Random Extremity

she paces the length of speech,
sidelong glances past surface, to its vast
lack. and she loosens, streams into
the gaps - before, during,
after.

expands.

she's not spoken
for weeks.

silence, acutely exhausted.
listen, nod,
understand within a
flat drop abandonment -
herself of herself
assuming form, lost
in the sound of
sound.

studying the sky, reeducating herself on color and things
before things had names, before
the divisive unravel. in the beginning of the end: word-ing -
intellect-launched capacity to worship
itself. cutting apart each moment in aphasia-like halts.

there is no third person,
no different drum.

winds heavy with the scent of other lives,
leaking wet lavender brush fire - an arsonists emotive pressure,
sore, inflamed and livid. fast curves, stay focused on the yellow line.
somewhere, the elements collide and make rain made heavy with pulled down dust.
elevator drop-fail to catch itself - thunder shifts her heart to an anatomically
unlikely location.

incorrect.

alleys full of couches without pillows, gutted appliances, dying plants
and she grasps why some pretty things get
thrown away - lightening frames the inconsequential
with reverence - this, she misses in the thick
sub zero.

warmer months, walking below a streetlight that flickers and dies -
right as she's passing. does this happen to everyone
or so often?

to happen.

the possibilities of taking one firm step towards any compass point leaves her spinning.
smoke odor, burnt oil, she walks through electricity towards anything carrying a pulse.
it is all carnival; there are men in shadow and she hears earth shifted by their feet.
no entrance to focus on, entranced and scattered energy,
all the places she's never been to, pulling.

half sleep walk, half life, half empty - becoming another element,
tasting salt - life giving. controlling the moon, the pressure
of blood, a cliff eaten back, is still
a cliff. thoughts like and unlike this adrift and crashing against
her stillness, their birth and aliveness, rich stores. moment initiates,
again, again.

everything is always new. she is too tired to smile in the throes of her own madness
and too polite to air its bright gloss tangles, all spit spark and greased slick.

she prefers incoherence, cacophony abstracted - this, she needs
so much. legs feel weak though they are
stronger than a man's - vocal chords sting with a song that has wanted inside her
for longer than longing - soft and hoarse and filled with ugly poetry men whisper to women
who are lost.

she doesn't know why he touched her or his name - disconnected - a visitor to the hour
unfrightened.

old memory. no more safer from her than she is from it.

un. huge hands full of calluses that catch in her hair
pinned down by the centrifugal force of her own awareness - coherent and calm and listening
to light burn out somewhere very far away - blood and ink - every writer tattoos this
world. its flesh says only yes.
even to the graffiti.

an utterance of night
that is curative - a salve murmur.
the human perfume and chant in scent
heard suddenly as if just delivered
but vortexed in the old, old.

ugly wax flowers fighting sunlight and steam - places where earthquakes occur daily -
the rocks move more quickly - you can witness their breath
and direction - a willingness to learn how to love - again - travel only through nights
without clouds - drinking a lover's sweat and then painting their likeness
in the sand - right on the fault line. we all have them.

she almost speaks -

1

Viaduct Notebook (3-2-91)

we only know forever
for a few years and
for those years, all
or nothing.
love for everything or for a lover, a dream, a flavor savored or spit
out we let out our calls of grief or joy without favor -tending towards a bias
of reverence for life because part of it is ours - expressed by us
only in that we're part
of its yearning ache.

i don't know how this gets lost. i see traces in those it's happened to - i see it
in their face and can just tell and i want to ask - was there a first time that silence got too loud?
the sounds of your own body, your heartbeat in your ear, your essence striking
against cloth, against wood, against glass that's milk colored -
water down your throat - a gulp - these sounds sent you opening windows to pull up any out-sound,
to drowned the "in," not caring where they're from - a ball bouncing down the street, a car turning over,
feet that aren't yours.

how can one forget their internal terrain is rhythmed with wisdom and vast and pumping out its
mysterious music -all the time. or do they not ever know.

light a candle because you remember the scent from another fire - blow it out because the best part is the
scent of a flame's absence - scented wax and wick and smoke. try to fall in love, to be alone
with an awareness that at some point, forever was outgrown and now,
all fear, and a belief you know better. the call:

fainter - and its impulse for action, let come, let go,

a private inaction sets in - even, or perhaps especially, in busy
busy lives - gone lifeless. i see this everywhere;
this city roars with it. and whatever my experience,
however piercingly hard sometimes.
at least, i am also,
piercingly alive.

