35 - Borderline

There’s a mad devil at my center,

drives me out to my fingertips

and feet to live gutlessly

by touch and taking. I press

my hands on anything to keep

nerve fires alive on the outskirts of

my bad neighborhood heart. I

empty pleasures into other skins,

fluoresce along electric spines

and ride the spin of rooms

adrift in foamy wash of spirits,

slip through bends of typeset notes

on truth and fictions

overstating certainty in black.

But dark is fear of not seeing

what roams about in here.

They say my empty

is only God-need.

But it’s God threw everything

of use out, put up fences, and now 

there’s a mad devil at my center

rattling the ribcage

that keeps me out.

34 - Eating Spam for Dinner Again, Looking Out into the Yard

Divorce brings all manner

of truth to light; a plant

can become a corpse.

There lay Charlie Tree,

a Norfolk Island Pine

older than me and raised indoors,

mom told him daily she

loved him, told him

he was a beautiful tree.

Still gave him up.

Dad dumped him

under the backyard hedge

of his bachelor pad,

a new duplex

with sliding glass patio doors

for easy viewing.

We watched him,

being dead out there,

thinking about why

custody is called a battle.

33 - This Is What You're Supposed To Do

There are still half-feral cats

in the back gnawing dog food

poured into dented tin trays,

still the pool table, drab felt

chalky, ripped and piled with

flashlights, shoeboxes of papers

bolts in zipper bags, nickels.

There is still wood stove heat

slow-burning the empty

kettle’s thin copper base on top,

front door propped a crack

and drying enormous wool socks.

There are still endtables piled

high with library paperback

mysteries, lent VHS tapes in crates,

baskets of junk mail, all

addressed to “Loser.” There

are still two separate beds

in two separate rooms, still

that proud solid pine carved

stopped clock and fine

undisturbed fur coats on the rack.

I am still seated at the kids’ table,

twenty-three years running,

and I find a turkey bone

in the stuffing you assured me

would be vegetarian this year,

so I could still eat something.

I’ve never yet heard you

tell my father you love him,

but everyone, even

my aunt’s butch girlfriend

and those damned cats

get fed when they come.

32 - Help Yourself

Drunken, the soil

throws up its worms.

Guts-raw, glossy coils

thrashing the walk

knot my stomach,

reaching me.

I choose one, pinch

at his middle, lift

and learn how the most

vulnerable ones rage:

shuddering, snakely whipping

to punish the air

that exposes.

Forgetting myself, then,

I was actually afraid

I am like this.

31 - So Insulting, So Enlightened

One year, my sister and I

subjected Christmas mythology

to empirical testing.

“Sign here,” scrawled on

cardstock, “if you, Greenie

the Wonder Dog, who we love

so so much, are truly real.”

Then a hand-dotted line,

the length of a linchpin.

Folded over, addressed,

blessed with a gold star sticker,

scotch-taped to the pebbly wall

above the obligatory cookies.

We’d play the powers that be like

cheap psychics fed false

leads on how to flatter us best.

Come morning, bypassing presents

we opened the card to find

our stepfather’s scrawl

dyslexically confirming

the existence of a recently

invented flying dog.

We frowned a little at the gifts,

realizing they had been sacrificed

to the idols of magical thinking.

We both got just what we wanted.

30 - Passer Aux

God fell the morning we kids found

a baby starling on the lawn.

Stepping close cat-softly

our gasping pupils gulped

the light off thick grass

swelled with verdant juice,

arrogant to outdo the absurdity

of a bird in the dirt. Everything

was strange. I pictured

his feet black roots, feathers

shoots and fronds of night

and scattered white seeds

for planting flight in Earth.

But silent, hurt, and sunk in

adolescent bloat his downy

starscape a wilt of absent heaven,

stolen on the descent.

Order: passeriforme, passeri

same as those penny-sparrows who

never fall without the Father.

We tucked the little aeronaut

into a shoebox bed and blanket,

cradled as the car flew to

wherever white-gloved

ministers could right this

blot on invincible birdhood.

We couldn’t stay to see

if he would fly again, though

they all smiled nicely

in that lying way.

Who is responsible for flight?

Where does it go when birds die?

De passer à travers ma vie,

passer aux oubliettes,

mes passereaux infinie.

