I infinitely prefer the pen

Just give me a note-pad dammit
that way I can actually feel the pages filling up.
Run my hands over the backsides of the pages,
feel the words inverted and savor their imprints.

Snippets

It was so cold last night
I don't think I could make it
if that chill closes in tonight.

It looks nice now,
but the horn says that there is going to be storm.
The weather here changes at he drop of a hat.
Rain shadows are really quite impressionable.

it's okay to type the words over
and over
the work is never done and that is how it is supposed to be,
just like you have to live every moment up unti lthe one you die.
good god I am hungry.
Wish I could eat my hands and feat and blanket.
If I make enough words I'll be able to eat them too.
Maybe.
Better save the blanket,
there might be a storm tonight.

landsick

psychosomatic rocking
slung low
this hunk of dirt has a heartbeat that unsettles the feet
pavement is pulsing
under a gelatinous mouldy-fruit-skull.
There's a fuse under all that sway
and it only takes a moment
for everything to reach its pit.

I fly off the handle rocking
knocking into the backdrop
mouth leaking
spittle and words indistinguishable.

two 350wrd pieces.

Horror
Just thought you should know:
there's red running down your chin
and reaching in a curved stream from your ear.
Despite your white-toothed smile
we are now
only waiting for your lips to turn.
Olive branches are actually quite brittle
prone to growing sharp-edged betrayal,
leafy undersides plotting against the fruit.

Ambitions burgeon into a silencing stance
and my body
(as well as my body of work)
can't give you any more ears,
your mouth having eaten too many voices
"it's about what's good, you see.
For everybody.
We shouldn't being advertising that it's okay,
to be
like 'that'."

Well.
People are like that
and in your righteous bones
I can see a creature coming alive,
the infection gathering to a head
My listening gets stuck
on the way you use
"everybody"
you see unless you mean to say what's good for everybody
is food, and home, and drink, and love, and freedom to be-
then we're not talking anymore,
because I am battling back against that crawling thing,
whose eyes are fueled by panic
its engine begins toothy:
bifurcating us and them

Your monster makes violence against photographs and scantily clad canvases,
and your red rhetoric will only be read as a prophecy
for the hammering death of uninhibited expression,
cracking voices shake and shatter down to plexiglass
and bolted down foundation.
Violence empties out the access
and after the images fall back to their base elements
arts is left one last valiant act:
expose the splatter patterns,
unapologetically open its cracked mouthparts,
bring sharp and close into focus
what's been done to the mechanism.

Broken voices should never be wingless for too long.
Red rhetoric is a halo for the inhumane.
So please before you hoist up your hammers
let us clean our mouths of any possible massacre.


Instability
I.
Before taking the stage there are those particularly terrifying moments of physical vibrations, when all your neuroses seems to resonate at once, moving loud through your bones as if you were a tuning fork. The contents of your mouth lose their anchors. Your teeth and tongue become soup behind your lips.
The stage is waiting for you legs unwobbling approach. With it's lonely microphone dare your stomach widens it's nauseous eyes. Certainty fluctuates dangerously like a chain-smoking barometer. The modifiers getting ragged around the edges as the incongruities lumber in the corners growing closer.
Physics is picking on you, or maybe your (un)luck is bending the rules. But your chair is not familiar anymore. Laughing legs criss-crossed against your support. These are the moments of insanity. The legion of over-stretched moments in which the stage takes you, rockets every kind of neon neuroses through your veins until your name comes up. The Stage opens it's mouth all black and bright.
And you take it.

II.
That's when your train comes in, when the rails stop pulling your wheels apart. The timeless spinning stops, and you catch all of earth's gravity between your fingers. Your word-plucking fingers, making poetry shapes in the air and slashing hieroglyphs into the microphone. You are a singularity choosing its corporeal form as a typewriter. You are a sparrow building it's nest in a boiler, a flower getting hot with heartburn, a hard-drive with a headache.
The equation of living gets broken by your teeth, the marrow hangs in the air, now hot with the infinitely possible permutations. Numbers running algorhythmic through your fingertips as the numbness palindromes itself out.

III.
Neither is safe or stable or committed to getting back into balance. Poetry isn't about that. Poetry is not a checkbook. Poetry is instability.

prose poem (unedited cause I am lazy) NOW EDITED!

