"Leap, empty handed, into the void."

I notice the stars. Burn scars on the arms of night. I notice the tree in the driveway and the way things get white when heat is remarkably absent. We are tall in the room, tall like flames in a fire place. That's how tall and long our faces are. Nearly touching the top-surface under-belly of the situation. We have been smart for a long time. smart and foolish. I'm ghoulish on mountain roads in the winter; left turn on arriving and in through the snow bank gates of the lane and long in coming down, up and around the old tree next to the house that Bob used to live in. The lane is empty now but for us with our cars parked on the soil skin stretches of the forest floor, and our feet up on the coffee table laughing as fights climax between powerful opposing forces; smiling dining with wine, with time, with sighs under our belts; we have been smart for a long time, yes, my yes, we have been foolish. Smart and foolish. How we forget to be so proud of ourselves for having survived. For mingling mindfully on the kitchen floor spots that are sore from our mingling. For keeping our roots tethered twisted and distant. For having not betrayed our positions.

a long lane between the trees and i turn left on leaving. you're a good man. and a good woman. I turn left into the bluffs that rough up the shoulders of the road and sweat icicles in winter. I descend on leaving and breeze through, I turn left between the snow bank gates to the hill. The very last mountain I will ever climb tonight. I notice broken limbs lingering in treetops, black against the blue of a deep night. Patiently waiting for the day when it might undo itself and be severed from the thick monstrosity that held it so long and cold, shimmering, and eager against the sky, to lay lightly dying and pereparing to recycle.

I know we are distant but we live together well. When your mind breaks again from the fiber vessel of life and living that holds you up cold, shimmering, and eager against the sky of time,
return to me.

When life lets you down, remember that you are beautiful and come home.

All of you seething sad, happy laughing creatures. All of you leaving creations in your wake. Even if I never see you again;
come home.

"Israel has waged its fight against Hamas in the last weeks of the-"

Newspaper type sentences make strong statements in piles on the desk. Line from papers to headspace and out into the world of perceptions and assumed realities.

Headlines.

You spill wine on them and care very little for their fading. Their lines flail in the room like ducks during hunts, trying to make sense of themselves. Piles of newspapers line the kitchen table-tops and floors of the centuries, and still very little is said or gained. The rooms of the centuries have grown mostly silent and empty, with a surrounding landscape increasingly occupied by the stuff of graveyards. Or the noise of them has become so constant that you can only regard it as silence. Or the noise can only regard your simple ear structures as ignorant, offering no complexities or sonic jumps of faith. No voices outward spoken poking out of the age. History offers you no instances of beauty tonight, in piles of newspapers. You search for it swiftly and thoroughly because you know it's there. And in the house of history, the odors of old grandparents lingers in what you remember of kitchens before the imminent burst of technological ingenuity lifted the faces of homes and traditions all the world over, and refitted your youth with the shaking opaque amber of memory.

When all is well we sprinkle talk with laughter and tears so that when we leave, our days seem normal and lacking all the knots of adjustment. When all is well we forget the foxholes that flank the line of time, the long railing line of time, and we jump up, we hop on and ride, talking all the while like we were kids in a grandma kitchen, or maybe laughing and crying with the winds between our hairs, getting up so high and invincible and keeping such solid footing that we can't do anything but fall in love.

And I know, I know...
The winds of change, and the winds of history, and the winds of mystery, and the moist sour breath of death thriving with constant fertilization and affecting our olfactories from close range. You know that with laughter and tears, change becomes revolution. You know that we touch at least once every season. You seek the stuff of nightmares and the stuff of dreams. You must rummage in the house of history, if only to release the dust of ancient corner conversations, or to catch the echoes of what poets sound like when they speak freely, or to stir up the rotten odors of lovers that never parted.

