She don’t know if she’s got the radio on
Or if those are voices singing in her head
There’s not an object she didn’t try to pawn
Leave the money on the dresser, she said

you were leaning on a fence post
i wish you'd look that way forever
further from the moon
distant stars like telescopes
waiting for the sun to rise

and your bones feel like mallets
pounding out a rhythm on your skin
stretched tight over the head of a drum
and you press your hand to the glass
and the blood fills your lungs
and your heart pumps the light
that spills out through your eyes
and you see the buildings swing by in sync
blurred on the edges, swaying, dancing in time
to the rhythm of your life

it was a luxurious disease
that kept creeping through her breast
her teeth stained with good wine
she told herself she was blessed

She touches the bruised spots
and wasn't it fun?
curiosity undiminished
she resets the horizon

flowering orphans chained to the broken drums
know the mirrors hidden in the back of the sun
asleep in black clouds they say cut off your wings
in the parish of sorrow you must sing
of seaweed and sickness that quickly depart
the angry perfume that spills from your heart

its just a sympathy for the strawberry
its just a synonym for the soul

the grass marked molten with horses' hooves
that fell eloped and rotten
like our foreheads against the wall
our finger splayed across the ceiling
our voices and calls barked back across the lawn

we saw with eyes that were diamond dark
we felt with nerves that were vacuum and void
we learned to love with the black balls of glass
that hung suspended in our chests

when

under tombstones of glass and steel
we buried the dead in land that's no longer there.

she died with green eyes but she was born with blue
singing antique hymns that flowed right through
the jawbones on toy thrones that hold back their moans
of the time and the terror of the love they once knew.

Equator Hymn

he meant to chase away the sadness one day
to chase it away with anything, anything really
he meant to chase away the sadness with a torch
or a vacuum cleaner or aspirin or booze or electric
neon hologram jesus figurines that glowed in the dark

he meant to chase it away by hiding the words that he swore
and whispering the fashions that he wore
left over from the last three years
the fourth year having been not very fashionable
and more inclined to use polyester than was really necessary or wise.

he meant to chase away the sadness
and so he squirmed and shook and shimmied and stung
he broke and fell and wallowed and whined
he sipped and supped and wandered and won
and then finally, finally
he belched like a broken beast.

You as a Nest

there were treasures in the water
there were visions in the sand
there was weight and heft
and birds that screamed their jealousy

there were also animals,
there were animals and sounds
that breathed in the night
that lived in the smoke
and danced under skin

animals that lived inside you

and looked out through your eyes

watching me.

Compassion

"My hair is on fire," he said in relief.

"Well, my mind is alight," she said in response. "My skin is a burden, but I still feel alright."

"You don't understand, you don't comprehend, you can't find the answers, you just don't see the sun."

"But the air is attraction, the air is inside, the air is a heart and my heart lies with one." She smiled like a leper on a crag-pocked hill, she smiled like a statue standing perfectly still.

"Don't you see? My hair is on fire. The flames they are burning, the flames they reach higher."

She spun and she reached, she laughed and swore. "Time-flaked tears that welled from the shore, my skin is a burden, a burden for sure."

"You fucking whore, you awful fright. The agony of the wretched called down upon your head, please set me free, free from my plight."

She gathered a bucket and filled it with dread. She walked to his canyon dumped it in right. His screams were the echo that bounced through the trees, the dread it did nothing, it fed on the flames.

"You kill me with compassion, you squeeze me with pain. Why would you do this to me, this horrible thing?"

She grinned while she wept, she understood so clearly and fast. "My skin was a burden, I told you all that. I did this to save you, to save you at last."

Untitled #1

Set the kids aflame
they'll thank you for their days.
Presidents proclaim
"they were asleep in different ways."

Monuments of ash
from the garden-gated gun
when silences outlast
the sinking of the sun

i don't want to die in the city alone...

when you went away

when you went away
i was watching the snow
drifting up from below
the slow sway of the days

you never said a word
but your breath was so salty
the moon was at fault
see you blur like a singing bird

in another time
we were dancing on the sun
the rays had just begun
to rhyme with us in time

bleeding foreign sands
my tongue was a crutch
and now you've been touched
by a strange man's hands