Realized

Three nights I have lain awake
Storming through half-sleep dreams
And possibilities, thoughts,
Mental magical carpets,
Half real, half realized;
Doors half opened and swinging
Smooth computers peripherally
Analyzing and verifying
Believing yet incredulous
Of the panoramic impossibility.
The stark lightning of imagination
Energized and rampantly naked;
Leaping obstacles with merry, nimble feet
Barely touching – gracing – the earth.
A sweeping wave of everything
Reconditioning, revitalized
Colorization by raw power
Of [...]

Home

I should listen to the sea
‘Cause I’m never turning back
I’m not who I used to be
And I’m never going home.
I’m so hard upon myself
I cannot seem to learn.
At the bottom of the well,
I sit and shiver in my bones.
I really don’t know who I am;
I’m busy being someone else.
Trying on my different masks,
I lose my [...]

Hang On to the Rope

I wish I could string and sell
These beads of sweat;
They keep dripping in my eyes
And leaping
From the tip of my nose.
I can’t stop pulling on this rope –
The mine car can’t slip any further
Down those tracks.
I don’t know why I took this job
But it’s a challenge
And I hurt in every bone.
I’ve found muscles I never [...]

Sellout

I sold out to the rat race:
My time is spent trivially
Pursuing carrots and cash-ews
Running around like a chicken
With its common sense head cut off.
Important criteria have shifted,
Tabbed into the margins of
My papers.
I’m so busy taking notes
There’s no body, no bulk,
No substance, no spirit,
And the price gets paid in years.
Oh, the price gets paid
In years
From now [...]

THIS BRIGHT LIGHT

Ah, this bright light –
I was a closet Vampyre,
dancing on cardboard tombstones
with flexible skeletons
who beat chopsticks on
overturned Folger’s coffee cans
– it shrivels the flesh
and weakens the bones.
I’ve heard of the process of aging before,
from people older than I
(that was all [...]

Opossum

on my driveway in Point Loma,
smoking 3 cigarettes,
I thought it was my cat Ferguson
cracking bird-bones at four in the morning,
but the white and grey patchy creature
was a shiny eyed opossum,
who moved off as fast as it could
back down the sidewalk
after discovering its way back to its lair
in the college leaf-lined drainpipes
was guarded by a flannel-skinned [...]

Zambone Machine

why do my dreams lay siege to me
as if I was a fortress of stone,
a dragon unconcerned with men’s matters,
a river who just picks up the bones
of foolish dreams who jump the chasm
and fall to drown in icy water,
for I move the other cliffside at will
at each new attempt I aim to kill
my aspirations if [...]

Dead Parking Lot

drums, call the drums,
beat the drums in a circle,
summon sound from your skin,
bone and muscled rhythms.
spin the spinners, earth born,
hearts beating taut, within,
throwing warm loops of blood
in long arcs through your bodies,
racing and rebelling into movement.

Tuned In to Static

these fingers are filled with blood
that time wears down to bone.
obsessive, driven to write
and blister, chafing without
a rest, a reminder of hard work
dropped out and tuned in
to static; the station’s gone dead.
what do we do without direction?

I am Adopted

Adpoted, I adopt my own ideas
About who my real parents really are.
My mother; ocean and spring rain; the dew
On grass stems sparkling, a field of stars:
All water, blood that courses past my eyes.
My father – rocks and wood and muddy bones,
The mountains laid behind and raised before,
All sturdy piles of softly mortared stones.