To my best friend
Originally uploaded by 'Larissa Grace

Excerpts From Unsent Letters

...Breathe into it. That’s all. That’s all you have to do. Let it
come to you. The effortless effort. Just begin. The gesture inhabits
Meaning. There is no repetition …

I only read the margins. The places pressing out --
suspended sidebar thoughts we think we'll
expound on later, but hardly ever get back to ...


… The explosion we heard,
the sound real book-binding makes every time it’s opened.
A sigh, sliding back towards us.
I really don’t think there was anything we could have done
to stop it ...

… The place only you touched in me. Steam up from the streets. The manholes
Held Their Breath when we walked by. I can’t bear another over-romanticized
moon that won’t wear its light with simplicity.
What’s more beautiful than a freshly washed face? …

… White spiders - a metaphor for - I forget - a real thing too. Once in a parking lot late at night, one came down from nowhere and landed on my car antennae while I was driving away. Over twenty years ago. I never forgot that. They’re out there. Building. Lines anchored star to star. Hitched on meteors and space stuff. Dust. Artists. Complicated. Simple.

... It’s simply not.
Not you not
god the man the trinity the listen to me law giver
forgiver never give her another chance slant
the scales in your favor if you chant away the
hours in prayer - not a moment of heart there -
words should never be empty.
The richest words just can’t be said
or unsaid. Therein,
lies the mystery ...

…Rituals of my body - some sacred, others close in on
blasphemy. Ugliness can create beauty and they will
build another web. When one dies, another will
carry on across Heaven to places we can’t imagine.
So, not the one you turned the tap on down the
Sink. I asked you not to. You thought me ridiculous.
Doesn’t matter. Not thoughts or the fate of a single
spider. It’s not singular and carries on.
It’s what they’ve done for - how long now - centuries.
Building beauty dot to dot to places
you’d think they’d know better than to go,
but they don’t. They just go. Pilot’s writing.
Not caring, cuz in truth they care so. The wind
carrying the message away before the finished phrase …

… We are all sandcastles. And too, the breaking tide
swelling and lifting in response, washing
our own best efforts away because

... Destruction is quick and easy to do but
not to live with ...

… A voice. Around the same time as the first spider struck,
you made me a tape. It had music and your voice. I played it
over and over. I heard or read somewhere that
with recordings, every time you Listen, a fraction of the sound
is lost - wears away or something - wears off. I feel
those pieces. If they slip away, they slip
into me. Internal transfer.

... Stickers kids collect to mark
the calendar. All 365 boxes. Boxes
and numbers to live within.
That's what we teach them, but
I don't think those bound down numbers
mean a thing to Time ...

…When the tape finally emptied, I was full. A wave, a distinct
frequency, an infrequent, singular occurrence. A constant.
Irreconcileably You. Me...

... Explosions - in themselves, in instant replay -
beautiful - never mind - when the smoke cleared,
what was left? After it hit the house,
when the message written
with a stick in the sand
was washed away …

leaky psyche

Light & Sound
Originally uploaded by s_nazari

guidance on a cellular level.
he’s like that.
rhythmic. his skin
hums. a tuning fork struck - held
at the lip of the moon. that light’s kiss;
it vibrates through.

water carries sound.

he reads the day in how his palms have changed.
the things he’s touched,
still left there. they do not wash away.
indelible.

to close his eyes, he sees
no less. he does not
close. no shut off. not fully, not
Ever.

mine, like birds resting in his. mine,
small flames in the dark.
strange, cold flames seeking
elsewhere for their source
of warmth. he is my elsewhere.

distance itself is
a place - shaped, and with texture and
weight and length and i measure it, finger by
finger to my lips - hush - the gesture itself
says already enough, it is
enough to listen.

water everywhere, not least of all
in absence. just a drop to start.
enough. profound. the waves
beat and break. too, the desert
remembers and still flows. mirage -
an arid approach to storytelling from
an old ocean floor.

the magnet loses direction - beat and
Break. the heart, human, from sand
and water risen. its needle spins and
points a finger to lips, and maps the way
to distance ...

WIND

the migration
Originally uploaded by biancavanderwerf

an argument with solid things.
a question that wants to remain,

questioning.

both sides of my skin, stirred.

something lost in
recognition.

cold morning beauty can co-exist
with fine-lined anguish.

my son wakes wild eyed, i wake

vanished.

conquests after lady's skirts and
important letters held loose
by distracted fingers.

always the wind.

once mine once come from come
through but not of
me residue of yesterday's dramatic exit
soul risen from uninhabitable body
good-bye is a sound oncoming
storms shoving past structure
combustible language dizzying
run on invisible flames
running cold i
feel them
i feel ...

the storm's eye fixed on me
from a distance. what can
it possibly see?

chaos burns quietly. its liquid name
replenished by the vapors that hang
on after my breath. ~ linger ~
a cat at my lips while i sleep,
a sleek thief. ether's thin skin heavily
tattoed - deeply graffitied by Being's quirks
and symbols - a twitch at my eye - a sigh
i contribute to the onslaught of crosswinds.

i feel
again i feel and repeat i
feel and keep
going through the motions. muscle moved
by bone, bone
first, moved
by chance. a brittle branch creeking in
a selfless breeze.

Bones
Originally uploaded by Atomic Citrocity

I exist.

