temple building

Flat top treetop
Broken down river
I shiver
cause that cloud of smoke pouring from your lips is cold
or is that the broken quartz on this path poking into the arch of my foot?
Slow down boy.
Your pledge pin is shining too brightly on your black t-shirt.
Your legs are like scissors, but you’re cutting crooked in your haste.
I wonder where you’re running to
with your mind sprinting so fast that your face stays still
even when I smile.
Drip drip drop down the slope of the mountain,
should we pray for freezing rain to dry up the spring,
hurry it along for the burning fire of a summer sunset?
Two eyes piercing through the branches,
barreling towards me like a raging metallic beast:
A furnace to tear down these woods and turn them all into
heat pouring sweat pacing down my body,
worker ants forming a string from my mouth to the navel of the orange resting in the
palm of my hand.
Where is mercury rising to, and is Venus around the corner with her sulfurous yellow
clouds masking the seashell as it shatters on the surface of the lake?
Come my kelp friends,
shake your bubbles up to the surface while the turtle parades down below
dodging to and fro like an alpine skier
skittering off to the side as the goose submerges her head.
Fluffy white teddy bear tail rounding and bouncing sending ripples lapping at my curled
toes.
Still, still.
Hold them still. The pollen will wrap back around. You will be one with this world. Natural, normal.
Just keep telling yourself.
And here! Hear!
The trout arches out of the water, fins flashing between the stretching rays of light sliding
down the particle highways, bounding off debris and into my eyes.
Victory! The championship! You have defeated nature at the quiet mouse game,
startling it from stillness into the vibrant array of reality you fail to notice bounding through and picking up flowers and stick to build your temple fortress under the willow sobbing beside the dock.
You win a morning and an evening and an eye for beauty programmed into your halfway
hard heart.
Here’s to your tangled thistle hair,
Your porcupine skin slicing into the brick wall.
Here’s to your naked limbs angled on top of the grass like passing driftwood.
To your head full of lyrics and fears as it leans up against the golden bark of the
grandmother tree.
And she tells you that you are at peace.

of the moment

You're freshly cut grass beneath my feet, staining my soul green with your infinite tounges.

fagaliscious

There's a topless girl in the light in front of the library. If I could touch her breasts would be like shining pink blossoms. I wonder if I should walk up, shake the guy's hand, and say "I want to fuck your girlfriend."

I wonder what it means to walk around all night talking beat poetry to myself in someone else's tone of voice.

I wonder what it's like to have a crush on the girl your ex-boyfriend wants to sleep with.

I wonder what it's like to be you with your pointy elbows and big lopey lashes that dangle on my face.

I wonder what it's like to know how to stop.

The woods are a nice place, when you're little. The woods are a great place if you don't have someone's name tatooed across your chest announcing your race, gender, heritage, and anything else I couldn't already see from looking at your face.

I wonder what it's like to play footsy in the library computer lab with the person sitting in the cubicle across from you.
Write that down, it's a date.

William and Mary is the place where they send people who know how to give themselves detention.
William and Mary is the place where people lock themselves into tiny rooms in enormous buildings on a Wednesday night where there are more books then there are faces and they starve themselves on the knowledge their teachers have ordered them not to remember. This is William and Mary, after all.

Can you screw your life up with the click of a button? If anyone can, I assure you it's the kid sitting next to me in the computer lab. His acne is sweating as he frantically copies and pastes as if the bouncy curls in his head might disappear if he forgets the last little hyphen before the period.

I guarantee you, the smart people already know what you're going to say, so that's your cue to be silent.

I love boys in suits and baseball caps.
I love boys with pokey bellies and their hands on their hips.
Or ferocious girls in their pleated skirts with big sticks carrying off their masculinity in the baskets.
I love all of these things.

I guarantee you, that band-aid won't solve all of your problems. It will leak out, whether you tie it with nylon roping or let the sorority girl with the bleach blonde hair and the mulched roots sit on it like it's a big pile of compassion and passion and protection. Honey, penises don't come with condoms attached, so get off it.

