#whitecarroll

Threadbare

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

Into Winter

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

Re-Shelved

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

A Small Fire

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

Back to Forward

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

Something More

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

Lascivious Grace

1

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

2

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,

or the times younger

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

3

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

4

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

Because I Watch The News

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.

Writing Wasp-Eggs

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,No Statement

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

Gray Fragments

stars, forever shine,unburnt * fast melting eyes of ice cry * this heart bruises itself with every beat * I will survive my dying

I Am A Barrier

1 writing to devour time as time devours bits of me, wrinkles are gaps

2

I break through walls,  barriers made by saying only human, if enough bones break I will heal to inhuman

3

after a while, you see yourself as territory others walked over,

by this age, you seek to reclaim yourself, now, obsessed with conquest

Swells From A Dream

it will start

as a dream

slowly rotting to

a memory that

you can't burn

from your mind

it sticks to you

like it did to your skin

and no matter how

nice life is right now,

still it will swell and show

that you are

a basket for shrapnel

of things you survived

but

don't worry,

there is more

than just surviving this,

there is also the joy

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

Animus Headache

There is a football game playing and I'm sitting in a nice chair

Faking serenity

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

Hooray For December

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

Yeah, That

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

The progress of poetry

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

Serenity

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

Old Again And Again