The tea screams into the morning,
disrupting silence

After we sweat out dreams clear as ink
Drizzled on white lillys, wet

In the fog,
Of new sun

Anticipations of our youth ascend while
Clinched fists draw you closer to
The throbbing violence
In an orchestra of muscle

Setting teams of horses, thundering
And their leather crackling tight,
With a bit that won’t snap beneath
The weight of your teeth

You are towering on me like a park angel in the fall when the leaves
Are blowing cool
And the eyes roll one thousand times
Across pillows and smooth linen
Before they capture the
Upside down image of what heat in the night of a December feels like

Tethers of distance never disclosed or defined but pulled apart like horses through a field
When sweat sways and
The wind distinguishes what is direction and

Movement beneath wet legs of beds and sheets,
Encouraging the mouth to breathe

The winter approaching. For the two of us,
The time when we live in each other
And survive the death of solitary.

Seasons

I.

Lying beneath worlds
Of milkweed’s
Airy feathers, dancing
And tickling the ears of sleep and wonder.

II.

The son of Appollo and Coronis,
You were born for greatness
But also barely born.
Coronis was murdered for trading on love;
Rescued before the fire
Cut from the heat of her stomach
The legs of curious seasons striking
Matches on wooden mantles,
The twisted knots of translucent cherry pine
Shining burgundy
And grace into the morning.
The crows watched as the blood dripped from your body
And you greeted the crowd with a fury of days.

Raised by Kheiron,
The wisest and oldest of all Centaurs,
Your life honored the sick
Who could be healed in Aesclepion’s
Sanctuary of belief
In the classical world
By sacred snakes on wooden floors,
Under beds
And in dreams which were reported
To priests first thing in the morning.

III.

The errand of your time
Nodded toward the notion that human beings
Can be fixed. That they do not have to suffer
The folly of human experience
Or the total break down of things familiar in a life
Not of our own.
This is the story of Sanctuary.
And Asclepius,
You will die by lightning
Against charges that you raised the dead
For payment in gold.

paper

Things die wonderfully
At days end;
The snowing prophesies,
On ground taken by storm.

The warmth of low light
And windows graying from outside in
Creases the chance of missing
The solitary night,
Where we appear not ourselves
But far wider
Outside the gates,
And more brilliant
Than anything on the horizon
Our eyes touched today.

elephants, rising

Elephants look cool
In the backyards
Of your neighbors.
They turn a dream and grey it charcoal mind
That cannot be remembered.
The ones that make you feel instead of think
The way they skin up bone,
Snap hairs on teeth,
And crackle under the light
Of the moon.

To sit on your patio and watch an elephant
In the pool of your neighbor’s backyard is one of the simple pleasures in life.
You might have a pink gin in hand
A woman in the other
A Hot dog or other summertime food
And for the evening you are there
The elephant swims in patterns so delicate
And unfamiliar to speech
That words concentric
Fall to codes
Never uttered by a human mind.

Dear Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Night is a mind field exploding hagiographies
And you motherfucker are all in. There is an issue I need you to help me with:
I either got the girl’s milked body in my mind
Or the silent way in which she dresses in the morning.
I don’t really pretend to sleep,
not so much. I can’t sleep when her back is bare and
her skin is yelling silver jawed butterflies
Right into my gut. They fly at the speed of light
in a vacuum of free space,
They don’t sting when they enter. Once the butterflies have carved
grottoes of bone and steam, I make love to her when she isn’t looking.
If you were around to make your 36th film
I’d say you’d like to film me watching her.

Olivia Newton John

I am 7 or so
Lying underneath the dining room table.
The one that is reserved for special occasions
Like Christmas or Easter. The one we never use.
The one that sits with perfect table cloth,
Still white, lace in the shadow
Of the hutch
Holding the best dishes on display,
And lladros my dad bought for my mom.

The hutch looms over head
And me, underneath
The table, cloistered by white linen and lace
The sun illuminating the space from the window.
Up above, Lladros staring down approvingly,
Their white, porcelain faces,
All delicate in their position
As I lay the radio on the floor.

I am under the table
In the cell right off
The kitchen, in the room that is reserved for things
That never happen.
I push play on the recorder
And adapt to a pillow.
My ear is on the voice,
The voice is in my head.
My emotions run wild with
Love and lust and things I don’t even know about yet.
I cannot define what I have
With her at this moment.
I am too young to understand that
Lying on the floor underneath the table is a moment of
Terrific erections created by invisible beats from Australia.
And it keeps happening,
This meeting,
This time and space.
Nearly everyday
Underneath the dining room table.

light

I didn’t know whether to watch you
Read or
Listen to you
Read the words that mean so much.

The galloping silence only
Broken by a voice
Or the breeze so generously blowing in on our minds.

Running ideas into the night
(Not) Intolerant at time for trying to define, but letting it vanish like vapor.
We are safe then
And couldn’t find each as othered or not of the me—
It wasn’t like that.
It wasn’t at all like that.

We had all night to fall into words
For moods triumphant as the humility one gets from spending the night
next to the ocean when just being alive is the only thing explainable.