The women at my age who marry

are all legs and elbows,

all smiles too big. All of them

just wanting to be kissed. And now

they all think they are very,

very happy.

Of Sleeping, Of Waking

In Seattle I asked a friend
who years and many miles had changed
the way

in which time moved

and he said In an instant.

And when I asked him
if he ever thought it would slow back down

he said No.

I this instant, I close my eyes and pretend

in this instant, like a child
I lay down to the Earth, to the past
and feel the grass on my neck
and feel my spine settle
to what lies beneath it

in this instant, I ask Jesus Christ
to be Jesus Christ
and though I’m far from too old I can’t
and I feel that, as time passes I wouldn’t want to

like any bitter adult, I want my time back and
like a bitter adult-child,
I want my friend back
and

like the both of them in the morning,
I open my eyes and Oh no

Oh no

oh no.

Of Growing Up

We had a pop can fireworks show,
a backyard Forth of July
and every girl wore a tiny t-shirt,
every one the same bouncy hair.

That was the night I melted away the sole of my shoes
and left globs of black rubber dried

the night we stole beer cans from parents,
after I disappeared into the movements of dusk,
before I went back behind the trees.

I remember orange glowing faces.
kissing on the edge of the yard.
I remember not having a way home.

Blured to the very edge, I believe my eyes wet that night darker.

And when the first cans exploded in the fire
embers out and up, raining down from the closing sky
I remember we all gathered close,
watching to see how bright it would get.

a thank you

many are things 'no longer'
and in the gone away there are photographs,
4 by 6 inch windows
in which to look out on a world that was

and if i spread out all of you,
the candy bars, red carpet and wild smiles, just right
they whisper -

i made your mother

and only then, grandma
is the what you were and so much of what you weren't gone away

and though you may, she never will

To Spring Unexpected

fresh rain drops, fallen snow and you

you beyond counting,

you the disappeared

you always recognize the faces -

the so bestowed

for the everyday.

and everyday,

between test and self-test, between each morning

you awaken fresh flowers

and birth us in surprise.

Disambiguation

Even you’re not sweet in the way I want you,
excuses, cents and cigarettes
like a pinch here and a pinch there, being that that’s the way
and it leaves and it empties and it hollows.


Take me a teaspoon, whole
as an attempt to thin down.

I’ll take and taste the whole of you
all alone, the length of my tongue.

Once, I actually tried to write
and it tried to be a poem
and it tried to be about you,
but it ended up like always,

being just about me.

Poem

1.

On the edge, near but not entering

the colors of a California garden

I sat with flowers, white pink and red, as they too tightened with and sweat the sun.

When curtains pull back silence,
when breathing replaces the breeze –

my bones up and leave, never to return to my body.


2.

Sometimes we make things just for the hoping, to remember
such as it is –

‘such as it was’

and also sometimes, we invent ourselves in a place
like someone's tall tale that we pretend is our own
and that place becomes always
and invented in it, we then become forever.


4.

It can easily be a love poem , a shape in the clouds
and it can easily turn into a plane passing beneath them,
to a bird landing near a trellis bench, shaking and startling.


5.

Mine is when blue flowers were falling, when I thought
this is unique –

‘this is a sign’

and I had known no place before it

and it knows no place but me.

Of Faith

A hand, now
bare in the winter and
the cold is touching

white rose pedals warming the red bricks wet and
near my feet –

lost, what is meant to –

never was it meant to.

Love.

Forgetting, the flowers of a wedding and
surely, will hands that held, but
what was picked up –

never.

The beholden.

The steps of a Greek church paused me
pedals and stopping
I picked one. And this,
this was a house I had never visited,
but for walking by, but never

are we just walking by.

For The Seemingly Sightless

More and more, I find that
I want to kiss all of you
closed eyelids,
people I have never met and
never opened

and often,
I find myself staring into faces,
wanting just to smash all that I am
into skin, into bone.

So if you don't know how,
then imagine knowing
what might it look like

when cheeks crinkle, when a smile is too hard
pulled back, that smile isn't really anymore a smile
at least, not really

because that's how badly I want,
just for you to see.

Obviously, that makes me the bastard son,
some animal the likes of which
you have yet even to discover.

Undoubtedly, you are the human cancer, shame
that which urges the eyes closed
when our species is consumed with self-pleasure,
pride

and adamantly, I will someday shake and ask you,
you of the same species -

Will you never know? Will you never know? Will you never know?

Lantern

I don't know if they ever happened,
the parts of me that I have squeezed down my throat and
nestled deep in my rib cage, secret
underneath my heart.

But I imagine a burning there,
where my insides must look like a lantern-something and
I imagine all glass
and at the right angle
all little light blossoms, all flapping wings.

They were much bigger then, the places today
that I am too scared to walk through,
which is why I swallowed
juice and gingerbread, sand and skin, dirt and flower
and underneath my heart, in my rib cage
is a place that still tastes wind.

Later, some breath will blow out in me
but now, before the no-air, is the brightest moment
the hottest –

The bluest of flame.

