Barbecue

A dry rub, your strength, on my skin as I crackle
You brush, you brush a barbecue spackle
You smell, you hold, you bite
I wait, warm and falling apart.

Aug 29, 2008

Aloud

My whisper to you is as loud as the world
you hear me as a mute
Your right hand around my neck
listening
I tell my secrets aloud for the world
to you.

Aug 29, 2008

Nirvanic

No one touches those tops up there.
Only the Bodhisattvas who decided not
to come back. Leaving us
to level and burn mountain ribs
into something bigger than us, dumber
that will vault us
one day into atmosphere
where we'll exfoliate rain,
weighing down nirvanic smiles.

Sept 1, 2008

Things Fall Open

Things fall open
like my literature text book
to one page
dug into more and puckered
with tea gruel and tea cup fingers
with half dry pens and eyes
still wet at the tips and showing it.
I fell open like that
in front of you.

Aug 29, 2008

A Game I Play

A not bad song plays and gets better
as I imagine I am in love
and letting my hands rub one another,
in humid, unaware distraction
rather than because I just finished an infrequently
delivered thread of affirmed life
in a script beleaguered so by self consciousness
as to become my mother's own and cramp my unused bones.
I make them twist and pay for their misattendance.

Aug 25, 2008

Mid-Autumn

Your iris filling the corner of your eye
is a quarter moon made of herb flour
a perforated cake I can
weigh on my fingertips
and devour.

Aug 25, 2008

Sky Sympathies

How does it go
to be the sky
everything forced away?
While reaching holding
dropping losing (weight)
getting ahead
nothing keeps apace
nothing clings.
As different daily
as two people touching God
the damnable rest
of the world (of God)
dropping
drippings losing sight
of their giver.
Sky alone
arching a spine around
that last visible spittle
before it is shoved up close to the earth.
Sky alone.

Aug 2, 3008

On a Mountain Track

The pianos go too far
and we must sit back
against something
connected to the ground
to keep from falling
between black trunks
onto faces
ivory with teeth.

Sept 1, 2008

Into

I stumbled upon the feet of the universe
and covered my own with wings,
whispered, who's there?
A response blew open my span
and an inhale
sucked my heart into the world.

Sept 1, 2008

Pulled Down Sky

Pulled the sky down over ears.
Now we wear clouds for eyebrows.
And some make a commerical living on the trash.
A whole fleet of trash hawkers, trash sculptors, eaters.
We're pulling the sky down over them too -
now everybody can touch
with their sawed, or their squeaky raw clean
fingernails.
Pulled threads from it and poked them full of holes
for offices.
Or beat them with elbows and fits for roads.
Or swallowed them so our teeth look and our breath smells
like it.
Like something we shouldn't be touching.
Now the roof between here and there is an oil
splashed window,
burned to an uneven yellow.
Showing shadows instead of reflections.
And we're still pulling, eating it -
by the handful.

June 9, 2008

by this river right before

By this river right before
it trundles into the big city
the child in man stands behind me
above me
saying words only God's ghost understands
prayers and a voice to prayers
I haven't said.
Two water spiders ski upstream
One dove cools the heat with her weeping
One arching stone bridge rolls its underbelly
in four jade ripples
Like I could stand on that full circle,
sitting hip deep in the stone smelling flow
And it doesn't give away that it's afraid, or bitter
to know where it's going and to what it will be
reduced.
It doesn't betray curd and weed, dust and walls,
not feet, no hands ruffling it there.
Only threads from gravel and trash too close to the top.
Only threads from rare wind hovering
like a sweat bee to lap it dry.
Now it's here. Smelling itself, smelling hands
feet, spiders' legs and wild grasses' legs
smelling mud it mashed itself, smelling
the under belly of a stone bridge.

June 7, 2008