2

Viaduct Notebook (2-26-91)

Feels different in here than it looks to them - modeling does - private jobs with photographers - they are nothing like quick pose for a sketch class. I don't think he feels me evolving/decaying with the moments - faltering/prevailing - tension manifest to the visual eye as skin - it doesn't feel to me that he does. With quick sketch, pen and pencil and chalk - I am writing poetry in slow motion with my body instead of my words - as if alone. Simple. The artists can pick, reinterpret or transcribe what they like - or come up with their own ideas for where the lines should be, but I am not - perhaps what I lack suggests what they need. But. Standing in front of a camera - it's all about his intent - I am an object. He thinks I am naked but that would have to be a choice - of mine - and I do not choose to be naked with him. I don't know why his fingernails are blood black - like every one of them was hit with a hammer - HARD - but my eyes keep straying back to them. He has me standing behind a bunch-crumple of plastic - semi-clear cloudy sheets and the windows with all the sun that's warm but doesn't penetrate -and I am just shy of a shiver - even though it's something like being in a green house - washed out and standing still and I don't even know what his lense is focused on -

torso shots. He tells me:

"I've been accused of performing acts of violence against women by cutting their heads off in my photos - but - uh - even if that's true - which I don't think it is - it's pretty innocent."

I didn't say anything to this - he didn't seem to expect a response - just started tearing (strategically placed) holes in the plastic and having me reposition: "Turn a little more towards me - goodstop - can you hold that?"

yes of course i can staring at his hands again - fingers on the buttonshutter (really really black) and i want to ask but don't because it would be rude and i can feel my boob sticking out of one of the holes in the plastic and it feels really ... bad - like it HAS been cut off - and magnified - and you would have no idea, looking at his photos, that black fingers took them and i have no idea if anything we are doing here is any "good." comes back to his intent: is his heart seeking to create art or is he just looking at a boob sticking out of plastic cuz he likes that sort of thing.

is this art or should i just patiently wait for an internal apocalypse. more ruins to wander - do I abandon myself.

that same night, i'm at an art gallery with mark and meg. some show for sculptures made from found objects. what is it with all the wire? it's everywhere - and even weirder, meg points out the artist - over there - (her??!!!) a vary fashionable lady in very expensive shoes clicking about in the center of her creation - room after room of things that seem to be designed to feel horrible inside me, personally. trying to make a statement - a real, innovative, edgy artist - have a beer take a look wear a fur or blood up or wear all black and live large and small talk and be flambouyant avante garde serious statements about .... yes. this is really something ... different.

meg and mark are talking about some of the local female artists that just "... garden, live off their husbands and paint.' i don't feel so good, and don't tell them that i stood for just such a woman for 7 hours in a garden last week - a commission piece for the denver art museum - she ended up not even using it. holding one position for that long becomes incredibly painful - but you don't want to bother the suffering artist.

"How would you describe what's here?" Mark asks me. I think I just said, "I wouldn't ..." - though I was thinking, 'explosion at the dry cleaners' - what with all the wire hangers. He says "We're all being raped again aren't we?" I'm not sure what he means; he is so beautiful but right now I feel disappointed, at large - in that beauty. Especially right now, I needed it and ... ... ... I'm not saying men don't have a right to talk about that word as if they truly understand it, but I wonder. I do wonder.

Sitting amidst all this shit and I'm asked to describe what is here. I just wonder WHY we are still here, being angry and disapproving - and why this display bothers me SO MUCH. Why don't we just ... go rather than stay in a place we don't like? Free beer. So are we really so much different than the artist herself or all her admirers - and she has them -I can hear them 'admiring.' So I say to Mark, and I think the comment seemed a bit odd to both of us, but I still needed to say it: We are nothing but our sins until we quit seeing them in others.

