11:20 am

You leave me confounded

in a volcanic desert of blue and pixels

And I can't even hate you for it

I like to say that I have

seventeen different ways to view things,

17 ways to think.

But how to think about this?

Can betrayal occur when no trust exists?

Or ever existed?

I guess that's the problem.

I perceive when nothing exists.

You know, that condition goes by many aliases:

imagination

paranoia

blind hope

It's the latter here.

Signed in red crayon.

A Lost

Heave that backpack

you've got someplace to be

I know it's cold

take my gloves

I want to show you this

Hop the stone wall and land heavily

in the laden earth

leave the books down here

and I'll race you to the top

Here among the gnarled fingers

you'll find Peace

like melting snow in a hazy afternoon light

Today

My hands smell of fire,
thumb calloused from flame
lit in the darkness

The echo of fast-strummed guitar in a gym hallway
makes me feel it in the corners of my face
that thin smile I wear as I lean shyly, slyly against the pastel wall.

I was so high on caffeine and
homespun music
and the love
of friends and strangers.
I think I could love everybody here,
but I'm a stranger to them.
Their lives outside these halls are like a shattered mirror in a heavy blue summer rain,
and as I peer deeply into them
all I catch are shards
of past and present

Still, I say, I've got to say,
"Fuck people. People suck."

Shades

You're the coldest red I've ever met.
You fizzle, like a pot unwatched.

Will that anger and pain you keep scab over,
desensitize,
or bleed freshly?

I can't pretend like some of this
isn't my fault,
but like I said,
you are the coldest shade of red
I've met.

11:39 pm

I must say,
I rather like the way
my left hand looks as I type.

Veins like subterranean rivers
beneath the skin. They're almost overflowing
in my left hand.

A Cantaros

The water washed down on us in buckets
bubbling and boiling in the walls
where we popped them like blisters

It overran the concrete –
water flowed up from the grates,
an exodus from the sewers.

The world was simply drenched
and trickles soon became oceans,
the forests now the everglades

A banana yellow canoe
floated away downstream
out in the flooding church pond,
Huck and Jim on the New Mississippi

The boy looked stoic in his splotchy olive coat
and his black cap
as the world hailed at him

And his father reclined on the leather
watching the Weather Channel blather on.
“It’s raining,” they explained.

An apple blossom sat delicately
upon the windshield,
where it evoked a thin smile and
a pang of despair

Then those scarlet lips were
flicked away by a distracted wiper,
and the world seemed to erode away from me.

1:01 am

My eyes were open sores
from which welled sleeplessness
and desire

Parallel Romances

I. Audition

Well, hello.

I’m just going to warn you
I’ve never performed well
with a small audience

a huge crowd doesn’t really bother me

But this intimate setting is unnerving.
You’re right there,
You’re tangible
so forgive me if I fumble a line.

So here goes.

II. The Piece

Are we alone?
Close the door and pull the curtains;
darkness is the ally of the naked
and the self-conscious

But I tell you
I am not the same man in a crowd
as I am alone,
nor the same when I am with you

So I say again
is it just us?

Good
I hope you’ll soon see
that I am the unturned rock

III. Callback

So, you didn’t decide on me the first time?
Well, all right. I guess I can be a weird first impression.
Too much or too little

Does my self stand up to your scrutiny?
Go on, inspect
Do you find me lacking
or am I the one you want

Well, go on.
Take your time
I’ll just sit and wait

IV. Wait

But The Wait is the worst part

They say patience is a virtue
but patience is either a mental deficiency
or a lack of willpower

I do my best to just put you out of my mind but you’re like a splinter dug into my skin and I dig and I dig but you won’t give

You don’t know the grandeur of my fantasies;
how the simple kind smile you give me
makes me ache

V. Divergent Paths (I Know)

I know why I let stuff stack, why I let the little mementoes do nothing but ferment on the shelves. I’m afraid I’ll forget. So it piles on every available surface until I spend my day hauling, place to place, and it all becomes nothing more than my burden

And I know why I don’t scream love to you, why it bottles, because I have my azure friendship, and if I always have it, I can never feel dejected or lonely or cold, because I’ve never given you that chance to strip it away from me

And I know;
Why I twist my stomach and gargle air at even the notion of telling you these thoughts

And I know I’ll forever lament that Us was nothing more than a fleeting vision I once had,
and that now I have to do with some others for a while-
but that you’re always there with me
just not as prevalent anymore.

And I wish I didn’t do this to myself.

VI. Rehearsal

The schedule check
is a routine tick
Actors flow through the area,
compulsively check the highlighted section,
and diffuse through the side doors

Then later, the complaints,
the grunts of resentment
(But some part of them likes it,
I know,
but they could always just be masochists...)

