the stars, the sea, and sleep.

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Don't Get Too Close

A misprint in a bestseller
Has become the fingerprint
For the investigator.
He was fixated on extraneous information,
But still straining to find his justification
At the bottom of a pitcher of sangria
To find that none of it was a good idea.
Earthy eyes, vanilla hair,
Well, can I just say that I wasn't aware
That coincidence would find the archived page,
That confidence could tear in such a way
And this ink would bleed onto the frays
So I'm left with so little room to say.

Monday, August 30, 2010

Time (The Catch)

Silence on the river, science on the roof.
The Boston skyline sunk into the river
Sitting on the edge of a shiverless night,
Fighting with words to find out the truth.
Another secret in your green and blue,
Restless until the message got through,
Clasped and released to fall asleep,
Sixteen hours, all to keep.

Sunday, August 29, 2010

c:

A mirror facing outwards
Is effective both ways, simply glass.
A simple glance for a thousand chances
For an honest masquerade with the lights
Out and everything clear,
Nothing out of my sight.
The switchboard's sharp emissions,
Solid light that does not dim,
Are what I cannot unbecome
And everything I've always been.

Saturday, August 28, 2010

Caught Up

This haphazard gap hazard has been relieved.
Cables are stable, suspended, we're free
From the burden of gravity.
We're floating over the tragedy,
But we sing in reminiscence at the water.
Landscapes were painted in her eyes
And nothing stopped her,
Except for her lashes that could retrace slumber.
I declared you a war for the sake of alliance
And you polished your charm, so harmfully vibrant.

Friday, August 27, 2010

Sassquatch

In precious fractures of seconds and sounds,
The acoustics split and slipped up your frown.
Smile! For the awkward and unexpected
Is wrapped with surprise there in the present.
In a place where home was no more,
It was encored and took us up
Three short of nine. The holy trinity
With a taste of less divinity.
There was ping pong in paradise
There was singing private symphonies,
But the apple tree was dangling
With the poison fruit that bit me.

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

The "Next" One

Ironic.
Almost iconic.
With the luck of a skeptic,
I should be more receptive to pocketless fortunes.
So I took up the time, but it wasn't enough
And innocence paid in insufficient funds.
In the matters temporal, of fractions and odds,
I heard a soft ticking that fear won't turn off.

Crossing Perspective

Bodies made the sentence,
But the words gave us our breaths.
It was the stench of stale whiskey and past anthems
Withheld in glazed ceramic,
And it was about time to be let out.
The pale yellow-brown sloshed about
As a lion paces the cage,
As we slipped into a warmer stage,
A swarming taste and broken ice
That buzzed about like dryer hives.
Each tessellation told a truth
As sweet as honey and as simple as youth.

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

[Tabs]

Fresh faces, labeled pages...
They were immortalized in a social medium,
So far from the moderation it needed.
Every name, a unique key in the shape of a pen
And its bold strokes cloaked what was then.
Faces turned red from the pressure,
Unmeasured perception of digital depth
Of plastic pressed against the skin too tightly.
It's not of the image made,
The blood now wanders free.
It's not of what you are sure,
It is all that you might be.

Monday, August 23, 2010

Bearings, Bearings...

Swing low, sweet fidelity,
I left my daughter in a burning city
And found my firstborn son,
The original sin with a magnetic spin.
Sing low, deep melody,
I rest my fodder in my wounds and pity
As I shook the compass in my hand,
But blood kept pumping by demand.

Sunday, August 22, 2010

River Dance

A tremor shook under the stage
The script book slipped between the cushions,
The numbers to letters, goosebumps to sweaters.
Everyone with a reason to catch the breeze
But hoping not to catch a cold,
Holding on to metal wings with precious cargo
Beyond where a car could ever go.
Desert highways were arteries on dry skin
That cracked and collected at every city
And left tracks against the layered tissue,
Telling the stories in two separate currents,
Assuring each other that they'd have the courage.

Saturday, August 21, 2010

Future Family Friends

I could spell it all backwards in the bubbles let out.
I left the sand asleep in my boat shoes
While consciousness sunk into my head again.
But we've got cars, buses, trains, and planes,
And blacklit gifts for the textual stains.
In the simplest way to alter the page,
The iconic chords of rolling hills
Were ironic shots traded with what we got
At what we once had, or thought.
Time-slapping, eyes closed,
Belting the words we've always known,
I drove down California in a dream,
Silhouette palm trees, red to green.
The dawn stretched neurons from behind my eyes
Before the lights went out and the evening died.