3

more from The Viaduct Notebook - and Meg - unedited (January, 19, '91):


I empathize too much with her (arrogant, my belief that this is what i'm doing). I relate, identify, project but can't fill in the difference. Hers is not mine,
but at work, we understand that on days Meg's not there, she was likely unable to get out of bed -
staked there by the weighted pierce of "it."

Her movement - she gracefully lumbers - head sways
with the fall of her feet, slow-like every step - every motion is an effort she has to deliberate over before taking. Walking itself, unnatural.

and I think it isn't good to get inside your head like this to get there and stuck there and never mind your head - how should I behave anyway
and it isn't good to drink alone and lately I've been making a lot of stupid mistakes. it's hard to believe a locked door, by itself, can change your
life but war - not desert storm but our war is nothing is different yours from mine but I worry - my ability to be in this 'normalworld' and function as a part of it and ... ... ...

when I asked meg why she came here (to her old apartment - now mine):
cheap rent - but really, there was a man - a disk jockey (who now lives across the hall from me).

Meg didn't listen to music for three years because of him,
and not just his station,
not any station,
not even a tape,
and if a car pulled up beside her with their radio on,
she would plug her ears.

3 years - she tells me while we are walking again after work under the viaduct; i'm trying to understand what he could have done to her and of course, she won't tell me - only what she did in response.

she has a picture of Jack Kerouac on her wall in her new place. i've seen it but didn't know that's who it was or that she took it down here - a mural off an abandoned building's wall - which is where we are now but we can't get close to it because they fenced it off - barbed wire. meg comes here to take pictures all the time - well. not as much as she used to. all this was beautiful when it was new to her but now it's industrial garbage - not the same. i think we're both attracted to it because it bespeaks abandonment. she tells me they are going to turn - all this - into an amusement park with stores and maybe even fake turf - i can't even imagine. we've turned and are heading home, side by side and quiet. I feel us - side by side and see us, for a moment,

from a bird's eye view -

Meg's slow, iambic gravity and me, (how do 'they' describe me -how has she) ethereal fragile insubstantial - whatever.

both of us balanced at the fulcrum of this place and 3 years without music and the singing voice I feel stuck in my throat and the barbed wire holding us out - or in. I feel a large sound build and send out from my throat - involuntary and NOT deliberate, not a moan, not a roar - to anyone but me, a scratchy half word/whisper. meg says, huh? I say, nothing - just clearing my throat. I still feel it there now , that sound - maybe it is always there.

4

it is just this: the absurdity in free floating anguish
and bereft paralysis -barbed wire wrapped
through my belly and chest and throat. if i move, it will shift and dig,
if i don't, it will spread.

when something situational is wrong, it is there -
when absolutely nothing is wrong, it is there. the worst question
at a bad time: why? pinwheel thoughts - too many of them and voices
that aren't mine.

and there are things I have learned to do that will help.
don't think just do them they will help.

but there it will still be - waiting and rhythmed to rise again -
a cold planet that takes the sky. mostly, i've learned to just keep
doing the helpful things and generate my own idea of warmth.

such an isolated words - when it is appropriate, there's no energy
to say it - and it is very private - it is all skin but cannot feel touch.

5

before familiarity, a long recognition -
i felt you; i sensed a deep
internal waiting that knew, before
circumstance surrendered detail to when,
to place - by touch i could sketch
your nuance across the dark -
your face and the fact
of your bone's.

reverberant slipstream swallowing effort -
future leans back into history. hurry with
ease, i'm here, ivory towered, free verse
eloquent, swinging trapeze that sways
the rotational plane with orbits defying set patterns,
rings turned to bells around Saturn,
pealing away each sphere's harmony,
throwing the reins to the ride,
staying astride, gripping
nothing.

without anticipation, patience set its jaw,
tracing yours in the dusk that sets heavy and empty,
here - misplaced - and here
and gone and again,
rhythmic -
a heart space -
always in waiting.

