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.