the stars, the sea, and sleep.

Thursday, November 22, 2012

A Year's Pass

A year's pass and the colors sink into the carpet,
What has absolutely floored me adorns the burnt display of a broken past
A magic act of smoke and ash.
If I could only
Ask that you could have known me
Take the wheel that would have drove me towards anything that wasn't colder
Than what this endless night has shown.
Now I'm on your shoulder, surrendered to how you've grown.
I will never know,
And to do so would mean certain death.
So I caress the edge like broken glass
And bleed the past in frozen breath.

Thursday, May 10, 2012

Day 120: Black Shiners

Reheated and as stale as the day before
That pre-summer heat was closing the distance between
Your breaths and the floor
My best and what I swore I would never be
After everything that I had been.
Now everything stuck to my skin
As I surrendered any gesture
That could be fed off of, to you.
What wanted to be true solidified in thin air
As satisfying as the haze that enveloped the cityscape.
I couldn't breathe; I loosened the cape and retired the man I made.
A noose around the nape swallowing the venom of a snake.

Sunday, May 6, 2012

Day 116: Quesafajitadillas

Wake up for another normal breakfast
My favorite kind of normal
That I pretend you always hate in jest
And prebend these rubber plates imressed
Against your hot face of a concrete boardwalk
Chasing the sun onto the front porches
Of Owners of Porsches and those more fortunate
Toes creeping close to what had gone
To where the water treated beneath the sand
The shorline fit between my hands
To get a better grip on this sandslip perspective
To burn the papers of the advance directive
While teachers in an apartment being students of tonight
Put two parts of a circle into three parts of a sky.

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Day 105: 5F-214N

Listening through your part of what I could not title
When everything was best replaced with your name,
The beaded rain pressed up against the windshield;
I am coming to see you as more of a stranger,
Sleepless panels and cheap alcohol grain.
Spent behind a lockless door,
This is the home I shared with you,
Secrets set into the navy blue,
A stressless strain, out came the truth.
How quickly snuffed, or spoken youth...

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Day 104: Jeff vs. Orpheus

An old wooden chair with red velvet upholstery
Whose dust shone like stars freshly fallen
Its creaks were not picked up by vibrating magnets
But the seat was still hot from descent.
Years of followers that encircled a tight belt of silence
Quiet space left for a recluse.
How he finally climbed down
From the words we could not hear
That we weren't quiet yet ready to feel.
As concrete as tin memories left buried in a box,
Its love that burned your heart
And smoked you out like a fox.

Monday, April 23, 2012

Day 103: Rinse Obsession

Fear is a waterfall made of
Gravity and water tension,
Lethargy and our best intentions
That slipped on the bank
And cracked its soft skull
On your firm impression.
I love you like a bag of bones
I've hung up in my darkest room,
I love you like a marionette
I've strung up for my secret shows.
I breathe your air with no regret
Because I haven't let your soft hand slip,
Your aromatic decomposition
Is my disposition to get a grip.

Friday, April 20, 2012

Day 100: Spoke Too Soon

Air pushed through a plastic tube,
Hot and weak like fresh smoke.
It spoke to spores that had seen a war
But were now getting caught in the draft;
Shell shock: the alarms rocked as it all left again,
All it lacked, like money sacks, exploded like the pen.
All of the sworn promises that you left on the line
Were none you can make nor were they ever mine,
They broke a perfect surface, a once newly-born moon,
Whose craters hold the echoes of words we spoke too soon.

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Day 56: Love and Porn in Culver City

Cold, but when pressed against the wall
Or pulled apart
It warms only to a sting.
The loneliest sing, a monologue
Of short gasps of sequential shock.
Traffic pushed the sun over the CNN tower,
Food was left to go in the pockets of my cheeks,
Zooming through a ghost town with a bloodless brother
Silence without sirens, and chasing the doctor.

Monday, March 5, 2012

Day 54: Fixity

We were on your front lawn
Where red dust stuck on blue paint
That flew through an open window,
Once broken by the babbles of a brook.
This brick porch is a creek bed,
Was once the cat dander and mosquitoes
That found their place on my skin,
Now buried deep in time.
And if I didn't have the first title,
I would've burned out the whole spectrum
Because this is everything:
The golden flame, the silver ring
The bronze medal that three could bring.

Sunday, March 4, 2012

Day 53: Counting the Joker

Here is one more ephemeral blow,
Raps upon a door locked from the inside.
It peels the glue from my skin;
I hope it helps me see my true side
Picked at, hiding under a scab.
My bones are a garland of pearls
Fragile as such, they are draped in
Sinews and teenage promises.
Here is one more arrowless bow
That struck at your hearts
For what you did not know.

Sunday, February 19, 2012

Day 40: Stage Table Dinner

Parked in front of a memory
Words spoken through a light box
To the headlights in the review.
The door pushes through the cold
Clamoring to get in, as a chatter's letting out
Walk to the door in the same mossy steps
The same glass breath from standing too close to the door
He never knew there would be more
Who ever said there couldn't be more
Strangers taking place of the most welcomed past
That warm, but do not burn in the presence of fire.
And as God's will's desire, I preach
And to these teachers I teach what they taught
A homebaked good packaged and store bought
Inspiration for a generation I forgot let simmer in the kettle
Of the well-wishers, the poisoners, and the pots.