6

thirst and soft paper -
blank.
hand opened, palm flat, I press
into it and feel its whisper.
my fingerprints pull back;
my identity, elsewhere and waiting.
my spirit,
quenched.

glass and skin altering each other's
temperature; texture and oily film,
a heightened state collects there to
shift the possibilities of what can be viewed.

texture without context.

easy glide through
paper doorways;
empty train yard groans its
elaborate weight through the mundane
waiting. bored passengers boarding boxcars,
unknowing the tracks themselves are transient.
- one word spray painted on each car,
carrying its own baggage - its subliminal
meanings - no two passengers feel
the same thing.

not tomayto, not tomahto - not tone or
pronunciation. when I hear tomato, however you slice it,
I think of my father I think
of night shade and green fruit on a browning vine
in late autumn, too late, and too far below
consciousness - what else? I can't tell even myself with
every word running course and sharp and yet,
the page, somehow, neither rips or resists or

combusts.

simmer and silt

unnamed shapes present themselves;
the senses sway in and
geometry steps aside.
let it find me in the stillness;
let the words come seeking to
define me - i'll provide occurrence
amid widespace in an unriddled heart.
you, provide
the meaning.

Throwing Muses - "Two Step" (7)

A lag time between what I write on paper and typing onto a screen. Word floods, via a pen, and I can't write fast enough - but something occurs in transcription that needs time. I think I understood this, even before my 9 post challenge (which strikes me as sort of silly now). It's not on my terms - language isn't - the words find me originally, and then again when a spiral falls open to a page or whatever; I type them into notepad, then save and leave them. From there, I visit - not changing things much, if at all - so much as adding -expanding or rearranging to where they want to go - the way roots spread - or spills travel. And I do this until they feel done - not me with them, so much as vise versa - they just don't need me anymore. Then I post. However odd it sounds to express, it's the process - but one I have to at least be attentive to. That is what quit. That's what I quit doing - and it's what I'm reminded of now. Still, I will stay with this - and post things before they are ready (or ripe), but both they and I, I think, would have been better for being allowed the grace to develop according to something more mysterious - and organic - than a quota. Deadlines can be lifelines - but not always.

8

this far
on this side,
a shaft of light leaves half
in shadow -
and what is not there overtly,
what I can't quite ...

here.
the midway,
the fine balance on the fence,

a heart that could be going
either way.

do I wait.
is there something I could ...
?

what is said,
set insights,
so different,
so luminous,

so absent.

9

past the grey maybe,
a natural curve that does not want
to be fought - let it slip through psyche,
a needle-less thread-easy
out in and out round body its singular
output sublime through and through you
in yet not in me - heart - recurring
grainy and
feminine.

grace dips its soft force and I ride
my own slope still and yet,

when it crests,
if its wave
of anguish disengages from ebb and flow
- if it locks in freeze frame, stiff - I will break
for it.

Swollen postulate before gap
resonance where questions surf and skate - if it stays
there, I will not
linger to argue the veracity of yielding.

not aloud, unmoved, reused, cycled over
cast back ground between forming form itself.

humanity.
absurdity.

atoms crashing, billiard balls
bouncing molecules off each to each in a men's
club where there's much talk about women
without talking about us at all.

persist gently.

specific vibration - a tone assigned to every bone in my spine
and when aligned, I am attuned. smoke cobra rising to fill and disperse -
for place in distance, it takes my shape.

not insensitive;
I have just quit feeling.

female male fee I pay for being
unmoved by the performance
of well developed characters,
conversant, observant,
thoughtlessful without
deep occurrence -
small sleeping fiber forgotten
its purpose.

weary.

a guiding star -
event horizon -
planes and shadows at certain distance,
a guiding force risen on laughter at crowds
and their pleasers and pleasures
and rigid ideas like
North.

air tight logic solid arguments with the unknown,
for the certainty in a tome, while
the All carries on - illiterate - prolific - beatific.

oblivious.
clear.