You can feel it now; all our moments mingling, in the empty halls, with all the moments. In the unfinished house, we are both the inhabitants and the architects. We collide. You can feel the mites and the living things. You can feel the edges of this meeting one another and disappearing sometimes. You can see the light laying out on the floor beneath a sill with no clothes on and no blankets and no shame. You remember the way she moved her legs and looked away, acknowledging that it concerned only her and her surfaces and her sun. You can see the panes above, grimy with the grease of bugs and the mineral deposits of fat rain drops and dust devils and sprite summer sperm; the pollen and the wheat. You can see the Earth waving. You can see what the windows sees. And you begin leaving the house of history. Only to return with a new head for engineering.

And I know, I know, I know...

"Forecasters See Fast Recovery-"

I see women with more to say than a New York Times library. I see you putting all your strength into grinding your teeth dull because you're strong enough to build this whole house new but you, but you.

Do not dull your teeth to make it less painful to bite your tongue.
Do not bite your tongue.

When again you build the house of history, I will publish a newspaper to leave on your stoop and as the lines between our heads grow shorter, the first headline will read:

"I Will Love You For the Rest of My Life."

Our piles of beauty will line the kitchen tabletops and floors there, softening our daily echoes and allowing us to rot before they all break down to dust.

The marquees on our gravestone faces will contain pixel-digit colors of kool-aid red and skillet rusted orange. The glazed glisten over brown eyes. The spectral green of living things, which even vision cannot reproduce.

And from the window, when read, they will give explicit directions to our collection of moments in the cosmos. Time is just a measure of the expanding size of the universe. Every moment is a stationary point within its skin; every moment is a freckle. We rest there somewhere. Here. And when it finally begins to come back on itself, all our moments will grow too big for the house and come together in one blazing ball of life, love, history, and mystery, collapsing in on itself and hanging heavy in the nothingness that precedes us.

Buck 65- Square Three
Ani DiFranco- Pale Purple
Chad Crouch- Union Station


I've loved so many men and women in my life that I'm beginning to become accustomed to their presence and I know that so much active outward energy might be a nuisance for the whole complex of humanity, and I apologize for that. Veins and limbs. The strain I cause on all the traveling bravery of great thinkers and good lovers and well spoken poets, I'm sorry. But I am not sorry for the truth of it. The reality is that we look back and we smile. Or we cry maybe, or throw things across the room. We toss our coffee out and our pictures, but the reality is that there are lights bright enough in our past to grab our attention and ask that we turn and look. I can't be regretful. The morning glow of the snow out-glows our cigarettes and probably illuminates the galaxy a little bit. The light in the driveway hides our dark sides for now, and I would sacrifice my right to promise if you'd believe me when I say we're a beautiful pile of people.

The first door bangs against the door frame and the second door speaks in creaks as it welcomes us or fears us or begins to know with groans that we belong here. We plant ourselves on the couch like seeds, and we begin to grow. We plant ourselves on the line of time and it passes us by, quick sharp, and merciless, sailing just over the hairs on our heads. And when it passes, we get up and go. We stand up out of our strong holds and run until we hole up and hibernate or seize up and die. We're up on the edge of it; between two freighters on a long train bridge; between winters after all the world's nucleus catastrophes. We've become grateful for photosynthesis and reflection. We get up and grow. We grow up.

And I find it hard to be comfortable anywhere except alone or places where people always are. Coffee shops and bookstores. Highways. Urban center sidewalks. I talk when people talk and try hard to make it like we're saying something. I smile much of the time. Highways and back alleys. Cigarette breaks and basements. Public bathrooms and bedrooms. I try to sleep when people sleep.

I look forward to learning more. To knowing less. I look forward to the messes of our lives. I look forward to the photographs and the walls they might marry. As I remember gratefully what we were, I look forward to what we'll become.

It was so long that I felt like time was stronger and smarter than us. But the reality is, time is already falling apart and drifting away. We've already won.

Now all we have to do is celebrate.

cold hold on me. I couldn't get warm all day. shoveled the sidewalk on main street and drank coffee. Ate an egg sandwich. There were puddles all over the floors, pickling my cold toes. All smiling people that would come and go. I spent all day using a parascope to peer through my thick fatigue. Dribbling incessantly with wasteful witty judgement, and silently; why am I inside the mortar shell?


