Trees Will Make Their Lives Under a Summer Sky

We were seedlings when you thought we were the brush.

As bruised as my ego was, I mistakenly took you to be
the truth for the moment, my day at a time formula
prescribed for those landscapes in my mind where you
had yet to exist. The plates have shifted, and so comes
the smiling mouth, churning like a hot gyre, grounding
the coffee bean, and the iron ore. Hilltops exploded
into a background of hate; the kind where dissipating
clouds overcast a sun soaked skin -not yours nor mine.
The leaves and berries were torn from their branches,
bark stripped from its perennial core. Those roots
we knew would take us days to excavate came up without
great effort -their sprawling veins dropped, lifeless
as hair upon a shoulder. A liquidification of soft
spots -spots that were lighted by lamps: tunnels of
dark-room door-ways, and naked men and women melting
into the developer, waiting for their portraits to appear.
Falling trees, barely falling, but lifting upwards
toward the gaping hole in my head pried with your arm
around any good Christian man, praying to God that he
gets you into your full size bed by the time two a.m.
comes around. He's late, we can't wait much longer.
He's late we can't wait much longer. We must hurry.
When we were made we were set apart. I, in the corner
of a hotel lobby. You, near the edge of a cliff with
burning bodies at the bottom of its cape. I let the
bad parts in, and they obliterated your joints,
your pristine landscape. You firefly, never again.

(Never Again)

There Are Things Which Must Cause You to Lose Your Reason or You Have None To Lose

Turn the lights up. I need to say this before I sleep tonight. And that is that I've lost my sufferings like a pack of cards. The box should be around or in a drawer. This keyboard shows a full-house and I have a similar suit, but lesser cards. It's the writing that kneads my thoughts into edibility. Time outlasts my memory, and so recording is the only way. We can create and ruin, and the "I" that has become only an extension of the mind will demolish and design anew. The boy pulling on his shirt collar, a woman worth every lap dance of entertainment, the man behind a viewfinder, photographing an infant and mother, and even that child that twisted all of my desires for hers will inevitably turn into literature. And what difference does it make when you have all become the text on vellum, a culmination of thought for the flipping hand. The body is a bridge for the mind to dynamite: slabs sink into the river, and a gap remains in the air between two stands. What does a bridge become when it does not provide crossing? How does the body exist without analytical, and critical thought -a chemical reaction for creation? Are we trees in the forest, waiting to be cut down, only making sound when someone wanders the landscape?

You must write, and you must change your life, literature. You must adhere to your destruction, an accumulation of the explosion of the craft. Music will flood your soul in rhyme and commonality. Like birds and bees, we flap our wings, flutter the air, not drowning, but waving. And we are all biologists, anthropologists, musicians, and lyricists. The We are beggars. The they have eaten their young. The I commercialized into wit. The us abandoned the we for the sake of sexual progress. And the you asks "How long will we continue to read the words from the hordes of saviors suspended from our crosses?"

Ray LaMontagne

Well the truth, it fell so heavy, like a hammer through the room; that I could choose another over her. You always said I was an actor, baby, 'guess in truth you thought me just amateur.

That you never saw the signs. That you never lost your grip. Oh, come on now, that's such a childish claim. Now I wear the brand of traitor. -Don't it seem a bit absurd, when it's clear I was so obviously framed.

Now you act so surprised to hear what you already know, and all you really had to do was ask. I'd have told you straight away. All those lies were truth and all that was false was fact.

Now you hold me close and hard, but I was like a statue at most, refusing to acknowledge you'd been hurt. Now you're clawing at my throat, and you're crying all is lost, but your tears they felt so hot upon my shirt.

Well the truth it fell so heavy, like a hammer through the room, that I could choose another over her. You always said I was an actor, baby, 'guess in truth you thought me just amateur.

Was it you who told me once, now looking back it seems so real, that all our mistakes are merely grist for the mill. So why is it now after I had my fill that you steal from me the sorrow that I've earned. Shall we call this a lesson learned?

-from "Lesson Learned"

An Ocean of Noise

The sea change blackens the soul like a sonnet, burning inside of a ring, a promise made between diamonds and titanium trust. And we all make the sacrifice for our savior: the zipper unzipped -spinach without the dip, and a hole in the wall where we left our fist. Marks, permanent and inconsistent with our tastes -we would never walk in these directions, nor at this pace. There aren't just steaks and fins swimming along our legs; there are cities, intersections within them, and people dashing to corner bakeries to feed their thoughts with pastries. Can't we feel them at our feet? Swirling about the earth's sand, gyrating streams between our fingers every time we scoop with our hands. Wander the waves we will tell our youth. Hide it all under the bottle-nose's stale, buoyant body like History, like the mammoth's fleece. Murky the main. Stomp our feet on the land underneath. And murky the main. We've got our reasons and they are fine.

But all our reasons were just lies.
-to buy ourselves some more time.

Righteous as a Rose (are the anecdotes)

"reminds me of my ex
the words describe
our relationship perfectfuly
baby i still miss you" was etched
on the outside edge of stone
that built the Rubidoux cliff.

Only one river runs through
Riverside, and your standing
in it, she told the balding man
in his thirties. He played his
cards right and won a jacket
to wrap around his shorts with.

Campfire at the top, burn the
mountain down. Campfire at the
top, burn the mountain down.
The devil is a disc jockey,
playing all the sickest jams
and illest beats. (showcase)

A lime tree grows in a woman's
yard. And there are no fruit,
only bitterness renewed in every
birth, growth, seed spurt, and
host -the softer the shell, the
more famished are the flavors.

That cat is a disappearing act.
That cat is a disappearing act.

Evasive Shadows (I want you to read this)

Evening shadows slain, the material changes
with the landscape, and you change with each
passing day. The nights are flooded with
my memories. I can't continue creating a world
where you don't exist, nor can I continue
to lock you up inside my past. You are not
the same. I swore that when you spoke, you
smiled like the glint of the moon reflecting
upon the cosmonaut's glass helmet. I swore
for several days, hoping I would drown my
aggression inside of a mess of language.
Until I imagined you lying next to me,
the fire from the television toning our faces,
I was afraid you were too perfect a formation.
And you faded instantly. Like leaves blowing
from a leaf blower, the mechanics swiftly
sent your image into obliteration: a color
unrecognized, false, and posterior of the room
I was in. There was no glow, no lips nor skin
exposed, no toenails scratching my achilleas,
and nothing that resembled a future home.
Everything you said, like my daily dreaming
of you, and me catching shadows, is all smoke.

#11

Can we just skip the bashfulness that comes with meeting new people,
and get right into photographing you in the nude? I'd like that more.

You see, I'm not afraid of disaster anymore. I've fallen off of a steep
edge and broke the smallest bones in my body, and once they were at their
weakest, my larger bones attacked in order to ensure their reign over my
skeletal shape. A perfect design, drawn out from my ambitious bone marrow.

So don't be afraid when I want to tie you to the bed and beat onto your
throat with my tongue. It won't be verbal, but you'll feel it when I'm
finished, and you just might thank me, or applaud me when I'm done.

Can we just skip the reservedness, and you unpack your secret desires,
like love during wildfires, and those animals lying in the burning brush.

The Resonance in Resistance

I would like to believe
I can build a song
without carrying your
tune, and singing
your words. The notes
are echoes and brass
will continue to blow
where the wind left off.
A voice will seize the
moment, allegro, like
a glass of wine,
drowsy and vermilion.

...I am immune to you,
and your tiny violin.