instruments of winter -
the cold itself needs sleep, originates
in bone, travels out
oval-ing, resplendent lassitude. long
fibers unresponsive
but supple, so suggestive - dynamic flow,
upended prayer spill of words absorbed
by earth - by bucket and shovel, there,
excavation caves in and levels
with
me.

unclaimed memories - ghost's wandering
redubbed, rebooted meaning underfoot
never the same river, walking on water ...
meaning? no longer sure what it means.
still, it wants repetition
just beyond word. pressed flesh speaks
green golden 'til spirit grows immune to the
shindig where skin digs in, exerting its half life
elastic. .

resist.

unable to detect the scent of my
own skin - yours - but it's all the air I breathe
just now.

completion.

repentance
for the unfinished overflowing
boxes and unplaced cinderblocks that fill with cobwebs now long
left abandoned to home hollow corpses
of flight.

transposed amidst broken battles, a clutch convoluted - all pipes and
machines w/ no trace of efficacy in daylight. I hear them in devoid
hours - hours made devoid by our ineptitude - I can't
save the new moon from losing
its elsewhere shine - I am mesmerized
at my own discomfort with hope.

dreams come,
observe me with indulgent disdain, for they
persist, if not prevail. They stay.
they stay, yearning, and on occasion my lips part in
proffered explanation
that flattens - catches,

halts.

atoned.

absolved.

KiD CuDi- Love Stoned Lyrics on Screen HD

It has bothered me - how much I write, but how little of it makes it to a post here. My blog bespeaks a neglect I don't always hear - I let it merge into background noise - but I can feel it - looming clutter loomclutter. I have, before, more than once, made a foggy half promise to myself to post more often - and set a number of times per week or month that seemed reasonable to me - but then ... ... ...

SO

I write this post to myself because I have an intuitive sense that it is somehow important for me to say this aloud in a way that matters, as my relationship with myself matters much more than my old habits within seemed able to acknowledge.

9 posts in 9 days.

Seems challenging but not ridiculous and I like the number 9 - it is 3, 3's. Good enough reason for me. It doesn't matter, Lori. Open a notebook randomly and post a part of a sentence there, if you want. Or a long chaotic verse - the kind my Pop described as getting on a bus where the driver won't say where you're going; he takes you on a detour to the moon and you finally end up 3 blocks down the street at a convenience store. Well.

SO

I wouldn't make a very good bus driver. I forgive myself for this - and also for bearing little resemblance to Earnest Hemmingway ... ... ... Maybe NO resemblance at all. And after the 9 days? An epiphany or transformation or ... back to the conspicuous absence? Dunno. "After" is not the point. There is no point. "The goal is to keep the goal the goal (Dan John)." I'm just gonna keep getting on the bus - I'm not the one who "drives" my writing, to begin. And if I have to go to the store down the street, I'd prefer to include the moon.

kin - E - Z - ah - logy 101: Exercise is Good

heart sense rolls low, over
the word underworld looking
for entrance, exit, a pivot
or nexus from which kin aesthetics
join in stillness.

reversed bell tone, a shower of glass
returns to amend its shatter.
nervous tic talk-tug in equation pulls
numbers away; feels through categories
where existence holds,
allegorical and transient.

meta-physical pain break
apart the experience. psycho soma
depth perception deep innervated
intervention, inner rubric, so simply
splayed open - nothing substantial.

a beauty born of quiet failures,
undermining history's lock
down in blood and sense-sorry
deprivation.

muscle tone reverberant -
fahrenheit vision - loud
disordered notes not yet
music; brutal boiling clouds
color my joints, rhythms wait
for my long body, angled
release.

releasing rhetoric of loved ones, of love
itself departing. leaving the spurned adorned
with sanity's damning gestures in privacy
against absence of him, of her, of us, of
self, against eros consumed and spat out.

weep easy grace, child held back, wrapped
at throat by umbilical throes to a place before
language, viscous and vicious.

pure - there are no words for this elegant lack -
playing card burning in silence - ash fueled
masks, the script deflates fast - flat.
barbed wire coiled at the top of the fence.

