well shit. i'd planned on heading to the open mic night tonight at Cafe Aroma, but i found out after reading a few of my works beforehand, to warm up and try to figure out how best to deliver them, that i couldn't speak for shit tonight. My head is still a bit stuffed up, so my enunciation just kept going to shit. sometimes i suck at enunciating anyways, and tend to run my words together, so tonight was just an extension of that, and if i'm going to read, i'd like to give it my all. So i decided to just camp out at home instead and take a night off, and perhaps hit next week's open mic night before i take off for Guatemala on the 16th.

Instead of reading, then, i wrote! Here's my latest experiment in channeling the creative flow. I hope you're having a stellar night, reader, and that you're happy and feeling just fine. Dream sweetly tonight.

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the desert cave Antarctic

1/6/05

come desert land
fly toward me on wings
of blue corn sunsets, roll to me
over sand highways the color of coal
and flood over me
like a flow of white smiles
and the scent of unwashed hair
on a southerly gale

as your eastern torch rises I’ll scream out
in a muffled cry the names of the ones
let go
the little girls and great kings forsaken
and after my voice shatters, goes hoarse from a list
long and endless
I’ll grasp my hat and
wander off alone
as I do in times like these, this night, bitter and dark
down that coal-dust road
but don’t worry, it’s just sand
and dead tears beneath these old heels,
grains of nothing peppering a land
sucked dry of the verdant god I seek

and over this land that floats to me, the one I walk over
like a vagabond zombie
I feel you, taste you on the wind and hear you
in the clouds
and in the sky I see molten hate ejected from your
volcano eyes, engorged orbs that spill turpentine
and light the grass aflame
blessing this land in a death that screams
and curses your name
beneath the stars

but it’s a weak, comatose loathing
at its center, and stands little chance
against the antiseptic unforgiving sandpaper surface
of this desert reality drifting my way –
these little red stones littering my path
hold resilient to your white fury

here, I walk protected in the holiest of
shrines, impenetrable and
beyond you, at the cusp of myself –
just a windblown Johnny Appleseed
on a scenic byway,
the great divide

night and night

1/3/05

all I ask for on a night like this
where the air feels like polyester
and my ears are dipped in pudding
is that you sit with me awhile
and enjoy the artificial light, my one
spot of tender almond luminescence
fixed high on the ceiling, below
a more natural black above

somehow that black fits better
in this easy pajama time
but out there it’s icy, a surgical cold
that slices through eyelids with scapular precision
and flash-freezes nostrils during the lightest breath
but they tell me it’s really a comedy
that the stars peek down at,
laughing warmly at our
silly
human
shortcomings
and giggling at our frantic struggle
for a bit of summertime warmth
and springtime rain –
aren’t we a bit silly ourselves
just hanging around, sticking it out
like stubborn homesteaders
in a land of gray grit and shattered civilization?

but whether the suns and moons above
laugh, cry, or just fall silent
it’s tonight’s skin-on-steel contrast that
nips at our heels as we wander off to bed,
making sure to whisper one last time
reassuringly
that we’ll be gently rocked to sleep
under toasty graham cracker bedsheets
foggy bedroom windows
and that black star-sewer of hell above