I exist.
Originally uploaded by Atomic Citrocity

Striking against light to knock down
a shadow that scarcely resembles what I scarcely am:
a woman, a wisp of hair loosed from a severe braid.
Asymmetrical division of features, already loyal
to asymmetry.

Broken winged bird doesn’t need a wing, doesn’t need
flight for walking - of course not.
Air-crippled only. But something in its small body
has met the skies expanse, something knows
and so carries to hops across earth,
This Hurt. A limp can be all-encompassing.

Wings in the rafters.
The sound of someone hammering fence boards.
A train through a canyon. Slow grinding
cement trucks. Children’s balls bouncing off
house corners. The angles make chase
a practice in deductive risk
(I always missed the ball).

I can’t see any of this.
But I know the sounds.
Not where they come from …
streaming from some place
in off time gone by.
Resting in my consciousness.
Old sounds leftover from events
long under the bridge .
I respond as an echo
to these echoes.
Low and estranged from origin,
in tissue thin places of recall.

Shattered.
Spliced back together.
Tender towards all I can’t touch
which still so touches me.

52 card pick up

far enough below the Frozen,
mad humidity rises from
earth's boiling core.
warm stone's wait 'round white
roots that stay shy and hidden
behind winter's poker face.

i am decembered in rooms that shake
with the weight of heaving trucks
gearing down, while the highway
goes mainstreet for a span through
this tiny tapeworm town.

i need

i

need to be ...

beside me, a whisper i passed through,
hesitant ... turned back and passed
again, backtracked to listen. a redness
speaking ardently of crystallized
white. tree terraced winter splintering the
cold crust just jutting in cracks
sent out as star felled, deliberate
sky debris pell mells below the bellow
of a soft soled shoe.

is it his?

is he coming? will he

ever ...

i need ...



tracks so vague -- set deep but spreading.
slow going either/neither way.

it is not winter though in the
white room of my thought, where
temperature's disinterested and lost
to a skyline tight drumfull of
vapors - porous poison, fragrant bloom
distracting the wind to come, then carry
its scent to my lips. buried there like
the taste of him only heard beneath
my skin. dethroning all other senses,
usurping calm countenance kept over
my handful of cards.

cards fill my close-chested palm with
royalty. one-eyed kings can't see me
while i wait to play, but perhaps will
choose to fold, withdraw, lay flush
and let the winnings go to
his cool hand.
it's sad display fanning
a few spades
and a joker with
a too familiar face.

needs hierarchy

cocoon.
Originally uploaded by Atomic Citrocity

the horizon's rim -
chipped china cup, tiny nick.
sipping lip there leaving no
less than the blood red sunset
slowed down to heaven-speed.

dizzied
by thirst. only water
will do. want may conform to etiquette,
but not need and you are
no longer and you are lost
with the light past that line across
earth, across water - out there
somewhere where the wind
dies. tied down, horizonal,
emptied harness for light.

this, a soon-calmed fight of wilderness
in me. my silence brandished
in the vanishing of weapons
that the air once struggled between us -
spun webs between us - i caught
only myself. casting out careful glances,
full to the rim, full
of gentle posture. only vague
fantasies about moisture our skin
might create, close and sated.

heavy paintbrush.
poised moment - only one.
one above the clean canvas.
there. just there, the sweetest
memory i have for us.
a memory invented
free of decorum,
full of thirst.

Do I scare you?
Originally uploaded by Atomic Citrocity

hold.
still.
amidst vigorous mystery,
stilled and emptied.
a shell
i am, a shell at ear,
collecting loose threads
off songs far from
here, where waves clipped
and crossed, tangle my
heart.

the memory of motion,
that's what moves me.
the sea, i am the
sea at shore. for a moment,
i am neither approaching nor leaving --
awash in kinesthetic prayer.
re-absorbing the sounds that
still haunt aged footprints,
shed through sojourn like old skin.
i recede again, give the land
back to itself,
slate clean.

King Crimson - Heartbeat (Live in Frejus 1982)

M T ME

the weight of could be, perhaps,
someday. the rawness and intricacies
of waiting. modulation between
acquiescence and persistence. a river,
a woman's body ever balanced through
deep rhythms of the music below truth -
the truth beneath music. i would give
to him ...

What is simple, speaks volumes.
I lie still, save for the vibrations
that comprise my bones.
I’d have him watch me, idly as a man who rests
beside a river, sensing the stones on its floor,
restless and catching in slow progression.

Listen for yourself.
the longer shadows hold to
nothing of the form they collapse beside.
blocky echoes saving memory -- Longing.
length implied at variable depths.
his call spreading through me, then
stopping, shy of throat. on its rebound,
soundless, but for its foreign vibrations,
now homed in and haunting the vast spaces
between my bones.

only squared-off lines, right angles, halls
lacking the fluidity or spontaneous flow that
should be the birthright of human Soul.
Still. I live here. In rooms that play me
back to myself with monotone and weak dimension.
flat images speak unkindly through my eyes,
toward my ovaled, edgeless desire for perception.