I can feel cher's heartbeat travelling along the floor from my brother's bedroom. It's been four years and I'm living with my parents again in a bedroom that wasn't mine to begin with. I'm not sure what they think about all of the things i've piled in here; books, posters, photos. I'm a fleck of orange in a giant's grey eye. The snow is piled up outside so I probably couldn't leave if I wanted to, which I don't really because it's five degrees out and there are few people that want to see me as much as they want me to see them.

The FBI was looking for us a couple days ago because we took some pictures of their building.

my desktop is a metropolis of juice bottles, wine glasses, books, cups, and name cards from various people, artists, and businesses. I have a minivan with no back seat. the back seat has been replaced with: a laundry basket full of photographs, a wine glass set, a guitar, a bag of vintage poetry books, two giant leather-bound bibles, a pea-coat, a collection of cd's, a half cent of used and unused film, the book I'm currently reading, ralph's financial records, motor oil, transmission fluid, dvd's, a bag of new books, and some clothes.

I wonder why my most important possessions are in the car. I wonder why I fit in the sagging driver's seat like an ass on a toilet. I wonder why i don't care while I drive. I'm satisfied.

my tires take to ice.

sleepy thing:

i miss pulling you out of bed when neither of us has to work.

"...because real love isn't pretty"

urgency is the opposite of patience. what's in the middle?

Henry Miller basically says that artists are dumb representatives of the universe. And I can believe that, except that I believe that we are part of "all that is fluid and intangible", if not in body, at least in spirit. Which is to say that if you think in terms of bodies, you have to admit that nothing is fluid and intangible. And the universe is probably something that exists only because we recognize it. So logically, artists must be translators between the two; connecting the world of vocal bodies with the world of cosmic whispers, and conducting secret conversations with each of the two that the other will never have the capacity to acknowledge or understand. These conversations are the structure makers of the temple of belief that we, as artists, afford ourselves. It's the cosmic patterns of speech and punctuation that build them. The universe is the temple. Art only reminds us of the idea of a temple.

Art is meaningless.

I guess that's what he's trying to say.

Papa M- Unquiet Grave

Ralph was trying to get me to eat one of his hamburgers all day today. He seemed really excited about having me try his patty. His smile almost looked like rubber because it was so big and he was so enthusiastic, and I felt like I was towering above him and he was anchoring the whole fucking place down with his big anxious face. He was swinging his arms around and the sun was shining outside. He was complaining about his oversized waistline. Though maybe not in words, I am a master of irony. It was the kind of day that's fossilized in amber; hard edges with something really nasty inside, but in the light of age, analysis, and curiosity, it's all quite beautiful.

Shauna and her heavy pony tail are always quiet until they interrupt the greater flow of things with spasms of passion. Angry, or humorous, or even innocent passion. We all agree that she's culturally deprived, but for all the quiet lonesome words she riddles off, that woman has some anger in her lungs. The air of it comes down off the slopes of distance that separate her and her boyfriend. It comes from the cobs and webs that dress the corners of the mother's house she lives in. It comes from angry old italian men yelling at her for trying to cook a burger.

And then he smiles when he offers one to me.

There were people coming from all over New England to settle on the apex of their weekend with coffee, tea, and traditional North American comfort food. They ate all of our soup and most of our chili. They spent far too much money and were incredibly unkind for a holiday weekend. I smiled all day long while I took their cash. That's the lasting affect they had on me. I remember their faces and the shapes of their voices and their coarse speech patterns. I remember their spectacle frames and their names and their sweaters. I remember which spices each spiceless one of them likes better. I even remember which directions their eyes move when they're talking to me. I really gave a day to these people. People who are, as they say, neither here nor there. At least they're not anymore.

Now they're in the starscape of memory. They're on a highway somewhere driving home, quiet and bored. They're on a train to a new job, a new apartment, a new love waiting. They're off in the distance now where silence replaces the weight of their bodies on floorboards. Where dusk resets the colors in their eyes. Closed doors replace goodbyes and we sigh. We're all fine. They are pieces left on the playgrounds of my mind, and I am enjoying recess on Main Street after the cars leave. All fig leaves in the hemisphere, soaking up the sun and waiting for the Dolmas. All figments of my imagination.

