the downside of genious
is that I must go to great lengths
to experience life in new ways

each renovation features
awkward mechanical motions
jarring against each other

the more unsettled I am
with each clamoring movement
tells me how successful I am

while so many others desperately
search for peace frantically
my life's work is to stay uneven

show me strange and wonderous things
my heart cannot take this predicatability
I need reasons to wake at 3:00 AM

I need my midnight labrinths
to keep me challenged enough
to spark that uproarious glint

I need to know with certainty
that life is far beyond me
to keep me from falling to ashes

Bike-ride

Perhaps the division
intimacy against privacy
is just a vision
melting in the mid-day sun.

I started hearing footsteps
careening around unlit corners
trying to catch my moves
sliding off silvery walls.

how could you want more
from me? There is
nothing but what you have
been given. So create

something new from me
to open some eyes
and parlay new ends
from warm-felt fingertips.


There are ways to know
if summer is just a season
that passes into a slow
rhythmic darkness. I felt

rain on my shoulders
splashing up off the road
standing water, long-filled
with iridescent love

waiting to be unleashed,
leaped into the air
as a flowering bicyclist
giggled and tore through

the puddles. With nothing
but an entreched connection
with life expanding from her
in an archetypal moment

life became her. Streaking
from her tires, beams
of radiant vibrance spray
vitality into the air

covering everything. Tell me,
how could you not be renewed
to feel alive in the open
world casting open her eye?

what is wrong with our species
that thousands of epic stories
explain how men and women learn
to love one another?

and that we continue finding
beautiful poets broken hearts
telling us of love's true value
forged in tiny actions?

it ought the be the simplest
thing in the world
like breathing

my friends, have patience
I'm slowly learning how to breathe

Fortified Senses

I can smell something
grasping at my legs


the sun is setting
tree stilettoes silhouetted
dancing into darkness

and elsewhere cars
park in alleyways
like highways to anyways

oh, what I wonder
I wonder

catch me for a spell
and listen to the day
creaking to a halt

the proclivities

of men to seek

bold new ways to

simper in the most

fortified castles

I suppose it is difficult
to understand from another
perch high above the scents

but drifting eyes
hasten to catch hold
of whatever is left
to hoist us beyond
these thick fragrances

roaming

the night

we all should know why
fathers build tree forts
for their burgeoning sons

before the winter solstice

if every story featured construction
erected in all sorts of directions
with delicate gestures, pursed lips
and wisps of perfume towering the planes
with withering dithers of pierced eyes

followed with amazing fortifications
crumbling with microscopic matrices
along faultlines of indescriminate
motions twisting into airless canopies
settling to a brackish tundra metropolis

you could smell your way through
to the nearest stream and traverse
through mountain passes in endess
shadows cast under the crag always
protuding into the sun's hazy eye

and when collapsing at the mouth
of the stream you found yourself
reborn in a sticky mess of new and old
memories and scrapnel lodged in ancient
trees along the unsettled ground

you could always look up and find
a few things to anchor you into
this reconstituted life (formerly
yours) again still like this
taste of perfume or smelly lotion

lodged in the back of your throat

you see
if every story
built and destroyed
ended at its beginning
then we would know

and somehow
in spite of everything
it would be alright

but those familiar smells
can taste so
strong in strange ways
when you can't
place which direction the wind
blew toward you in
these last glimmering days

before the sun
starts coming back to
lengthen days
and build new seasons

ode to attachment Parts I and II

I. Some Sort of Recognition

I've rarely watered eyes with simple words
my throat usually catches them inside

somewhere stifled in my body are words
by the thousands locked in transit

and yet once in a while
despite my whole body
a few important syllables escape
and my body can relax

but tonight
words are spinning everywhere
in all of the caverns
like primordial bats on Mars
flapping enormous wings
in an unstable atmosphere

I've heard that in a completely still world
a butterfly's wings can start in motion
catastrophic chain of events --
certainly primordial Martian bats could too

I just wish
all of these words flapping in my stomach
could give me something to hold onto
if just for a few more moments
instead of a string of awkward words
written late at night in a dark room
on a worn out laptop


II. A Toast

to everything I've loved
have loved
will loved
and love now

I hope I've shown you what you mean to me
and, if not, that I may forgive myself somehow

but most of all
to those who know
its all true
- all of it -
and a thousand times more than you know

to you all
- particularly you -

I love you
and it is everything

I hope you feel the same