I memorize the details. Attach them to the unseen.
someone frequents my dreams: a specter of myself,
in love, and stilled. i take to a journey
lacking destination. there is no thing
to leave behind, but inexhaustible, the places
i will go.

aquariums

Slivers.
color and flight
splintered off, things dropped by flocks
overhead, over time, passing by.
things pulled in. things lost
in disregard. wings and earth -
birds slowed in movement from
air to ocean - a thick transition.
glass fish resting their own bellies on
their own piss. dutiful, small snails
at the speed of their own light.

faces pressed close to watch.
glass houses. what’s said of those?
don’t throw. privacy's a commodity
made loose and waterlogged. his demand
and her acquiescence or its absence
filled this ocean. Nothing but windows.
No introspect. One just looks out
through ancient womb overflow, through
breaker waves that rise again. a bargain
with the moon again. a compromise
to salvage her bodies ideas of ides
and ends. Shaking the beach,
frantic as an hourglass
out of time.

in rolling distraction, she re-arranges
the carefully planned -- the constellations
of starfish and projections. Her body floats,
a planet, a muted call stretched
wide, misshapen as putty. the shallowest
tide pools still sport their sense of depth.
what do you possess when you're holding breath?
will you, for both of us?

the brown mice of mysticism, in their infinite wisdom
lean rapt against the glass.
they mock and admire the star and cat fish, as if
they’re the opening fists and barefoot hills
of mountains waltzing
through the dust.

Pull to the Dark

Pull to the Dark
Originally uploaded by Atomic Citrocity

There is a legend
of a king that gathered his greed
with image and vision,
Crossed a border --
invented his ideal woman,
his concubine and queen. Something ranging
through his potent power - desire enough and alone,
set fire to her lungs,
made her Real - made her mortal.
So in flesh he ruled beside her.

Another tale
of an artist. he fell in love with a woman
he painted. Daily, he put her to canvas
perfecting her image while he grew gaunt
and wild eyed. So disinterested
in mortal life’s third dimension.
At last, he painted himself into the border
framing her form. Made himself
a fictional image just to be near her.


HER STORY:

i am running across shallow water beside my lover.
the wind’s bitten a small hole clear through
my heart. It whistles there. A breeze crossing shallow
strings. a mandolin propped by a cracked windowpane.

i am flying the ships trapped in bottles as if they are kites.
i will wait til they’re quite high, i will wait
til it’s night and then cut their strings. send them sailing
over the moon.

i am growing along a low shore beside
patches of reeds and cattails.
we are the trued woodwinds. mouthpiece set deep
and perfectly shaped to suit the lips of secret desire and
northern lights.

i am attuned. a flute made of anything: cobalt, copper, amethyst,
aluminum and string. invented by music itself in a grave time
of need.

i am imploring - an open request to an old lover who loved but
Never, he knew he
never
knew me.

drunk from sipping bottled milk weed
and half forgotten lyrics from songs we loved as teens,
on public streets from a paper bag. my love
and me. real or dreamed, in a long time coming
somewhere cast from now, off the sleeve of
a boxed up jacket, he will pull a strand of long gold hair
Long Ago left there, in one of our careful or careless crossings.

i am asking, when you find it, and you will, due to fate
or astral travel, do this: thread it through
our memories. hand weave our time
together on a transparent, transient, errant loom of used to be.

i arise out of need.

i am sitting in a diner drinking coffee.
across from me, a man organizes his ideas
like an origami artist -- folding the Sunday Times into
The Shape of a Woman. uttering something remorseful
at her headline. mostly, i notice,
the color of his words. they are umber
and encase his body
like a fitted sheet.

he takes my face lightly
between his two fists.
turns my neck til my eyes align with his.
handles me like a loosened cog and he will be
the tool tugging at my cheek to set me straight.
i only bite my bottom lip
and lower my eyes.

build for me, using only fire
and one right angle, a model of my mind, a template
for heart.

he says all we really are - we - merely silk
snagged on this sliver of existence.
he is calm in his skilled use
of turbulence that unwinds
my beliefs.

i am a woven braid - iridescent -
a dream had by crows that left
their feather’s lighter in the shade.
pulled from the bordering blue
round the white in flame.
our coupling. as it cools,
through caress and seduction,
it will take on a clean shape.
We will watch it come to be
What it will be.

It hardens before me,
An ever changing sky,
a sheath of memory.

And there will be no waking.
Such is the border between
dream/reality.

The border itself is a place.
I live there and i feel,
i can feel it being crossed
both ways - dream to reality,
fantasy to dream - by He who has seen
a good deal of Himself but nary a glance
of my face.

hush

Firefly
Originally uploaded by Atomic Citrocity

words witheld.
no-speech.
my lips, a cauterized wound
--bud frozen just shy of
bloom in an ever and almost season.
it can't reach beyond its waiting.

a promise i cannot break
for all rash attempts.
silence is felt. a rare feeling at that,
past and not merely, the absence
of sound.

the air quivers first - then the leaf
with weak stemhold, accosted
by soulless wind.

it begins again - insistence conveyed
without utterance - words aloud, disallowed,
unwound from the forbidden fabric
of noise about love, about fidelity.
loyalty has no interest in time or distance -

a vow that's resurrected in each
seamless breath - truncated, not by verbal
clutter or excuse or expectation - the details
cannot touch it.

streaming

ancient dig just below a
thin surface.
primitive uplift,
looks like ice from a distance.

glass breaking slowly,
a travelling weakness.
a crack that lengthens,
indiscerned from day, to
perfect day,
imperfect focus.

a splinted bone, a shattered
language. those who speak
it no longer feel the splinters
cross their tongues, no longer
notice schrapnel spinning off
each word.

broken by degree - each degree
alone, not so important.