All they left me with was cash and that's fine; I bought four highlighters, some post-its and a marble notebook. I can give it back just as easily. I'm driving home, listening to saxophones from new orleans and harmonicas from kentucky. I'm listening to the engine to make sure it's not going to quit me. I'm a blue van up on the ridge, on the highway, with the ceiling upholstery falling down and the speakers snapping at every crescendo and drum beat. I'm two hands on the steering wheel, two hands on a camera and a cigarette, two hands on a stereo and a coffee cup, trying to keep my head up. And all the while I'm driving. I'm driving home with all the meaningless pieces that people leave of themselves when they just don't care, and all the strain of what words weigh when people care too much.

I came home and stared at the stars. My neck used to know the exact co-ordinates of certain constellations. I'll get back in the habit. Reading the stars is like riding a bike, right? What if each one was an idea you had? What if each one was a memory? What if one of them pulsing is the love you felt the first time? What if each of them is a photograph you wish you could take with your mind, or a poem you wish you could write? What if each one is a statement that makes you stronger?

I try to remember to let things happen. Because everything will happen. And I've got to say, I've been doing a pretty good job recently.

But sometimes, I am blind.

And if the stars are braille on this big sheet of paper,
sometimes I just don't understand.


I spent three hours staring at photographs and reading Henry Miller.


"My policy has always been to burn my bridges behind me"

Vetiver- Been So Long

"Confession is just an honest way of lying."

Tumble out of the darkness, you mess of movement. Your shell is made of invisible expansion; infinity and everything; your shell is made of nothing. I see your dark edges coming when the sun sets. Tumble into town now, you prowling lioness.

You are welcome here. These hallowed streets are for hollow evening echoes. Anna and I are whisper-hairs wrapping ourselves around the trees like ribbons around pillars in a temple. We are sailing silk among the cries of ducks and wild cats. We are sick and pickled in moonlight. Our voices show our size and we talk about the human condition on Woodbridge Avenue and on down the bend toward the Old Pond. We are sailors or pirates where the cold is our ocean and the wind is our stars.
I think we both prefer scars over regret.

Anna is cloaked, hunched, oaked with drooping willow hairs of purple crimson and gold, or so the darkness seems to show. Her eyes catch the glow of things better than mine with curved glass and curiosity. Neither of us knows our translation for "home". We try not to be ungrateful. We try to remain faithful in our families and in our selves.

Tumble down the wooden wall, you broken piece of courage. The town is drowned in the fractured harmonies of dirges. The Pub is full of the ghosts of love. Community might be a dream to me, it might just be a collective memory; it might just be the consequence of language. And what do we really know how to say? I am clouded in the smoking room. I don't seem to know you anymore. There are a few conditions to being alive and you might never be satisfied. And I, and I, and i- in choosing to live unconditionally, and to love- i am among the quiet and the lonely. I am opposed only to believing that death is a ruly path; that life is the math-crap of formulas. These are not things we make or manipulate. Tumble down the stairs, you drunk.

The devil is a scantily clad cartoon character with breast implants and big ears. She sings sweet doo-wop lullabies to fat white men and their turkies on cold nights that masquerade as holidays. She sits in bars like stolen sex and waits for your lips so she can use them to whisper lies you might otherwise never have noticed. Anna met her when her head met stone down the crevace hole. And we laughed.

There are few of us that love and love ourselves. If there is a human condition, or a shape for me in the cosmos, I wont accept it, and I wont reject it. I'll disregard it altogether. I am a collection of impressions.

I am so grateful.

And my shape will still remain.

"Time has a way of knowing what we have in store."

washington dc: we're coming. via delaware. we'll be there.

This buttercup morning comes tickling her chin and she wakes up with a big yellow grin. She melts from her toes to her thin hip bones, and her breath-chest deep into each piece of hair glowing hot in the sun. She didn't want to get out of bed just yet. She wasn't ready.

