the stars, the sea, and sleep.

Thursday, March 31, 2011

From The Ivy Vines

The most uncertain war is the one we don't fight.
We send our lives in scores and letters,
Extracurriculars and jobs at night.
Hope comes packaged in clear tape
Tucked into an indistinguishable cardboard box,
But chance travels with no postage
In cargo planes and 5-axle diesel trucks.
The warlords are aged keymasters
With futures made behind rusty gates,
Who make our youth strip a dimension
With the intentions to write their fates.
They are blindfolded and called judges
Driving on an icy New England road,
They'll slide off the Cape of this college town state
If they know they won't catch a cold.

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Candle Clock Bravery

Do you remember the words I slipped under the dinner table?
It was our communion that stained an old union sacrilegiously.
You were so unfamiliar with the taste of red wine,
But quickly acquired the its distinct consequence.
He had eyes for a feast, but a heart of bread, soup and iced water
Who once lived in a city on a hill, but now he stood on a mound,
He asked you to see the ruin and to hear the quieter sound.
But requests don't ferment like the rumors on a tangled vine
That now cradled fabled lovers too hospitable to time.
You have years since quit the book, but now you give me your devotion,
You see that fear deludes so well our rationale over emotions.

Monday, March 28, 2011

Quick and Heavy Swing

Your heels rolled on the marble like when you were a kid
Against the feeling of hard facts at face value
That baited your every breath.
This is how you see the way you see
When you find yourself suddenly staring at the ceiling,
Wondering who knew someone so headstrong
Could break their neck stumbling up on it.
And if this fall is groundbreaking,
I am a seismograph with no sense of direction,
But I'm okay with your shaky words and imperfections.
I am a polygraph with no sense of time,
But I'm okay with your lies, if you're alright with mine.

BuPo

A week's worth of experiments
Harbored the greatest compound of my existence,
You broke it down to the barest elements
And it built you up with the greatest elegance.
The chemist pretended that the chain never ended
But pretenses blemished it with kink that I lent.
However unstable, the carbon copy was in pen,
Vulnerable to each mistake, not to break, only to bend.

Sunday, March 27, 2011

Loose Change Poet

I got closer to my baiter,
And I marched through the turnstiles
Towards the arteries buried under the city's skin.
Within we could either be blood cells or bugs,
But the nightlife was anemic
And the street lights weren't enough to see it.
I got closer to my slaver,
And I pushed past the yellow line
Towards the chain gears and tires
Pressed against the city's skin.
There were track marks for the sewage
But the storm drains made no difference,
I got closer to my savior,
But disallowed her my deliverance.

Friday, March 25, 2011

Now There Are Edges To Slip Off Of

They purposefully left us behind
So we could pass the time like pages in the wind,
Like some summer reminiscent.
The sea breeze sings incessantly,
Even the sun has incandescent needs.
With every window down
I could tell that we were free,
I felt the concrete screaming back at me.
This was my home,
The big city drone,
The suburbia seeds,
My growth and my peace.

Raspberry Sand

I still remember how my fingers did travel
However far south on a brightly colored map
And your veins pushed like rush hour
Weary blood cells, shirt and tie.
She made a firm fist with the tides in her hand
And her wet hair stained like raspberry sand.
Now I've been rained in on a prison with wheels,
Calmly quiet and cold in the crystal and steel.

Thursday, March 24, 2011

VisitoR

We make weapons of judgment with cones and with rods,
And satirical fodder that we drum off in snares.
We laugh and we love that we're alone and we're odd,
We don't know what they think, but we know we don't care.
I am the cynic that laughs at himself
I am the center you laugh at as well,
You are so simply the color of all light
You are what I am that keeps us alright.

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Let's Be Friends

Fair skin in a dress devil black...
You were always for high contrast.
In the night, regrets are easier to hide
In the night, secrets are too far to come by,
But still, here I am speaking up to say hi.
Rationale was the cancer to your memory cells,
Hope's rocket combusted shortly after it propelled.
You are a white sports sedan,
Hydroplaning like an angel,
Diving off at angle,
Surviving, pearly eyed, and doing well.

Monday, March 21, 2011

a posthumous picture.