Resigned, they file in,
greet one another-
“How are you?”
“Tired. And you?”
“Same”

Then we repeat,
and some element will be found lacking-
it is tuned honed or refined,
our director an Arab sheik
amid a wealth of crude oil talent

VII. Inspiration

I am the Bohemian, the Renaissance man without the resources;
artist, writer, actor, singer, historian, techie, critic,
(though I do some better than others)
I live in a self-induced squalor
class without money
an unapplied genius
nerd but not geek
an idiot with brains
the unemployed dependent with too much work on his plate
the liberal borrower of Inspiration
the thief with clean hands

Can you steal ideas? It seems to me the closest thing to stealing a bit of the soul
But should that be condemned? May I say, to you poets long dead or dying,
that I steal shards of you and make them part of me
not because I am underinspired
but because I am overinspired by you

It seems at times
that we enter an age of semantics
where the words of history speak so loudly today
that we can’t get a word in edgewise
and instead read lines from a page.
So, history, may I say
that you give me the words to express myself with
that I have been grasping at for my entire life
and that every man or woman that I read becomes family
Dickens my grandfather,
Emerson’s just Dad,
Rowling’s my comforting mother.
Whitman is my brother,
Dickinson my reclusive aunt,
Shakespeare my crazy uncle,
Rimbaud my lewd cousin,
Elliot my confidant,
Ginsberg my guru,
Hughes my brother (from another mother)
Twain my rambunctious friend,
and numberless, nameless others are my Inspiration

VIII. An Exercise in Energy (4 Haiku)

soft voice, speak to me
command my concentration,
you are in control

Dial of Power, set
at level TEN makes blue sparks
fly from fingertips

And it clicks like the
sound of train wheels at midnight,
and I can do It

And I see him, face
to face. I introduce him,
and they acknowledge.

IX. Costume Room (a limerick)

Behind the closed door of the room
(which is where we keep the costumes)
the girls get undressed
and the guys do their best
not to stare (and go to their doom)

X. Performance of a Chorus of Extras (a sestina)

Hours before, there’s a dearth of energy;
we lounge and idle, me and my friends,
all on the couch, all in a line
no one in costume or character,
our eyes,
beleaguered, recoil from light

But on it comes, that harsh studio light,
and at once the energy
of the stampede, our eyes
focused, me and my friends-
no judge of character-
we move in disorderly line

As we eat, we talk of bad pick-up lines
and make light
of what was dark- who We are, our personal character
by now the damp air of the caf holds that certain energy-
the excited nervousness of friends-
I’m sure you could see it in our eyes

We put on make-up, line our eyes
examine our faces in a factory line
of vanity, ask our friends
if they see what mirrors don’t. “Move into the light,”
she says. That thin burning scent holds the energy
of so many forgotten characters

Time to do it, get into character-
on the leaders all eyes
are set. Exercises in energy,
the din of cawed lines.
“Shut out that harsh light,
focus only on the hands of your friends.”

Up the slope, my friends;
backstage we are characters
but onstage, underneath the burning light,
we keep our eyes
off those chairs, the line
of audience, their enraptured energy


With tremulous energy
we speak our lines
with only our eyes.

XI. Curtain Call

I owe you a final bow.

You certainly were a good idea,
while you lasted

I wish you were more
(than an idea, that is)
but then I wish a lot

The show goes on, love.

I use the flash to try and find people in a game of Manhunt

nighttime in holland

a statue in denmark

Ink

The heavy laden sky,
dotted in the inky milk of galaxies,
burned brightly above us -
the horizon uncluttered
by the tenants of the earth

We plodded through the snow
or walked down the center of the road
talking loudly of the inconsequential
at stream of consciousness

Still off in the East (or was it the West)
lay the dimly glowing candle of daybreak

The swings made the screech of dying animal,
but it was nothing sinister -
their hinges only rubbed uncomfortably together

My toes throbbed in the canvas of my shoes,
ill equipped for this kind of thing.
And my lungs wheezed loudly as we ran back to the house,
ill-born for that as well.

A shiv below the left rib
and I collapsed on a convenient post,
and focused on the in out in out
the rise and fall of my shoulders.
They called for me to hurry up,
but I only sat and heaved

If only you could have been there,
beneath the rest of it all
and flown with me on snowy swings
or seen the water lick its salty lips
or run fast with me in piercing air.