My summer is opening again and it’s got wild animals for teeth. Last time I went out away I let some of the words hang back on trailing postcards, the way a kite makes its tail from the pinching repetition bows. The intervals were measured by how often I could afford and procure the proper postage. The redwoods crept closer as the asphalt narrowed its tongue. And I watched yellow over take the landscape from Coos Bay to Arcata. The Bread truck hummed and Allen took so much care to write all the miles down with a carpenters pencil. The dashboard overflowed with numbers and wetted our hands in the paling green pickle juice. Jumped naked into a cold ocean. Came out with mouthfuls of kelp and salt. We stopped for sandwiches and peed in a field. The fennel cracked and breathed a licorice dust in the hot yellow afternoon. Even the shadows collected some gold flecks that were more than just dust, I'm sure. I saw the gray smile of sea lions too many times to count, they were like eyelashes in a blinking bruisy bay. The fog didn't even matter. We flip-flopped our way across on honeyed vagabond smiles. It didn't matter that it wasn't 1972. We stopped for every hitchhiker, even let some of them make love in the back as we fried eggs with sand between our toes. Low slung propane between he the dunes we made a mess of the pancake batter We gave whiskey to street performers because we did not have any quarters left, danced to the busking music as sunny skies began shutting their doors. We spent $10 a day until our pockets dried up. On the first hooked leg of the trip the forest nearly ate us. That was the night I decided not to do any of the driving. I resolved then to hang my body out the sliding wooden door, to sit in the chair that might pitch me into an asphalt kiss. I danced to Credence in a swirling tan contraption of a dress as our wheels howled down the California coast. The fog nearly coaxed us over the cliffs. Hwy 1 breathed purple down our necks and slipped us into danger with switchbacking slings and swallows. We've got the dents to prove it and I hope there is still some of that hillside worming dirty in the cracks of the van. Two mandolins made conversation and in between all of that we picked up Thea. She drew a pirate on the naked pine siding and gave her voice to the road. "I've been doing this since I was fifteen" she said boldly to our dumbstruck faces. She said most everything boldly. She told the best jokes, dirty and otherwise, fetched us food still-warm from the prizingest of dumpsters. Girl knew all of the tricks. Lived large and made grand (pause) exceptional laugher. I received a voicemail from her the other day. Said she's be in the headed west again soon. I hope she calls me back. Maybe she'll want to sleep in my yard, even though the city sky seems to make her sick. You could tell from just one conversation that she was made of all love and endearments. Lit her cigarettes like they were candles for the hopeless. She gave. defended the downtrodden when the tourists bent in to snatch a moment of their motions. You should always ask before the flash. My name is knocking around in her mandolin case. I hope Thea calls me back. And that somebody records her music, in case to road ever decides it’s done with her. My mind keeps wrapping back to those licorice fields, where we didn't know who owned what part of the land, listened to how overgrown the "no trespassing" signs had become. We sang a few songs and watched the highway pass above us. I hope someday the road calls me back.
My mind is running out. My mind is running out on legs growing thin as ball-point pens. That can’t be all of it, it just can't. We saw elk, like icebergs, in the tall grasses. Only visible from the eyes up. Drank all through the night with our campsite neighbors, hoping their 9-year-old daughter couldn't hear the dirty word falling sloppy from our mouths. That morning, over a mountain of bacon and all the leftover vegies we'd carried 600 miles, we spilled coffee on each other's toes. At one point there was a ping-pong table. I traded a new book for an old one. And stopped to cherish the dog-earing pages. I hope the road calls me back.
I still haven't looked at the photographs. I took so many photographs and I still haven't looked. I left them on a disc in a drawer. A shiny silver donut shut in my bedside table. In the second drawer, where I put the things, I really, don't care that much about. Old birthday cards and giftbags I intend to re-gift. Giftwrap is far too expensive. I ate a hamburger for the first time in two years and slept all the way back to the ocean. The concrete arms tied us down for a full forty-five minutes. We squirmed under its arching freeway tentacles. Sometimes the highways collided so violently that I was convinced we were gridlocked in the sway of two gargantuan cephalopods making love. Or making something convoluted at least. All the way down we lived on tuna fish sandwiches. The road called out our names with repeating yellow tongues and I hope that the road calls me back one day. Her cracked asphalt voice is one I have begun to silence with empty pocketed excuses and a sad sack of somedays. And I miss her. In conjunction the whirring roundness of rubber and his old engine reluctantly turning over I miss her voice the most.

Some subjects (a summary of the untranscribed)

lately all the words
(nearly self-forming at this juncture)
have been falling between the binding cracks
notebooks harbor huddling places
for lines washed into blues shivery-thin
and bent down, wine soaked corners.

I wrote about the letters running together
"Sincerely,"s bumping into "Love,"
the coincidence lets us round ourselves up.
We both ate too much that day.
My mouth is full enough to avoid the conversation all together
Instead I invite the furnace to be our mouths
or at least to gesture the way our mouths might.
It's good to stay warm.

One day
You'll open to the momentary-ness of the words
(instead of loading them up with all that momentum)
start approaching your typewriter
like a finger trap
its keys teething down
pinching anachronisms into careless digits
sentimentalism enters most easily through the fingers.

Regrets can only be swung one way at a time.
you see
regret is an odd number
maybe even prime.
with strange angles that gyrate
defying measurement
or any intent to condense.
Even when you consider all the factors
the numbers open wide
and laugh like unbalanced odds
One side of the metronome is alway hungry.
Still
it's worth deliberating him down to one-sided echoes.

The air is electric with revolution
in both political and carousel forms.

The Earthworms

The earthworms yawn long, magenta & mauve
over Seattle's glossy sidewalk mouths
wet concrete tongues
stubbled with pebbles of milky and ambitious size.

Singing above the street lamps
power cables crackle open the throat of midnight,
in movements sharper than a hum,
lines vibrating edge over edge.
The mercury drops through April
sharp and heavy with intent.
Cold air forces spring into a fever pitch
of shivering restrained colors.

But the earthworms,
you must pay (you pen's) attention to the earthworms,
slow like a meditation master
they make breathing a full-bodied endeavor.
Dreamlike
the sidewalks are splitting
under the force of one more season
that's where the earthworms come up
and make the most of the her jagged and unconscious rupture.

Secret Ambition

At nine(teen)
my ambition had rose petals stuffed in her mouth
and lace wrapped around her ankles
we muffled her with romance
and hid her body in a trunk.

And now it's all crashing down
with the smell if decomposing romance.
there's no money there
in the murder or the hiding.
We've got extra smiles under the counter
who sell themselves much better.
Smirks provide the best business
& I've start keeping nickels between my teeth
the heavy metal takes up my breath
pushing poetry back into the trunk,
I mean,
the deepest part of the throat

I'm sending a tea-cup hug to my tempest tossed throat pocket.

But the nickels are falling round from my mouth
and I used my last paycheck to roll the tax man
one long cigarette

And the poems are lining her body
dusting the trunks innards with romantic decay
chocking down poems and rose petals
I have to keep the coins inside
no matter how many debt sores open the gums

This ambition is made of somersaults
and cinnamon echoes
her feathers are fluxing and cruxing,
but we stuck her hands in the dishwater,
made her dance in the broom closet
stuffed her dreams into a hairnet.

She gets quieter as the rent gets taller
never chooses secrecy
with hands too fast to be anything else.
but the empty pockets
stifle the frenzied speed
and anchor stillness
beneath the fingernails.

This boldness is getting chomped
between the typewriter teeth
the hammers bruise the paper in alphabet shapes
and the whole damn world is imposing again
widening the emptiness of pleats and pockets and purses.
All those dreams steep like tea
or a field lying fallow
as the toxic machine pinches the pennies in.
My feet move me forward
round coppery bruises and all.