solitude's release - fist opened off
a sparrow's ankle. wings frozen mid
flight. calm -- calm settles
just past panic's shoulder - heaven
is gone. wing frozen open in
outdated response.

i track my breath's ancestors through
older, stifled breezes --
through storms
that fell
against themselves
and let the garden's
hold in peace.

sovereign shadows sent like
stained sun's -
static shadow remaining from
a form you washed away.

shape.

recast me.

move my skin like dark, beneath clouds,
cross geography.
adjust with your fingers, refine with
your fists, thought brought down
to reconfigure whims conjured
at the drop
of my name
- i am changed.

the constants - the places i trace.
ritual's burrow.
someone else's habit
lingering on the tip
of my finger.
an itch, that's only relief
is through touch.
the number of words
in a sentence,
the number of
letters, the number, the
symbol, the ragged advantage in
counting, as if
being led to some destination
-- some place of import.

a white expanse of morning,
swaying with just forgotten
dreams and brows, empty
as blank pages.

on my side, my back feels long
and hollow - a large sky spread
between every bone. i need
someone pressed against
to hold it all in place.

a barrier to hold, withheld,
a flood of touch, a witness
to a woman's intimacy allowed
and treated as if he weren't
even there.

awareness.

focused.
to a pin prick
point and spreading.
for now, heaven spilled the stars
and look - they stayed right
where they are while pouring out
from my heart
like a hub
through my blood
to the tips
of my toes.

seized up ~
a place where the earth
goes tight,
retracts, then
splits.
a stone wall between
lover's arguing
the fault line between
need and want --
razed in an unrelated quake.

the birds go quiet ...
tornadoes rarely come at night.
the eye of the storm blinks
and human emotion colludes with
the weather. a voice and a spark
accompany thunder.

something acknowledged,
something denied,
a structure settles, the walls
sigh.

a mild swell of emptiness --
dire. accosted echo,
the nucleus of silence,
loudest just before
you get there.

come pose your composer

a storm, delivering its pulse
to my wrist.
a thought, a dance
without audible music.
two bodies laced with tones.
i wake daunted and silent,
listening for movement like a bird
with its head cocked to the world ...
my ear to your chest.

my hearing sense has shifted deep,
displacing my solar plexus.
the speaker is deaf
but the sounding, through replication and dialect,
is precise as this world will allow.


heavy with dawn, my prayers
are few. all patterned through
the repetition of day's
in singsong - simple rhythms.
appeals for and from
myself, with my heart
held up, transparent to
the mystery from which
it spun. set down - an idle spinning -
a hand, a giant metaphor
the great poet
tossing out a verse.
i am those few words.
i'm at loss to live them.

then came hope.
a simplerhythm.
a wavelength.
don't blink. you'll
miss it.

sample from my 'daytimer'

lucid and upright,
the gradual alignment that sets in
one rib at a time, promoting
memory as a template
for tomorrow.

i am moving sideways
cross a linear map.
man made and obdurate,
i crash through its codes
and outwit the unquestioned
law on my tale, camouflaged
in an arc of question marks
and communal hunger.

i feed you and grow sated.
i wait for your need to
acknowledge my own.
i lift the raw harmony
dug from a deep place,
earth scent hung off its heels.
keened enough to bust
the mute button permanently ...
at least,
for now.

a cliff fall of dreams ...
i can feel a root shifting beneath
the earth, beneath my feet
enough to make the ground unsteady.
tightropes. everywhere. some just
much wider than others.

i'd not waste a candle on the
darkness. let the night suffice as is.
if i whisper, too many may hear me
and my words are many and my words
are meant for you alone. you
handed me a mirror, as if
you, for the first time, handed me,
me. all i can see is a faint draft
of memory. this, i call my
my features. my identity. this
is what i face.

emotion and thought riotous.
loosened lightening, but
no rain. random and abrupt
cuts - precise and silent. no
thunder. how far away the storm?
i wonder.

perhaps at first, i loved you most
for loving me. love at first
sight unseen. a song at a height
beyond our reach. a bird
in the branches, consistent and
sorrowed above us. we'd say
nothing. listening. words hung from
our fingers like lamps in the darkness.
a light shared and shed only via
touch, with full awareness that
darkness is fluid and anything uttered
may well be lost to its current.

i know what it would be:
doorless, yet in your hand, a key to
so many secrets i'd well hidden
from others, including my own
conscious proximity.
i'd move back, moving
into your arrival and fall
forward for your arms.
we'd share the hold of a shiver
in my belly, equally. each breath
specific and memorable.
bird's quieted. storm
fully arrived and resting
beside us.
completed. completing.
complete.

missing inaction

Words have moved,
quiet birds
merged with breath.
even the wind
can't feel them

moving.

resolute, in
instinct calmy abandoned.
countered and broken,
their timeless migration.

i can't feel them.
their edges and curves won't catch
- speak numb across my fingertips. i can't
fit them in my mouth or shape
my tongue to dance their form.

i am waiting.
i've nothing but
bone dreams, nebulous
patience and wings of my own.
hoping, where prayer loses
its way amongst clutter.

wishing, across the empty
skies. my dreams fill
with language
in rife visitation
'til they burst into
waking: mute sand
moving across
blank surface with
the same shapes
i've seen from
smoke rising from
old candles.

throat-swoll hourglass
tipped on its side.
does anyone have the time?