29 - I Turned My Face to Funerary Skies

The hermit moon is sheathed

again in midnight’s sable purse.

Stars pinprick dull and depthless points,

frail phantoms comforting starved eyes.

My let breath stops short, goes nowhere.

There is just the fact of night.

In darkness past, I might have prayed

my heart into the hot rapture of bats

roiling smoky through the shapely,

generous black. Following echoes of

my own cries. But I’m no longer lofty.

Bent, I read the blank book of moonless dusk,

soul a cool bone cup to hold night’s ink.

To write, again and once again, the joy

of a black and indifferent heaven.

28 - Fluid Offenses

At dinner, sat in a high-backed wood chair,

trained to gulp tepid milk silently.

He coached me to open my throat so the drink

could pour down without resistance,

no deep inside churn of wet gush heard,

taught soundlessness so no prim ear

could tell that I did things to live.

Swallowing was the first way I learned

that my body, traitor, was an unfit home.

I would also learn, later, some other ways.

I sat by the bay, listening, all the water safe

out there and my mind became an ocean.

In nautical lore, the swallow is an omen

a sign of the shore, to follow for harbor

by cries from their velvet brown throats.

But I, I in my wood boat flung far from the earth

knew no birds could find me to sing.

For the roaring wide sea sprawls

and swallows my edges and anchors.

27 - At the Bay Beach Wildlife Sanctuary

They sell dried yellow corn in

fifty cent brown paper sacks

taken past the concrete embankment

on down to fowl pondside, where

goose beaks bicker on

my corn cup palms,

hard plastic tong mouths of need

pinching kernels, me.

I, five, am flushed with an eminent

sense of importance.

We kids learn on these educational trips.

My grain-grown flock would do

anything for cheap gold

magic beans. And I

made them eat off my shoes.

Learn, and repeat.

Back home, my father

would dangle Circus Peanuts

over my head, saying

“Dance like a dog.”

26 - The Sacrament of Depression

The lull draws down our pious bows

to lie with dying incense, let the cloy

of unwash weigh us low in a droop of undone space.

Heavy with turbid midday’s wine and idle

in thick, a tame god’s granting

foolish prayers to bathe in substance.

Now I am here like air in bread.

Homesick for the whisk of passage

censer swing alighting gusting’s kin.

But all smoke settles, remains.

Was the world ever thin enough for we

who live in going?

This hollow now is some death,

the inert ferment robbing body, blood.

25 - You Only Get What You Give

Girl knew she would have troubles.

The church handed her womanhood

on a silver platter. They said:

“Make sure everyone is served.”

24 - Empty Circles

Once, hunters thanked the patrician frailty of beasts

for their takeable flesh.

We punched the bloom of exit in buckskin hearts

shucked the husk from souls

exhaled into the mouths of leaves.

Or wherever we imagined they went.

But we are choked in ghost-thick air

laden with refugees from presumed pardon.

Where are the ebon eyes of the dead as they die?

Where is the skin that bounds off the wronged?

The jelly of tomatoflesh slips from its hide

a boiled heart. And on the cutting board

a tap head weeps off wet beads of seed citrine

strung with clusters of soap’s hollow pearls—

I’m sorry, I’m sorry, forgive this too.

23 - Follow Your Natural Bliss!

My family raised me a skeptic of disease,

an atheist scornful of diagnostic gods,

and Hippocratic demagogues who would ensnare us

in fear of a treacherous body.

Infection’s perfidy, we knew, was cheap suspense

like any flimsy drugstore paperback,

like Gideons’ gift to weakened travelers.

We respectfully knew not to lambast the medical tradition,

but it wasn’t ours for use. It belongs to foreign realms,

where holy books of clinical narrative knit up the parts

of anatomical mystery into ethnic motifs:

Avicenna’s Pahlavi patterned roots,

wax cloth animalcules of Leeuwenhoek,

Vesalius’ woven Fabrica Corporis Humani.

Artifacts of the culturally early.

Enchanted modern minds still literarily tour the halls of Kos,

but remember this asklepeion has met Atlantis’ fate.

Too much love for myth bespeaks the folly of

malingerers, of fools.

Wise folk put those mad compendiums away.

