Surveying 31 days of scars
An infirmary for words
Just shoot them as they sleep
I cannot bear their needy countenances
for another day
I gilded my tongue with water from the black flask
Now everything I say is the absolute truth
Even my dream self points a finger
Muttering sideways to its brothers
At how changed I am
The stain of words prints my bedsheets
with a map of meanings
I am too weary to decipher
I must break all my fingers
Before they scoop out my eyes
So tired of seeing everything
in the light of my own heart

bought new snow shovel

i look out window every day

not a flake in sight

I have met the love of my life, the girl of my dreams, and my soulmate.
They are three different women.
My love burned out my eyes as I watched her fall
I wandered, hands outstretched, in search of her in the country of jagged glass
Our greetings no longer Amiable, our stares strange,
I still remember the sweet blood on my cut hands, some of it was mine.

Another I met in an afternoon vision, folded note slipped sideways past my ribs,
Warning me of a red fire boiling in from the east.
My men barely had time to lash me to the mast
The last knot snug just as the golden voice rained aching over my heart.
I remained ever an island to her, she a sunset strangely settling in the east again.
A span of time and circumstances cut between us and I fear I cannot Bridge it.

My soulmate stirred beside me in sleep when our names were the alternating beats on a drumskin stretched between the teeth of gods hunkered in secret parley until one sneezed and one laughed and the skin snapped, a canvas whipping in the wind, paint crying over the map of all the child-smudged continents from where they would send for our varied parts only to scatter them over and over from the cliffs of the moon down to clay-slick river valleys where red monkeys sift the water for the syllables of the incantation that will make us whole.
Her voice is the sea foam call Beckoning Again from the cave where fire children raise pinky fingers to write messages in mercury. For her I will always answer, will always fly and fall, shudder and be still.

The three will never weave me a skein of promises, a blanket under which I can sleep untroubled
The three will never confer and trade secrets
The three will never compare their familiar bruises
But when they cry out from each horizon they are a chorus and their song finds a common center
They are the Sisters of the Storm and my oceans boil when they draw near.

About two years ago I lost the ability to fly. Not like Superman, nothing so impressive. Just a loose kind of upright hovering, as though my heart were suspended from a cloud passing high overhead. The onsets came unannounced: Electricity warmed my spine and I simply inhaled, drifting upward, dangling until I could push off a nearby wall or streetlight.

It unnerved passersby. Spontaneously flying people were unsafe or at least untrustworthy. [read more… ]

Somewhere on the moon is a picnic basket.
You leaned against the black monolith
and I leaned against the crashed capsule.
We ate a meal of heart-shaped sandwiches.
It is so bright on the moon that your pupils turn to pinpricks
and the stars vanish.
So you can understand why it was hard to see you
against the monolith,
against the infinity draped along the lambent lunar curve.
We put on our star goggles to see clearer.
I showed you the fire the wise men followed.
You pointed out the comet that would boil away the oceans.
We watched the earth appear.
When I tried to put it in my pocket,
you stopped me,
saying it would only end up on my shoulders.
You gave me the mountains of Tibet, instead.
“Start small,” you said.
The line where the light side meets the dark is so distinct
it looks as though it were painted there
with the ashes of every hopeful campfire.
We danced back and forth through light and shadow
like a car weaving at high speed down a forgotten highway
where laws were too lazy to get up off the porch.
After a while I grew to love being dizzy with you.
On the moon, even the most serious things
weigh less than a golf ball.
In our hurry to catch the train back to Earth
we forgot the picnic basket
and several other heart-shaped things.
I still see them now and again, as though through a telescope.
The secret of the moon is that there is air there,
but only for a time.

I will not apologize for the train wreck
You brought all that baggage
Now you sort through it
Because now I’m hunting for my voice, see
I got tired of all the parallels
So I uprooted tracks to grow ladders out from stairwells
My voice might be up here in these mountains
Echoing between griffons’ nests
Or nestling between a goddess’ breasts.
Goddess?
No, I’m getting confused again
Just two soft hills I passed when I used to take the train.
I will not apologize for stealing the bed sheets
You taught me to make a parachute just in case
When what I needed were sails to visit space in my starship
My voice twists tongues with the sun, hon
It don’t parlez vous you and your moon talk
So bright and quiet, but visited by shadow
You know, the dark train that could
But I should not concern myself with lunacy
While my voice still calls to me
From the lip of God’s coffee cup
Take a sip and stay up to see the griffons landing on the street with me
As I come flying home.