too early to be late to be
waiting to take what it takes:
one moment's ample to change
a life, into open
invitation for
flight.

simple stories honored
or lost in the retelling.
i am too tired to move forth
in defense. so they are hurt.
i cannot heal them.
history so far from truth,
it's history, no longer.

there are hinges that open
to swing both ways,
letting in what is leaving
at the same time.

my memory opens in the wind,
dances silent as a ribbon
within its own colorstream.
it folds, to keep itself
in place and safe,
end to end.

a map, i can bend
to place your distance
in a curve so our
geographies touch.

neither sky nor road's fully
emptied. ever. a long expanse
of absence still, dense
with thought and ancient
questions no one's asked yet.
pulled into place by
a headlights warped light.
i have lost you.

absence shared.
unlikely intimacy.
sometimes it's my needs,
what i lack,
hunger, that
holds me
together.

shadow in exile

the darkest hours aren't fixed
between dawn and dusk.
a bleak light grafted to unclaimed,
late noon. flat
and thin edged.
sharp. don't touch.
subtly sour. it bleaches
my texture flat. a complete and quiet
annihilation despite

a backdrop of birdsong.

i strain to hear the
things with wings that sing.
it's everywhere lost to simple listening.
how do we become so used to beauty?
irreverent.

writing is a place
of emergency. writing like
a fugitive hidden
behind sanctified walls.
a poorly made roost - oddly sized nails,
splintered boards -- unstable, yet crafted
with care - full intent.
a center erected.
homed birds return with a message
or not.

if there's a barrier, it's a wall
of invitation. the stones fit loose,
carefully chosen for
their imperfection. room to breathe,
each to each and each between.
the wind given voice, so it comes
to sing - nature's force diffused
through its unearthly whistle,
channeling ghosts or perhaps
the rocks themselves.

and when the mooded earth
move-fidgets, the stone's resettle with it.
inverted time lapse dances of mountain ridges,
sleek as snakes.

urgency can be incredibly slow - thoughts so
deliberate, they stall
- somewhere
- impossibly vague
- safe from written language.
startled and kept at bay by
light's sharp edges. taken
for granted. so, guarded from me
by my own internal silence.
a boundary erected
with reverence's final vestige.

mariner's lost manual

i form my lips around shapes
no one bothered to name.
i blow sound through them, untangling
a language of instinct and white bone.
jutting from the earth's skin,
pale and made silk smooth by grainy winds
un and retangled through the desert's
mouthless throat ... or easterly and
stale -- hot off industry's maw.

a language of boats built on frozen river's,
waiting to sail with the thaw. that's faith
or premonition or wisdom or
madness. the wind's blur down
any clear line between
the lot of these.

hard to trust february's sun.
Still yet, choose to --
just do. however landlocked or sordidly solid
your geography, learn all you can
about the sea. and the earth,
even as you breathe through gills and flare
your rainbowed fins.
dedicate wild imaginings to the rest --
whatever falls between.

write down your dreams.
mimic the shapes your heart takes upon
itself. set them to speech.
don't lip sync the facts.
build your sail with whatever's at hand:
stone, spider's web or flannel sheet.
set it true. again, believe.
hold firm in magic. don't
do the math.

motive 8

reverent spies, shadows bent back
so far off from their
original source,
they come to believe ...
they themselves, become the belief
in their own separate lives.
life outcast to continue
beyond the strife of tactile form.

i lit a candle at the window,
it blackened and cracked the cold glass.
i lit it to let in the light -- to
attract some future thing out wandering
the dark streets alone. i lit it
so someone might look twice
and wonder ... just knowing they might,
i felt less alone with the gesture. i lit
it so i could blow it out and
breathe those post-flame moments in,
when the wax and wane and
wick scent grow strongest. when
time is a flavor that settles,
frightened on my lips.

Coldplay-Clocks Lyrics

i write in code
to myself,
among the breed of mathemicians
and clockmakers,
insensitive to anything,
save intricate sensitivity.

there is great care taken,
many secret rehearsals behind
the finished action through
gears, letters, numbers.
but somehow letters,
words -- they're
different.

writing offers little to
the viewer - a tiny distance
between my eyes and the pen.
a relationship takes place,
something happens.

the clocks here are not safe.
there is no battle between us,
we simply don't believe
in each other. i am stuck,
they are erratic -- left unwound,
struggling -- set ahead by a few moments
that i subtract and squander ...
i am still late.

my broken voice -- its shrill husk
falls away. i offer silence,
a quicksand of nothing left to say.
carefully breathing to loosen the
rubble of all i contain.
entrained to the sound of ticking
despite my attempts to pull away.
i am frightened.

