thanks.

In the darling moonlight

And wrapped up in my signature three layers,

I walked from chair to shoes

And from shoes to car

As if it were the most arduous of odysseys.

Following the staggered lines

Solely because of nagging muscle memory,

I drove to the lake,

Where summer bodies

Had left the earth for a moment,

Pulled back down to the dark waters

By only the warmth and promise of life

And the laughter of friends.

In my desperate sorrow I expected to meet the laughter again

Expected the universe to finally say “Alright,

This one’s had enough.  Joke’s over, throw him a bone.”

I expected to meet the beckoning kiss of family

That filled the mid-august air

And sent sparks through the life-giving waters.

At the all-too familiar response

That silence readily gives,

The sadness found me, my guard abandoned,

And drenched my skin.

These words, sparsely read,

And taken only partially to mind,

Are the agents of one desperate call,

Born at the unfriendly moonlit lake:

Let there be eyes that call my life beautiful

When the silence assures that it isn’t to me.

get a room, U2.

I wait on mornings,

When the summer sun spills in through windows

In a golden wash

And silhouettes the doors with latent energy.

Inhaling the musk of grass and insects and mountain trails

From the blessed vantage point of our back porch,

The dark night hours that lay behind me

Are all but erased.

But memory keeps these afloat,

These night hours with near-drowned eyes

Wide with the sight of the cold beyond,

And calls them again

When fear deems them useful.

Fear that rises in the throat

In darkened hallways

As pale women with haunted, filmy eyes

And strangled, guttural throats

Crawl like skeletal spiders past every corner.

Morning, with her smiles

And promises of light and life,

Is yet always malleable to the dark spirits

That crouch in shadows

Surrounding the prize of heavily needed sleep,

And the fear keeps me at a distance.

Fire & Ice

I’m not your friend

Until maybe tomorrow

Or Tuesday

My schedule is somewhat hazy

And

And

Wait

And

I could never pick the candy bar I wanted.

And…

I’m not a disposable camera

I’m not an expendable employee

I’m not your favorite toy

Grown old and dusty and thrown to the corner

I will not be a soda can

Drained of its purpose and crushed into a pile

Of un-purposed matter

Although I know I’m deserving of it.

And…

On windy days like this,

I would give my heart to be a buffeted tree,

To waver but retain that grip on the ground,

No more being dragged to unknown terrain

And dropped, disoriented, struggling to find my way

Back to the empty hole

Where I had just been standing.

And…

I’ve said before

I feel as though I’ve lived ninety years

In twenty year’s time

Without the happy accomplished memory

That sometimes comes with age

Now I believe I’ve only lived an instant

Because past and future are both pictures

That continually flash and are burned

Because the only proof that they both exist

Is in my condescending scars

And the hope that sometimes fills me up.

Coraline

It’s been articulated in every direction,

Spilled from its carton by a boisterous child

And it’s dripping off the edges of the counters

And leaving footprints through the halls.

Some could say

It no longer needs attention,

And some could say

The mess it has left

Ought to be cleaned and sanitized.

But despite its history of chatter,

Love maddens me

As though a wire were strung through my chest

And looped around my heart,

And the further you walk away from me,

The more it burns,

The further I’ll walk where you lead.

The stories that do not leave me

That color my dreams

And sharpen my days

Hurricane around me with great force

And you, inexplicably,

Are standing with me at the center

You are the keystone in songs

That itch in my ears

And fill my skull with eerie light.

Some could say

That without you on this earth,

Beauty would pass through me like a window screen

Unconscionably unnoticed,

A golden spindle wrapped in graying thread.

lithium carbonate

London’s on her way

Back into my eyes and ears

Like fog sinking down from the celestial plane

And wrapping round the weathervane.

Words come slower than they did,

Catching up their coats and dashing from the unemployment line

To see what the new development is and, hopefully,

To get a graveyard shift.

The sound of rain on the darkened asphalt of Palace Court,

Of tin foil clenched in a child’s fist,

Comes rampaging out of an unswept corner of the year previous,

And drenches me in fear,

The kind that fills up your answering machine with unrelenting calls.

The broken heater, the glass-top table,

And the loquacious sound of letters being opened,

Followed by sinking news of home,

These things bury me.