Monoxide

Storms in Kansas

The eight o’clock appointment suffers complications.
The ten-thirty never shows. The two pm believes in other things,
rests chemistry in a violet bath and breathes in fractals
until she is nothing again.

The twelve or so picketers are restless and defensive.
There are questions of the signs they brandish
and guesses as to where those pictures came from.
But speculation, like the chill
over the snowy plain of Kansas, never escapes a set of lips
and we’re paying for it now in panic.

Every second dilated. No more wild eyes.
No more passing glances.
No second chances.
Now we are here.
Now betrayal flatters us.
Now we are here.
Now the shutter closes.
Now we are here.
—Now we are not.

Now we walk the human wave in silence,
heads under hoods against the wind.
And in the waiting room every word is a memorial,
so my skittish tongue is useless on the nurses
who tell me the doctor is going to solve a problem.

He ties knots and he gambles, and with steady hands
he will sling a silver star
so far into the curve of your horizon
that it ruins you entirely.

And I will pay him for his work.
And I will take you home,
and try to put you back together,
tying up your joints and binding up your hinges
to bend you back into the figure-8 you were.

But you shake your head, and say
that you were one life.
Not two circles separated.

Today was drenched in consequence.
Tonight will be a moebius strip.
As the consciences drip out of us
and we clutch the plush polyester
pillow pulled from your dress

like a party trick.

Before we left the house that morning
we sat together on the couch.
You told me a secret
through the contact of you head upon my shoulder
about a violet bath. About futures.
You told me that they grow like trees and die.

You whispered to the future that day
to the laughing hologram.
A weeping willow
painted on the pavement.

Now we rolled across the Earth
like the storms in Kansas.
We dissipate like the lightning
which hides inside the thunder.
The fearful flesh obscures a mind
that labors only to be loved.
Deciduous and innocent
it begs for a continuum
and that during all it’s silent toil
there may only wrestle one.

Haiku for Dirty #13

He played a twelve string
With the blue veins in his hands,
bleeding as he did.

For everyone, for Everything

All of the party-goers
have spread
like fast climbing ivy
over the back porch

under the big
orange clouds
and sodium vapor
streetlights.

they all seem like
drained oxygen tanks
leaning against the trees.

With such grand planning
and such a quiet
craning neck

and such a slow glance
and such thoughtful gazing

We see it,
And there it is.

We are both
just so sunk.

With only the distance
of a living room between us
we fall hopelessly in love.

This is ceremony,
cacophony and politics.

This what they meant
when they told us
that we would
not be kept away.

This is
for everyone,
for everything.

This is how
these stories end,

with people walking home
in swift reverse.

with no one
watching

at all.

Haiku for Sweet #4

We rambled like clouds
Over the arms of new chairs
at one another

Sidewalk

Looking past the roofs
on the houses

At the lattice
of woven clouds
under the failing sun.

You want
to hear music.

You just
hear the sigh
of the highway

Dogs, children
barking, screaming,
no birds or anything.

Feedback in a vacuum
where everything
eventually
escapes.

So much so
that it keeps
getting colder.

All the time.

Bethlehem

His daughter stands
by his IV rack.

His breathing
fills the east wing
of a tired hospital
with it’s hurried,
tired nurses.

His nose is running.
The nape of his neck
spreads on the pillow.
The oxygen mask;

there aren’t words for it.

The ring-finger
of the right hand
twitches now and then
with no discernable
rhythm.

She takes his right hand in hers.
He doesn’t grasp,
but the twitching stops.
And he points to the mask
and he taps it twice.

He pulls at it.
She removes it for him.

He mouths the shape
of an old town.
A crescent
on the northern arm
of West Virginia.

Flashes of Chapel Road
in the seventies.
Coffee.
Honest labor.
Relapses.
Broken faucets.
Coffee.
Bed.

She sees him as he was
when he was an infant,
a vacancy of understanding
and curled fists.
Tears, without
any comprehension
at all.

She does know
why she does it.

She picks him up
and carries him
like a baby,
out of his bed,
out of the hospital,
and puts him in her car.

She wipes his mouth
and buckles him in,
and they drive away
to West Virginia.

His eyes scan
the black tree line.
The night sky is brighter.
There was no light pollution
where he came from.