ZAAR

commingled

i move back through old words --
a fine litter of gestures between them.
unscaffolded music,
tuneless and splintered.
you're under my skin
sumliminal, painless.

we are.
our structure disguised,
revealed only through footnotes and
side glances --
peripheral hymns rising sourceless.
i almost recall the chorus.

light so loud i cannot hear my
own footsteps as i
walk across the room
towards you. it's as if
i don't exist, while you fold and return
fresh sheets of sunlight to their source.
free at last
from the earth's
possessiveness.

word by word, i return each moment, each
verse, each paper thin
conversation
to silence.

for days i go without speech
beyond absolute necessity.
i find nothing absolute.
gesture's amplify in meaning and complexity.
the slightest movement in
my lover's resting hand,
one digit's bare shift,
an unfinished sentence ...
the slow, easy flow of
a large dark bird in upslope.
a feather filters to my feet.

all angle and oval with implication,
endlessly almost too much
for me. ingredients lost
to amalgamation
turning and turning, one breath
blended across
the blades of a fan, golden
wheat gone to white
ghost powder in a mill - rebuilt.
inert substance.
sustenance.

waves

milk is every color but white and
sometimes, a bit of weak blue.
nourished by skylight's where the sky
forbids certain cliche' hues,
while absorbing
all others.

the colors i see, are the frequencies rejected.

on my colorless days, nothing gets in.
when he was very small, my child
watched wild kaleidoscope's
hammering off my skin in directionless
flight. depending, he'd grow
agitated or quiet ... sad or sleepy from
trying to imitate me. in turn,

i learned to drift-pile these times into
the corners of his absence -- night time,
or days when he was away, visiting ...
so, in his presence, i sought porousness
-- a welcoming toward all color --
to his eyes, i became
transparent ... even invisible.

this experience of his mother,
most comforting and familiar to him,
easiest for him to share.
in his lightness, he could sense me most
through what he was, himself.

every explanation is partial. what's reflected,
is underscored by what's absorbed.
shingled color inset, overlaid, splayed
in streaming rivulets like
root systems of trees or grief. fire-spackled shadow ...

and so the day goes where i felt his tiny hand
in mine or woke with him wet on my chest in deep sleep.
the very weight of him, his mass and substance,
still fills me with inexplicably bright levity.

sojourn

we choose our name's each day anew.
our thin-skinned names, our
transient names and we call
to each other.
how will he call me?
will he? and my answer?
i will answer --
honoring the voice
if not the word.

we walk beside the river,
he and i, toward a horizon.
there, it pours itself
up into heaven and heaven
spills back through its veins.
walking for a long time
til we need time
no longer. sometimes, he moves like
a pawn beside me -- slowed by silence
and limits and private rhythms. sometimes,
he moves as if slipped off my side,
like an unmoored lifeboat riding
a surge towards a shore of willows or ferns
- several paces from me.
he always returns
-- a dove with a branch.
the river and i,
his starboard.

he is casual at the rim where
the water falls
away from
the earth. the end of
the world. the beginning of all
myth's which lack logic's gravity.
on the edge, he stands relaxed
and easy and free
from vertigo.

There's a crossing, a point
where the river floods out a road.
we hardly notice, having chosen
the water's purpose as our own.
the tire-worn path,
just a useless artifact.
it means nothing to us.

a decision was made
... or many more than one.
we made them privately,
without discussion
-- silent, wise and human
and riddled with a sense of
what's honestly needed
even when that seems to be nothing.

it is pressing -- press-pulling us
loosely towards Forward, over
washed-out roads we
never needed anyway.
listen, listen, we are
listening, for the secret
behind language, listening,
for a rich and fertile absence.
a place to rest
beyond the urgent calling
-- where i have answered,
always, already.

In Other News ...

surfaces hurt
simply, with thin stains
that stay
in shallow permanance.
i should not underestimate
the power and thrust
of shallowness.

discolored, where
the water's strong voice
has worn a groove --
the desert recalls
the shoreline
through us.
there is no mirage,
just shared memory.

old record,
skipping diamond,
next week's rainstorm,
an ex-lover bathing,
the rattling pipe's.

i hear them.
their harmony just beneath
my skin,
wet and shifting.
broken-in floorboards
groaning in flashback
for every touch from
every ancient footfall.
they grow louder
in the dark.

i wake and walk
lightly, pressing
my weight
in soft lifts up
toward the
heavy Above.
i offer
the maalstrom
my silence.

incoming clouds in cupped swells.
shade travels below storm
like shadow falling from bird's
in blind flight.
instinct.
this one arrives at night,
but the dark doesn't recognize
this darkness.
the morning is left
a bit confused.

i read the clouds.
i read the words.
they're exactly the color
of the page.

i know a Silence caught
in repetition, teaching itself,
its self across distance.
and this is where i am,
though distance itself is emptied
of me -- cut off from everything.

coaxed by small, swollen flames
into vision -- illumination?
the edges, well lit, lifted high
to suggest the shape
of things but their forms resist
belief in me.

a heart lies in the wings. not yours,
not mine. i lean in, listen to
who's beating -- balancing
the wind beneath their flight,
following it back
to its source.

beginning. some winds roll off
stars, make it all the way here,
re-channel through hills,
through man-made corridors.
they come from the outside.

some winds -- cold -- my own ghost
passing through me in cat-like drafts,
or sharp twists like wrists snapping
free from binding.
their origin, internal and freedom
follows these flight patterns back
to its own prison.

editors

a looseness to my frame.
a space between each bone.
plenty of room for eternity there,
everywhere. there is nothing so
heroic in allowing the inevitable.

in closeted speech, in patterns
attuned to too much conversing
with silence, my bones speak
of or for me. i've been accused of empty
words -- too vague, too loose.
as if that is wrong,
as if the room afforded there
should be made thick and air
tight so questions cannot breathe.

balanced on the slim ribbon of consciousness,
i have watched language sleep beside me,
restless, or still -- half illumined
and as much obscured.
lost in sweet shadow and articulate
hesitance. it wakes sometimes,
in a sudden shift. it opens its eyes
like a child from a deep sleep night fright.
looking straight at me, it recognizes
nothing.