I huddle in a bedsheet tent, flashlight turned

to pale my face, to mimic death’s angelic visitation,

my body transformed into a text of fantastical plague

I will read after dark and in secret.

One hand to my chest to catch the shudders

of elaborate coughing, such hellhound barks

that rattle my bedframe’s brass knobs.

I am hot in the bright with a countenance of fever,

so I prey on my health for deliverance,

honing the taboo art of summoning

the Catarrh demon for testament

to my possession by mortal ills.

They’ve denied that I’m sick for years, by now,

but I believe, I believe, I believe…

Yes, the skeptical method trumps all superstition,

and we soberly forfeit those childish things.

No Pasteurian oracle of etiologies can foretell

the body’s sovereign courses,

no pharmic idolatry procures

the myopic dreams of men.

Paracelsus’ opiates shall never

be suffered to dull the reckonings

of nature in we who are

fearfully and wonderfully made.

22 - Undignified

I couldn’t handle it, and I felt strong

enough to admit it back then.

So on the third day of 6^th grade,

I cried not to go back to school.

I’d just come there from a 42-student,

two-room K-8 church school

on Marinette County farmland,

where the playground stretched for acres,

and the sky over cornfields was clear for miles.

But Crivitz had half-lockers, chain-link fence,

each hour was a classroom change.

The rules seemed arcane, and I wanted rules,

but no one would tell me them straight.

My lone friend was a lisper, and I needed friends,

but I couldn’t hear what she said.

I complained of an upset stomach.

The counselor sat me on a dusty sofa,

made me shoot Koosh balls

at the poster of a basset hound’s sad face,

which didn’t help out a kid getting hit

in the head by boys pitching fistfuls of paper

on the third day of 6^th grade.

So I cried not to go back to school, back then,

when I was strong enough to be undignified,

in the dim inside of a doublewide trailer,

where we sat on the sofa and it puffed out dust.

And my arms flung out like bedsheet ropes,

from the window of my anxious gut.

And they hung midair an instant too long

because you had to decide if you’d catch me.

Then you leaned in, conceding to catch me.

Well, I felt our unhitched moment.

Two train cars on the frozen north rail

which ran by both schoolyards,

two train cars just uncoupled and running

together in wobbly, failing momentum.

Then one sped ahead, as the other slowed,

and no one really got hurt.

But the distance is impossibly huge now.

I felt it, but like I would so often stash

my chore allowance in several odd jars

I spent all my strength finding

hiding spots for my hard-earned anger.

So I hated the sofa, and I hated that dog

for holding my stupid pain. And then

I thought differently about throwing things.

But you kept me at home after that,

and I kept careful about being dignified,

and I learned a whole lot in 6^th grade

in the doublewide trailer on farmland

cut through by the frozen north rail.

21 - A Feeling

When all my color bled out, the white room was left,
where I learned I’m not the source of my own desire.
You gloved your fingers safe, to “take a look inside.”
I owe you this feeling; you know it is dangerous for me to be empty.
Your face, frontispiece to knowing all about me, rises close.
“My head is filled with you”
and
“This is what you want, too.”
I have a vision of that milky seed pod bursting.
For now, I am shut up in the mind of a rigid bud.

Brittling stalk of papyrus sedge, my body plied gets bent.
When you had gotten what you came for
I also took something from you.
I took the probing hand and I keep it inside;
it gives me a feeling.
And it teaches me
And it points me
To flowers grown from my white paper,
your soiled gloves left to rot with the reeds.

20 - Diffuse

I scrub my body clean with your body.

Come into my bed, get every last bit of me out.

I’ll become pure, I’ll slip backward

through pain into a million sterile holes

in the surface of the dark.

So I court your fish-moist skin’s

friction to rub me numb,

your urging weight to press me flat.

You can do as you like, these

are my evacuee procedures.

I’m laid bare for the journey as you

scuff my senses into the vagueness,

the pristine of fog. Enough, and I

mist out, through the mute scream

of a million open pores, a claustrophobic

soul sprayed particulate into the remote

nowhere of space. Molecule-safe.

I leave the place immaculate.

I scrub my body clean with your

attendant hands unknowing

I am gone into the night,

clean night.

19 - We All Felt Sorry For Ourselves

At the funeral, her grandfather

explained why.