Day 39: Who Protects The Sleeping Whom

"7:30 wakeup call in sick again," sings the alarm bell
The heater rings, made home the most pleasant hell.
So I took my coffee green with kin bounded legally
And familial ghosts of my savior passed through the tinted glass.
It was a holy fever or my mind left scrambled in a busy parking lot,
For the time spent on the hood of a black car
While all the other ones passed.
I saw no pine, but there was a zephyr in the sky,
Mixed green cut down under blue, this is me and truth.
I found my kin had found some kids
Finding a childhood I once did,
Two guitars and a xylophone
That started with a "z"...
Them and me, yes this is we
Now this is you, now go to sleep
Truth had left, now it's just me.
Remember floral waiting seats
Remember radiology
I had left, but now it's me
Them and me, now this is we.

Saturday, February 18, 2012

Day 38: Under the Knife

A day spent in bed, but never home
When a doorbell rings and the floorboards sing
Under the weight of a new man.
He reflects in the glass
Rearended on an onramp to get the port
Sitting in a bed all day,
Listening to nurses talk like a sewing circle
Slipped into the machine
All of the screens, metal gleaming
Talking normal and then sleeping
Wake up before they finished
Alive awake alert enthusiastic
Blondie in the holding room
Take me to discharge
The old wheeling out the young
Backwards, but I am done.
Not a new heart, but a way to it.

Saturday, February 11, 2012

Day 31: T2, C1

Chemo and nothing.
So hungry.

Thursday, February 9, 2012

Day 29: Family Adhesive

How long I've stared at empty sea and stars
I'm getting friends back through Skype
Reading of my risks a different heartbeat every tab
No food for today, the beginning of the fast
Calming the family, being soft-voiced reason
We're all working together
Three adults in the room. One child.
Tired eyes of a sleepless hypocrite.
Talking to the world about the future
Tapping keys until the sun is charmed out.

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Day 28: Where Airplanes Go

I stepped into a cold car speaking yesterdays
That fogged the skyline through a dirty windshield.
With a suitcase in the back and a book bag in my lap
To keep me warm, future plans chattered out of steel bones:
Future dads that clamor out of sealed homes
With windowpanes that play dead
Until the lingering night fingers on to the west
Where I go now. Where they had gone.
What I had left, and how they moved on.
Where airplanes go and sink by the sea,
Why winds prevail without a sense of meaning.

Sunday, February 5, 2012

Day 25: Talkative Bunch

The closest to normal I have felt in a very long time
I know there are more to come
But I am okay with this one
Let me return that email
Let me preserve those details
I've missed it for so long
You for the longest,
All to go so soon.
The winter, the cold lights, the crisp moon.

Saturday, February 4, 2012

Day 24: Ebb and Flow

An ounce of liquor spilled on the black keys.
It soaked through sick veins
But you spent all day in bed,
And we watched our remaining life
Through a oneway mirror.
Will you remember me in oh one two?
Will you think that I was thinking of you?

Thursday, February 2, 2012

Day 23: Sad City Bouquet

To sleep through the morning
And wake up again.
Gray becomes a softer black
Maybe I loved this city all along,
So I gave my thanks in a porcelain bowl
For what I took and what was dead on arrival.
She left all the sweetness preserved in her
As I finished my breakfast at the counter
Like a well established diner,
A hole in the wall by a hole in the ground.

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Day Six: Banks and Bets

Appointments with needles and staying still
I prepare my life to change
Putting the children to bed
In a luxurious bathtub of ice
In a room as dark as night.
I can feel my cancer growing,
I just need more than knowing that I'll be alright.
Mopey.
A mother cries and a daughter follows suit.
I cannot be robbed of my youth.

Sunday, January 15, 2012

Day Four: Places On Earth

Kelly and Cola.
Hanging out by the fire
Freezing in the cold,
Drinking cream soda to save my blood.
Designated driver for a loved friend
Designated crier in the passenger seat
Who couldn't believe this could happen to me.
Walked you to sleep as the black sky turned deep
Lackluster moments that I still wanted to keep.

Thursday, January 12, 2012

Day Two: Breaking In

Before the morning sun could find my half-shut eyes,
Skin stained sheets from the purpose of existence
That stuck with me like viruses.
For meaning you must dig deeper:
This is your significance,
This is your future,
The needle pushing forward
For something more than just skin deep.
What shakes my bones and finds what's in the core,
If it's the second stage, no repeat and nothing more.

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Day One: The Unknown Becomes Known

And even a city of angels couldn't protect me
As I sat on a denim-stained pleather couch
In a third floor apartment I called high water.
A smart phone caller ID played dumb
While a shaky thumb cut the noose around my neck
And dropped me into that icy water that felt so real.
I have never felt so alive, but there I was being reminded
That by 11:50am, I was dying.
So these hopes better keep me lifted while I am trying
Not to drown in all these cells that surely keep dividing.