Seattle Somtimes

too long
the inattention swicks back and forth
like lazy windshield wipers
their slanted eyes and cagey minds set
to move as slow as possible.

But that's what it is to move in Seattle,
You become intimate with the needs of each rainy rhythm.
The sky dribbles
because the seal on that gray horizon never quite snaps shut
like a half-screwed jar quietly wetting your bag
and all of it's contents.

Observe in horror the wrinkled words and blue lines run amok
mourn their passing
and then slowly (over the course of several sunshined afternoons)
drip back into complacency.

this turned into 2 different pieced up on edit

Start from scratch
pull the doodles
and their marginal dancing
into alphabetish glyphs,
make a mouth for every journey,




Every day I drive along one side
of the two roads
whose triangle mouths parenthesize Jet City's murkiest river.
The margins stretch through each compass point
in name and distance.

That was where I saw
(what was left of)
them.

I've wanted to write about those dead geese all week
their bodies sit still and oval
necks hanging lack
across the yawning diamond lanes
but the cars got in the way,
headlights too loud
for 4AM birds rounded down.

buildup

written 3.22.11 while waiting for a friend
There are moments of genius
& then there are others.
Mustard yellow times without distinction,
murky like watery tongues
creeping up the wallpaper.

You can't coax it
out of eating the entire bag of cotton balls.
The endeavor softly upsets:
"Consuming what's soft won't make you nay softer."

What's required is a reversal of the voice box.
The chords getting seasick in their nervously rocking throat,
but this challenge isn't about lapsing backward into genius.
The (r)evolution requires non-euclidean progression.
Quantam shivers must crowd the dance floor
with exponential happening
Their coupled bodies falling through the phases
Tongues frothing up mustard yellow.

The ending pulls it in
collapsing all the syllables down.


SLAM
In this space the train speeds past simile,
hot engine pushing on
straight into rocking metaphors
this night
IS
a tattoo in the mouth of the gods,
a rumor corrupting the dingy corners of the pantheon
gossip passed between the mouths of Athena & Hephaestus
just before the world tears out your liver.

If we blink the museums might catch us,
and kill the throat-ness from out words
oh yes my friends we must move quickly
keep warm our stages and vocal chords
before our words are made like the older legends
into cold and cracking stones.

Small snippet
I am working on so many poems
they are molding into dead hounds by the roadside.

I pinch my pen like it's the last drag
of a blue cigarette
rolled by the hands of a dying lover who tells you
"I'm quitting tomorrow".

Jars

It comes back in angles you can't quite trust.
Fire truck; reprehensible; catastrophe;
The words are just words right?
and not really our relationship.
Or what you really meant when you read those poems
in that way
(far too tight).
We are not comprised of empty ricochets
or words
whispered across a wide-based library staircase.
I didn't mean to call you out
as echo
when your body left the room

but when your body left the room
My mouth chased the ricochets into the newly empty places
I breathed ghosts into your footprints
and gave in to the limbo encroaching on the other side of the bed.

Our communications are more than just a forgotten turn
signal
stretched out in a lulling down turned position
click
click.
No. We're not like that at all.

We are buzzing erratic
a clock whose schizoid cuckoo
has both claustrophobia
and performance anxiety,
fidgety hands that think too much
and a yellowing face that melts much faster than any mustache could possibly imagine.

But now that your body has left the room
I am catching the ricochet in jars.
Without your blonde body to balance it out
the echoes begin building into a downhill prediction
and I should screw them down before they leave me too.
Jars are good for keeping things in.

When keeping hope to a minimum you must
make sure you've twisted their mouths watertight
like the words you read too close together
(or maybe meant to be run all together
like some of your favorite German words)
echoes need a tensioned seal.
If you put a poem in a jar it stays fresh
and wet with unwhispered ricochets.
When untwisted
the poem empties out
unencumbered
& deaf to the multitude of yesterdays it's been
since your body left the room.

300 word prose poem.

It's funny how the small things can catch you. An itch scratching itself just beneath the skin. Exposed by the curiosity of a lover's glance. And his kind hands pulling your fidgeting habits from their softly frantic dancing interplay.

I'm not doing it on purpose. Or blaming the imbalance of my body.
The fingers just get tired of finding themselves (and begin picking the rough skin away in bits). Each finger is a riddle with reddening jigsaw edges. Ten extended back stories, with their brittleness unhinged. The cracks have got salt in their teeth. Fingertips rip easy as the callouses are whittled down and down. When you open the rind the citrus pores intensify their misty glares. Ouch. Didn't mean to pull it that far. Several seconds of subsequent staunching and the prints begin to close up their red little mouths. So small. So loud.

All it takes is a faucet to get words going again. Fingernails carried away in a dizzy sharpened tension. And there are commas falling from my hands. Gotta keep this list alive, pull out the skin and let it breathe. The callouses make too much of sentences. They dry out the endings, and must be pulled back to a red-line climax. Correction. Some things you just have to cut out. To really get the feel of it I mean. Push the words back from hardening. Sharp red marks keep the fingers soft.

Enough of that now. It's really a nasty habit. Nobody likes a fidgety picker. But the fingers keep finding themselves. How can you keep touch from touching? Let it be. The cracks will know what to do without you. But you have to let them get over you. All over you. Wait out what's brittle. And let the context of your skin stiffen.


Prompt provided by typetrigger. Fresh prompts provided every6 hours.

this poem got left in an open window

It's been a year
and I've still got words by the napkinfull.
Too many notebooks get lost in the move.
sunk between the cardboard cleavage
the crooked pages aren't giving it away anymore
soft blue lines pine sideways after lazy bookspines
These poems need excavation teams
and at least two restoration experts
to bridge the gaps between jagged serifs and flooding narratives
where the steering wheel intruded
and the words began to swerve.