I love the big black men with the flattened noses and the gold and green and purple eyelashes that I saw in a movie one time.
Or maybe it was another life. But I'll write that movie later.

Hey boys, if you've been looking for a real man, one to write you a hip new story, one to make all of your dreams become fiction, one to be known by every who's who on the front cover, well you're looking at him.
In fifteen years, the girl sitting before you right now, well you better watch out, because without a doubt she'll be the biggest thing since Charlton Heston's penis to hit the scene or the wall or the floor.

Can you push that plug in a little further, honey, looks like I might loose my electricity if your static can't bring me some new strand of hope. Can you push that pen down a little harder because if I don't learn how to read now then some day I'll be a football player taking my spelling tests in the corner of the college library from the offensive lineman coach.

Life's one of those things, you know, it always tells you when time's expired or when you have to leave or when coming is the right idea.
And trust me.
Coming is always the right idea.

I should be the librarian pushing the cart.
And instead I'm bolting like fabric, because I can't handle the truth of rejection, injection, and infection.

I'm a big spiraling puddle of protozoa.
Chalk one up to evolution.

letter to bryan jones

Tonight when I was walking home, I wanted the trees to rub together
They make me feel like you are still with me, our bodies pressed closely against one another.

Tonight as I was walking home, I stood and listened to the frogs chirping.
I could still hear your voice singing our goodnight song
As the verses get longer
And the chorus remains:
"see you tomorrow"

I never know why all of these outdoor things remind me of you: the small buds growing from the overshadowed tree beside the path, the small plops of life falling from leaves and shuffling on the ground, the fresh scent of springtime breathing through my hair.

You are what it feels like to curl up next to a creek on a warm spring day.
A bottle of water and a book in hand.
You are as new as a green pasture yet as wise as the firmly fallen tree.
As refreshing as daytime and as still as the night.
Your quiet soul babbles nearby,
Never so loud that I have to run away.

And each tear that falls to my skin from your cheek is like lightning
As we stare up at the night sky from Matoka.
I'm not afraid of the thunder to follow
I'm too busy watching the stars fall down and into your eyes.

Come cross bridges with me.
I've been waiting for a night like tonight when I can sweep you away
And hold you
Until the redwood tree cradles us, slowly lulling our words into a steady hum.
Come walk with me in Eden
Take my hand and spurn a new race of tomorrows.
Find the middle ground
Between always being around
And breaking my heart.

If that ground is shaky,
We can fill it in with sand
Squishing it in between our toes,
Two kids on the beach
Flowing in and out with the tide
Until the wave crests
And we come to rest within
The crescent of the moon we have created.

Tonight as I was floating home
The joy of your forehead on my lips,
And tucking you into my heart,
The trees were silent
And you were not beside me.
There was a layer of dust coating the clear path before me
And I ran over myself and onto the floor
With the things I hoped to do tomorrow,

Yet as I crawled into my bed
Your head was on my pillow
And I squeezed it close
Knowing that was the only place
I would ever lose
You again.

I hope you are there,
With my head on your pillow,
Wondering how to keep me from exploding,
Taping me together the best way you know how.
Singing me lullabies with your strings pulled taut
And your lips curling around the weak spot on my neck.

I hope that you are shining
As I am glowing
And that our light will wrap each other up in Ohm

This is a story that starts in the sky and ends in the heart.
It is our path to walk
Though it may stray off course and the markers may be worn.
This is our hope to find
In a world of nonbelievers.
This is our secret to hold
Until it unfolds itself.

If I could tell you, it would be now
But you've always known.

in the summer's when you really know

you're the only summer that I've ever known
sometimes things can be lovely:
a chewy summer's day in the park underneath an umbrella
frogs chirping in the dewy grass
the lace on a frilly elderly woman's straw hat
the glow of a monitor light glaring against my eyelashes
the wisps of clouds as they float across the iris of your eye
the twitch of my skin as it adjusts to your touch
the way your lips close tight to mine as we seek out the first embrace of time

sometimes things can be lovely:
a 1940s day
a wicker chair
a towel
tall straw in the breeze
a cold earthen stair

I believe you are lovely when I see you standing there.