Burning Pitches of Fervor
Light tiptoes through the static of dust caught in cinematic expression beyond the good Sun’s third eye, and my heart dances
Within my soul, expanded past the skin of my consciousness, harmony meets circumstance and fate diverges until it is once in communion with itself, and shades of peace fall
And I can’t help but see shadows of blue exhaling from the mouths of wild fruit —
Fresh, aromatic, and so ripe with profundity that the oxygen cries with delight, and I am afraid to reach for it
Canary Rum
Yellow was the moon watching over the starlight as your face shone through like sunshine amidst rain. Go back beyond there, now. Grey and dilapidated, splintered with lost childhood. With smoke rings hung from oak trees balancing carefully upwind above the place where I sleep. And you walked in without even a hello. What’s come of us, Youth, gone long behind the sallow liver of the sun.
2016
This room is empty and cold. Spirits are climbing the walls like rodents, and the floor is covered in dirt. It is the same room that kept us up all night talking. The room where we discussed our favorite poetry, poets, authors, and philosophy. The room where you told me about your mother, and your boys. We sat here, and sometimes all we could do was breathe. It was in this room where you placed your strong hand on my arm before you kissed me. And you inhaled my soul. We waltzed on the ceiling and we smoked up the windows. I am waiting for the moon to show up tonight because I don't trust anyone else. I will pour us both a drink, but just for my lips. I am sitting alone in mind, body, and spirit, and this heavy silence is giving me a headache. I think I am finally going mad. The conversations we had last winter haunt me with realistic voices dangling on the back of my head. They replay our history like an outdoor theater in Seaside. No one is really paying attention, except me. And these voices are the best actors; I can hear the inflection in your voice when you speak about religion. And the slightly airy pause between syllables when you talk about Schopenhauer. Your words evolve so heavily, tumbling from your mouth, yet it is as though you pace yourself for an audience of reincarnated children. You spilled your thoughts onto my lap, and I traced every single fucking word on my thighs. I mouthed the pronunciation in your belief system and analyzed the meaning behind your perspective. My memory of such glory plays in shuttered slow motion bringing me a deep warmth, but it is temporary. Just as my lips turn upward with my recollection, I am gutted with despair and heaving with sorrow. A morose darkness ensues and I am devastated that you are not here. I feel like harvested wildlife, stopped dead in its tracks, life ripped from its chest still beating hot. I miss you and this room is perverse. I am burning sage and redecorating drunk. The memory of you follows me like an old friend, but his motives are slanted and I think he's an enemy in disguise.
Salt
The chandelier was grieving
Opals and diamonds
Draping my neck and confronting me with
An angel’s voice offering comfort
Caroling psalms into my inner ear
And such is the ebb and flow of
An ocean’s wake
Stroking land with its fingertips painted white
So I too felt its caress
Wrapped deeper within my consciousness
A cocoon with God everlasting
Paper Dolls Weeping in the Breeze
It is 3 AM and sound beats hollow against the oak and styrofoam and the echo of an empty bottle. Time emerges from the shadows, and I lean back. Ghosts knock and memories that are not mine come to play. A nostalgic fog permeates and darkness opens up its wide dry mouth. Life tracks leave scars callousing in real-time along my forearm and hives erupt. There is a sleeping rose garden to my right, it is beauty and thorns. And to my left: water. Baptism, change, baptism, change. It is 3 AM and the Sirens are crying above the hiccup of a metronome, and I am sitting still.
Duality
I walk a tightrope of commutation. Words, acceptable versus truth. I do not write metaphors or use imagery but it is often perceived that way. Life moves all at once in still frames. Yesterday a mouse ran across my room and my dog pounced. The rodent’s guts hung loose from her body still warm with the movement of her last breath until all was exposed vulnerable across the dusty wood shadow of her demise. That is what writing is to me. Something beyond myself suddenly speaks. It moves slowly up through my body like an exorcism taking with it all the details of my reality until finally it shoots from my fingertips and out my mouth into ink falling synchronized onto paper. I do not like to read it and I never revise it because the face of me is not the voice of my writing. It is as though I lead two lives. Two halves of my brain working at one time in different worlds. One a caricature in a play for which the script is abstract and the other: personal. My truth breathes only when translated through words dropped. The Eucharist falls from my tongue in opposite direction of time and that is what writing is to me. That is my non-process.