I know

I haven't posted in a few days. I am working a lot but also writing a lot (have about 6-7 poems to type up/edit and post) so yeah finding time for that has been a bit tough.
Please bear with me!
<3

blurts

The mouth is bulging with round words and crowding teeth
the blinking headaches wash it out
and my fingers aren't listening again.



I can barely believe it's spring again
only the music makes it real
notes pulling windows down,
it isn't raining at all.

back date #1 for me

Spring Dialog
The daffodils are gathering in down turned yellow gossip
crowding the forcibly slim
sidewalk trees.
Subliminal roots swallow the years
tickling up
jagged concrete smiles.


More Than Butterflies
Small flutters
start in the mouth of your aorta
and before you know it
you've got his smiles coursing through your veins.

Poets as lovers

There is a precipice of blinking images
in a poem not yet arrived.
The pages hiccup
and release a deep brown smell
that is sometimes coffee and sometimes beer.
The body of text getting less and less incorrect
(which is not the same as getting more correct).

The poets reach out their greasy silver antennae
(nails & pens & graphite fingertips)
hoping to slice through their metaphoric interference.

work

2 windows open
You continue
like an unended parenthesis
an implied curve smiles like a fish beneath the reflection.
Things continue being
regardless of how strongly
the earth disagrees with your feet.


Mileage
The engine churns & rattles
like a crow's angry breath,
leaves the lopsided journey in a lurch.

mumbles

the tongue
in dancing between italics
tilts past its balance
and shuffles hot from the dance floor.

I wanted this to be more haunting than it was

This sickness is an angry pinwheel on the back porch,
the hissing of pipes in the basement,
a shivering window in the night.

The bright gray gets sucked up by hanging rain
converts light into fog
and fog into conversation.
Words get sticky and you have missed your puddle
the conversation bus stops
beeps incessantly,
lets out the air,
echoes out an empty destination,
in a voice rehearsed every 28 minutes.

Mouths snore into another subject
and that rain just won't come down like it's supposed to
like a bushy-tailed spiral feeling
or a transient raccoon scuttling under the porch.
The air is hissing like so many suspended waterways
and the glass gatekeepers sigh
refusing to let the wind break.

ill

the mortar is melting
and bricks are sliding down my brain.
There is disaster leaking out the mouth
black lines collapsing out of the parallel.
It's all about perspective
and this sickness draws its fingers in front of my face
crossing my eyes into a dizzy blinking braid.

March

This wind kicks wet dust into my eyes
and forces the gears into an unwilling down-shift.
The ocean is still cold in the throat,
bristles mist from the wavetips
coughs dizzy seagulls up gravity's backside.

The sky is awash with oysters and dead nuns;
sallow bulges falling in and out of love with the sun.
The colors are losing their religion
slipping through every kind of light.
Reflections get sunk in open-mouthed puddles
the rain shivers on either side,
hesitates,
then makes one or two wet stabs at the sidewalk.

Lost clusterfuck of poems

Assignment Poem:
How can I open to new patterns of observation & obligation?
like a painting devoid of light?
or a body emptied of skin?

This poem just had its sky ripped down,
the fireflies smushed out by a geometry yawning too big for its own universe.
This poem won’t look at the moon
& must,
in the process of gearing up its adages,
lose track of its own fingers.
This poem cannot be a fit of mouthy neuroses.
This poem will not be about itself.

This poem must be emptied of its lungs
as punishment for breathing out
too many overzealous personifications.
This poem won’t be subtle
or try too terribly hard,
you will write it with your feet
while your hands get busy
scooping through sternums
& pulling hearts straight out of their chests
So swift and precise
it’d make magic in the mind of Indiana Jones.

Words Collected on Your Body

essential parenthesis (on your hamstring)
concentric cataclysm (just below the upswing of the ribs)
a curmudgeonly uncovering (running up from your kneecap)
braised unsettling grasp (all along the inside of your thighs)
gesticulate (neighboring your bellybutton)
relapsing empty-mouthed recursion (hovering over your liver)

Excitement
Common side effects of casually popping
the yellow chrysalis past your lips:
butterflies run queasy colors through your belly;
wet wings make their patience;
waiting to float up
& un-crumple in the heart.
In the right moment
The proboscis will uncurl
press the flowering aorta
and drink deep
the red palpitating nectar.

Consider the Following
Consider for a moment
that poetry is living
that writing is a stepping further in,
making words is leaving the porch door propped open
with a bowl of milk,
letting your convertible become a rain barrel.
Poetry does not in itself draw circles,
It’s followers tend to draw concentric paradigms.
Poetry is the backside of recursion
gearing up for action.

Eyes
Your eyes are quicksilver hooks,
their smirking curve sharpens each time I circle back
& your eyes are sideways () smashed together
with a slate geometry living in between.
The look in your eyes is barking with the throaty cries of terrified zebras.
Yours eyes are a lullaby with playful underpinning of revolution.
Your eyes are an invitation with lipstick on the envelope.

Your eyes aren’t blackbirds anymore.
& I’m so sorry nobody has taken the time to write about those eyes.
Your eyes are a thicket with a mouthful of snow.
Your eyes flash angry like brakelights
& when the dusk comes to shut you down
Your eyes don’t move an inch
and begin their solemn task
collecting purple for their underbellies.



Freewrite:
I guess I am going to be writing a lot more about the mornings. How the breath can manage to be just-less-than-grueling; how the busses move much slower— harvesting odors equal parts character & disinfectant. The moon hangs out in rooms I’ve never seen her frequent, smoking cigars and stealing brandy from the file cabinet. She gets distorted on purple. & I am thanking god for the warmth. I wonder if I could make it as a redhead. & I am blessing myself when I convulse(?) all alone. I want to be with the kind of woman who believes our engines can make it all the way to L.A. in a single blazing night. Drinking coffee until it stains our eyes. Her heart is a window into the red eye of Jupiter. A scarlet swirl of 10,000 hurricanes, whose motions pulse older than the concept of self. (maybe even before self itself?).

