Refuse/d words built into infinite forms of bodies. This collection is unedited; done in one sitting; sometimes daily, frequently infrequent.

Monday, January 31, 2011

the hate


is an animal
red and writhing.
when
a body
becomes a capsule
of hate
nothing contains
it except the
soft permanence
of arms
wrapped round.
What compound
Is hate, it burns bones
And wears
down the liver.
It kills
like cancer
and pulls
weighty
and thick
at the face.
Toxic,
hateful is
healthy
in the function
of alone.
But in the
kitchen
of family
of community
hate smokes out
paper moths
of hope
and suspicion
is the sound
of dark snakes
on dry leaves.

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

(untitled)


Memory is a canon
Of rhetoric
Because the ex-perience and ex-pression
Of time differ:

What of what we know is good
And what of what we know is bad?
What makes us beautifully flawed
And which flaws make us ruined?
And who creates a flaw anyways-
We are not objects, our selves transcend
This place.  Humans do not follow the
rules we have fabricated to evaluate worth. 

But just the same memory gets explained
To death. 

It becomes an art form to match prevalent points
From childhood to adulthood
Both hooded in the presentable self
While the true sensory ensemble of a moment
Remains embedded in our own skin
Untouched. 

9.


Nine crimes held tight over hind sight, split and felled ferocious dreams, seeing and seeming and stealing all three of every trinity, every fellowship and every beauty.  

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

closing the frontier


The car keys on the counter
signal the possibility of leaving
but this time we will sit and stare
at one another in the full daylight.

The sink drips and the linoleum
hasn’t been scrubbed and sometimes
the house picks up dust
that won’t be cared about until
new owners come and click their
tongues and wonder at the previous others.

Such is life.

So, sitting we observe the last curves
of each face; the last stretch of each arm and leg
the last tone in the last note of each other’s breathing
and there is regret, always, at losing someone.
This regret is a whole hillside
a long plain partitioned by rusting wire.
whose land is whose now,
so many years after the homestead.
Each space is a potential kingdom
until we finally abandon the well-digging.
dried, ended, a reverse migration. 

Somewhere in American history
it was decided that the frontier would close
when there was no more land and we,
the people, press up against one another
and twist inward searching.
The new exploration is a pilgrimage
into ourselves and companionless
we fear starvation and disease. 

There must be one more place
just one more stretch of prairie
one last island
somewhere.

Monday, January 17, 2011

word of the day


It’s funny that ‘firmament’ means the sky,
the heavens floating present peaceful.
The sky is as permanent, that firmament,
As any earthen landscape lies.  

Sunday, January 16, 2011

Oh wow. It's been a few days.

Ever feel like "the daily grind" in fact exists? Writing has been like "pulling teeth" lately.  Guess I need to "pull myself up by the bootstraps" and decide whether or not I am "man enough" for daily divulgences, hiccupping clean.  "The task at hand" is rabid with new tricks.  "Waking up on the wrong side of the bed" means you rolled around in your sleep, peeping into the nether world of awesome possibility. I dream cast constant, hitting the crests of infinite cumulus, the powdered fists of the first fighters: those seraphim fantastic. And back "down to earth," the real hurt, raw and infused with chemical ruin.  Captured again by alarm clocks, living just one day in the full round and back underground tinkering with all the dirtied leftovers of the brain.  Rusty crusted pieces of furnace and fireplace; old laundry; broken glass and doorknobs to no mans land.  Welcome to my backyard.  This isn't Narnia, no little half-goat will show you the way but if you wait in this open space a direction will be revealed: a narrative arc of a one-(wo)man show.

Monday, January 10, 2011

Us three

around the storm lamp
on the edge of lawn chairs
in the basement
haphazardly stocked
while the world goes
bent against us.
we wouldn't know
what is normal anymore-
memories betray us
so long underground.

Thursday, January 6, 2011

(untitled)

An engram inside the body
Is a memory based in sense:
the scraping bruising brining
things that last pickled
and repeated.  These
engrams collect until
the whole world is an
allusion.  Eventually, we
are people moving
in a long exposure-
vanished, an idea, 
the blur of residual heat.  

Monday, January 3, 2011

I need to stop watching 'band of brothers' over and over again


An abandoned parachute
Tangled in the edge of the forest
once was a full jump
carrying a uncertain son.

Which direction has he gone?
And with what weapon?
When the wind fall
Plucked his rifle like picking
An apple. 

So now the parachute is a silken
Ghost pleated neatly,
A tent draped and breathing
Like puffing snake skin.
And no son, and no weapon,
The grass a buzzing place
beneath the open sky.