i grow empty. i grow
meaning full and free from history.
anything truly at peace comes from
troubled past. so i've heard.
empty words. i've been accused
of phrases lacking clear direction.
i cannot provide a tour guide or map.
you are here in this verse. what is
verse but a place to get lost?
therein lies hope for finding
-- something -- a way back
or a way to question,
and perhaps then, a reason
to never return.

amnesia

In forgetting, what remains of passion?
What's forgotten? The lies I told myself or
truth's I failed by being too weak or too
strong in wrong ways. A finely honed loss
of autobiography. Something closes down;
redirects itself into emptiness and

I can't ...
(though I'm told this isn't true)
I'm searching for it like a rolled away
lost item. A misplaced ticket meant to take me
and one other passenger ...
somewhere ...
an important destination.
Everyone's waiting. I can't

remember who or where. It is written
in block letters on the tickets.
Before I've begun, I'm tired of looking.
I don't but

I can close my eyes and set my eyes
across a moving window -- a companion
beside me. Both of us gazing through
loops of surreal and remarkable remakes
of symmetry. The earth has been thoughtful
yet imbued with whimsy. She's set a hundred flowers
to buffer every footfall (if we walked there,
we'd step lightly) and high hills bent over
-- slow creatures, stone heavy,
mime's moving through time at a far
different cadence than
our window, my companion and mine, gliding
past-future. Everything slows down
when speed's so fast.

I travel behind my eyes like that.
Travelling.
Among strangers.
I forget that
I can't.
If not confidence, something's been built
through my solitude. Shadows move
across the walls. They watch me
watching. Apart from,
yet a part of their journey.
I'm their montage landscape: bereft orchard and
lush desert and so many lovely shades
of grey.

Random beauty offset by harsh absence.
Partialized,
halved,
and half forgotten ...
An indiscrete mystery.
Every third page missing.
Still, the mystery's complete.

sub limb in all

the muscle's in his hands are
the center of his confidence --
his fulcrum on the periphery, and
where he touches - touch - carries
back to the core. there, a blue star glowing
brighter than traditional light in its
cadence of classic rhyme and release.

however tired his eyes, they move
awake across life; crossing the tasks of
his hands, at hand. strong. but a strength
derived, he knows, from his own
powerlessness.

in the slipstream of agenda, she's a slice
of color slipping through a dark door, ajar.
a dreamer. a subliminal dance - while slumber
scarcely moves, there is a horizontal grace.
a subtle stirring; the outside suggests motion
behind closed eyes, and motion closes in again.
frantic. elegant. imbued with exhaustion for
these are the dreams one wakes from unrested.

banging into contained color to set color free,
breaking over structure, her white palms catch
the sparkle from the globe. breath is heavy.
she invokes it to use her lightly and asks the same
from his hands. still dreaming, his hands, still,
but never resting. centered.
just at the periphery.

My senses doubled by the traffic
of small things. Doubled over by moment's
waving their arms in me -- now now --
Stilled and unleashed, I am recalling and
clashing against the presence
with all my wish and memory revising
a boy who ... a man -
and I was something from a song for him while we
wrestled and becalmed within our small city of moods.
An ache that grew and fell with my pulse. A collapse
of the stillness, a feeling, always,
that there was something I had to do; an overturned
leaning towards departure. His or mine. Either
would be hard to accept.

What is adjacent to love besides love? I do nothing.
I just appear. And it's unclear whether he used me as
a lens to focus the light or a darkness to obliterate it.
I don't know what happens to me in another's heart.
We invented strands of harmony, stole some chords,
slashed the limbs from classic love stories
to rebuild them as our own.

What is adjacent to love? In our dualist kingdom, can it stand
of its own without opposition? Neither hate
nor fear step beyond its gentle compass.
I heard once that the opposite of love was indifference.
Perhaps that's close. I fear it.

Can you waste your life on a gift? I fumble with who would want or
even what's received. I search for a fragment lost --
a sketch of faceless remorse and 'what if' and
the formlessness where
everything has a purpose, just before it dissolves
into narrow shadow.
There is nothing adjacent.

to be written

when i write, it's perhaps the only time
i don't think. who taught me
this secret? how did i learn
or discover the privacy
of language? a trapdoor freeing me from
impinging traps, keyed to hidden chords and
verse disguised as clamour.

surrounded by intimacy, lost in story.
alone, i disappear into a world
where even i am a stranger, though here, identity
loses its clout and swagger. each word a
capsule of past collapsed beneath possible future.

disguised structure revealed only through notes
in the margin. a long, sideswiping glance can mean
everything. pause there. put down what you're reading.
the book you were given may have been
the wrong one. how long have you been studying?

i move away from the text, like spokes off a cartwheel,
like blades off a fan or floating wing. i move out from
my self spinning each piece, each
select rhythm, i am moving.
not thinking. i am writing again, history
ever carried to the present by small things: a seed hitched through
the fur of a cat. a stowaway bird echoed through
the hull of a barge so long at sea. the verses i whisper in sleep
til they wake me to find myself already reaching -- not for
pen or paper -- not for light; for my own pulse.
that beat cut loose and lifting out from my grip.

i'm blind upon waking - brailling the
shape of each word in my heartbeat, clear as effortless music
and all i am doing is feeling.

