my boy my darling my love

oh my boy is like dancing on a brushed dirt floor
my boy is the wind playing soft with my curls
i have climbed in that tree
and i see what he sees
my boy is the light that floods fast over me
to glory

my darling is warm summer rain in the grass
he is fresh from the sky
he is lightening's sharp flash
his heart has old thunder's deep rumbling roll
it brews steady and heavy and hot like a coal
we are whole

my heart can't be bought for the price of the moon
he stands firm as a mountain, weight deep in his roots
i want to be water tapped fresh from his side
may my cool draught relieve us BOTH from this fire

to smoke
to float
higher

Titanic

 
I get it now.
I was the ship.

Ships are always a “she”.

christ, you should have seen me.
 I was unsinkable and grand. 

My devastation: exquisitely alone.

In the end, it was only a scratch… 
A tiny scrape,
But it turned toxic.

Fetid.

Brackish.

You see, you were there, spanning an immortal existence
and I cut myself on you like a thorn…
On such a small part of you…
The only part you would let any of us see.


The damn wound festered and I went down.

The question is, did I try to swerve?

And what if I had hit you head-on?

extreme gravity

You care about someone else...

And it feels like falling.

There is a definite lurch...The kind that pulls your heart in extreme gravity to the pit of your stomach.

If I hide my face to cry; it becomes the only feeling I can even remember.
 And it is silently done...

Whole, Halved, and Rebuilt

i was more than you ever told me,

more than the rains feeding grass in the spring.

more than the wind howling hard on the plane

and more than the many colored leaves that it brings

i knew this, and walked on my own, feeling strong

but the walking, 

it lasted too long.

i am, now, a slight sliver of the full moon i knew

and the ebbing that took me was started by you

only once was it needed, many times did it come

a blindness that paled me, from splendor to none

i knew this, and waited for wronged to be right

but the waiting,

it colored me white

i will be, if the light shines, eclipsed by the sun

cancelled and nullified, reduced down to one

but if my luck finds me, as filtered as this

i'd begin to rebuild it, the heart that was his

i know this, so dreaming will hold me in place

but the dreaming

still shows me his face

Let it Breathe (cover)

A solemn half-year

what kind of despair is this?
it hums
and stirs
it sleeps at times
it swells as even as the tide

the current's cold as lovers' flight
it breaks me open in the night

but like a wound it heals or mends
til time can rip the seam again

and so it does.  it always does
which makes the healing double tough

it always rakes across my heart
it plows me under, e'er we part

Picking Wild Berries

  

   

i would rather die with an answer clenched in my fist

than a question dripping from my lip

    

   

   

My Favorite Cloak

you gave a gift when we first met

it fit impeccably

you placed it on my shoulders

so it covered all of me

I  learned I could not live without

the warmth that it provided

and it offered some protection...

just enough for me to hide in...

whenever we would meet, I wore it, 

covered up completely

i can not live with out it now...

my

cloak 

of

invisibility.

Me, As I Was

Listen.

It was years ago that I felt it.  Time stopped the way it must when you brush skin, or catch someone’s eye, or hear a scream.  Every molecule inside my body spread out like an orb to cover my heart, my memories, and the ones I loved.  I tried to become an explosion… and a shield, at the same time.  And it worked.  I was blown out into orbit around them all to hold them in place like a lonely moon.

As time went on, it felt like gravity slowly placing pressure on the borders, molding them closer to each other and me in the center, slightly spinning.

I thought the quiet out there was beautiful.  I was sad and at peace.  I didn’t think it could happen again.

It did.  It was a final pulse exploding outward… expanding my edges, which held at their breaking point.  The effort required such energy, it consumed my core. And, I still feel this way, burned out with space around every tiny bit of me.  I am never fully together.

Time has been busy pulling me closer to who I was…  but let me tell you, in the out pour of energy some of what I was has been magnetized…  and some of those charges have flipped… I am no longer drawn in but firmly kept at bay from my own self.

So it's too late.

When I see someone who looks like me on the inside…  someone who feels familiar…  yeah, I get sad again.  I remember what it was like to have drive and dreams.  I remember what it was like to have confidence.  wanting to be around them is like wanting to be home.

and if you are the one i see, and you resent it:  get off my back.  you don’t know me.  you don’t know what i want.
Because I just want to be kept together.  I want the strength of your arms to push against the power of my like-charges and hold me in place.

and i want to be comfortable in my own skin again

but i’m an empty bag flapping in the wind like sails.

What Would I Do Without You?

An Assignment

From Memory:

There is a thick hot fog that sits low in the wood at midday.  It seeps into the bark of each ancient oak tree and dissolves down through roots and out again into the soil, where, by the rising of the moon, it has done it’s waiting.