Starry

The train slept
at the time birds awoke and
I had one more cigarette
waiting for sleep, to speak
to tell me -
the sky is covering the stars.

All whispers.

Someday I will laugh
and when I tell you
then it will be years later,
many more nights, then
you will still keep me awake.

Her eyes.

The woman I marry.

At Twenty-Four

In the car
driving between the mangrove trees,
father and I.

Florida,

on the old dock lay
large nest of an osprey and

tide out -
pulling, the gravel road.

Slowly.

My father and I

and mother in the backseat
going crazy.

We will never die.

Let no bird
wake you out your window,
save for the one you love

- Las Angeles, July 13, 2009


Traffic and hot nights,
they’ve made me ready to leave, to say
‘Enough with this fucking place!’

but

for You my Friend.

We met at a Koreatown apartment, we met
where all of life breathed contentment
curtains, the breeze blowing through your open windows.

Why ever
had we hoped to go anywhere, to do anything

Talk.Laugh.Life.Drunk.

and you know,
I feel like a damn viking with you
or a knight

in some battle, certainly
where certainly we will never die
and where we are always taking place.

Now, zigging and zagging
on poorly lit streets, I know -

never do the happy think but of where they are

and just before running into the night I'll scream for us,

‘CHARGE!’

The Actors

Creating or

image destroyed

before –
be dam or
be jungle, wild

Something ate the stone.

Now –

The first sight,
an old saying

Obsession human. Quantifiable. Madness.

Crazy –
The damned before
God take them,

the actors I know.

We go to the ether.

When you went away
you took first your eyes.

No longer.

Yours,
falling

Yours,
canyon

Yours,
crater.

Carbon.

Cancer.

Of Islands

The bridge slats white

as we drive in blur, in moving memory,

in a station wagon lie.

Running remembrance

as youth even still is fading,

in God’s face, even –

even sun sometimes

finds water too bright.


Have you ever?

Because I did in the backseat,

once in a car two decades ago

twice, behind my body twenty-two drinks ago

and in the blacked burning, from eyes too long to light,

are the beaches below, there

what’s left of our future the Earth turns over –

swimming ass up yesterday,

ears popping in the dive down for tomorrow.


Of islands come these tides pulling

and only of islands.

It Ain’t Mine Neither

The ugliest thing
happened on the L today –

A woman was yelling in my train car

Anyone ya’ll spare a quarter?
Been robbed.

And everyone pulled smiles in at their sides or
shifted through their bags or brushed at their hair. Silence,
but everyone looked.

My mother was killed,
up on 95th…

A train car frozen in empty clang,
punctuated by the sound of a few coins in a cup.

I’ll pick pocket in here!

She got angry.

I been robbed, it ain’t your fault, but
it ain’t mine neither!

Now, everyone is thinking they would give her a dollar,
that they would give her everything, but it’s too late –

Now would be only for a lie

I been homeless, it ain’t your fault, but
it ain't mine neither!

And she hurried out the door between cars,
taking all of the pride with her.

The Sound

I had thought earlier

that it would be nice, maybe

to take the train today,

to look out at all the stops and all the people

living so anonymously from me,

but from the sidewalk the train passes above, like a jet engine so,

loud that I look to the sky for sound,

for all the planes that are coming to bomb us –

When will they bomb us?

too quickly

the lungs beneath the heart

exist

sitting in the air,
cold legs dangle and

we move in this way –

in one blink

we breathe warm,
we breathe from lips
and

in no hurry

in one breath –

exhale

in this way
beneath the heart we move

in this way
we exist

Drunkenness

1.

It will snow.

2.

I am a long walk home and

the hair will run wet down my face and I know

that it will snow.

3.

From the sidewalk,

I am looking for a quiet place, private

in which I can vomit in at least some semblance of alone,

for an alley or a doorway to double over in.

4.

Doubled over, I am saying this again and again –

Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know,

I don’t know…

Angry

For too damn long
I have wanted the boughs of silence
to count for the everything that they should

for deep rooted dreaming, for the power of birch
oak, elm and evergreen speech
to move in the winds of others,

for the smell of juniper to ring clean
and rid what rests at the cliff’s edge waiting.

Yet I wait,
as the leaves may wait, as the branches may wait,

as the trees wait –

their silence loud in stubbornness –

their immortality, seemingly, forever our image of always.

And when the sound of a single crumbling comes back,
from any distance,
I will rise up and speak for the waiting, for the angry.

If you were to listen you would hear –

I am not forever.

Down in the Parlor

my ankles creak

on the sore steps

– whole years passing through

as the bones walk down my body

and in the room corner

– above the burial ground

my soul settles,

hovering up and up, resting

near to the spider’s nests,

where every lie of my life hangs

where even the oil lamp

averts its eyes

Breathing the Same

You would touch me,

between the crevasses of the couch

between the small cracks and

between the cushions,

and we would roll

over and over each other, falling past lint and nickel

warm, invisible

before landing together at the bottom, in the dark,

and when we did

the both of us were breathing the same and My God,

My God…