how do i share this? i cannot keep that which keeps me nor
can i give it as it guards me from all that i love. it's
enticed me with its terrible proposal of secrecy
in separate hours that still, finally call me to intimacy.

pacing privately through my own version
of myself. guided through water with
minimal effort; a mother with
her infant in a green pool turning
slow-swoosh circles. my shadow lets me
go; sends me out seeking texture and
light - sends me out
from a core of memory that stores
life in splinters. fragments of music,
a litter of tones. it's all
sun through the branches. it's all jokes
and stories begun, trailing down
to forgetful overgrowth before reaching
any destination. i keep beginning with
this feeling: giant songs building nests,
resettling to digest broken off hopes in
scatter; restless integration. a malcontent at
peace in moment's pressurized; released
to stifle time spent, to send me slipping off a
glitch in eternity's upslope - a stitch in time's
side, a joke to leave one in the stitches
dropped time's nine saved again, if only,
if i could only recall
how it ends.

things i do

to avoid discovery,
i hide.
to discover things for myself,
i hide, for this is the way
to become a croanie of the hidden.

it is cold here. cold is good for its want
of fire and so i build. i read the coal flames.
there are words in them; they form and fade
in less than an instant. you must read very quickly;
very quickly or by intuition; let your heart feel them
like speech.

i feed the fire with dry branches and spare change.
pennies find their value in heat. they turn over, turn
color from copper to blue green
like the color of dark evergreens,
like the ash that fell
behind my eyes in fever as a child.
like confused waters
reflecting dusk where i reached to retrieve
something
under the water's skin. seen plainly but my hand
came back empty. that trick of
angles in water's deflection
that keeps fish safe from spears and wished upon coins
undisturbed at the bottom of fountains and wells.
once wishing well beyond my hopes,
i groped like that but you were not
where i thought you
would be. funny. now my wishes make fair kindling.
let the flame's tongue unroll the green story
before my rapt witnessing.
I'm all eyes;
listening.

perspective

ravens.
rising smoke against night's liquid
all caught in the moon.
a slow spread of blood underwater,
silken and grey in the false light -
a threat in its fact and what it might attract.

impure montage, dimensional daydream, my worldview, i'm trapped.
tepid bars - iron mirages, close-set.
still, the gaps between each lets a wide world out
in ignoble whispers with all the right words
immobilized by the netherworld between thought and
sound, tangled as a strand of lights.

Counting Crows - Colorblind

Juggling Magic

Juggling Magic
Originally uploaded by Atomic Citrocity

idle action, trans
action, transcendance sent to dance on a riff
or wind thru the string woven cross a girl's laughter.
something transpires just beyond fire, trans-pyre;
an alter of lifting flambouyance. flame bouyant and inspiring
the star's, their endless exhale, all heat and light.
a ravenous grace. a shadow, now spent;
exhausted and falling to rest beside its lover -
leaving loyalty to form behind, so form itself crumples;
a ragdoll no longer infused with light.

quick fuse crackleburns fast - young boy's dropsmash
flashbulbs off a viaduct bridge
into countless shards of silent wreckage glinting,
again; daunting as a gemfield with me here, obliged
to nod approval and spin myself dizzy.

Peter Gabriel - Mother of Violence and Humdrum (live)

Lyrics for Mother of Violence:

Walking the street with her naked feet
So full of rhythm but I can't find the beat
Snapping her heels clicking her toes
Everybody knows just where she goes

Fear, fear -- she's the mother of violence
making me tense to watch the way she breed
Fear, she's the mother of violence
you know self-defense is all you need
it's getting hard to breathe
It's getting so hard to believe
to believe in anything at all

Mouth all dry eyes blood shot
data stored in microdot
Kicking the cloud with my moccasin shoes
T.V. dinner, T.V. news

Fear, fear -- she's the mother of violence
don't make any sense to watch the way she breed
Fear, she's the mother of violence
making me tense to watch the way she feed
The only way you know she's there
Is the subtle flavour in the air
Getting hard to breathe
hard to believe in anything at all
but fear

owed to

night's country; homesteaded by
electric wires and undocumented tongues
-we've become our own sun - no; this
has always been -ask any nocturne
- ask me.

our dark anthem; mellow as marrow
sheathed by a day's white bone
- stilled as the warm alchemy
at a mother's center
- woven into round rhythms; i unravel.
winged and hooved; our ideas.
their special loneliness amidst
definition and natural LAW.
indebted to them somehow, despite
my old negotiations and romantic affectations.

breach - a breach of promise or birth;
a breached contract - something turned wrong
or broken. a breached thought or intent
turned round on itself with lifeline wrapped
at bluing neck.

to whom am i
indebted - to what?
to water's succulence.
my ears beneath its surface - those sounds
and a promise breached - sounds.
the familiar sounds of family - any
family, so like one's own;
with your eyes closed, that stranger
could be you.
hard to forgive them that ...
and so i ask
forgiveness.

breath and brevity

light shone through a bird's red tail feathers -
through novembered leaves, veined and flushed as
my lover's wrists above his hands; fisted tenderly.
stained glass clinging behind my cathedral of eyelid
and edginess - not quite or just a little frightened.

temporal as a boneless moth; this moment's unlimited
confines. i breathe your breath, for you asked me to.
i taste your finitude expressed
all through your scent;
so you, so very
in and of you, that you notice it
not at all.