The Constant Self-Conscious
The churning discernment, and its gears of constantly documenting the dead skin flaking away. Media rushes us into relentlessly turning on. The engine’s scrapping grind becomes a theorem for living. An eye/I that lives parallel to all of your if’s and hovers twittering over your then’s.


02/27
Pickled & prickled
a thistle floats in a jar
at the bar
next to the eggs
& the wicker cradled peanuts

Ink Monsters
I am harvesting calluses in my writing desk.
Constrained by the inbetweeness of raven-ous riddles
the possibilities do not stop
as POE whittles them all down to brightly grumbling verbs.

I am inking holes in this white-lined claustrophobia;
This monster of space untaken.

Open the mouth of your universe
force a space for conversation
vibrate life into being (itself?).


Weighty
My heart is more than broken
it is an anvil
hanging on by a hinge,
gravity dancing down it’s tensioned strings
my veins are laughing red hot with the tensile strength
it takes to hold your love.

Found Poem
You don’t let the weather get you down.
“I never really get sick” comes easy from the lips
As your body runs the gamut on the backburner.


Salt
Secret folk heroes
don wool hats & orange buckets
and sprinkle salt over the tilted sidewalk



All well done haiku
have subtext about weather
it isn't boring.

Little bit of light

When the words break out
your throat moves like a naked lightbulb.
You tear the lampshades from my eyes
& too hard, the filaments vibrate between pinched fingers.
When the circuit gets complete
open the twisting socket mouth
(&)
let the light pour out.

Just a small note:

Please excuse the long pause between posts. I am now working 2 jobs (one FT, and one PT), have been connecting to the internet at the courtesy of my roommate and am adjusting to a new sleep/life schedule.
However...
I have got my laptop back! Daily posts (after my schedule adjusts) should be much more regular now!

unfinished moon smells

I used to think the moon followed me and only me
our faces matched through the car window
softy vibrating on the way to thanksgiving dinner.
Scalloped potato medallions breathed up from my brother's lap,
the smell reached up & tickled the fog into a cheesy thickness.
I wasn't care about calories at the time.

We spaced our breath carefully
that moon & me.
I didn't want her to get tired
from chasing me along that yellow-tongued highway.

Turquoise tastes like chlorine
& I wonder if the waves in Florida taste like that
The only salt in my air rushes cold into the nose
&
if you can manage not to sneeze,
becomes a copper barnacle odor;
a crustacean with a pocketful of pennies.

I've seen the gulls
killing clams with gravity
& clams are no good
unless they surface golden from a buttery kitchen
my teeth wiggle with the grease.

Sunday's poem-ish

when you've got a splinter in your malediction
a flowerpot can freely grow
& thorns will prickle forth like freckles
on May's dying day.
Her breezes produce the most precious of death-rattles.

Her eyes are a pair of paintings painting nothing in particular.
Blood is round like peppercorns
& the lemons are falling from the sky like thunder rolling down.
Rumbles waterfall over mountains
the sound is a gray wash of heavy contempt
possessive & unencumbered
our electric tongues make the most of a stormy night.
The circuits come up short & must be repeated
The circuits come up short & must be repeated

Our mouths are getting tattooed with
a citrus needle
you are a ruby grapefruit in my palm
face reddening like the center of an Ahi steak
When I told you about the fruits
your face fell in like a house of cards
& my liver braced for impact.

I'd like to devour your feelings
—but first you must boil them from their exoskeletons
& use a nutcracker to expose their solidified bodies

Bet you never thought it would happen like this
after we dredged the red bodies from below.
Your dreams are a thing without the softness of an underbelly;
smiling with a misanthropic rind
the words become a backwards chain reaction.
I can't wait for May when our bodies are back in October
(coursing through every costume).
& my wisdom teeth are coming in like thunder,
I am hooked back from romantic time travel.
Here.
I am here
open to all the paintings (even those empty of thunder)
& I am here
poised for the forked strokes of sky cracking open.

4

Poetry is an undomesticated wisp of light
the kind that peers over the mountains,
with snow watering its dusky mouth.

Many moons
I am breaking promises
with more consistency than a pendulum's round & empty stride.
You are roller skates, surprised by a cobblestone alleyway
& a full moon coughing rainbows from its skin.

bar flirt
let's get down to our base carbons
let out tongues
tingle into pure chemistry.
I want to dig into your elements.

Gibberish
The voice boxes are scraping by
hush now, hush now, hush.
I've got a harpsichord in my piano plunking lungs.
The sounds drop like violent jokes
gravity hurling the keys past so many stories.
This children have gotten their knees into the finger paints
one more time
the furniture in crying rainbows
out of greasy upholstered skin
there is paisley on your tongue
a crimson flashing glyph.
the caps are breaking and the world is beginning to BURN
can you feel the heat turning, turning, turning.

Poor Poet Rag

My throat makes one more attempt
at swallowing its ballpoint Adam's apple
but the poems keep coming up
I soak the notebook
in milky acid syllables.
A body can't just digest itself,
you need the words for consumption.
Without a howling alphabet
your squares are slashed in half
& every meal falls into hungry triangles.


The rules are emptying my cupboards right now.
I am eating out of the kindness of my roommate's heart right now.
my wallet folds into a set of empty eyes right now
the blinking gasps asking: & then;
& then;
& then?

I have been holding back... (and I will edit later)

Valentine
But today,
small snippets of September
are filling my wet
mid-February chambers
the heart is a pumping slide show
of sharp ampersands & sunny apologies.

Iron lung poem
The words hit me full force
like the breath charging from a legion of iron lungs.
Replication of breath needs tension and pressure
& the sensibilities of a goddamn submarine.
our lungs are not simply coffins for re-animated words
this poem is not a resurrection.
However it is sometimes alright
to press our bodies into the iron lung;
feel the weight of and interaction pumped out.
Sometimes you must pull the gears from your pockets,
make your mouth and open slab
ready for the prompts
that breathe down the necks of strangers,
gray & rasping.

