The First 20 Stepping Stone Poems
and love is too small
of a word,
I fill my tongue with
a billion versions of that word,
to try wrapping kite string
around Jupiter , no bits of sound
will do justice to the tiny earthquakes
that run through my body when I see your face or
think your name
because the sun
grows less tolerant
of us, and the fingers of cold come
I must drink more coffee before
I venture out to do all these human things
to keep a grip on a job that holds a tighter grip on me
we live in a gentle place,
but in my 13 years here,
even I have found it to be cold
I have lost my mind of winter,
forgive me , Wallace, it stays preserved
like Viking rations in eastern Oregon snow
the entire city froze in
its tracks last week,
the threat of snow that
came only as a sneeze
of sleet,
even the clouds are laughing at us
I qualified as an old man before
people started telling me I was young,
the sky is gray and heavy enough
my joints swell to birthday balloons ,
the back under my skin a stain glass church window
in the evening , I envelop my wife as I am a coat of frost and melancholy
let the outside world be nothing tonight ,
social concerns and scattered responsibilities
sentenced to hang on the coat rack ,
tonight, let there be only the hiss of a space heater
the solidarity of cats and two people who escaped
into the warmth of together,for a few hours more
go to sleep
hoping that
all of today
that hurts
will be put away
on the shelf
in back of my mind
headache and sore back
the feeling of aging
a few more broken trophies
above cob web covered bits
of past anatomy ,
on a shelf in a darkened corner
I will avoid the ocean waves of epic love poems
and just say she is a small fire that burns,
providing the carbon base that makes me a life-form
something
stays here,
in the broken
glass world
of my memory
my blinking eye
looking back
because all
the sharp edges
of the past
keep my walking
ignoring wounds
I move forward
only because
looking back
proves that
I never should
have been there
Poems sometimes
are never
enough , just
a hunger falling
from fingers
hiding in paper
pretending to
be a statement
the less you write,
the more relevant
it is
The art of growing up is teaching your skin to become a mask factory
All the orifices stuffed with paper , tainted with vulgar poetry
My transgression is to pretend a part of me is still innocent
calling back to my own instinct , be as dead as a statue
Some nights, I am left in moods
I thought I have left behind ,
guilty feelings over my wife
mopping up the mess
of my self-evisceration
I remember as a child I would feel
bad for standing outside
obstructing sunlight from
a boy shaped patch of grass
now, in my mid-thirties,
a part of me still has not
grown secure,
wanting to stay quiet
about wounds, who
still sometimes
feels the echoes
of being told
how worthless I am ,
at nine after
harvesting a whole
onion field by hand,
left with the responsibilities
of alleged adults,
the pedophile who hated
his life and fatherhood ,
or the mentally ill woman
who would't get off the couch
to do anything except kill
my pets in front of me
when I was behind on chores
they are the ones who called
themselves farmers
and they have left seeds
which I have tried pulling
out of my bones,
but you always look insane
when trying to circumvent
your own skin
sometimes at night,
I can feel a bumper crop
coming on
Because I love to be not loved
they will ask me what my damage is
and I will say impiety is a comfort
when one was raised with grace used as a weapon
my future is a success if others fail to make sense of me
I learned what innocence is,
birth throws us into a world
gentle and illiterate ,
we age, hording weaponry
our skin turns to armor
by reading sharp edges,
this is a world of broken glass streets
every human soul a bottle ready
to fall off its shelf
keeping yourself alive
by believing in
the gorgeous cause ,
the idea that justice is real
and that you can see it
But then, you actually pay attention
and these things you hoped for
become stained glass portraits
in church windows
as seen by Atheist eyes:
dedications, so very pretty,
likely to nothing at all.