I am there, perched upon a great grey boulder, which has cracked nearly in half from time.  It has no moss, though it’s little brothers are almost covered by the stuff, dotting the forest floor hidden in and amongst leafy ferns.  I am here to watch  my moon shadow stretch.  When it reaches the tip of my rock’s crevice,

it is time.

The fog begins to creep, up, past worms and bones. 

It rises from each blade of grass,

out the very tips, up from the graves below.

When I breath deep, it settles in me and I understand.  

The air, this fog, is old.  And it has been breathed before,

by killers

and saints

and Romans

and natives

and thieves

and lovers

and me

and the ones I lost.

Balances

 

in constants and inconstant ways

from wetted through to golden days

i've tramped and been trampled upon

laughing still, i find me, solemn

grey is what my heart beats now

empty, hollow, bent, and bowed

given quick to sullen sleeps

clumsy falls from wild leaps

yet in a glass i see but blue

air to shine a crystal hue

blind to charcoal fog and night

blinded by a red twilight

fool am i to waste away

while in the orange bright of day

i am alive, this walking dead,

and could be bought a silver thread

the fates could fail to cut me through

i could be gold with love from you

but better still, immortal be

with gentle love from me to me

 
 

Red Clay To My Knees

tonight it feels like i am a thousand miles away...

and i can't even feel the weight of my body here.

  

instead, i imagine trudging heavily in the snow

there are hot puffs of breath in the night air

it is not quite dusk and the blood sun is leaking in
through tiny cracks in front of me

my old friend and i  have found a cabin.

we are standing with our boots in the dirt,

picking up dusted papers

looking under a stranger's things

but old friend is starting to disappear, rolling with the wind out from under the lintel.

i can't catch him.

my fingers stretch out - wreathed in the smoke of what was him

and now i am lost to the sight of my empty hands

and to the ache of all the home i used to have

Here Comes The Sun Again

  

     

 
 
 
 

What quality Defines you?

  

Patience.

I have been waiting.

I have been biding my time and I have been patient here,

in the wake of rushing lives around me.

It is a fault, though, this failure to hurry… to feel as though I have time,

while it is the water rushing off my legs all the while.

I am older now. 

Patience kept me from a worried heart. 

But

It has kept and keeps me still

from reality

and

Today 

I feel, for the first time,

this patience has been a mistake.

    

Drawing from Memory

   

  

Wrong/Wrung

  

wrong was your heart to be beating so

wrung was the tear from my eye

hard was your fall

and soft was the call

of the death I remember you by

  

A Portrait of Katie Marsh by Katie Feher

  

  

Emily

  

Emily says, "fear"

"write of it"

well, what of it?

I've got that.

I keep it in my pocket like loose change.

I use it to make a beat when I walk.

   

Sam's hair in a rush

   

  

Howard wants to know if I'm ok

  

Talking out loud is too hard...

it sounds
just like
me.

White Out

it didn't squeeze at me like this before.

I don't fit in my skin
and I don't fit into you like i want to

...
and you don't need anything.
...

so, what am I supposed to do now?

Howard's Assignment One

WRITE ABOUT A TIME IN YOUR LIFE
WHEN YOU FELT HAPPIEST ABOUT YOURSELF

In my near youth, I spent time...real time.

I traded it for colored beads and books on magic.  I spent half bushels of it on dreams that I tried to pin to cork board like dragonflies.  I gave it away to bums on the street and they spent it on beer.

I dressed in it.

When I wanted to feel the peace of work,

I wrapped hot time around my feet and let it keep my toes warm in the workshop.  It was in the glow of my lamp, and then in the soft curl of the maple shavings that piled below me like snow. 

It was caught like dust in amber sunlight before alighting on my skin. 

And when the work was done and the time was lost,

I traded in my scraps to buy more… one curl after the other for moments and days to spend.

 I poured all that time into the gas tank and barreled over the mountains of western Pennsylvania

to chase the sun. 

It was in those days I knew happiest wasn’t hard, and it felt like grace.

It was easy, like the sun in my eyes.

It was lucky, like the wind in my hair.

It was free, like the open road.

Wrung Wrong

     

with worried want and wrinkled will

i've wrung my heartstrings through.

how you were wrong to wait so long

and strong the longing grew

it crept upon my papers 

and it slipped into my pen.

it seeped from every fingertip

and sticky with it then

you wrapped your arms around it

and you wrung it dry as bone

wrong had been the longing

i was right to stay alone

   

The Victor Formula - Attempt One

Leave/Leaves

to leave a heart that breaks in pieces shed
like leaves upon a mossy forest bed,
gives sorrow to the broken left with leaves
which crumble, broken further to their knees.
and to see one's shattered organ fall in kind
must leave this hollow soul, a mournful mind

Bradley Kincaid Cover

   

   

Common Knowledge Cover

   

   

Yeats

 
For years I have only ever wanted to write what that damn Yeats has already said

and said well :


"I made my song a coat
covered with embroideries
out of old mythologies 
from heel to throat.
but the fools caught it
wore it in the worlds' eye 
as though they'd wrought it.
'song, let them take it
for there is more enterprise 
in walking naked'."


and well said.
 