Skeletons and Freewrites
Your bones are not bones when they no longer hold you up
and when I am with you my skin becomes defective
I am not thinking about you tonight
and I refuse the hot red sky scrapings
it is nearing the winter's midnight
and February has gravel in its teeth
& I don't know what your face means.
This season has an eyesore locked in the broom closet
and together we are slashing words in half
gnarling each fingernail by clawing wholesale at a churning universe.
if you are not here then you deserve to fall into the absurd
keeping the company of pastel tongues and overweight scrap-bookers.
Did you know the sky has a mouth like a sailor
tattoos hurtling from a broken horizon
the oil needles in and makes the most of potholes
and I am searching for a way to graft my bicycle to my body
because my bones are sometimes not my bones anymore
and I need something moving to keep hold my body up
to keep me together as I hurtle across the cracked pavement.


Non-Euclidean Regrets
Too much dry confusion
icy nights cough up dust & dandruff
my skin is allergic to apologies
regrets are best scratched off,
like the scabs sharpening your elbows.

The novelty sharpens and drops repeatedly
like falling through a never ending staircase.
My geometry has no shapes for what's been done to me
a name can be the shape of heartache
and the memories are being converted into two-dimensional tumors.

Dreams
My dreams are becoming an amalgam of empty street cars and dust.
The light is bending too far
as time topples over
into a premature healing.
I am breaking the past into digestible pieces
and forging gears from the jagged edges
I can't stay here without you
I need the movements to keep me alive.
I've nestled the jewels in all the right sockets
& I've got the springs under control.
I'm passing you by
barely an inch from the whiskers
eating up the time without you
each tick takes me into the sweet distance.

seabirds

To me
You are the sunlight
bringing translucence to a seagull's wing.

the freeway helped me write this poem

In February the waterslides are a downturned expression
pressing their wet yellow feelings against the graying interstate.
The morning shakes off
with the banging of the bells,
as the sky slips easy into a precocious 5 o'clock shadow.

In the architecture of my mind
there is too much breathing in the bedchamber
& sweet turmoil between the sheets.

My language center is bleeding on the bathroom floor,
showing off its red arrhythmia.
Its flow breaks the paradigm of bleeding.
The syllables shatter red into being
hotter than the softness of a vein conceding
-the words too irregular to have come pulsing from an artery.
My language center is menstruating from the mouth,
lips giving way to red possibility.

I've got blueprints & road maps falling from my eyes
& this dancing nonchalance is killing us.
Let our motions crack open syntax
stick a finger of doubt into the idea of a nutshell,
pry the universe out
& let the stars stoke your laughing vulnerability.

Shhhhh

Soft Saturdays thaw over a misty peninsula,
I've slowed down my eyes
and am breathing deep the rhythms of listening.

they keep saying I've got a hole in my pocket

another phone call and
my checking account reaches its empty arm up
for one more notch on the bed post.
The past creeps up like water damage along the walls
like the small black ants that keep coming back.
The gas tank lurches
half-ready to swallow
and let me know my number's up.
Still the ants keep coming back
squished black abdomens don't pay the rent
and you've got to hold that down if you want it to stop wriggling.

an explosion of freewrites

Pre-interview rambling
I could write here,
hugged by the soft music
& soothing directionless light.
The knocks upstairs are mysterious enough to spark my circling imagination.
The cooped-up coffee machines have got silver eyes
& they scream their histories from inside glass cases.
The ceiling is showing off,
exposing the strutted beams
and creamy underbelly.
the photographs bend my window through history
& I feel the music smoldering in my heart.
The city yawned into a yellow pocket with goldenrod ambitions.
This lamplight is a cradle
& I don't even care that one of my buttons is coming unbuttoned.
A gold-faced clock stares me down
as it leaps from the wall
like a white rabbit
showing off its slow motion hands.
This room is a dusty August
with an open top;
a quiet wedding in summer's backyard.


For Poets and Coyotes in this Time of Economic Turmoil
Your words have got incredible currency
-deep fish-filled lungs tug at your river's underbelly.
Your words are a brush fire kept in a safety deposit box.
Your words are a rattle-snake's skin left to crisp along Hwy2

I remember that E-burg cop
who tried to impress us by rolling up his sleeves to say
"You know, this is the most dangerous stretch of road in all of Washington?"
Why do you think I am here?
These words won't rock me to sleep
& yes, thank you, while I do enjoy the blanket
of an unscheduled dream
That is not why I am here.
That is not the reason these syllables hit the pavement.

This road is not safe
this highway of sound uncontrollably hooking together is so dangerous
my teeth begin chattering away like 10,000 typewriters.
There are coyotes waiting in the wings
& the thick-edged fists of basalt lean forward like eavesdropping bouncers
who spit their broken teeth at passers by as their fight rumbles on.

This road is sunk between this threatening architecture
& a hard unforgiving sun
which bakes its history into you skin.
& I am here for the words goddammit,
the words that are hot & strong & dangerous,
the words that wedge me deeper between burnt rocks and howling hard places.
I am not here for network dreamscapes
I am here for the words that will never be comfortable in the mouth of the holster,
I am here for loaded pumps of possibility
& words that put bullet holes in my paradigms.
I am here for the un-crunching of numbers
for the miles to open their bodies into the journey position
I am waiting for my paycheck to waste away
I am here to watch its meaning whittled down to a stub.

Because your words honey em-
your words are dangerous & unbankable
& your words have got coyotes in their throats
Your words are a revolution running down your lips
& passed the last ATM days ago.
This highway is dangerous
but honey I am here
for all its curves & potholes.
I've got your penmarks scratched inside of my ribcage
and the back seat is stocked up with your deep and heavy-measured breaths.
We are moving forward with empty pockets and broken ball-points
but when the sun gets all eaten up
I know we'll have arrived
because baby
your words have got incredible currency.



