Another Street, Filled With Too Much Rain

Only time can seal the divide
Between us now, the space
That gapes
At all the wrong things in the way,
The unspeakable disagreement
That has replaced
The face of love
I used to see
Everytime we met.

Now, just another street
Filled with too much rain
To take the risk of crossing
And getting far too wet.

Far Away, With Her

Thinking of you
In the small sliver moon
Overhead-

Of you asleep
Among pillowy suns
In our stellar bed

Feeling here
Far away
How dreamily
Your eyes
Must also be
Seeing me

Face the World

Out into the wheel again
The feel of concrete steel again
The asphalt echoes where thundering trains
Muffle the slowly going insane
Grind to the halted hearts of people‑
Out past the church of the elaborate steeple,
Past ribbons of receipts
And parades of sales
Down by the drunken whiskey bales
Past alleys asleep in the newspaper hay‑
Out into business of outside day
Armed to the teeth
With a cheesy grin
Concealed to the face
With a safety pin
Covering shit of the inner child‑
Inside with welcome, outside with wild
Eyes staring sternly in
Downing the soul
Till it barely breathes‑
Out into the smog and weakening heaves
Of desperation waiting
At a stoplight to die‑
Out into the cold with a frozen eye
And the will to give
Not a sense away,
Out into the self-same yesterday
With just a question to ask
Of myself in the glass:
How long have I always hated
The world I carryOn arms I created?

Racing Through Myself the City

I've walked Grand Canyons of mind
Through the narrowing cracks
Of building opinion, suddenly turning to find
Myself on the attack
With the growing rage
Of my own silent minions-
I've struggled to be free
And keep my captors in the harness,
Faced the firing squads of fear
In a tuxedo cut from my darkness,
Searched the alleys and cans
For a single dream
Of something
I felt compelled to call pretty,
Smoked the dying cigarette of a last man
Who tried with shaking mechanical hands
To show me the plan of the self in the city-
I ate the food my brothers laced with poison served me
And spent forevers washing down
Their golden silt goblets to achieve
A river of green forgiveness-
I've wailed oceans and sank their bottoms,
Survived only silently through treading determination
Till life arrived to preserve me-
Been stabbed again and again again
You manipulated, manipulating bastard of a bastard-
Who treated you like a bastard-
You made it hard to love you.
I've knocked over more plates than I've eaten,
Taken the food from a baby of innocence
And thrown it to a sewer of deception
For the vultures to pick at
And watch it grow and pick again.
I've chained my thoughts to a rock
And thrown food to my agony
To feast my desire
To tear my wanting limb from limb
To burn my soul over coals of cold despair
For eternities of mind,
Of pain, of aching brain,
I've lain across tracks of truth to break that chain,
Got bored then ran to start the engine again.
I've lusted my way into holes
I wouldn't care to mention,
Lost myself in warm ecstasies under honey-running volcanoes,
Made love in the pure fire blinding white union,
Had sex somewhere between the sheets of a lover,
Been afraid to love or hate or masturbate,
Share my soul or smoke a bowl
With a stranger
Who's maybe more deranger than me.
I've slipped on the marbles of insanity,
Got stuck on a one-stop lost rock block of thought
That lasted for days then weeks and years
Of teenage fears and endless beers
And LSD highs high on the mountaintops
Over drops and drops of cops and guns
And midnight runs to stores for more-
I'm known by every owner of a liquor store
For miles and days in the dirty ashtray haze of Sacramento-
Poor Indian bums guttered in the street nearby
Make you wanna stop for a beer and cry
But no time to waste in the chase
Of cars and bars and happy-hour stars
All pressed against the backside
Of the Church of the Blessed Union,
Next to the American River
Or maybe even in it-
But let us not hope this is the end and begin it
Before the sun of this muse and the strength of this spirit
Begins to drain down to its very last minute,
Let us not oversight before the vision has set
That this one road traveled is the only road we get-
That minding this body on rocking through Hell
Prepares Heaven eyes for seeing it well.

Set of Footprints in the Sand

There's not enough music in the world
To sum up the feeling I feel now,
Not enough trees in the woods
To find the shape my soul is knotted towards,
Not enough wind in sky
To blow the precise chill temperature,
Not enough hands
To touch the place that longs for contact,
Not enough mothers
To comfort me in this hour,
Not enough philosophy
To soothe my mind in ideas,
Not enough clothes
To cover up what's slipping out naked to the world;

Not enough legends
To inspire these feet to climb,
Not enough religion
To walk this water on faith,
Not enough drugs
To keep me fully numb,
Not enough pictures
To capture this feeling in its motion,
Not enough walls
To make me safe,
Not enough windows
To bend this striking light
And not enough time or sculpture
To capture this feeling as it anchors
Sentiment to indescribable floor.

The Turning Wheel

Assembled from the machinery of land
A human treads the very sand
They sprouted from
And moves through space like a dreaming breath
Which dreams those things the world cannot
And touches with hands the beating breast
Of earth, tracing lines along the knot
Of pines, of slowly growing moss
With legs the rooted trees have not,
With fingers of skin, sensitive and soft
Pushing in amongst the rot
Of wood and leaves they once lived in
Through worms and roving flocks of wings,
Through beetles and the buzz of passing flies
Who long since now have sunk back thought
To dirt in which the process lies;
At rest yet working the turning wheel
These passing thoughts have risen from
Like spokes emerging from ground to feel
The warm turning of the sun-

White Morning

Once, when still too young
To voice the deepest cries
I woke up rubbing fisted eyes
To the hush of rushing
San Diego beach waves, early in morning,
And climbed out of the stationwagon
As children dew, quietly
So as not to wake my parents in the quiet.
The atmosphere was that cold salt dampness
That crawls into the skin and wraps the bones
Beneath your T-shirt, but then
I noticed the birds and ran
And as my bare feet struck the smooth sand
I felt a flapping of wings unwind,
White as the unwritten words in my mind,
As sheets of paper, gusted by silent wind...

My Other Self

I wear all your tears and smiles
In a wardrobe behind my eyes.

The pressure of all your kisses
Still lingers on my impressionable lips.

Your hot breath churns in my chest
And keeps me warmer
While your dreams give the sense
Of a shadow falling
Around my corner.

I know every time your heart hurts
Because the wind gets into me
And I cannot move.

I suffer the same beats,
Hearing an echo to every second.

And now, my dearest self,
If you say goodbye to me
I will have no choice
But to forever abandon
All the shared leaves
Ceaselessly departing
From our tree-

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-