stomped down permafrost,
somatic origins where emotion
begins in very basic knots, squared in
the gut ravel, fibrous, flora scavenged
cells rebuilding, tightening round
electric pulsing impulse.

a healthy heart has no metronome.
variable drop beat, time follows along.
stops. stop the stop watch the
clock, time line lies lay me
low and this timeless moment,
it is
personal.

all I can do is
hold my ground so I've
something tactile and difficult to
let go .

all I can do is begin to ...
a body in motion tends to...
therapeutic intervention exorcise
the pent up ineluctable,
the gut wrench, open
incision, heart murmur surge
ritual in rarified experience.
every nerve root blind to
every rule my psyche lives by
in catch--rattle-clench hesitance.

only this. will lift.
my spirit. to
pivot twist air through its
surface, meeting full
exertion, pushed to
extremities until my
extremities cease

amidst risk and skidding,
perimeters threaten
ejection of self out of body
arrow going, druid
feminine madness spooling moonlight,
criminal in oil, moth in its paradox
loving light from a state invisible to itself,
wings afire while and yet, yearning towards
snake-shed skin to become
more moored in soul.

breath pushed so deep
I no longer breathe;
profound respite beyond
profane need. bruised voice and limb
lost to me, earned in urgency, unaccounted
and I do not stop for any of these until
past exhausted, time comes down, its soft
click pronounced far away and nearly
recalling memory, as if its story tells itself
fresh, like blood still flowing
for moments yet, in the newly dead.
far from this, distant witness to
mind in lightening fading, sparking
talk at itself while i inhale and let
go, just
go -
go to exhale -
breathe

out - expanding the pause between
all pauses.

leaving nothing of self for self
to hold hostage.

palettes

spirit relegated to the rafters, looking on
without comment at all
that goes on
without it.

are we alone? here in a crowd in
a box, feeling lost feeling
watched; observed, keenly aware
of Being never being
seen before.

a certain movement in my heart, slipped
between palettes of
time where Time stacks moments
high.

just behind:

an artist has been painting
one canvas only, for longer than
shadow-long memory.
old and still old-ing, yet
green-inspired every morning,
he paints a new vision,
one on top of the last, behind
the stacks, pure and focused,
paint layers thick and
thick and bubbled back.

passion rises and doubles - peerless and alone,
anon, in long courageous. juxtaposed to wave red
lengths: anguish. ill-immune to despair's pointed
bouts of self doubt. the thick paint on his brush subject
to judgment even through a steady relentless press of
spirit brushing up close against the
So Sacred in simple color
set over color over night drying,
time from its depths before time stacked high.
can you hear it? beauty's quiet geology; its
fission, tectonic and crack.

ancestral layers, with the new, chip and scatter to
his touch - the canvas itself
distressed, slack
and worthless, yet
still,

he is there and
he continues.

Rabelais was wrong - Nature doesn't "abhor"

an unmet need sustained
by its own presence alone;
thriving in its hollows,
is it then, truly a need? what perishes?
what sends out roots? sometimes,
absence responds in its
vacuum; generates something unlikely:

beauty.



settling into the in
between, grey aria - vague music
explicitly un
defines my slow
slow dawn descending from different depths -
a new place, timeless as the oldest star
i can locate - towards this source, i confess
dissonance, only to find all the words,
already there already
there.

in, out and under, not through intention,
this heart's juggernaut

never meant to

create a love for

you that touched but held -

untouchable, even

skin to skin.

uneven in loss, set off
balance, it is myself
i mourn; confined in a room
without angle or corner, for there are
no walls. i stack useless, open doors
flat up on each to each, towards
the sky, already slung low to meet
warped glass leaning blurry and frameless -
letting light in and in and in,
expansive as the big bang, still
dynamic, rolling out without pause
or regret. it never meant to
seek its rim-elastic limit without
rest, less distance and it won't pause til it
gathers defined limit and unwrites
that theory and laughs at mankind not
unkindly - it's just the IDEA exists between
cocky set ears which infinite lacks so it just