I am aspherical insobriety,
Dizzy from every perfect edge
Growing up,
Growing up
I've invested in
Stress fractures
And failure tests
For every hollow coin I spent.
The union is a shallow fallacy,
Common silence is common sense.

Conscious Lag

The darkness was divided into three separate sides:
Predawn, postdusk, and the ellipses of night.
Between the transitions, there was complete incoherence,
During which, the boy ran each thought through his mind,
He had his intentions well disguised in his bag
With a star in his pocket from the day's conscious lag,
But what was severe he had shrugged off as mild,
Now Father's caught up with his conscienceless child.

Sunday, March 20, 2011

M.G. C.E.T.

Turn the engine easy over,
It runs smooth along every edge
With yellow lights that cast over
The only way you've ever known home
That you could never take alone.
Stale air keeps the moment lingering
Like a blind man fingering every detail
Like a chemist better left speechless,
Their collision is heard as a hush.
Keeping it simple is keeping it safe
As the bumper implodes under instinct,
The inertial attraction that we've created,
A drought season's seeds that permeated.

Friday, March 18, 2011

Pure Moonlight

This is the closest I'll get to silent peace,
We cleared the east thousands of feet
Below a sea of loose atoms
To live life like loose flyers.
Always getting in trouble,
Always in bed after 2am,
Waking up to the feeling of hard ground
Against the heavy wheels of this plane.
Everywhere I look is a different destination
Any flight I book turns every timezone to the same.

Thursday, March 17, 2011

Scott's Day

I could feel her fading before my eyes,
Dissolving in a bath of tears
While her tethered fears precipitated.
Her indigo shadows bled into needed sleep,
Her muscles contracted all the strength
She couldn't keep...
When it rains indoors
It stains and pours,
It holds up each finger,
Keeping score.

All Night

There was a man with a plan who couldn't swim,
So he built a bridge instead between two days,
It was planned on blue paper called the night sky
That would connect a sun reborn in the same place.
He worked with steady eyes focused on his blurring pride,
The intoxication from what he knows against what he thinks
For that stronger taste that sinks to the bottom of every drink.
He melted his own wax model when he had reach its moral extent
And dripped a drunken gradient, radiance burning at both ends.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Reference Frame

Tell my why you wake up worried about the air pressure
Like your decorated ears would pop
And your years of listening would leak,
Like today is the day the sky would drop
And you'd watch all your angels leave.
The world is a cage. And you, its sweet parakeet,
Just swing me like the bending tree
Free me like the falling leaves,
Just breathe me like the god you please.
Just need me like its lock and key.

Monday, March 14, 2011

Maps of Matter

The blindest map is our imminent collision,
The romantically-lit celestial ballroom
Which started as the condensed chalk
That was nature's prescription for separation anxiety.
It became the life of the deaf explorer
Who opened a door for each irrelevant knock claiming,
"We are the shepherd, we are the herd,
We are slaves and we are gods,
We are unspoken, we are unheard,
We are dust against all odds."

Moving Forward

You know, I've never been too good at school,
But I could spell out your articulated intentions
And I could read your bread-breaking lips' inventions.
So we make jokes about rearranging the alphabet,
Being sure to avoid the horrid cliché of vowels,
And I sometimes ask why
Your hands can turn as white as wine
And your cheeks as red as your polished name.
Remind me of your worry from waning the whims of age
Divide me into chapters so you can take me page by page.

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Save Cameron

And all the scales in your head started tipping
Towards the lovely nothing you've held inside.
This heart throbs like a backwards joyride
That shatters the glass holding you from a clear path.
Your common theme is my near past,
In all its resizing deception.
It will miss you at the reception
But have pictures like it was there,
The color of his eyes
The texture of her hair,
You were a stone casket in a wooden coffin,
Holding plastic silverware.
The scale you left on the bathroom tile
Weighed your make-up meals molded of clay,
It took you and pushed you off the ground,
The springs revolted at your stay.

Friday, March 11, 2011

One-Armed Politics

Grade school attics hold static semantics,
Airy buffers that let our wet clothes breathe,
But the secret senate had said forget it
And dissolved in seamless sleep.
The re-summoned stuck like gum under a spell,
Words only chewed in a state of stagnation,
And all this talk about more often than not
Is just four quarters of a full rotation.

