A Crucifixion of Trees - just in time for the Christmas Tree lumber aftermath :)

Telephone poles
died for our sins
in a crucifixion of trees,
chiseled from the limbs
of living bodies

laid to rest over moats
stacked in piles for self-defenses
made to suffer each floating boat
hanging corpses to build our fences

Evolving David

Shore describing the landscape of wave,
Sea sculpting the border shore,
Evolving a David disguised in the rock
Tossing spray from naked shoulders-

The sea's an unsatisfied artist
Always seeking to perfect
The statuary of mountains
In surges, bursts of tools working
The surgery of cliff faces, dancers
Carved from the onward dance, chisels
Torn from each emerging body, Motions
Made of the passing hand,
An impression of ocean
Thumbed in sand-

Nights Like This

On nights like this
My love has all the solidity
Of a wound.

Stars scrape against that place
Where my heart turns
The dark world
With its lava.

It is wind and not air
Entering me, fire
Not just heat
Igniting my internal star-

Nights with the passion
Of nature for ideas,
Poetry for thoughts
And all of humanity
For tenderness.

A love of so much strength
It throbs like a sun
Around the flower in its hand.

But does not squeeze.

The Wounded Horse

You are a wounded horse
On the edge of abyss.
The tracks your thoughts make
Are so vastly intangible
There’s not much
Of you left.

I pray for you
Though I have no religion
And hope for you
Though I possess no decision.

Your choices of smoke
Are quickly becoming
An icicle cloak
Behind which freezes
The blood
Once running.

I pray for you
Though I have no reason
But that something
Has brought us together
For a season.

And somehow the waves
You make as you move
Create in my spirit
A permanent groove.

We are both in danger.

Hiking Nevada

Breezing the tips of crisp green needles
Hairy in the pines on craggy hills
Catching the alpine drift as it stings
The lungs at the peak of jagged spills
Into the mouth of the valley-

Clouds misting the rocks
Of every alley
Where the fog slides downward
In a brisk bite of wind,
Numbing bones and skin exposed
To the cold lick of snow
In the breeze tongue

Soaking in the stoic life
Of wet green winter arms
Careening the lip
Of cliffs hung
With strings of ice

Composing Darkness

I don't feel like writing
But I've gotta hang myself
From the lamp anyway
To see what lights-

I compose the best on steamy nights
When confusion moves
In an utter of darkness
When power is formless
Gasp of feeling-
Then hold it hard
As the senses reeling
Slow till the mind
Can give it form

Till the visions can be painted
Till the clay becomes David
Till the mood is reincarnated
Words
Hewn through language by the motion
Of feelings mined
From intuited gold-

Her Mind's Cloth

The wind wraps gentle arms
beneath her breasts
and surrounds
in a galaxy of sweet caress-

A slow breeze blowing
ignites the spark
that sleeps in her heart-

With eyes of knowing
she sees the dark
and pierces
the night lace
as if it was woven
inside her mind's cloth,

threading each nerve
of the wind's curve
with all the refined
will of a needle
eye-

Your Point in the Silence

Alone
And the room is only an echo,
Feelings inner silence
Stirred from deep moving

Quiet
Breaks forth upon my mind
And then a thought enters of you, a picture
Where it aches like a dangling clock

You terrify me
Because my passion is a terror
Longing to consume
Every fire
And bring it to your doorway
To be stepped upon

As I sit in this room
With only these words and the slow turning
I’m forced to remember
And suffer sharp new roses
Which even now crystallize in my mind
And bring back your vision
To my lips, wet dew to my nostrils
As they burn

A breeze enters the room
So subtle it’s not really there
And my heart smolders with it,
Flares up its candle and strikes
At a point in the silence
Where your memory has entered
Through this crack
In the open window
Of my heart
And blown away
Everything but your singular arrow,
Transfixing my lung
As it chokes upon
This impossible song
And cries

Bender Drunk in a Trendy Bar

It's all stupid
Without you to make it sense-
Here I die
In some drunken sand
Heavy beneath a sea
Of trying phantoms
And grasping ghosts,
Small music escaping
The hole of my alone mouth
On the clinging lip of the bar-
God I'm fucked up
And still writing no escape
While everyone else dances
To impress
The people who aren't watching
Only us hanging lids at the bar
Drolling over cigarettes
In the dream smoke
Breeze curls
Round the eyes
But still feeling
Even that's freer
Than no breezing at all-

Excusing the Flowers

For now, it’s better
That I wear my hair long rather than short,
Though I attain the goals of neither.
My best days are humanitarian,
My worst murder.
I drink gasoline to wash away
The water's perfection
And water to chase away
The poison's reaction.
I am a spoke

Spinning between two cycles,
With one cloudy foot amidst the dream
And one mangled in the realities
Of street machines.
My eyes change depth from surface
To Atlantis,
Empirical math
And irreconcilable darkness.

The music I make
Is the dream I'm falling asleep to
When it is not the lion
Whose hair wakes up the sun.