The car’s burnout was apt;

she needed purity,

so God came.

The casket was closed,

we each kept our own

favorite ideas.

March, two days later, I huddled over

a grease-sheer paper bag of warmth,

McFries on the El platform floor,

southbound at night.

Her train was headed the other

way, but she smiled,

in pity maybe.

It seemed kind, yet

the door closed,

and I had the particular guilt

of a person using junk

to feel better about

some indignity.

18 - Supplication to the Voiceless

From the time I was a child

I feared the suffering of insects,

bodies mutely pulped.

I watched the machinic clutch

upon a mangled ant, grinding

down last limbs in dogged

irrespect of its own dying.

With each burst bulb of

a laden wasp I waited for

some puff of their interior

mystery to be released.

But silent, they marked the

limits of my knowledge,

those wounded gods.

I pray to them daily for their wisdom,

because I want to be ready.

17 - Pentecost

In modest drape of cornflower

crepon, curl-shawled an uncut

crown, the bride of fire stands on

flat soles for her anointing.

Oil-crossed brow like a bullseye

for the Spirit, her uptilt gaze

guides congregant eyes in heliac rising,

so the Son may set on them again.

They robe her in a sweat-silk cloak

of coaxing palms, invoke the Lord of

Pleas, open her throat.  She’ll spread her

lips for tongues of flame and beg.

But this is sober witchery. She utters

incantations, spells a hex on recognition,

mutters nonsense dulcet choruses

they seize as holy kinsong.

In their hot tumult of lit-wick bliss,

her soul is a small cool stone.

She spends them, and she sates them

and she departs unwed, lone

celibate among the saints.

16 - Evangelicalism

Their warding curses
write in gold and black.
The first, enforcing rarity.
Second, making sure we don’t
forget our getting off the track;
conjuring one unseen eternity
in front and leaving yet
another nigh and chasing
at the back.

15 - Soteriological Experiments in Luddism

You will amble a transient on

grit-packed freeway shoulders, turn heads

in panopticon windows, the car-borne

surveilling your mendicance.

In the wind of their passing find written

the key to moralities of speed,

in your face flush the heat

of some primal shame

jumbled with an older dignity

you don’t yet understand.

Still your limbs in pace with

no purpose, and shrug

off the suit of excuse for your

being a walker: this is

unlike your to’s of the

routine morning. And you will bear

the hard scorn of concrete

and its swift patrons,

capsulate fleet of militant

goers belying the arbitrary sky.

But heaven stretches in every direction.

Your body will learn its courses

in this dissolute vault, where

vagrants find absolution for

the vagueness of being.

14 - For a Different View

When the sun’s florid hand blots

wrought iron curls in calligraphic shadow

on the net mesh of a window screen,

and its felting of highlit white dust flings out

depthy fields frozen in a snowglobe

moment resisting imperial summer,

time pockets to accommodate this

unseasonable dream:

How I would skate in that

frictionless immunity from

seasons’ melt of perfect surfaces.

13 - Untitled

No, I’m not “fighting it.”

Enough of waged wars.

I’ve slunk into the window

sill gap it’s left unshut

and puffed me up with words,

prising wide the lit space where

I hate the least

to languish.

Watch me blow out wax

paper boats on

drafts to nowhere; pray only

may they run aground

on green green

reefs of uncut grass.

12 - Avian Laze

I lie nested, a moony, rumpled bird,

dreaming up caricatures of flight.

Lax-limbed waiting proves that wings are unlike sails,

demand a casting out to snag their hooks

on the tumbling silk of cloud-marbled sky.

Blue the dispassionate banner of heights

flown by my eyrie — as indifferent toward furled feathers

as blown-away hats and casual mortality —

I should know better the unlikelihood of wind

to net me in the tangle of its sheets,

all a ruffle and rousing of slick pinions

spiriting me high like tented paper.

But I’ve forgotten the flex and crackle

of a sober climb’s full musculature, and

how to measure out the needed

tendon-lengths like strings

for a taut kite:

I’m indolent for the dim and shifting

shadows cast in the caves of my eyes.

11 - Submarine

Preparing to dive, poolside,

he bares a pitted chest,

draws stares to his

one sunk dent of a sternum.