Friday, August 20, 2010

(mm/dd/yyyy)

My conscience hid under the sheets
As I slept through the emergencies,
Already convinced that I left
And that they wouldn't let me up.
I awoke in smoke for a refund
And was given change in the past tense.
The powerhouse is a vandal
Like the hibiscus scented candles
With the strength of sins on Christmas Day.
These are a few of the things in my name,
Etched in the bark of an old nameless tree
As timeless as the cold frameless sea.

Thursday, August 19, 2010

Sillies, please.

My sweater was a grave, in which you buried your face
Before a reach-over retracted as sure as the name
Etched into stone cold shivers,
Impulses that go into hibernation.
Acknowledgments on the final slide,
The sun slips under the ocean's tide
Pushing out bubbles that rush up from the sand,
The day's last breath used up in a sigh.
A runway dissolves in wet darkness and foam
And leaves me to fly from what I've always known,
One more timely wish for the last stitch was sewn
That last track had played on which I took you home.

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

A Quarter Back In New New York

He'll take you to Cassadaga
Where the ends begin to fray
From the end of the beginning
To end of every day.
You could be his stitches
And tie your wishes on a string,
He'll wince before your needle
When you feed him what he needs.
Sterile is procedure,
It is not quite how it bleeds,
It's clogging at your leisure
Unless these lesions need to breath.
The pressure was your fingertips,
Spoke nourishment uncurdled.
He milked out every trace
To save his grace with written words.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Girl, Such A Boy

Temper, temper, weather high,
Your oxygen is trying to hide
To leave you breathless
To leave you restless in the bed of night.
Summer strummed a perfect note
And sequential dates slipped down your throat,
Kept in time, a steady line until the coda;
Pick up in one year with less tan on your shoulders.
The cold is a phantom poking holes in your sheets,
But you are unscathed and still bathed in the heat.
This cold is an atlas that folds all apart
That will not take a threat from the shot of a star.

Monday, August 16, 2010

Pacific Sun

You are the king and I am the magician,
She is the artist and he, the engineer.
We sit and listen for the Tokyo chimes'
Echo in the station over alcoholic pride.
Temporarily illiterate in the retrospective,
Ms. Detective had to ride the bus home
For what was more than just a rewrite.
It was more than double scoops,
Summer goosebumps shook the car.
It was a union transatlantic,
It was singing to the stars.

Sunday, August 15, 2010

Ascension 9:27 - Rewrite the End

With a jacket and the windows down,
I crack open the older sounds
And let the light flood in from
The bulbs out in a hall made of concrete.
Contact. Flushed from rushing winds
Slowly passing in the same direction,
I am swerving lanes, but thinking straight
Letting out names like angels with no discretion.
Streetlights climb and disappear under the night
From when I dreamt up imperfection
In my digressions of the night.
A lazy collar, crooked smile,
And eyes sunk like runny ships.
A theatrical ending to nothing at all
But blood-hot hope left on my lips.

Saturday, August 14, 2010

Waiting In Weather

The air about me shook with talk show reruns
And my eyes wandered beyond the black silhouettes
Against the soft orange glow behind the panel.
Every channel was an earthquake
And cold voices made their choices again.
The freshest soil held the oldest faces
Who spoke through dampened cloth,
Denatured to the most natural state.
They were back to what made them not (or) so great,
Singers are for singers, but the bringer stays the same
Personified, thus given life with her love-given name.

Friday, August 13, 2010

Fill The Hole To Reanimate

To get so close as to touch
Is to run trust under unfiltered water.
Sickness is the willingness to be immune
But the sick can turn you wicked all to soon,
And light the match right under you.
Yell at me and get sloppy when you do,
Put the end on repeat and
Tuck the rest away in a filing box
To collect the dust of maturity,
Slowly burning in the attic
Where I keep all my impurities.

Thursday, August 12, 2010

Carriage House Tilt

In a common theme of "Don't say a word,"
I have found my backlit revelations.
A lack of knowledge is understood
Because anymore would do no good,
So it is taken with a smile as fact.
My hair stays gray and remains intact,
I also could have gone to Brown,
But the adjective before the noun
Is pronounced with comical disbelief.
A tongue tied locks before two weeks,
Replaced with those picked by a theif
From the little names lit up on the screen.
And after a year,
I barely know what they mean to me.
Or what I've meant to them.

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Business Casual

With so much talk about change,
We pooled our thoughts to buy some time
And redirected to a social geometric,
Playing in a circle where the center was the focus.
The paper slave trade turns cranes into locusts,
Selling beauty for dirt to build great empires
Rolled up and tucked away in a filing box,
Collecting the dust of maturity in the mind's attic.

