cacophony I (november, 2011)

blood and bone
and an age
of skinsoft decay and disease.
the taste of skin
and the foreign fear
of your own body
as something alien

the dreams where
reality doubles
when the mirror
is all of you and more
and you're left
with a tearsoaked clutch of teeth
rampant
in your ransacked, messy halls

sweat finds you awake
still somehow different
older
and made less for it
by the driving divide
of anarchic alien flesh
that fills you all up
when your bitter brain tries
on the real, helpless world

never cold in his life until recently (november, 2011)

though
I'm sure
is the most hateful clause
breaker

and so, you sting it out
undoubted
in the crushing freeze
and cancerous rush
of a cigarette
below freezing

sting the letters out
syllable by syllable
until your fingers turn blue
with ink and frostbite

you treat the silence
as seeds
sow spaces
with craving
and fill up the empty
with the hint of potential

perhaps it's a lie
the comfortable fiction
you gladly glaze
over
tell yourself
that old lie
again and again

all senses become acute
in the crispcrusted moments
of realization
as the slowdown
inches in
and takes it all away

this time
I'm leaving nothing behind

stormchaser (november, 2011)

and I in silent wonder stood
hove as a storm-splayed tree
swaddled
in the black breath of night

"Oh, there you are"
as the line
slid into silver perfection.
quick.
too quickly
for the ember and ash
for the hissing crush
of words forcing their way
down into my lungs

grasp those phrases
snag the cord
with branchflayed hands
hammer the reflection
of light and heartbeats out
into that canopy of clouds

it's there.
just there
in the breakwater crash
the firstflight of birds
returning to other places
and the shatterdrum of ice
lapping at the shores of a lake
like the fiery thought of peace
on the frozen form
of a stormdreary
never-thought-it-would-happen
troubled dream

and even as the cloud passes—
the chaos of a fresh-sewn idea—
the drawing-in dark
whispers back to life
those daylightsaver seconds
when the sky was just the sky
and no embers creaked
in their gyre and gravity
or flickercrack fissured
the simple silence
of a second of a skydrunken night

interspace (october, 2011)

her body tenses.
hold that moment
clear in the golden light
of floorlit beer and memory
and there's music

it's not so poetic as it appears
this isn't a case
of singing spines, rib rhythms
and the tempo of her heart
no
just a song

piece those stitches together
and it's something
about memory and forgetting
time, sadness
and perhaps continuation

claim all those thoughts
as your own
out of the lamplazy windingdown
dripsplattered table times
with their coffeestain thoughts
on old folded napkins
sealed with lipstick smudges
and the remains of the last sip
—the one that near spilled in reaction
to a voice or a look
but solidified
as the drip down the side
to be caught instead
in serviette seconds
at a dimly lit bar—
take it from them
to your booktrodden walkways
and secret altars of failure and fame.
keep it.

she'll remember you
as a quiet and distracted lover
and she'd be right
unless she could hear time sing