Addendum To a Break-Up

She'll do.
She's a rough approximation of you
without the sense of humor.
She'll do
and she did.

Rough drafts come through
the window.
A woman like that will only let you
get away with her for so long.
Every time she left
I was paranoid she wasn't coming back.
I'm turning into John Cusack.
She's never coming back.

I write my fuckin heart out for you.

The Only Thing Separating Us From the Stars is the Ceiling.

I wake to two text messages,
O, all of them from you!
My new room's almost arranged.
This desk fits snugly under
the bed. I wonder if we'll both fit
in a loft so close to the ceiling.
Look, I've created
a new place to be lonely.
There's danger in not averting
these actual feelings
developing for you.
Why now? Why you? Why me?
And are they coordinated
with what is going on over there
inside your heart?
I fear I'm overshooting the mark...
Tomorrow pleasing French girls
will come along.  I try to dispense
my heart equally on everyone
but sometimes it seems like
only one person is worth it...

217 Hours, That's How Long I've Known Her

It's so early
I'm forgetting
what she looks like
when I haven't
seen her
for a couple
days.

I want to
see her all the time

to memorize
her quicker than
she is disappearing.

I catch
what moments
I can

like flaming snow
from a firework
shriveling to ash

in my fingers.



Boredom, with its
table of queer
instruments,
deals out its agony.

In a German accent it
urges me
to go outside,
to busy myself
to look away
so the hours
can slip
by unnoticed.

I refuse.

I want to be alone
with the pain,

the palpable absence,
the only feeling
equal
to her presence.

This pain
is the proper
debt for
what
she will bring.

Out of
the dark, her
face comes
in a flash.
She is beginning
to live in me already.

The memories
are slowly fusing
themselves to
my flesh.

Imagination is remembering
a future
that never comes true.

I can almost remember
the future

the future
where she hides,
waiting.

July 29, 2013

It takes approximately 30 years to get the message
that time is actually turning,
that this whirled world is headed somewhere,
that the mirror shows us a new face every time,
only it's nice enough to reveal us gradually
so we're not driven suicidal all at once.

We are creeping towards night
but only because it's day.
The dark clouds loom.
They move into the room.
The sun looms over them.
Do the flowers suffer in rain?
The Black-eyed Susans nod
with tears, Yes, yes, yes.

Yellow is plentiful in our meadow today.
The sun blowing its light all over the grass.
I am not comfortable unless surrounded
by green: grass, leaves, stems.
They place me. They hold me there.
The forest is a spa.

Today, summer, growth is winning
but the birds are not singing
about transcendence. In fact,
they are quite unhappy.
The sun barrels through the sky
burning away clouds.
The living flute of the beak forces
agonized notes into the indifferent face
of a sky so blue as to be totally mundane.

The earth is retracing its steps
like an insatiable nomad
or obsessive trying to find
something it lost it doesn't know
how many years back.

It finds the same handful of skies
it always has, a pearl necklace of stars
strung across it's murky night.
I've been dragged on almost 30 trips already.
It's the same shit every time.

White Fawn

white fawn shunned
finding family in snow
eyes pink
clairvoyant

a roost    hunter
puts eye
to arrow

white faun
closes eyes

growing her
crown

vanishes
into winter

The Art Room

Some kids found their rooms:
Math room pizza parties for those held in place by statistics,
four mirrored walls enclosing those given strong bodies pressing iron into muscle,
a tiny box for the Special broken off and hidden from the general population.
Those who went to the art room followed the music:
Stacks of scratched mix cds flourished with magic marker,
curated directly from fresh teenage hearts
made into sound flying over Doc's Art II class
as they sketch, carve, snack and chat.
The only room where students are allowed
to talk to each other all period
and pencils work to produce souls
instead of information.
There, the ineffable takes shape, in papier-mache, 
macaroni or glitter.

Here are the kids who knew how
to make mistakes. Perched on stools,
napping on the couch in the back,
the duds, the nerds, building things, hanging out,
shaving sculptures into their scalps. Their minds escaping
in paint-smear, light and earth, becoming amorphous blobs,
new species of globule bacteria squirming across a slide of canvas,
things under the microscope, not for interrogation,
but for companionship.
They reach no understanding with the world through movement
or the way the colors talk
to each other, they only reanimate the confusion into something
they can be friendly with.
Visions surface from the blank stare
of a white page.
They know how to get rid of that white;
just start getting it dirty.
Eventually it begins to look like something
clean.

Nate starts new genres every class
though he plays no instrument: oy-punk, ska-core, pinhead blues.
Corban and Chip engineer robots
from their dad's junked wiper blades and orphaned gadgetry.
Quiet Jennifer looks
into the peeled aperture of her camera.
Golden Nick sketches always,
scoring every conversation with his etching.
Their eyes cast aloof
from what everyone else is trained to see,
staring into discouraged hallucinations.
Unable to convince themselves the visions aren't there,
they exorcise them through messes of paint, wavering clay,
kilns burning mud into permanent shape. Splotched
mistakes arch gracefully into unforeseen purposes, the erroneous made integral.
What is discarded or shamed in other rooms is here followed with curiosity,
rescued and incorporated into a perfectly rendered mess
of liquid. The rejected is what was, what became.
Here kids let their hearts out, casually, without having to explain them,
like red paint from a shiny new tube.
Can't everybody see it? It's up there on the wall, collaged out of glue-stick
and diced magazine scrap.
They don't have to clarify it in the desperate pomp
of a poem or the insipid glitz of jazz hands. Put on the run by the logical requests
of Spanish teachers, they can relax here,
and so they are real, and so they are different.

As adults, they still use what they learned there. I watch them. They are my friends;
bartenders or line cooks or nurses or clerks, their basements are cluttered
with bric-a-brac, creative purchases, bought not out of necessity,
but simply because they explode the room into life:
A creek painting amended with a rhinestone deer cutout,
the orange booth of a defunct bowling alley,
Happy Meal characters leftover from obsolete Saturday mornings.
Their dens are hung with 4th grade prize-winners, Governor's Show picks,
a woodcarving of an eagle so ugly only a Mom could keep it hung
on her bathroom wall for thirty years.
Exacto knives and staedtler erasers point
from Warhol coffee cups on drafting tables,
T-Squares and light boxes are dragged through a gamut of low-rent apartments.

Maybe in the cupboard, maybe out in the garage,
a box lies closed
but not empty,
filled with crinkled tubes
of hardened oil, a palette stained
with a multifarious rash of colors,
a forest of stiffened brushes growing
from a ceramic ashtray.
Every now and then they put a record on,
pull this box out, open it
and again, with a little insistence,
the colors come flowing.

Drinking the Wine

New lovers lie on a blanket
Inifinity lays six
feet of dirt against the fresh
pine lid beneath

I wonder what they see
when they look in each other's eyes

unperturbed earth
accustomed to a long diet
of deaths most
of its graves unmarked
forgotten

The grass is given
a close shave and a fresh drink

Four corks run
through with the sharp end of a pigtail screw
lightly stained in dark wine
the dark wine pouring
from fingertips into
little covered cask