A fistprint, no doubt, a masculine lack.

Flaccid buckling,

unsexed.

But I recognize this.

With a swimmer’s intelligence,

he’s packed up a lifetime

of unexhaled sighs and

compressed them into a

dense core of his own

immense gravity.

It threatens collapse but it’s

breath enough for the

coming submersion.

10 - Möbius Rain

Hung on the dark underbelly

of the firmament sphere,

I am a laden wet bead,

about to drop.

Even God can’t keep this

micro-ocean from

mingling with

space rivers.

9 - Christmas Casket

You built a box for the birth of salvation.

It was cedarwood, stained.

Nestled underneath a Yuletide spruce, the hope

chest crouched like some anthropic bud

off the conifer’s dying body,

trampling its skirt with

blockish feet.

It was ugly, misaligned, and guilting:

The lid was crowned in twisted,

viney wire, applied with spikes

driven down in woodflesh,

and opened, you could see

the tips protrude inside,

reminders, maybe, of your

hard toil.

You would always remind

us of your

hard toil.

Resin-scent would henceforth be

everpresent at my bedfoot,

cloaking me in the aromatic

afterlife of trees

and filling my throat

with presence,

an admonition that my future

was your gift.

I was meant to make my dowry in it,

Assembling the sundry lot of

coupled life:

towels, cookery, bedthings.

But I filled it with

cheap, broken junk.

8 - If I Can Make It Here...

Here on the Atlantic coast, lip of the deep cup drunk in migrant faith,
I am on the cusp of seeing Truth:
        The postulant’s scopic skyline embossed upon the blue,
        like layered shadows cast by fresh eyes’ bright dream of it,
        city-solid, life-alight,
        but the ocean bedevils unsteady heels.
I feel the border’s weight from this changing place,
and follow history’s dark reverse, away.

Against the concrete inner curve of dock the water
beats a muddy waste:
        chopped froth upon the rough wall.
        Up rise brown peaks, and peaks
        of damp remains, debris, expelling
        the hushed filth of waves.
The Hudson paints its image on the city’s porous coast,
delivering banished revenants, drowned ghosts.

7 - Pine and Porcelain

Remember my satisfaction

in knick-knack shelving: pine

riddled with phloem, xylem lines

cheerily cohering in supportive

chorus that yes,

finespun gewgaws shall be upheld in this place!

Yes!

(Lacking power,

I had twisted screws through drywall

to sturdy the board by all

the torque my own right shoulder had.

As if this deed would compensate for

fragility elsewhere.)

The artifacts were inane.

A matte black Bastet cat with

inexact gold embellishments,

bought for twelve dollars out of the

import store cat pack,

and also hollow;

a white plate, glazed

to seal in a fingerpaint print

of a child’s pawlike foot;

two identical porcelain dolls

from a forgetful giver,

both named after me.

They all stood in a vague line

saying nothing decisive.

The dust now crowds

around the absence of their bases,

chalk lines,

anxious tracings of a murder scene.

Well, they were cheap.

Convincing, I professed my loyalty to the pine—

a venerable tree, bent to an unfit purpose—

But oh, did my skin prickle with

a sympathy for that porcelain.

6 - For a Friend in Storms

And in the grips of it,
toss out hope in banknotes, blow
crushed paper lists from windows
Go, say to kept things
From the pockets’ hold
your hands
retreat to keep from losing

Loose, cupped folds of linen
slings for broken limbs;
despoiled of trinkets lift
the yoke of grips on things.
Night begins asleep in hammock’s hold.

Don’t fear the emptying of pockets where you kept yourself;
you are the weave and safety of this vacant haven.

5 - A Kind of Treason

Level-headed.

In that home, poise was a virtue honed through

a sardonic attitude toward the use of books:

The gravitas of classics and

weight of histories were transmuted

farcically into literal gravity,

to calibrate a muscular keenness for

interpreting imbalance,

adjusting response.

Columnar girls,

holding up virgin

tomes, with the straightest spines.

Yes, it was still like that recently.

Who knew this prim tutorial in

feminine comportment—

to help grim sisters stiffly pallbear

their uncracked, funereal lives—

was necessity encrypted, an urgent warning

obscured by its own

comic obsolescence.