Claustrophobic Side View

My ears are still ringing from the words you said,
Or was it artist brushed up in my head?
Here is my water and here is my bread,
Stomach of butterflies, heart full of lead.

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Make Your Definition In Anticipation

I could give you every word he has uttered
Like the loose change that makes these pockets heavy
That is frantically pushed into a meter solid red,
And you could collect it for something meaningful
Or scrap it for the cheap metal.
But the intrinsic value comes from the trials of the mouth,
The deformations of tongue and the wind bellowed out,
Gift wrapped old calendars, and planners post diem,
Watches running backwards to a meaning roundabout.
I present to you my past, every action carried out,
All time was never lost, just misplaced in what is now.

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Lab-4 Play

Coincidence are roots conditionally planted
And shaken free from my own release,
These are the fruits of you waiting for me.
I only break the bitter skin,
But with the hint of something sweet
That sits on the tips of my teeth.
May you be swayed in the wind of my words
May the old oak creak with the songs of young birds.
But may I be weary of my courageous assertions
Though they have granted myself this conscious dreaming.
There was never a line to sign for assurance,
But I'm drafting my sleep for this hopeful endurance.

Getting to Know Murphy

Every accident comes with an according accent
That speaks of each incident as an angle of coincidence or fate,
The deflection of light as it shears on your face
Or the Coriolis explosion of a calendar's dates.
In a spiral of colors with dizzy fingers,
A presence lingers where every curl lost grip,
And your heavy words slipped into the uncertain sea
Dissolving the rules that would govern the key.

Sunday, March 6, 2011

The Struggle For Truth

Pride is the beast that lies on the couch
Who keeps the door and sleeps few hours,
Courage is the pair of red streaks the night devours
And defines the light in a field of steel towers.
Youth is the heart that tethers your aged wisdom
A chasm of fidelity, power and grace.
Truth is the battle in the confines of your blood,
The tickle in your throat, the tired look on your face.

Saturday, March 5, 2011

Beyond Blood

It's warm enough for a heartbeat under my sheets,
So I tuck what I can keep under the sheets of a made bed,
Pillows pressed up against the bedposts
Like the tall ghosts of towering steel at the break of dawn.
There are clean pressed suits over dirty city streets,
There are a hundred thousand threads that bed between you and me
And catch the morning dew that freezes.
Every step on the concrete cracked like a chisel on diamond
And the look in your eyes was most precious, turned me to stone.
So I stood as still as a stoplight and put all of my time in
To watch sunlight collide into a newly made home.

Friday, March 4, 2011

It's all good in the hood.

Current thoughts are too rarely concrete
And too easily let the wolf in to keep me company.
You stay close to me like a pack of cigarettes,
And your regrets dissolve into hot smoke,
What's left from coming clean.
Pleasure me in nicotine
Be the justification for all of my sins.
I want to be the knife,
Sharp all around.
I want to get under your skin.

Housesitters and Homewreckers

Who would ever leave this world to ourselves?
My mouth was full of guilt
That dribbled from the corners of my lips
That I attempted to hide with a smile,
Cutting the tension with my grinding incisors.
The taste of freedom was masked with bile,
Words that would come back up from trial and error.
We said leave it to God for whenever he gets back.
His creation needs to be rewatered,
The universe is beginning to snap itself back.

Thursday, March 3, 2011

Count On It

I tried to articulate with inept strokes,
But the horsehair vibrations
Turned into steel lovers with loud whispers.
I am but a conductor with wax on my fingers
And it's hard to feel anything beyond
Some numbing plastic feeling,
Some double-sided, burning candlestick,
Because you have to go through two zeros,
Before you can ever get to six.

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Burning Your Earnings

The grandest projection will always be flat,
Like the soda that sat out in open air;
You only wanted its liveliness to breathe
Into the rest of the world,
I thought you were done with your drink,
Out to debate with Aristotle.
Your words have the complexity of double-sided tape,
So I took it for face value and set the money aside.
Pretty girls will all have their tiny watches,
But I promise you they will never have the time.