Moving Mountains
You give me shivers of the skin
so small and numerous
I can feel the deadness crawling through each cell before it flakes.
The hanging-open heartbreak pops with blisters
& forgetting you is like dancing all night in my baby sister's shoes.
You've got to pop open their angry mouths before you sleep
we don't want a callous now do we?

I am tying myself in knots of gristle & whisper
Quickly- now is the time of guillotines & pendulums.
The clock sounds swirl and quiver into a waterfall of moments
I am not spending with you.

Another unfreckled fifteen minutes scrapes by.
And I notice the rotten-toothed horizon
that holds me
this sky yawns wider than the shriek of your name inside my ribcage.

I see you making volcanoes in the distance,
stop myself from eating the ash from your sky
& let the thickness settle.
Watching you ash over is harder than that he bedrock gone cold.
Only you can choose yourself out of the volcano.

& I am one more time keeping my mouth out of your sky
trying to feed my own hungry sunflowers.
But the mouth still moves in the shape of your skin
the gasps still punctuated by a smattering of overzealous freckles.
(and my God are your shoulders crowded)

I am on fire with ginger punctuation
there is a volcano in my chest
(and I can't tell who it belongs to anymore).
But now is the time of guillotines and pendulums;
a time a carefully calculated puffs of smoke,
To wait
To eat food that fills holes
but doesn't impact the soil content.

It's a lie to say I'm only here for you.
I'm here
to hook my dreams into the mouth of the volcano.
I want our mountainy mouths to breathe smoke-spirits into the cracked-open atmosphere
& when our smoky bodies would touch the sky
you'd put thunder in my mouth
& shoot lightning from the teeth
our skins shifting so hard and fast
the elements shiver at the sight of us.

But the mountains are making the most of their time
and I am only building my own avalanches anymore
cold white cascades making time between ruptures
(I love you. I love you. I love you)

& I do hope that springtime comes before the next explosion
or at least before the blistering snow
claims any more climbing souls.


One More Former Student Goes Unemployed
I am the great white hope,
full of literature and promises
my belly is tearing from the weighted hooks of student loans.
They told my I could be everything
so I took classes on Rimbaud and Bukowski.
Instead of computer science or grant writing
I learned the way of the Albatross.
My teeth got broken from a too-long hanging on
and now
I use the broken bits to scratch out cheerful cover letters
for jobs that hit me as wantless as their implied mouths mouthing
No.
This poem is a headline
about my body falling like an omen from the sky
shot down by one more capitalist captain.

fell sick again

& even through the sudgedly illness
my skin & stomach are filled with nervous ampersands,
their curves making a trampoline of my belly.

Is this awkward?
-what it is to feel caught?
I always thought it would be softer than this
(wholer than alone).

Every face blurs in and out of possible recognition.
Certainty has found the end of its extension cord
& my unknowing pulses out the door
-oozes violent from the windowcracks.

There is a torn-open sky
exploding possibilities.
I might know you,
find you
& fill your rubber boots with meaning.
Souls, black with coffee breath
break open my lungs and skull
filling me up so fast
(like an unforgiving run-on sentence)
& all I can do is sit stunned
& grab the squiggled end of every ampersand.

stuff and a run-on

the wrenching laughter
scrapes angry marks in the recycled air,
too heated,
our section of the stratosphere
presses gray & heavy with mediocrity.
This conversation is smog,
punctuated by bad cheese & flimsy chicken.
Anything you might say
would spray like febreeze over the heartbreak
& slightly improve the breath
pushing jagged from each pump.



Screw the moon
& its yellow belly
tonight I believe in the cynicism of midnight fog.
My body becomes a simple residue of solipsism & dust.
That swinging scam in the sky
(Too much. Too heavy. Too wrenching.)
All those moments just
aren't.



My body is already starting to rebuilding itself
after one more cycle
in a lifetime of gripping the in-between.
The rocks on the bottom refuse to smooth out
& this river represents sharpened distinction,
a live boundary carving the rules down to bedrock.

This poem came to life
at 65 miles per hour
& I am going to pieces faster than a waterfall.

Mind misted over
like somebody left the shower on
or made love too long

angry, the words shake & hurtle sideways,
the alphabet wets itself
after being forced through too many flaming hoops.
This pain is not a circus.
Although things do have a way of circling back
& I am living between the rings
collecting stale popcorn, gunpowder breath & wrinkled ticket stubs.

Time

I let the days read like a pendulum
drawing an endlessly open parenthesis
to hang on gravity's mouth.
She breathes in measured motions
a mediation of falling
and blazing forward on spring-loaded hope.
I let the days read like a pendulum
trusting the rounded measurements above my head.

Patience & Rhythmic Salt

I am waiting for the bricks to pull me in,
for the bass to ultimately shake the fantasies into action;
call forth an alternate universe:

An ocean of jitters
endlessly coming & going--
Making frothy footholds at the moon's expense.
Our minds have got jellyfish & driftwood for teeth;
Our poem coming up loose with mouthfuls of sand,
The thoughts crust over & dry out
like leftover starfish.

She drinks like a fish
who has a liver for every broken heartbeat.
Fish bones beguile the teeth
& finger the roof of your mouth like an insect

& I am waiting for the embrace of the jellyfish;
for the year of the sand-dollar
-a time when this series of crashes might buy you back.

I am waiting for the tide to wash up
empty of fish heads & needle bones,
Waiting for the salt to heal
for the jellyfish to untie their stings
(&move forward in the tempo of the lungs)

I am waiting for the moment I can reach up
and pry open tha short yawn of sunshine,
plant my hook in the yellow mouth of sky,
and drag her by the teeth into spring.

Lost (freewrite)

lost,
got there expecting things to
go easy,
be smooth.

The diagonals are all off
& I am parking parallel
2 blocks away.

Wait.
Why am I rewarding myself with a fucking pastry again?
The chocolate helps
to calm neuroses
grown in a state of procrastination & unpreparedness.

3 spasms in a series of failed frantics.

I think the bites are getting rounder
but the morning is tearing away much faster now--
as the excuses muscle in,
their buzzing bodies pollute my mindscape
like a horde of greedy bees.