Monday, August 9, 2010

Wake Up, Sleepyhead

"You're quiet," she let dribble out on the floor,
Only half-kidding, but allowed to bid her fears farewell.
Unaware that the genie kept her quiet in the smoke,
I choked the words until their memory was made a folklore.
The churches were all going out of business,
No one to wipe the dust from the pews
Or to give the pleasure of metal on cloth
In hopes of keeping a superstitious cough away.
There was something pulling at my chest without a key,
And my ribs rattled like the old cellar door
As I started slipping under from security.

Anthropocentric

Marionettes run around in a scissor parade
And claim that God is their face to the name.
Everyone holds the compass backwards
With no circle, but a single point
That a penny on the ground reflects more
Before cashing out for what little it's worth.
So please don't be long or I'll learn without,
Because I only walk with the handles out.

Sunday, August 8, 2010

Nighttime Glamour Music

The city is a jack-o'-lantern that glows a fading orange
From the pulsing street lights that carve into car hoods.
Movement gives a heartbeat and the evening lives on
In brake lights and late night drive-thru's.
The sky puts on her evening gown
But some still roll with windows down,
Letting the retro beat light up the street
With the stereo ghosts that haunt while you sleep.

Friday, August 6, 2010

Swimming in the Theme (Part 3)

I count the pills beside the filtered tap
And look through it like a kaleidoscope
To find something peripheral and pristine,
Shining through the slanted glass.
Slipped out of static insecurity,
Only wrapped in black laces and pearls,
There is none, but the bruise of curiosity.
Your love is a trinket, adorning my nightstand.
You live on as a moment, the swing in my head.

Thursday, August 5, 2010

Been Released

These territories are drawn with
Something I've gone long without.
False shouts respond to echoes
Some hundreds of miles away,
But the mountain face only changes
With unforgiven perspective.
Reconciliation is respective to grape vine,
But settlement is better lent
To catching up with time.
From hyperventilation,
Condensation comes like smoke.
The trees rustle to silence,
Defiance sinks into the snow.

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Peeling Back The Railroad Tracks

Before a notion of the motion sickness,
I once felt her heartbeat between the rivets.
She wore her whispers in gently tied ribbons
That would caress her neck and coerce a smile
Pressed against my ear. I could only hear the rumble
As luggage tumbled down and each word
Dissolved and crumbled off her blood red lips.
The stakes shook loose as their numbers diminished
The station bells rang with a station unfinished
The rails trailed off, the thought incomplete,
But I hung onto those words as I clung to my seat.

Counterdict

Litter your albums with labels and dates,
Every brittle name is reduced to
Little imprints on your retinas
From something that once touched you,
From some sting that got too much of you.
I threw a brick at the water's window
With a note that sent the captain my regards
For discarding every shard that could
Cut out something real and leave a stain to prove it.
You're deranged, arranging your hospital pills
While your parents pick up the hospital bill
For your educated contradiction;
You're being earnest with the fiction.

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Meditation Under Traffic Lights

Drifting under melon sky
Sifting through formaldehyde,
I drive for miles on cracked asphalt
That shakes the back-lit display.
The numbers dance in a light parade
And silhouette the needle's sway
As the day slipped down on every side
And dried off-yellow on the horizon.
Their eyes glaze over, hiding names
To show that which could not be tamed:
The summer slip that drips unpaced
From flooding warmth in empty space.

Monday, August 2, 2010

Lemniscates (Precalculated Aftermath)

Sixteens on the ride and bass,
Eights on the strings,
Singing in groups of threes,
And I don't understand a thing.
It brings honesty at true face value,
Looking into someone's eyes,
Breathing some of yours
Being some of mine.
Wondering if it will explode
In fists or kisses, hits or misses;
Shine a little more for show
Buy a little more for business.
Everyone's got their own egos to tame,
These bloodsucking demons,
So vain, so vain...

Sunday, August 1, 2010

Thank You, Moools

You look dapper, all buttoned up
In your new coat of independence.
Free to breathe out your occasional
Condescension on those who have
Transcended your coupled plans.
Don't spend too much time
In front of that dusty mirror,
Hoping one day these shirts will fall level.
It's just another trend:
Sperry shoes and cardigans,
Rayban glasses for pretend.
Just ask for the steady breakdown,
The static guitars, the humming drums
That all have nothing to say now.
But the reverb keeps your secrets pronounced,
Until the only notes left fall flat on the ground.