The stuff of old films.

Funny and sad.

These days, I bear myself,

an atlas of cryptogeography in

two hands.

I balance the glass orb of my

empty eye,

refracting cartographic distortions

when I tip.

It rolls, and

I scry this crystal ball for direction

but it changes.

My arms have tired of keeping such a fragile balance,

the way a still head

never made me tired.

4 - Prayer for Stagnant Waters

See, a shred of police caution tape
yellow trampled and tucked
into a pine chip bed:
the quiet of crimes.
This place,
dappled with wrung lemon rinds
bottle mouths kissing through
topskin of pond green, bobbing
mallards
the madness of swans,
it swallows the dreams of wakers
forgetting iniquitous night.
At this humid shrine of the languid
I pray for my salvation:
Send my soul with the Gerridae skaters
cross the membrane of tenebrous deep.

3 - For a Friend Alone at Night

At dusk, the warm of you
diffuse into the cool
collects the waternight in
young leaves’ gifted breath—
The jewels of dew.
And you are limb-heavy with
this weight of untaken
exhalations
languishing in
verdant excess,
left to your own keeping.
But water seeps;
drops from tips of fingers
trickling soilwise to subtle roots
the subterranea of ardor fed
are sipped for arborescence.
You are the littlest rain
that’s fallen to me,
field friend.

2 - Fact

Color is the scaffolding

Remains when feeling rots off bones of the seen.

No, Aesthete, the line is not bare — azimuth, arc of peregrine faith, it is still fraught with nautic thrusts

Impelled to plot the promise of frontier, even faint.

But a stilled heart admits the nudity of hues.

Sculpted in bas-relief, palette oils mime the depth of things

No longer rounded out, ballooned like glass filled with desire’s breath.

When does blue cease to be a mood?

When does green slither backwards in its unbirth to stasis?

Find yourself looking to pigments as facts, and then you will know.

For mine, I saw the amber dappling of shine, vestiges pocked in the face of thought,

And trusted this fossil-memory of riches, preserved for a dormant one.

1 - At Morning Service

At the amphitheater’s base, a stream babbles wetly in tongues.
Congregant flowers, blushing faces rapt, thirst:
the air is thick with roots’ occulted prophecy.
This ministering crowds out my fleet and mammal presence here.
Through hewn stone, dug beds, gymnasium of latticed pine
I tread a postulant in the audience of roses
who know their own bodies’ muted ciphers,
forgive the animal misstep.

To plant: being, diligently.
Swift bloom of summer, search yourself for this vegetable power of listening.

0 - An Introduction

Hello.

This blog was initially housed at Tumblr. After sufficient frustration with the interface and some formatting issues, I chose to migrate to Blogspot, which offers equal simplicity without the irksome meme culture and incessant spam profiles falsely inflating my stats with phantom notes. I'll reconsider Tumblr if I suddenly make it my business to circulate Homestuck memes and passive-aggressive identity political diatribes masquerading as activism, believing these to be the height of cultural participation and entertainment.

For now, here I am. I write, or attempt to write, one new piece every day. They are of no guaranteed quality, and some are little more than sarcasm with line breaks. But the point is to keep myself producing, to never fall into the assumption that valuable writing can only take place when I feel energetic and prepared to reinvent beauty, and to work out my sense of the world in the best way I know how. Sometimes it's a chore, but some of my best work comes out of forcing myself to look where I wouldn't otherwise believe meaning could be found. This is poetry, I guess.

Sometimes I will be inconsistent, and miss a day or two. I try not to, but I've got this hole at the center of my mind that roars louder on some nights than others, and I spend much of my time trying to compensate for the awful sense of vertigo I get when I approach it. At times, this means stuffing my brain with cheap television into the wee hours rather than staring into the abyss with pen poised, or pretending that I'm going to finally, at long last, write something on my other blog, and instead drinking my seventh cup of coffee while becoming cathartically huffy about some new travesty of the intellect I've deliberately sought out in some comments section just so I could feel something, and pretend that I've finally found my righteous cause. These things happen.

But mostly, I will write, and I hope in some very limited way, it matters that I do.

Now I need to run off and transfer my thirty-odd entries from Tumblr to their new home. Cheers, and enjoy.