poems come from the abyss
one always hopes to fill,
at least for me ,
no lines from heaven
behold the joy proposed of being an artist
worrying that you really did fail
in turning your soul to statements
the true nature of what we do , unknown to us
letting the decay of sanity sink in,
we hunt beauty by way of letting logic fall to abstraction
close your eyes, let the right line and word and image be a piranha
hand goes in the water, hoping for a bite, for something to
latch on so hard you can pull it away with you
the loving breast of an artist allows eggs to be planted inside
it, only for them to devour till fat and mature, to burst away
and take flight, as far from you as possible
No matter how many
love poems I write,
Or times I try explaining
all of it to you
None of it would be as effective
as if I were to simply
place my heart on a platter
and that would be an act
whose gruesomeness
would be profane,
no statement is proper
no statement is effective
and you tell me that I don't need
to try explaining it ,
but then sometimes lying next to you,
I am afraid that I am draining too much
and not opening my own floodgates
stars, forever shine,unburnt
*
fast melting eyes of ice cry
*
this heart bruises itself with every beat
*
I will survive my dying
1
writing to devour time
as time devours bits of me,
wrinkles are gaps
I break through walls,
barriers made by saying
only human, if enough bones break
I will heal to inhuman
after a while, you see yourself
as territory others walked over,
by this age, you seek to reclaim yourself,
now, obsessed with conquest
still it will swell and show
than just surviving this,
of just knowing you aren't dead
and that maybe life can be great
despite the fact that you're still in it
say you're at risk of becoming a partial optimist
just rest assured that this likely isn't a terminal case
There is a football game playing
and I'm sitting in a nice chair
Behind my eyes my neurons are a forest
lightning burning off all the branches
Tell them everything is fine
because they can't smell smoke
Fighting the flu leaves you
embarrassingly brittle
and thinking of yourself as little more
than a dump of old sensations
stained and barely felt
night is coming , to make it easier to
hide all the wreckage that makes you ,
grab your hot tea, and go under the blanket,
hoping tomorrow makes you less fevered and less
introspective
the cold
the headache
the shadow of my age
the melancholy that seeps in
the soft winter that you still hate
the unending backward flow of thoughts
the swollen joints
the cracking back
the lungs like cement covered balloons
the fact that whenever I talk about it, I am whining
Poetry and it's need to be born
is a speeding car, unconcerned about how much roadkill it creates
Some nights it finds itself on a back road of porcupines
Cut-Up Reality (Homage To William S Burroughs)
institute despair
here, just here.. there.. invention light
seem long as flowers , in the world-wilt
you , silently hollow Promise such strength ,
unkindness lays upon the world,a curse to leave it be
This wooden ice ... melts to splinters
Still seem at gently/ violently calm
and you silently rock your mind back to farm days
In the horses straw
No circle can counsel , you cannot hide from anything
making enemies just by being alive
though enemies the high deserts ,
the sand that creeped into your bones
and became a soul,your body is
just snow that sets upon it, pretending
we have actual seasons
The stars of winter's poem
is riddled with parasites
is wistful of passenger
such by their injuries
it all makes sense if
you just stop thinking about it
because
most often
there is very
little left to write
about other than my obsessions
which usually just focus myself
and the likelihood of my failing something
and I try sleeping
with this kind of internal shadow
putting frost over my innards
despite the calmness of my life now
the obvious reasons to be
happy, but really , you never do shake
the things that birthed your trajectory,
a trajectory you stayed on for so damn long
feeling like you did not deserve any better
and it is even hard to say what kept you there, what made feel comfortable,
after all, you had already changed so much
had already let the scars of your youth fade away, hidden under a new
blanket of numb skin that was too old for its age, but at least it was far removed from what it had been,
I swallow my scars and feed my ink-sickness ,
puke out the viruses onto a page and call it writing ,
and it is winter now, the time when sickness is at its yearly high
and I am calm with this, I am contented with this, something like the happy that I am, except this goes deeper, into all the puncture wounds and cigarette burns and razor scrapes and times I screamed my hatred at everything holy, living dead, and Imagined , until my vocal chords snapped like kite string tied to two different cars, and I simply ran out of hate, and people to focus on, serenity is not a state of mind, it is simply a state of exhaustion, where you no longer are able to cause all the problems you felt comfortable doing
Can feel the rain
in the window about
in my mid thirties
and everything
is swollen and rusty
and I don't complain
I allow myself the stigma
of seeming distant
because that which fills me
most is the urge to complain
And there is no value in that
it shows you to be the rust ,
the weakness the baldness
that was once a man
as firm as an Iron gate,
If all you feel is ache,
do not admit to feeling anything
make your mantra a stolen line
from a horror movie
I am so exquisitely empty
