the stars, the sea, and sleep.

Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Fire Fader

Writing in cursive, I'm stringing up these curses;
If this had been the first time, we might have revised,
But it was a dark car parked over slick oil
Shimmering ghosts though the headlights and cold.
I'm wondering how the hell we ended up on Melrose
With you balling up the fear in your sterling hands,
And letting it drop at 1:30am.

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Fineshrine Hands

And so I gestured towards the soft contours of your crumbling wall,
Into which you fell like the dust settled under your unmade bed.
It cradled your shoulders and warmed the small of your back,
Ruffled your hair in the carelessness that you had grown into,
Grown too hot to hold like your loose cannon pointed towards the shore.
Who needs solid ground when the world is spinning out of control?
Collectively chaotic--the stars, the sea, our mortal souls,
We exploded like the cosmos, you supernova to my blackhole,
A fleeting effervescence these pearl white sheets could never hold in.
And as its lovely shatter battered the walls that rattled out a response,
It was this fertile churchyard soil in which your permanence ensconced.
Hail Mary, saving face, this sea burial was shipwrecked,
And beached a heavy heart into the depths of what was repressed.

Friday, October 2, 2015

Mesa

Your gravity bomb teetered on the soft edge of my bed,
Shitty beer stuck to sifting thoughts
Bought forward on the pretense of penance.
These beating arteries of arbitrary depth
Brought on an honorary death to the clotting silence;
Whether from the shock or the clock, it was bound to go off.
Liquid crystals made a six, blood flowed swiftly to my tongue,
So I made my own luck, and struck the alarm so it sung:
From New York to Boston, Chicago and home
I dipped into the shadow and immersed in the drone.

Monday, September 28, 2015

Luna Supine

Countless couches,
I swirl my drink,
And painted in these black eyes
Dreams of countless divisions.
It spins before it pulls apart, but until then,
Holds together in a string of unabashed pearls,
Undressing a soft shower of light raps,
And making room for monsters.
This familiar roar of concrete bands
Lays out as smooth as splines splayed,
Creating cold splintering halos
Hanging low over this brooding flame.
A frame rattles against a battled statistic
For a complement and none to settle,
But one to shake these autumn leaves free
Of a clingy rock cradled in fire,
Eclipsed by the fading flicker of a winded city.
How quickly my lungs collapse
Under the weight of a tinny truth relapsing,
Close enough to the soaring steel to taste:
My heart will sink in solidarity
Just to close in on the space between us.


Thursday, September 17, 2015

Come Down

Threes split with intentions laid out for a few.
Assist, I run towards a lighthouse with frosted glass.
Misunderstandings of what to strive for
Dive hollow seeds to keep the morale up as the heat beat down.
Fire, ice, fire, ice, sugar, yeast, and water.
Let the river speak beside demands laid out explicitly.
Both quietly winding from no definite basis,
Covered in silt and becoming of open curiosity,
Slips between skin and leather
Summer makes its final remarks.

Fours split with intentions laid out for a few.
Assist, a horseless carriage runs past a backlit clock.
Too twins looking into mirrors is just bent glass
That divides light by the Common denominator,
And quarters make change where it is due.
Could the water ever feel this cold?
Final remarks carved ink into amber pages;
Come down together: the ring, the cross,
and the thought of knowing what is better
To quell having known no other.

Sunday, August 2, 2015

SYC

And as the sun crept through the back door,
Nipping at our bare feet,
A distant thunder came soon thereafter,
To which you were his echo
And a storm that left down uneven steps
In a hurried patter that washed, but did not absolve.

I grasped my arms and gasped for breath,
Cashed my karma and danced with death.
I counted the seconds that would be hours
That shouldn't have been ours, but seemed to be.
One...Two...Three...

Gentle raps met across a gentleman's door,
There was grain in our glasses and grain on the floor,
And nostalgic indulgence hung thick as thieves
Where your pale light spread across a distorted sky,
And a deep blue fixation mixed into sweet hazelnut dye,
Round after round after round.

The blocks were spinning and the gears were grinding,
Rubber was greased wherever patience had no timing.
Precipitous - what slipped between us and a dark road
That drove us into a skid and out of control,
Down the rabbit hole, past everyone we know,
Until we were pressed against a jagged edge
That would fray the night into foil trays and frosted windows.
Unfamiliar keys put the wings on this fictitious score,
And we reconvened in disbelief, up three stories, nothing more.

When Juno came by, we were all unprepared
A second stage repeated? No, I wouldn't dare...
But if you open the door, I'll let the flood gates open
So let it all out now and take it in unspoken.