7 am

Just above the sky’s crown
is yellow like a ripened bruise
the clouds are braided,
pink and purple
marriage of night and day

I race beneath their cover

The People Who Came Late

I.
The air is fat with the mist of burning newspaper. The couch is a tad better than threadbare, all its original softness gone, the hard wooden skeleton jutting up through the crimson fabric. The high-ceilinged room is lit by the chandelier that hangs above the underused grand piano. Oriental rugs adorn the floors, disguising the ancient wood beneath. The heavy, pleasing scent of wine clings to every fixture of the building. A wooden chess board rests on a glass coffee table, the black and white soldiers abandoned mid-battle. Large pieces of three-layer German chocolate cake float on white plates nearby.
Something cuts through the fog and reaches my addled brain. I open my eyes so that I'm staring through the cloudy lens of my lashes. There's a couple at the door. They must be family friends, but I've never met them before. They wear coats to guard themselves against the cold. There is a broad-shouldered man with muscled arms, the hair shaved cleanly away from his head so that it gleams in the winking firelight. He surveys the room like a bird of prey. His knuckles look like eight miniature fists, and earlobes mesh with his neck so that it forms a fleshy bridge. A short woman with hair pulled tight into a ponytail and quick eyes stands anxiously by his side. She wears a scratchy green shirt with a sewn on badge over her right breast. Their eyes find the couch.
"Are you the one?" the bald man asks.
Am I the one what? I pause.
"Yeah, it's me," I say confusedly.
They rush at me. The bald man pushes a stretcher, a can of oxygen riding the plastic bed like a giddy toddler in a shopping cart. I sit up quickly, but the women pushes me down and cautions me to take it easy, slipping an oxygen mask over my mouth. The flimsy plastic crinkles with my rapid breath. The man forces the stretcher down with a metallic crash, ready to move me from the warmth of the hearth to the cold of that bed.
"What are you doing?" Mom says quizzically from the entrance to the dining room. "She's in here."
The paramedics rip away the mask from my mouth, click the stretcher back into place, and race into the dining room.

II.
Opa and I wait in the lobby. His hair has left him, only a few white strands clinging on at the sides. His eyes are Aryan blue, and his words are heavily steeped in Dutch, his two souvenirs from his early years in Holland.
"Why are we here?" he asks me. His mind is old, it doesn't carry him much farther than the door.
The room is filled with tacky chairs with China-made fabric covering their metal interiors, cheap seating for the masses who wait to see their loved ones in the upper floors. A secretary's desk is at the far side of the room, the woman taking a break from the phones to drink he coffee out of the Styrofoam.
"Oma's sick," I answer. We sit in silence on the stiff chairs, and wait for Dad to park the car.

III.
Oma's propped up by the overused hospital pillows. She's wearing the thin standard issue dressing gown. She's swimming in blankets to combat the sterility of the hospital and the dreary grey slush of March that's just outside the window. Physically, she is very much like her husband, thin and wrinkled, but with a head of wispy, ice-blond hair.
"How are you?" Mom says, taking a seat next to the IV-drip. We all situate ourselves around the bed.
"I'm," her voice is high-pitched and weak. I lean closer to try and distinguish breaths from words. "I'm fine."
"We brought you some flowers," Mom finishes. The men sit idly, unsure of themselves.

Incantation for Sleep

Fall into the sky through the sheets
carried off by the strong hand of the wind and fatigue
fall up and down in perpetual motion
and exile your tears to the pillows
then let consciousness be skimmed off your brain
So your soul can roam the entire earth
and be back in time for breakfast.

An Arrogant Moon

Do you know what to do?
Your heavens aren’t immutable any more.
They hold sheet-metal in suspension
dangling above your cold shoulder.
You peer down at me, from your unstable
throne
and I stare right back.

Pill

I’ve got a pill
stuck in the throat
Attempt to soothe
but still there
lodged
like madness

So I carry it with me,
and it remains
not enough to choke
but not enough to make me stronger.

Flooding on the Gold Star Bridge

There’s only headlight
to guide those who cross
this spider-wisp span

An inscription of neon yells to all that notice,
Turn back, children
Flooding on the Gold Star Bridge

But the steeds of motorists
skim lightly over the wet,
their shields to the wind taking
gashes on pristine silver glass

A Cold Day By The Sound

Boot-trampled path through deer kept grass
to the awaiting cracked-white steps.

A drop off the bottom
and urban shoes
kiss sand again.

That endless march
seems to meander here,
lost in an alley.

The sitting-log beckons
adorned by charcoal cave paintings.

She and I add our art
to be blown on
by salty fish breath.

Clouds overhang,
impending nothing;
just visitors here,
alone save for
us.

We talk of nothing,
embracing everything,
except each other.