their ragged wings; alas!

If I keep letting time drip, drip down

in a steady cadence

I will become

The Thing with infinite mass

that sits

at the bottom of a gravity well— 

watching light bend towards me,

and years will become months

will become weeks will become days

will become hours, then minutes, seconds— 

moments where I watch the droplets dance across my fingers,

The first pride was a riot. 

The first pride was a brick thrown from the hand of a black trans woman in defiance of the blue-suited fascists who came to round up her people like clockwork. 

The first pride was a woman who would not hang her head in shame for the color of her skin or the dress she wore over it standing at the front of a crowd that said in one voice 'we will not be silent'. 

The first pride was queer black and brown hands raised in defiance, breaking windows and lighting fires instead of letting their kin be dragged away into the night. 

The fiftieth pride was a party thrown by corporations who wore rainbows on their windows while black trans women died in the streets. 

The fiftieth pride was a carnival patrolled by policemen invited by comfortable company men who sold stickers that said 'we hear you' to the people they'd forget by July. 

The fifty-first pride was canceled, the parades put in storage until next year when the company men have assured us the deaths will be long forgotten. 

The fifty-first pride was forgotten as black voices rang out in protest against blue-suited fascists snuffing out black lives and dragging their bodies away. 

The fifty-first pride was a brick thrown from a black hand into a window that could be replaced for a black man that couldn't be. 

somewhere, out there past the neon 

and the haze of burning sagebrush 

and cigarettes and softly-fading moonlight 

there are stars—burning out forever out there, 

one by one, but I don’t see them.

their fire isn’t bright enough to penetrate the halo 

of this pulsing yellow glass and concrete scar 

I think that we’re fascinated by autumn

because it’s a season of dying.

Because of the cyclical nature of the seasons

we’re assured that this death is just temporary,

that the trees and the grasses and the animals

will come back in the spring, after the thaw.

The world will be made new,

so we celebrate the slow, colorful death of the old one—

winds grow stronger, the air grows colder,

and the last reminders of the preceding summer

fall and coat the ground in a gentle carpet of dead tissue.

But the real attraction comes from the fact that deep down,

we know that this is only a temporary reprieve.

Autumn is the beautiful, golden herald of winter,

I go on long walks around my neighborhood after dark,

hoping for inspiration.

  Usually I just come back colder.

  My feet echo over well-trod residential sidewalks

and I’m struck by just how many people are stowed away

behind cream-colored curtains,

some of them lit by the soft blue glow of a television screen.

  But most of them are dark and quiet.

  These rows of houses and apartment buildings

have bright porch lights

that throw my shadow out onto the street

beside me as I step past quickly,

hands thrust deep in the pockets of my jacket.

  I never walked, back home.

  My house was too far away from anything,

in a nest of country roads that had never known sidewalks,

crossing canals and shaded by cottonwood trees.

  I was always afraid of the dark, there.

  It seemed so much bigger with nothing boxing it in-

anything seemed like it could be lurking just past the edge of the yard.

You couldn’t have paid me anything to stand ten feet from my front door

with the porch light off

and my back turned to the fields.

  Here, Callery pear trees brush against brick and evenly placed streetlamps

and the closest thing to wildlife is the eyeshine of an alleycat as it darts beneath a car.

  When I cross paths with someone else walking,

hood drawn against the cold,

neither of us say a word.

  I figure most people who walk past me have somewhere to be,

some errand that needs doing.

  But maybe they’re just walking too.

  Hoping for some kind of epiphany

but coming back with nothing but a red face and cold ears.

  I don’t cross a lot of paths at 2 AM.

  I mostly trace routes that I take in the daylight,

but looping from one to the next with no thoughts of destination.

  I know that I’m going to end up walking past the red-brick temple

and the green-painted house next door,

to the creaking old brick building

with red Christmas lights shining dimly in the top corner window.

  I always check my mailbox.

  I know that there’s no night-mailman making deliveries

but my keys are already in my hand,

so I feel inside the empty space

before turning the corner to my basement apartment door,

past my neighbor’s porch light, always glowing,

even in the daytime.

  Mine is always off.

Apocalypse Then:

grays and browns slowly seeping into the edge of frame

until the scuff marks and the layers of dust and grit

and the all-consuming sense of nothing getting better

remind me–this has been going on for some time now.

  I never had a moment of catharsis

when I self-consciously steered this plane into a nosedive

and took aim for a wind-worn mountain

30,000 feet below.

  I hiked to its summit, once.

the next time I tried I realized past the halfway point

that I could go no further

gravity and bad choices and a slowly-building end-time scenario

were conspiring to keep me grounded.

  I’ve been in a gradual descent into something less

than what I wanted and somewhere further

than where I wanted to be-

and ground-level doesn’t have the stopping-power

that you’d think it would.

  I thought I could dry-mop a landfill

and keep my bedroom smelling like lilacs.

  and that laughing at the appropriate moments

would make my smile reach the corners of my eyes again.

but I just learned to lie more convincingly.

  I am the rusted parts in a 1987 Dodge Durango

up on blocks behind a house

that no one lives in anymore.

  I am a cottonwood tree with withered roots

slowly falling towards the

dried-up stream-bed.

  I am a tangled clump of string tying

things that shouldn’t be together

into a crude approximation of

what people look like.

  I am dressed in ill-fitting slacks and a crooked name-tag

holding the door for a woman who’s lived longer than I’m going to

  “How’s your day been?” she asks.