Monday, July 13, 2015

DC

Writing to pass the time
To let every mimed moment pass by,
Silently mine,
Writing on quarters to make change,
But this would never change anything.
Let me hold you like I stole you
With each glance to the left.
I spoke up but these words fall flat
On some subtle smalltalk about timing
Or how haphazard rhyming could turn my assets into cash
And burn a fire that could control you.
A tinny reflection of red and black light
Was a sea of sequins and close acquaintances,
Unbeknownst to me.
Refreshing and unsettling,
You are the living ghost of what I might have gotten right,
If I could fill the void between parallel lines
Stretched out too far.
And so much of a breath could unrest this house of cards,
But I would pull one every day
If it wasn't a race to get too drunk or be too broke.
The best bluff that I could sell you is the one I haven't spoken.
Gently pressed up against the wall,
I get lost in your rhythm and the whiskey on my teeth
For a whole lot of nothing, off-key humming, grounded feet.
This second pass of reality is a gravity I've had to fear
Now I'm not quite sure how it ever disappears.

Monday, July 6, 2015

Divergence

Silent night. Mouth cotton dry.
A tinge of rust makes up this blood red sky,
Gunpowder suspended from the bets we'd made on parallel lines.
Here I was, standing on stilts, but pressed against flint and carbon.
Every spark was a tick that dissolved in smoky eyes.
Even explosions at eye level could not keep me level headed.
So sullen streaks hung soft lights in the summer sky
Of things that had started, but never ended quite right.

Silent night. Hands to your sides.
You take a step to the right, and let the moment pass by.
Lips left unpressed like a story never told
To say ghosts never die, they just only grow old.
Seven months, it seems, this yellow bird sang alone,
But merely inches from reality, you floated the idea to me:
What if it were okay to be weak?
Just cut out the blank spaces and let the ink breathe...

Silent night. Lost in your eyes.
Acquiescence that blessed the amber sky
Was a door that I held for a promise I could not
Was a breath on my hand and a warmth I'd forgotten.
So when I opened my eyes, these heights lost their luster
There were no more surprises - the cold bed left uncovered,
But still I beaded with sweat that stung like gasoline--
A short fuse and old sparks can only mean one thing.

Silent night. Swing low in time.
How we fall apart when we just want to collide.

Tuesday, May 5, 2015

To Waste In Michigan, 2003

Some nascent clarity had once pulled me under this same dull light.
It seems darker now, but it was stronger,
Resilient as it drew away from this jagged horizon
That has since torn to frays my once endless western sky.
What stands before me is unattainable, yet sustained by lethargy,
The slow burning of a reflective effigy
That ceaselessly shatters with the sound of a thousand claps.
--I always miss the first act, acting in intentions of action,
But stagnant in the actuality of what has always happened.
The fear of death is in the shadow of indecision;
There can be no perfection if aimless fate has no precision.
So let the stars lie flat in a memory revisited,
Let the sun abandon symmetry with its petals all twisted,
Let the tide lose its temper as it foams at the crest,
To the weary and bested: Put this theory to rest.

Monday, February 16, 2015

When Juno Came By...

When it rains, it pours
And I'm making correlations to the precipitation,
Comparing present negatives with the proof of that day.
While your forgotten rosy fingers bubbled to steam,
You froze in frosty haze into deep phases of dream,
As if a mirror image of clarity arose
So that we couldn't see ourselves.
Words dripped in my ear as warm whispers
But ran numbingly deep, destined to be
Merely a stain in the carpet, washed away as quickly as it came.
And such was your streak and my reputation,
The bitter taste of scent as I descended onto thorns,
And the reflex of fate made its claim to open doors.
I was foolishly close to circles that instinctively return,
And a fortnight of misguided friction made a light enough to burn.
Cordiality was lost in the dark and abruptly abandoned,
And my ego dissolved from the salt of heavy hands,
Like the way a dead star left unguarded keeps on shining
Through the nauseating beauty of precipitous timing.

Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Expecting Sparks

This is learning the touch of your own malleable skin,
Pressing against your chest and feeling it sink in
As your head rests against a warm, cavernous pillow,
Made curious by your hand that cooly slid underneath.
How your heart beat heavy over me,
Filtered and diluted by tangled sheets
That kept me warm, but hardly breathing.

I set your bones with my own bones,
Twice lapped and wrapped tightly
Against the time I had wanted you to trust.
But it was cast to crutches,
And you walked out alone, at least.
And as the chips were peeled from this stubborn shell,
It cried as it cut to the center
Of each of our confessed contradictions
From pulling out a better person,
But not without consequence of pushing them away.

So now you finally stood,
But pressed against these glass walls.
I begged you not to be my delayed mirror
And chased at you with an eraser and sharpened pencil,
Demanded you not be my alternate ending,
Or any for that matter.
Yet with it, you drew circles upon circles,
Damned circles,
Until points were circles,
And circles were walls,
Of which you bounced off like rubber,
And took back every step I tried to place in yours.

So now we finally stood,
Lost in smoke and mirrors
From the screeching of leaky brakes
Careening over canyon bridges and ambivalent peaks,
Running from my fear of projections,
And the sound of a conclusion that would inevitably fade.

So now I finally sat,
Put one over the bar set far too late,
And waited for you to reciprocate.
But we had been pushing and pulling,
Back and forth to a greater degree
When I had hoped to make it out of twenty-three...
So when we expected sparks and instead got a fire,
The light burned out – destabilized and got tired.

This is the last time.
A Möbius strip made out of a letter,
Engraved in the uncertainty of Always & Forever.