To explain these oppositions
Is somehow the reason
A poem climbs to its height
And then dies,
The same way valleys
Of disintegrating bodies
Forgive the flowers
Born inside their eyes-

Between Two Worlds

Lying on my bed sprawled out naked like a god
first feeling the wind along its skin,
fingers of coolness with a subliminal hint
of perfumed pollen and the distant ocean-

Half dreaming I turn and stretch
between two worlds, the sheets of a sail and the bed,
sustained by both, separated and woven
through the mesh eyelashes thread
when the light passes through-

My arm moves in every dream,
stroking the air where
the rounded-out ball of a star
now parts the grass of a purple lawn
mottled with suns,
digging fingers between the blades
as they soften, fold into sheets
that my hand lets go as they slide
away into the next wave-

The Looking

I looked for you everywhere-
How many deserts have spoken your name
In their silence?

-The moon's breast is filled
With the same white longing
Where her milk spills
Into the silver clouds
Of diamond streams-

How long have the old rocks known your secret
And how long did they suffer?

You are preaching your sermons
To the mysterious ears
Of alley clowns and mountains-

Your ghost is a flickering shadow
Just come over the hill,
On the verge of speaking
Its true name
As I suddenly turn
To face my reflection
Vanishing
In empty air-

The Softness of Suffering

My suffering has fashioned a deep well
That communicates birds
To the dark ocean eye,
That slips deep and grabs
Hanging wings from the sky

That flows ancient rivers
Through the whispering endless heads
And in surges delivers
Its sermons to the beds
Of silent time, with lips pressed
Against the swell,

Each soft wavering line
Defined
By the endless strikings of the bells

Chopping Branches

Would you think me conceited if I told you
I used to be a genius
Who sacrificed half his brain
To the gods of pain
In exchange for wisdom, plunged my mind
To the depths of sorrow to make
The other limbs stronger, swam the delirium
Of drug-induced doldrum and madness, blew a hole
Through my aura and liver, lived through it
Then lived even longer-
Would you believe that heaven relies upon hell?
Would you consider the fleeting joy of this cell,
This body shackled to a mind thinking its soul
In these eyes: restless, fearful and burning with tears?
Do you know I sacrificed fifteen years to live
On fast forward for five? Do you know that
The highs and lows are more alive
Than a thousand blurred together in the middle?
If you consider the hours we piddle
Over television lives spent in the mind,
The psychodrama of thoughts spattering its soundtrack
To the tune of repetition,
If you think! and think of Odin's vacant eye,
His headless wisdom floating the well of knowledge,
If you think of the pain raining joyous sacrifice,
Of one eye seeing farther, casting aside
Sight to lead the blind,
If you think of the bridges burning behind
Lighting ways to fire in the head,
If you think of half a life as better than a whole dead,
An action performed in the passing twilight of now
Outshining the staleness of evergreen boredom,
Outburning the wish for perpetual sun,
If you compare ten same lives to a different one
It's not hard to see
Chopping branches
To heighten the tree.

The Flawed Aphrodite

We emerge from eternity
And slip back to its dream
Like a flawed Aphrodite
Risen from the sea

A momentary stretch
Of dawning intentions
Like a single day's sunlight
Over the tops of mountains

Expressing a single, perfect direction
Despite the air of death's imperfections,
Or perhaps reflecting a wisdom
Drawn from them

We rise like poems
From the collective churning,
Singular waves summoned
From the motion of rolling

Skin the color of the milk we give
And like no other mortal
To suffer and love

Eyes a reflecting shell of suns
As we gaze towards a birthplace
Of stars above

Just a swirl of feelings
Wrapped up
In a temporary string
Of elements

A necklace drawn back
To the tidal pool
And broken apart
To its last components

By our inescapable living
In the gravity that surrounds us
And the indefinable lines
Of that rule which has bound us

To be simply seeds
For a formless motion-
A coral chair, borrowed book,
A lover's back
Against the ocean

Somehow winding up
For an instant like a god
In this temporary kingdom-
A single drop
Of running blood
In some elaborate body
Breathing its freedom.

All This Loose Ground

Such red roses
Must be growing
Amidst the thorns
Of your desire,
Dripping with the secret
Grapes of such passion

I will prevail
Over the monsters
That destroy me
And share perfumes
With you
In virgin gardens
Our love is preparing
From all this loose ground

I hold you
Beneath my fingers
Like a butterfly that trembles
The leaf it lands upon

But one day I will hold you
Like a leaf
And you the butterfly

Broad Strokes of Mind

I want to speak great gusts of wind,
Open the heart to full sail and soar
with a scream the tempest, cry the mind's eye
in a tear of hair from the beast
holding closed the door-
To moan the dog's groan, the breeze sigh,
Words of rain to explain the turning sky
with the sound of ground rising, a branch stretching lines
into wings, spirals of meaning
to wrap the world
in an angel of singing
grief, love, ache of rain
on the brain stinging-
Start it off with broad strokes of mind,
Grab the serpents that coil the world-
and unwind.

Flashes of Lightning in a World of Thunder

One day music struck me
And all the poetry in its bolt poured forth
Through the holes
My feelings had left open
To make space for creation;

One day seven thousand poems
Died in my skull
And from their flowers
The future was born;

One day art caught up
Reality in its wave
And like a lifting of curtains
Became the world;

One day death became
Alive for someone
Immediately reborn;

One day, a word
Was all it took
To overthrow the moment
And forever suspend
Time by a nail in a closet
As the next word fell
And we were all left
Holding hammers
(Or the longing for them)
As passing stars fell out our eyes
Alongside feelings of gold
And dust, moving fast but leaving
The brilliant wings
Of fleeting birds
Behind in our bones.