doesn't hear. on the outskirts, in life's pyre dreamt fire,
i wake cheek to shoulder and scented of smoke; slow spun
fingertip spin print my cosmic mark remarks on likeness -
just like a pinwheel, kaleidoscope bottom spills out,
off center - are there moments,
do you feel it too? i just ...
i can't.
cope - nothing to hold on to, but then a sense:
the great grab on me - a need
relentless - look up.
it's not that
important
and yet ... and
yet, every gesture out and in word, its deeper drive goes

bang. mine - in breath, that pause where exhalation won't
manifest - not in a gasp or a roar or a fugitive
storm, just ... calm. an inaudible hesitance loaded
with quiet permanance - faint creation;





a tone, then
a word, one. again. uni verse, a
caress, in tent, campy yet
inspired, tired and startled, old inertia tossed
stolid amidst lush aridity. paradox
locks into place, finds nothing at odds within
itself, functioning beyond logic's dysfunctional grip
and ire; i slip the hinges loosely off their poor fit
to nowhere; door settles easy, loses itself to my
echo, my sigh sliding open, open old boundaries designating
nothing really real, just keeping illusion in compartments passing
one 2 another. someone shudders and senses a ghost, mutters
a prayer and stares towards the opening, careless wind
where it makes itself known and shifts atmospheric,
lyrical rounds thru my blurred, unfocused

underground.

shapeless gesture; even the wind, as
only one, seeks for its voice, a belly tongue and
for its textures, a heart cracked open by high
pitch whistle through loose walls. blind fingertips reading
the infinite ending while the reader begs a beginning from any
random open page.

every morning's a foreign country. i wake only just arrived and in want
to understand its language; giving over my ache that my own might be heard
and if not by kind, learned and shared, even only
by one.

even only by one someone else nodding recognition, confirming my antiquated
hope, bound in tones and belief. short of this,
why verse, why create, why
speak?

paraliminal

9 dreams, minus mine, hush, 9
questions confined to us. 9 ghosts
unquestioned, their posthumous
premonitions fill my light
heart, wend their way through the weight of
the wait, gradually, towards
sudden.

silent shift,
unseasonal last frost - windows patterned as if as
if the day wept before beginning
and the cold held onto this intricate grief.

low dread-flush through me; i flex against my roomy bones.
dis em body awareness of body turns like a wave collapsing back
to its underside - an ache resurfaces - something wedged in the watery
floor flips over and up - set like a white cap upset, set
like a gem in a gem colored throat.

i seek softness beneath harsh appearance. perhaps
brought at the outset, and placed there when i'm not
looking, for and by me, put and waiting, tethered lightly
at the ankle of futured need to hope
and seek within the dark hour,
holding its breath, and mine, and All Breath
of spirit, at once suspended somewhere
between near
and now.


you are restless; i hear this
in my skin and cannot shut out the input.
your phantom-scratch relentless and cross,
all across my captive flesh speaking back
through the impact of time over dreams
and questions and cat lives,
9.

amidst human text,
surely someone else has written
the words i need. i don't know
where they are
and can't imagine how ...
i cannot find them - seeking.
i will have to put them to language
for myself.

it is not
about the words; it is
the body yearning to express
its ineffable touch, given
and received through nuance, every
nuance, every
sense in

quiet reach towards heaven,
bone extended and sinewed,
stretching long beyond its function.

breathless in my own breath, i love
a few - i love
you and by extension, all being, even
in its most remote resemblance
of yours. if there is one soul,
all a part and put through the illusion of
apartness, living a bit here, declining
there, narrowing, expanding; you
manifest its surity, caress its
quiet perfection. bombastic, elastic, astonished
at your self

and no less astonishing to me. turning and
turning your gaze across dullness
to leave it shining. i will ask
nothing though, i ache to ask
that you stay, i am
too aware of my own
vanishing.

Fugue [from French; an adaptation of the Italian fuga,
literally "flight" from the Latin fuga, related to
fugere, to flee]

1. A polyphonic composition constructed on one or more
short subjects or themes, which are harmonized
according to the laws of counterpoint, and introduced
from time to time with various contrapuntal devices.

2. Psychiatry. A flight from one's own identity.