And she didn't know then how old her mother was when she was knocked up the first time, said she always hated it when people said they looked like sisters.

Blisters like that on an already sensitive relationship.

She was too young herself to understand how often and how quickly things get out of control. She never even wondered on those birth days how old her mother was; she just smiled and promised not to fight for a while.

Her mother woke her up for school daily, pretty little sleeping thing precious, stretching skin bag full of all the day's hope. Her mother was sure that she was dreaming big and peaceful and that's what turned her hairs yellow when she got old enough that peaceful dreams were in defiance of most things. Her mother was up off the ragged mattress and down the creaky hall, her shadows dragging across the dirty morning sunshine spots on the walls; the mechanical whispering of the door handle and her mother's face calling wake up wake up, and a pause before the door would close again. Her mother was a witness to her sureness.

Her mother's face was always sorry, she thought, but couldn't be sure anymore because the world had taken most of her mother. She saw her only before school in this bedroom in this building, set back between other buildings like a lot of parentheses that had these two people between, moving like secret sentences with cereal for commas and coffee for structure, and trees -oh and trees, up from cinder blocks to the cleaner spots of sun that come down to flirt sinfully with alleyways- oh and trees, the exclamation points that give them lines to the sky; better then most lines these people could devise, sweet lines, sweet lies.

She never looked though. She never looked at her mother in the morning, and her mother didn't look at her at night, and didn't look much like anything at night, but she wouldn't know anything about that. Her mother took time to herself and kept it deep down in her throat. Her mother didn't come home at night, she led a lucrative life.

But she wouldn't know anything about that.

She hears the front door shut. The front door is always shouting profanities in the morning. The front door drives people out with its vile language and now the place is empty. Nobody would know if she never got out of bed once in the past three years.

The refrigerator never seems to vary its supply of milk, cereal, rice and pre-cooked beans. Now that she's older, the refrigerator is beginning to leak secrets that her mother might be lying about "someday tropical beaches, baby, I'm working night and day."

The refrigerator is friends with reality, who lives somewhere in a public housing facility and can never seem to be able to afford more than rice and beans. Reality is stuck inside a gripping, crisp photograph in a glossy philanthro-political magazine, and keeps taking the plastic tubes off my clear plastic pens and leaving the ink wells. Reality smells like piss and burning styrofoam, and never seems to see a street sweeper, and reality doesn't really like back alleys so he leaves his needles there, and reality never had a father or a dentist, and reality doesn't know how to read, even though she pretends to, and reality doesn't know what fresh skies taste like and reality's days are always exactly the same. Reality is always somewhere down the hall moaning while her baby cries. Reality looks like a little girl, but talks like a soldier. She negotiates on her own terms. She only goes to school because time has a big mouth and she doesn't know how to fill it just now.

Her mother always says "The only pleasant conversation you'll ever have with time is gonna come when you shut up and have some hope. Just have some hope baby, and time is gonna fly."



And that's probably why she stopped keeping track. Every birthday passed. And she didn't even know how old she was when these stupid fingers dropped a pregnancy test positive into the same stupid trash can in the same stupid building; she knows what people do with crack pipes now, i mean clear plastic pens; she's got the fingers for it, I mean she developed them.

She stopped keeping track of hope, too and knew her baby would be born addicted, which is less than she can say for her slut of a mother. Even her stupid slut of a mother knew better. And she knew for sure, the last time she saw her, that her mother was old now. And her mother knew that she, too, wasn't a little girl anymore, with dreamy curls of peaceful things.

Her life happened quite the way it was supposed to.

Her mother saw it in her eyes, his trademark, the mysterious motherfucker, dealing in promises and hope. Reality steals his ladies' little girls from their classrooms and pimps them out in their neighbors' rooms. Reality throws their mother's out once he has their daughters. He takes the spark-shine from their eyes and replaces it with a matte-glaze finish.