Heat

 
this heat makes you hold your breath.
it makes you close your eyes slowly.  slowly.
it makes you stare into the sun until you look away and still see it
and only it.
when you look at me, do you feel this way?
do you know about this heat?
 

Almost

  

Almost

Almost

I touched your skin almost hard

I smelled you almost all the way

I closed my eyes almost

I almost thought of you

And I was almost careful not to
   

  

Two Week Old Feeling

Amanda laughed when I said I was sure of two things in my life... One:  that it was Thursday, and Two: That I would never see Mark O'Brien again.  You wouldn't think it was all that important, but his absence has made it exactly that.  Only, today I realized that it didn't bother me anymore.  I'm not sure what is worse:  not finding Mark , or not looking for him.

 

That One Knows

  

  

now that i'm home i can see that that's that

and i've a got 3 good reasons to never go back

  

   

Smoke

   
I thought of a gone boy yesterday and the smell of smoke from the night he built a fire in the floor.  i knew him to be far away.  in the north, he 'd say.  but he is not there anymore.  it's like thinking of him brought him back.  it is a strange thing, like a vision of Christopher McKandless on a road heading westward, to see him here in a town on the east coast.  where it's all so civilized.

Old Wind Blowing

 
I haven't got a peace to keep,
a tale to tell or a sight to see.
I haven't got a sail to fill,
a thought to hold, or a time to kill.
I haven't got a one to love,
a hell below, or a god above...
but i have got a thing to learn,
and a heart that aches,
and a skin that burns.
 

Today, it is an old friend

    
They creep up on me, these past lives.  
Today, he is a boy I loved when I was very young, but thought that I was very old.  
I knew so much then.  I knew about God.  I knew about time.
I knew about mathematics.  
But something must have happened... a fracture in my sense of smell,  a catastrophic wrinkle in the fabric of weather and place...  I have un-learned.


I must ask you all my questions.  


I will not fight.  
I will not rest so much. 
I will not kiss that boy I loved when I was very old. 
And I will be very young.  
I will never stop singing to my father.  


You will be there too.
We will learn mathematics.
  
  
  
    

Blue Valentine

   

   

   

    

Blue Valentine

Dig It

 
my hero stands there, lost to the life that I left him in.
We have nothing left in common, but man, I dig the change in a person.
   

Less

 
You were lovely.  I was less than that.
 

a grey youth

 
i saw a film about people who have lost other people,
not like change in a sofa cushion,
but like when someone who is falling slips right through your fingertips - slow and strong-
until you are left looking at your hands,
not knowing what you used to keep there.

you think "my hands are empty now, like my heart"
only, when the next person dies, they seem to grow right out of your hands a slip away all over again.

 i remembered, then, how the old dead make way for the new dead.
 

     
    
     
his legacy was made by the throwing of his weight against a wall
   
    
     
    

Is it true? What we're made of?

  
tonight the air smells of salt and thick fog,
like those nights when we sat out on the porch
and lit your cigarettes.
even when we didn't...
the light fell from our fingertips.

Equivocally

 
There is a fire alight in the living room,
and a shadow awake in the night,
a woman is lost to the glow of the moon,
and a man to the fire's light...
and though the wind howls and kicks at the frame,
our window stands firm to the fight.
may it always be so that the good in you,
be balanced by the blight.
 

The wings I made

  

   

it was not simple,
but i am far less afraid now
of change,
and of truth...
and of faithlessness.
 

you're not there

by the time it took to say goodbye,
you had already immortalized in my mind.
that seems unfair now.
no amount of light or truth with sway me.
you can never be real and i will never believe you are not what
i say you are.

On Stage with Hat and Dress

  

JEZEBEL AND THE CROW'S NEST

wilde or welles or whatever

  
"I'm not saying we should misbehave.   
I'm just saying that we ought to look as if we could."
  

Rug Pond

   

   

   

black days

    
there is no sense of light or of life in this home
with my body so damned to the dark
i am dead to the day and its people there
not one breath but my own do i mark

i am roaming the halls once the lights have been dimmed
and struck dumb by the flickering screen
and i check all the windows and doors for a ghost
frightened sleepless that one might come in

when i finally rest, i feel freedom is lost
i seem more like a shade than a man
almost, had i no one to answer to
but if someone can trap me, time can.