a piece i just wrote last night...

(and, yay! i finally have the internet again!)

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inland shoreline blues

3/30/05

around in loops and squiggles I wiggle and twirl
with my nerves aflame, on the tips of icesickles –
I still smell you on my skin!
and like snowflakes that plunge below
streetlamps amber in the depth of winter’s last
springtime grasp you’re distant,
calming, soothing and nearly here
like a phantom fuck,
that ethereal you riding me like
a perfumed wind, smell I can’t quite shake
the one I wouldn’t should I could
but I cannot
so I’ll just plead ignorance and keep cruising
down this deadpan desert road, single dirty hand
on a single dusty wheel
where the sun slides into the earth as
smooth legs into a dusky pool
and electric sunset canvases bleed into black
when the stars get restless,
wrapping my hallucinatory journey
in cooling air perfectly poisoned
by a
moment
just beyond the vanishing point of
this circular foxhunt
endless

alaska

3/17/05

I can’t help but wonder
if under brightmoon starcover
I’d stolen myself away last night
if I’d rolled north to the mountains
on a ribbon of black
and told everyone I faded off, faking my death

amongst the caribou and auroras –
living like a god of the world

perhaps the pines would have pointed me to nirvana
and the slow rivers borne me to bliss
all the while with the wind the one who’d hold me
whenever I’d get lost for a moment

guess I’ll stay

3/17/05

I’m back in that bar again
the smoky one, corner-pub down in the
dimlit downtown
where olympian swimmers are the losers and
the runners, well, they’re
the day’s grand heroes, men of myth
whose rough cotton skins burst at the seams from
endless courage
as they spin their tales and
raise their sails
for a destination anywhere but here
to a place anytime
from now
but the funny thing is
drink after drink, time after time
I look up and notice I’m
the only patron here
a sad old man whose heroes
ran away in the night
and left me swimming towards

something

tsunami of Nevada sun and Mexican wind
coats me like batter and i'm lost beneath the pain
of carefree summertime whimsy
and
day-glo
           horizonsmiles
in the west
if they'd told me it would be this way
i would have just sipped a little more

but here i find myself sitting and lamenting about things i'd rather not divugle unless i speak in the muted tones of a geriatric fool, wheelchair bound on the fast track to a life void of smiles, peanuts, and dewey grass on the bottom of barefoot mornings. i'm so afraid, deathly fucking afraid, of something i know i have to someday do, but i'm stuck again... like a rabbit under the steel wheels of a coal-fired iron horse of long, long ago, that never seems to quite go away, but just lingers a few feet behind you, shining its weak lanternlight on the back of your mind like some idiot weilding a candle ready to expire, wax melting and running down his hands like white blood, the stuff of ambition and confidence.

why can't i do this?

the bottle isn't the answer
but oh how i wish it was
sometimes
like now
as this hurricane screams
its heavy fright-train avalanche mockings

no idea where this one came from ... at all. just one'a them thar poetic blasts from the great beyond, ah reckon.

i hope all is completely pleasant in your world, reader, and have the sweetest of nights.

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done, just like the other one

3/10/05

her dreams collapsed in on themselves
like a pumpkin on the porch
solidified and liquefied
in Halloween’s freeze
but oh how those dreams used to cling tight
her little fingers clutching handfuls of quilt
in the dark –

now
they glide away like cars on ice
careening lazily crazily towards lord knows what
and all she knows
is that
he’s the only one
who’d care
the only one who’d ever notice
her sunken autumn smile and
yellowsquash eyes

i'm soooo tired, reader! I've been stuck bobbing up and down in a sea of drama today, clinging to nothing but the seat of a shitty airplane that crashed and threw me here; the stewardess told me it would function as a floatation device, but she's starting to lose her credibility.

perhaps some beauty rest is in order for the Goat tonight.

Alas, i wrote, finally! This last trip to SLC has really fired up the poetry engines, so hopefully those don't run out, and i can crank out some more work. This one i'm posting tonight originally formed about a week and a half ago, drawing off the guatemala experience (mostly the nighttime mediatation in Tikal), but now merged with some of the inspiration i received and felt in Utah this past weekend. For what it's worth, here it is. (I've written better, and this is a bit of a departure from my most recent works, but shit, i'll post it anyways, since it feels like it's finished.)

Sleep well, reader, and dream of sweet stuff.

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maslow

3/8/05

fade into the twilight

forget not these lonely cries and scattered
dead-resonant driftwood thoughts
that slither about
in a bit of grass before me –
         serpentine sharp slivers of
         yesterday’s smiles and the blackened laughs of ages
         seduced by whimsy in the occasional
but before you sublimate into the peppered night
remember how I’d climb
to the top of it all and sing a
silent tune
around
the
stones
twirling on a whim
while trees and leaves blacken your silence
and explode from the pressure of frozen elation
I found in the ascent to those
forbidden
expiring
distances
between you and I, the ones that
still make me sigh slow spring tears
in the night like midnight mist

so one last time
before you go
rise to the moon and dance with me! come see
this world in that muted chime
as the lord of all and saint of none
pivoting across the branched leaves
of trees twittered and scaled
skidding
like a weary warrior child
bellowing as her father fell, bastard sun
roasting skins of the thousands who wept
for us

and at last
after all this fade

i want to drink more... kris and i broke up.