And her mother didn't care which needle this time. She carried it like a sword, like the Queen's Knight; like an honor, she carried it home. She cleaned all the windows; sunshine, high time, power lines straight up to the skies; she wanted to see the trees leaning over all excited just to be tapping on her windows; she didn't care which of his alleys it came from now, the needle. She burned it down and filled up. She made too much, and she'd like to think she never had enough. She put it way down into her bones, smiling, this time, and hopeful, because he didn't have a say in where she'd go.



And when she went to talk to her about a crib and a room, she found a note next to her mother's smiling, rotting body. Stinking mess of a mother, rotting body stuck to bed covers in the dirty morning sunshine. She could see her mother's bones exposed in the same shapes that the sun came in the windows. And the trees danced there. And her mother was smiling.

All those raging tears and her mother was smiling.

Reality ignores the smell coming from his neighbor's apartment. She opens a note and there's a key inside.

It says "I'm sorry baby, I've been hiding all our hope. And now it's all for you. Storage Locker 223C in the basement. I love you"


It took her days to drain the tears and move the body. The city has a team that specializes in death. They come with badges and suits that billow stiff blue pastel down their bodies, and are generally unmoved and unapologetic. Their camera took it all, but would have little to say about it later, in newspaper articles, despite the volume of words and the wide audience. These are fanatical media moments and isolated from general public life somewhere.

It was days before she finally went to the storage locker, scared sober pregnant, fat, and she didn't want that for her baby. She was walking through the cage at the secure entranceway. She was turning the key, hoping for some memories. A waterfall. A warm morning sunshine pause between "wake up" and the choking bedroom door.


They were dusty up so long in stacks that some of them were almost rotting but she was saving them quickly with her dropping jaw. The largest available storage locker, and way back into the dark; stacks and stacks all covered up in blankets of dust, all the way up to the new ones in the front. Mountains of money. Decades' worth. And on top another note.

"You always thought I had time kept way deep down in my throat, but the truth is, I kept it shut up down here. Now we're gonna let my time go and you'll be left with all the hope."

This was a dark basement vault with paper stacks of old life lifting and giving flight to their odors and their seasons and their tired sighs. She could smell every grainy meal, every cup of coffee, every dumpster, every classroom, every cigarette, every bed she ever slept on, every cock, every sweating scalp, every piece of shit. She could feel the cold winters and the hot summers; she was shivering for it, and sweating, and trying to keep from getting snow in her hair without a hat, acid rain, the trash that scattered up the streetside in the wind. like rats. She sighed and sat down, embracing her swollen belly. She was breathing calm, and quiet, and getting ready to remember how to dream and how to fly. She could smell tropical beaches and granite stones. She could smell the ocean. She turned the note over.

"PS- Reality doesn't know."

"A cripple walks amongst you all,
You tired human beings."



Light bulbs are shaped like cork screws these days. Despite the speed of electricity and light, they take several moments to brighten. They cast a blueness over surfaces that is reminiscent of Vitamin D deficiency. We're developing the technology to collect methane gas off landfills to make energy. There are towns in the american southwest that are twisted sick and still recovering from the testing of nuclear bombs. There are whale wars in the waters off antarctica. There are gang wars in poor neighborhoods. There are kids drawing hieroglyphs on train cars and empty sewage caves for the anthropologists of the future to analyze and say that we were beautiful before we failed. All lacking recognition or humility.

I was in a closet full of tea and fruit juices, under a halogen light bulb, when I was enlightened with a thought concerning placement.
I'm repeating myself.

This is my concern:
We spent most of our lives tearing down boundaries and at some point, without our immediate awareness, the Boundary itself fell at our feet. And then we, who so often and so fully wish to see the rise and the fall of the sun in a day simultaneously; we just kept swinging into the night. With all walls down, now, and space acting the grifter of our energies, in what direction do we shift the focus of our labours?

In the wreckage, we might find more of the energywe need in the rising clouds of degredation; the combustion of the living; the odoroma of life happening always. We might find the energy to keep moving. To walk and to finally enjoy the space we made for ourselves. This is a matter of perspective. Because collectively, and unfortunately, we tend to get free by imprisoning ourselves.

If we were to see properly, we would forfeit the fight to calmness and rest because, regardless, we do tend to get free.

