Friday, October 12, 2012

Dead Language (texts with Benjy)

Can we commit ourselves together when it finally comes to be all padded walls and white, speaking without words, a language of our own design that only we alone only partially know yet completely understand ...? Can we save and destroy the world in the same breath, within the beginning and end of one sentence. Can we?

Because I just shot 5 words point blank to death...and there's no turning back for me.

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Full and Over

5 years
Have seen these eyes
a lifetime of chapters
to write

We forgot our anniversary
Moving in and out
so often
Your records
started skipping
and my switch was stuck
on self destruct

tea leaf, tahoe, peru and

the moon
never went to bed
Like we finally did

It was there before
and after the show
All night long
our cigarette smoke
curling up
around each star

the crystal bay
the jazz
the heat
the fan
the lights strung up
a slight awkwardness

The moon
lost a bet with the sun
and stood there
naked in the sky
All day long

And she
feeling like the moon's shapes
Kept the dream in motion...

It comes quick like a flashbulb

In a shiver
you default back to a year ago
when you were afraid of being touched
Your only comfort
a thought
to be locked in a trunk
finally safe
Hidden
from the world
Safe from yourself

The moon didn't do much for either
of you
The wind moved the curtain away from your window
The street light shone through
Spent the night holding on for dear life in each others arms
Letting everything die like the stars in the dawn

Wednesday, October 03, 2012

on mornings
when the sea is flat
the sky taking its
long slow inhale
before the day,
i am thirty two
years tired

i swim
the atlantic
each of its gentle strengths
holding me up

with each stroke
the muscles running from my
elbow down my side
to my waist
stretch  as guitar strings
against the fret board
of my ribs

barrier islands and grandparents
seem timeless
unshakable
but disapear
in one great turn
of the earth

the barge on the horizon
on the sea
has secret
serpentine hoses
coiling beneath it
in the dark
and cold
currents

its weighty machinery
pumping
the sandy earth
to the shore
shaping
the planet
to mad wants

from this distance
the whole process
seems silent
the huge ocean
offering no protest
or laughter

the tools of man
attempting to hault
the passage of time

when the world finally falls
apart

the things
becoming violent, then still

the colors changing and alien
in the sky

the gods,
senile, may confuse the end

for the beginning

fell asleep
in the cab of an ambulance
limbs jumbled against
its hard interior
the uncomfortable
pressure of still
things

to pop songs
of youth
with drawn out soprano
sylables
in the chorus

the next time i made love
it was out of desperation

a sad hollow panic

physicists have shown
gravity to be the only
force that acts across
long distances

when tight rope walkers learn
they are three feet above the earth
slowly developing
a controlled sway
of their feet

there are no crowds
or safety nets
at that distance

chris found
mountain roads winding
in wine country
and tall petrified
forests

found the pacific ocean
and its dangers
at the feet of
brown hard cliffs

found liz
technicolor
and dancing
at brunch
in  mythic
San Francisco

the old dog
confused about the slow
failure of its body
ignoring
the awkward gait
is still excited
over
the strange scents of the earth

from the park
a russian orthodox church
sits fat
pregnant
against the night
and everything is wet
god is wet

i place a dry shirt
on the park bench
so i can sit

the closest
thing to a hobo
talks about bombing
suicide hill in San Diego
on a skateboard

four times
he made it to the bottom
before one wheel
caught on a pebble

the title
for douglas's book
came to him
drunk, sprawled
out in a field
in Austria

the dew settling upon him

he was hitchhiking through europe
he was young

when i was small
my parents were divorced
i would see my father once a week
and one time
he took me
with him
when he went to
donate
blood

i was afraid of needles
and pain
and the pain of knowing
that pain was comming

he said it was important
to do a good thing

years later i was years older
and my father told me
his job would give him
holiday time when he would
donate
blood

somewhere
the sun sets,
a great round god
dissolving in the sea
the lights go out
lovers
turning into
the heat of one another
and there are no eyes
outside
leaves
shift their weight
in an almost still air
moisture
gathers

ernest's hero
in the mountains
in the spanish conversations
his pack
heavy with dynamite
the stolen horses
tethered to a tree
in the field

a bridge off somewhere
waiting to be blown

the planes
small as
distant constellations

align themselves
silently
the city's circling
halo

she smokes
while she rides
the old rusted bike
it squeaks
the wet night
twinkles in time

i never met him
he was a taxi driver
and he dropped out
of college

i appreciate him
letting me take jana
to my junior prom

she told me he
had a poem about
how kissing was
two slugs wrestling

i never met him
i never read his poem
but it is still
my favorite one

he retired from
the new york city
school system

now sells books on
bedford avenue

believes in the supporters
of carlos castenada

and thinks he asked me
about my hair

the last time
we didn't meet

i work nights
i see enough sunrises
to know
after the beauty
they start to ache

their force
nauseating
as all beginnings
or birth

the slow and quiet
unwinding
into a cities
movement

the night is so simple

(the good writer
creates a phrase
draws it from the everything
from the empty black night
from his humaness

and its so true
and honest
and pure
that it can't help but
become cliche
and used up
till its dead
and empty)

so when the dynamiter
made love to maria
with the short hair
in the spanish mountains
on the otherside of the line

the earth moved for them
and it never will for anyone
in that way