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.