We would see that the rubbles of the Boundary itself are so vast that they bridge the gaps, and we would walk and sit resting and lay sipping teas and eating fruits and we would write and draw and snap, to prove it's true. Soon that's what we'll do.

And we will make sure to take care, and keep a love in the air- electric bonding love in the air- the gravity that curls our hairs- the clouds that part our throats. We will keep a love in the air.

So that when we finally come back round to the familiar sounds of songscales and alphabet-tales; the cycles and circles that will reclaim our everything as a simple seedling, we still might breathe in the emptiness.




[The weakness in the gravelpress, between each stone, gives growth the mustard seeds and milkweeds. The steel screams of train cars pressing hard on old railroad ties, old piles of old gravel always built on old ruins and old ruins, where the treeline holds the forest at bay, and looks ragged from it.

At the backs of brick buildings, things get wild again, without concern for the fronts of them. The crooked porches crooning blues that are black against the sky-hue of the moon. And the double chins of phone lines after long days. Of hard work, i know; of birth and worth and mercy, i know; of faith and grace and tears, i know. Of joy, the heartened martyr of mortality, i know. Of shame, humility, and death, i know. And with nothing left to say, the phone lines are slow in turning away to make for sleeping.
The train comes piercing. The gravels' faces make a surface together, making smiles together at the stems coming up from them.

The old road ran between the line, down where the bricks meet the weeds, and the sky, up there whistle-drivin sky-flyin smoke machine of a train; the old road gives way to basins that on better days, that is on rainy days, will gather a crowd whose speech is punctuation, loud (the bullhorns of frogs and microscopes i know you remember now how to see with your ears), and lakelike. Some of them here or there with their arms out toward the sky that gave them birth.

These are rain drops on a puddle.

These are renaissance poets.

And when with your hats and dancing, sun glasses prancing gossamer, reeling off what you have or haven't learned, but memorized to tell, and the speech just as well; i can tell you make a good human. where weeds breath chokingly the apathy and ignorance, this is where you forgot to tell yourself how things grow before you gave a glance at things that know death like it was a breath they'd take some day.

So afterwards, the shock is calming, quiet, and abstract; it has a meaning but you can't quite tap it. And then, when with your hats and tipping, and the atmosphere inebriating, and when finishing your paragraphs and throwing out your road maps and godly stupid finger flicking switches punching walls of darkness trying to get free...

when you're watching the rain fall on the underbelly of history,

give it a mind.]

the last one awake with winking voices;
the course we take.

from towers.
specs of dirt and the longstories of travel-
moist particles in the air, rich with flavor and
I am with taste.
I can taste it.

White buildings black from making it less ordinary and more
nostalgic
for those of us that couldn't be there.

from towers
watching modern sports unfold untold joys and
captured in the sun and
capturing the sun and
we are one
of many of these moments burned
into the belly flesh
of the universe

with yellow, the brittle and
mellow combustion
and god is with us if we want him, yes
god is one of these
dying memories.

becoming scars on our hearts
and truth in our art.

the last one awake to witness the wilding of urban scriptures.

emo operas.

White lines pass us by and we come out fine.
we come out wise.

Purgatory is an airport just beyond the south side of town, in a city of hotels and diners. It has a streamline interior of modern architecture and design; colors of a single frequency's family of tones. It's filled with the echoes of voices flatlining, losing life, and stating in machine wheezes a collecting course of directions, each in conflict with another. Every direction leads back to the same bench waiting for an egg sandwich and coffee at the entrance to the complex of terminals, and nobody's terminal is on the map. There are no cigarette breaks. There are no books besides the same copies of political science statements and romance novels. There are no windows that get direct sunlight and there is no hushing the conspicuous sounds of engines, whose destinations are mysterious.

The place is filled with faithless faces sitting on top of a scaffold of bones and flesh, scarred from the pock marks of sex and intoxication.

The place is filled with people that never speak the same language.

The place is filled with soldiers, poets, and money.

The place is filled with lost lovers.

The place is filled with mothers who have suddenly been set free.