  “Just great”.

“I’m doing fine.”

and everything

you've ever been

will one day

be dust

we’ll weep for you

we will but soon

enough we will

be wept for too

and in a 

thousand years

no one will know

that we were here

I don’t know if I've been here long enough.

I don’t know if my roots have grown

deep enough to keep me

on the ground.

I taste dust in my teeth and I’m not sure

that I can stand upright much longer.

I always thought that one strong wind

would be enough to blow me over,

knock me out of here with

with all the other brittle things

and I’d keep blowing for a while,

but they've been getting stronger.

I’ve seen telephone lines

tangled around tree-branches

and muck-water lap against

the bottoms of bridges.

I’ve seen cottonwoods

bend until broken

splayed open across sidewalks.

I’ve seen windwitches holding circle

against chain-link fences

in a deep dust-haze,

stacked deep enough

I couldn't count them

I thought that I might be them

uprooted but stuck fast

against the wire

insubstantial but still crushed beneath

the weight of all this shifting rolling trash

I am an accumulation of dry, thorny pieces

that aren't growing anymore.

They haven’t been for a while, now-

tiny almost-raindrops disappear

against the cold cement as

the last scattered patches of blue are

swallowed up by gray and  

I can feel the coffee cooling 

I pull scrap paper from underneath

an ever-growing pile of debris

on something that was a desk once.

I’ve made a nest of dirty socks and

blankets and overflowing garbage cans and

everything I thought I’d need someday.

I’m a tangled clump of string tying

things that shouldn’t be together

into a crude approximation of

what people look like.

I’ll clean up the mess before you get here,

but dry-mopping a landfill

another brittle blown-leaf cadence

as a cold wind pushes through

newly-bare branches until

wood and sky and 

I sit surrounded by

Backyard, Late Summer.

I caught falling stars 

on the tip of my tongue

as I mouthed wishes

that I could never grant myself

promises I wouldn't be keeping

Dark blue. Past navy.

Moving into that place on the far side of midnight,

just before the dawn breaks.

Stretching further, making my vision past-tense

as the dim light in the center grows harder and harder to see

how you took my breath away.

I’ve got it back, now-

But that won’t keep me from waxing poetic about you.

About your skin. I’d write “brushing it is like touching a live wire”

even though it’s really more like carpet-static

but poetry in person is flat

and we didn’t pass cut-out sonnets in English class

for laughs.

I’d like to think that paper is still worth something,

even if I was too afraid to spend it.

I know that I’m a sinner.

I never needed God’s permission not to believe in Him,

and I didn’t need his permission to turn

positive impulse into ugliness.

I didn’t need Him to make me hate myself for

what I couldn’t do to you.

You didn’t need Him to enable the worst parts of me.

We didn’t need Him to stop calling each other.

I didn’t need Him to tell me you were right,

and I don’t need you to know what color

The only other words I've written in this place are ash– 

read once, burned, and buried beneath sagebrush

above a copse of trees where the mountain spills snowmelt.

This dappled sunlight is foreign to me,

so often have I come here after sun has set

and breeze blows colder down the mountainside.

In the nighttime the park sighs 

with the sound of a thousand branches swaying

as I navigate the underbrush alone.

Daylight is filled with rustling leaves, but also birdsong

and the sounds of dogs and children, 

and the park is not an opaque old thing that can swallow me with no trace.

I have to be a person in the sun.

The light confines, defines the outside edge of me– 

my warm skin lit up like a ‘No Vacancy’ sign.

I don’t have to be anything in the night, here.

My words are taken up by the wind and lost 

before I need to write them down,

I never really went

for the xx chromosome set.

I didn’t understand the biology text

that said all of this rapidly shifting shit

was for the purpose of “procreation”.

I didn’t want to explore

the secondary sex

of the newly-busty

13 year old

in the desk next to

my desk.

They proselytized so deep

that they crammed any

propensity for

“faggotry”

deep in me.

And I wouldn’t let myself think-

for a moment-

that I wasn’t

a normal straight male

whose hormones lusted for

the opposite set.

I erected walls and forced myself

to believe this beautiful lie

that I was like them-

that someday I’d find that mythical Girl

and I’d know what love is

distinct from those shameful thoughts

that I pushed further and further down

whenever they surfaced.

Locker rooms were filled with landmines

I kept my spine straight, eyes forward

terrified of being marked Different.

Terrified they’d read my mind.

Terrified my gaze would be a noose

and I’d become Pariah and lose

every false friend and indifferent confidant

and be left with me.

Stranger in my own head

uncomfortable in my own skin

trying harder and harder to keep up the illusion

that I was worth knowing

while I refused to know myself.

I went five years before

those walls eroded

one night while I sat sleepless-

With each thought another crack spread

until the edifice collapsed

and crushed any hopes that I’d had underneath it.

“Jesus Wept.” (John 11:35)

and I wept too

because He had been fucked into me

and all of the love fucked out of me.

before I was aware enough to

not give my consent.

And now I had to be content

with time wasted,

not in discovery and self-reflection

but with self-loathing and deep repression;

and with an adolescent psyche

You dug Venice in the dirt and poured concrete.

Now it’s cracked and half buried in sand.

You don’t mind- it was like this when I came

and saw tree roots tangle in the tufa stone.

I was a boy here once, in wide green fields

but the green is empty, and Venice is sinking.

I’ve had your dirt in my chest for too long

and I know it’s not going anywhere anytime soon