Skin is shaking in a series of goosebumps & scribbles,
& I can't be late again
I'm only built for so many mistakes.

2 (seperate but untitled)

Time passes closely,
with footsteps small and hollow,
coupled laughter fills the moments
like yellow veins in a daffodil.
Small pops of quiet
make their slow release
over a smooth afternoon
of soft anecdotes and closed-eyed smiles.



I am what you pinch out from beneath your fingernails;
the empty feeling of a callous on your fingertip.
I am exactly what you say:
a wing-clipping villain
when I choose
between nothing
and pain.

leftovers for lunch

Freewrite:
Are you sure it doesn't matter?
Hot red holes yawn beneath the nails-
I am curling and burning like a blond witch at the stake.
In this heat
rolling down the window barely rustles the feathers.
There ain't no rain in sight
& the migraine rasps angry & yellow over the dusty wheel marks.
I've got footprints on my forehead,
these bootheels are not imaginary,
the path less traveled just happens to be through my frontal lobe
and these feelings are heavy with footfalls
& spurs a-spinnin'.

Small piece:
I'm a schadenfreude junkie
-gonna laugh at everyone's pain tonight.


Running Sounds:
The city puts rust in my lungs
and winter clings about the ankles
with wet and needy hands.
Feet stagger where the pavement has been broken.
There are train tracks and stories too grown over to revisit.
No matter how many strides I take
my heartbeats still sound like his name.
I run until my ears are burning with the cold
and there is a simmering beneath my skin
the rhythm speeds up, but never loses its trajectory.

two times

Stories
Miracles are too big for memory
the myths are chicken wire,
smoke rubbed forcefully into mirrors
the reflection degrades with every retelling.

Falling (edited freewrite)
I cured the moment by giving in to gravity
let the adrenaline tilt into my skin.
As midnight howled beneath my helmet
the world stood immovable beneath the doe-eyed whistling wheels.
I've got acid in my legs and acid in my backside
(Heartbreak is a chemical burn
that breathes out
reaches back through your capillaries as you try to leave).

My body is composed of collapsible organs:
A pumping origami heart
(she thinks she can tell the future)
intestines knotted into ampersands
& a liver that fits smooth into a shot glass.

I know the beer will make it come out
& the elephants are tearing through my architecture.
My body is made of sockets & rocking chair stories
& Goddammit
I'm not changing the sheets until he takes me back.

before the ruins

There's cracks in the ceiling
and cracks in the mirror
nervous smiles in the architectural exoskeleton.
Gravity multiplies
and the teeth turn to mercury.
The rebar slowy curls
and tense rivets empty their moans into the night.

build-up

1/12
I am a crime scene
my body tingles,
waiting to happen.
Patient for the red tape
and the catapulted light.
you can't stop the sounds pushed out
my teeth got cut on the empty sidewalk
of words made rabid by being unspoken.

1/13
A poem should be
Roomy.
Leave footprints
as the body drinks the margins
the spaces are harvested in your brain
Thickets of beatless linebreaks
the tall grasses ready to be romped into matted music.
A poem needs more than a backyard
and will always find holes in the best built of fences.


1/14
I miss the blue skies
and cinnamon freckles
scars between your smiles.
Your skin gives me the patience of the seasons.

Music Machine

On the page the paper breath cracks:
swooping glyphs open their black eyes
and yawn a linear series of numbered sounds.
The grid weaves away
a shaking topography of compressed breath and screaming strings.
Formulas shiver into listening
splitting twilight into sunrise.
Notes both sharp and long
punctuate and scale the blueprints
of a time machine looking to be made through the power of sound.


(a magpie poem)

January

In winter you hang springs and jewels from your listening.
The mechanism tightens
and the shivering sky takes a gulp of distinction.
The empty trees sharpen
like a woman's angry eye.
The air splits and spiders into cracks
and fluidity
(making the most of possible escapes)
rushes out of being.

/

An Eyelashing
The eyes are filled with endless needles
blackened rosemary clings to the inbetweenness of seeing.
A thin line of witnesses to the world coming in
no wonder they sometimes jump in.

Pulse
On her wrists the veins danced like light from a keyhole
through a sideways glance I am peering in,
fingering for the tumblers of a heartbeat unlocking.

A balanced meal
The moment laughs the scales out of swinging
and turns my world into a plate of naked fish;
life eating the balance out of living.

Dreamspine
Discomfort angled in
and convinced my back to pinch itself awake.
Too bad
my spine is not a dream.

Freewrite Inquiry
Could you open it?
make an incision on the page,
extract all the ingredients,
take the sounds from the words?
and the shapes from the text?
Could you
Remove form
like a surgeon removes the appendix?
Or would it all break down
collapse into a lack of synapses
neurons reversing evolution
curling back into themselves
each cell like burning paper,
shaking and introverting to ash.

Sriracha (edited freewrite)

I know I am supposed to go,
my fingers turn the key
& the engine sometimes backfires.
The engine is thin & bought on too many favors
whose trajectories pull tender & tenuous.

The bathwater is filling up my ears
& the sounds are only gulps now
as the engine slowly turns over.
There are roses in the basement
and a saffron song chiseled up top.
She's got fried rice in her heart
& the rooster crows too red in its spicy ribcage.

My tide goes out again
& it is never enough.
The dry rushes back
& my body is flooded with the cracked skin of
5,000 onions.
Our voices sautéed the winter air
& cries caramelize the ceiling:
"I can cook this down for you."

The bulbs grow hot in the rooster's mouth
his feet beating out a spurred song:
"are you awake yet?
are you awake yet?"
the words are indignant enough
& my control knows it's time to climb out
& freeze my fingers down the cracking hillside.

Cold sunshine teeth wash over cracked fingers
as the engine slowly turns over.
The tide puts salt in the eyes
& this is what it is to leave you.
You are heat & tail feathers
& ginger simmering away
–-fried rice that stings the lips alive
& and dances fire deep into the houses of my heart.