear

she stumbles through her message losing her balance
thoughts teeter on the back of a chair and tumble to the floor
picking them up she hesitates, embarrassed what can she say
the timid advance, the final hopeless offering
it is all there
listen to her,

she is saying something

I watched the battles,
Heard its sorrows.
Now,
my eyes sear,
I have come to see as the wind feels.

My friends speak to me
Using words bent,
Screwed and
Wound through
Steel forming machines.

I answer with
Doorknobs,
Tire nuts and
Spaghetti ladles;
It is all the same to me.

Buildings,
Walls angrily
Ripped away leaving the raw
Skin so close to blood
Tender and vulnerable 
Now, facing the wind sun
Rain.

The poet moans in loud, sometimes angry,
Doldrums
Blindly dropping each word, like sweat,
Refuse. His voice, a
Monotone of sorrow.

Broken bones,
Walls, machine gray
Mortars of old replicas, old fortifications, old lies
Now stand visible and repulsive. A Day,
A simple day gone past.

And I cannot see beyond
The bitter, bitter sun persimmon.
Just another whisky and off it is to the woods
Where I had been the night before and
The night before that.

But all that is left is the campfire,
That burnt out campfire and peat moss.
A damp forest and
A figure where once a woman lay.
She carried a lantern,
A bouncing light in the distant wood.

O free me from this expansion of time
That holds, in a single breath, my body floating
Above the complex doom of Hades’
Stars and scars, infinite remorse and pain.
Give me the peace to lie down at last and be free.

Lost Coast Review Summer 2014

In my dream,
snow hangs
beneath the streetlight
unmoving, while
white haired Banshees
ride the whorls
scream in silence.