She wonders
if he knew her.
If he would have
given her a fight.
If he had the strength.

He hums
when he breathes.

He breathes
under the glow
of the highway lights

passing
every
other
second.

And with the brush
of the AC
on his cheek,
he falls asleep

when they are
just outside
of Pittsburgh.

A Communication

I will spray paint the CN Tower
in caustic neon comic sans
to illustrate how this sentiment
broadcasts from my chest.

I will get arrested for trespassing
on the slope of Old faithful
to bottle the steam
to send to you,
so that you understand
my constancy.

I will design computer programs
that chirp digital messages
of affection
to the style blogs
that you read.

I will climb mount everest
and throw a paper airplane
containing a list of your virtues
into the crags of Nepal.
It will of course
be written in Nepali
so that the people there
can read it too.

I will steal one thousand doves.
From the dove factory.
And if it turns out that
a Dove factory isn’t
a real type of building,
I will build one,
and then steal the doves from it.
Because you told me once
that you like the sound they make
in the morning.

And I will sit with you
on benches,
on swing sets,
under bridges,
at bus stops,
on roofs,
in gardens,
in lobbies,
in waiting rooms,
on beds,
in tents,
underground
and in the sky
and anywhere else
that you choose to sit.

Because I am trying
to illustrate a point.

I am trying to say
something to you
without signs or sign language,
without morse code,
or codes of any kind,
and least of all
with my vulgar
and ridiculous
speech.

I am trying to say something
with everything.
so that, eventually,
reality may be reduced
to a simple phrase:
I love you.

With everything,
in everything,

I love you.

It’s love poem time.

Halley’s Comet, 1910

The whole family
is out in the yard
craning their necks
to face Halley’s Comet.

Eleven Kilometers across,
and traveling at
one hundred
fifty-seven
thousand
eight hundred
and thirty-eight
Miles-per-hour,

It appeared in silence
in the open sky
in mid April, 1910

And so our country
watched it in silence,
young cold hands,
spilled all across America,
still barely leaning west.

It seems people
were smaller
back then.

Or maybe people
get smaller
as they go along.

They saw the new light,
and wondered at it’s color,
rummaged for sketchbooks,
aimed their new cameras,
read H.G. Wells
and imagined
in their new living rooms.

It left on the 20th of April,
and stole Mr. Twain away.

And in 60 more years
our bent necks
will crane and pivot
To face Halley’s Comet.

And I wonder if
the sky will be clear.

And everywhere I go
I feel smaller.

But I don’t know how
I could feel so small
as they were then,

in the cold glow
of a close star
falling forever
into Bethlehem.

If I Miss the Sunrise

If I miss the sunrise
it will be the best sunrise
in the history
of all new daylight.

If I am wasted
on only a few people,
I will consider it a gift
given to myself.

If I am left out here,
if I am left alone,
I will think of things
that I never would
in either revelry
or solace.

My lungs breathe
when I don’t tell them to.
My heart beats
Without my ever knowing
it was there.

And if I have to stay up
a little later tonight
and write a long poem,
and regret it in the morning,
it is still far better that I do.

Because

I would rather
spend the day
in fitful rest,
than squander
one million years
in restlessness.

And if I can’t think
of anything to say to you,
or if I turn my face away
please understand

that it is just because
my ocean
is like your ocean.

Understand
that I still
am only waiting
for something new.

And if I miss the sunrise,
tell me it was beautiful.
Tell me that you never
saw another like it.

I will believe you.
And I will know

that it finally
happened.

The Dead Oak

I took a walk yesterday
Through the memorial park
and the cemetery
to the dry riverbed.

The nights were growing longer
and growing colder.
Everywhere, the concrete
was darkened by the rain.

I passed
a dead white oak
while I was walking.

and I stopped
to watch it
for a while.

Its roots had cracked
through the sidewalk.

Its leaves
Had all fallen off.

Its branches
couldn’t catch
the wind.

It was gone.
And it will remain
forever.

A shadowboxer
against the sky.
Against time.

A new home
slowly hollowed out
for the termites.

I left the tree to itself
and crossed
a wooden bridge

which stretched
over the grey
churning water,

and headed back
to my house.

Skinbear

They are looking
for evidence
the hairless
vertebrate.

The one that was found
on Montauk beach in July.

Beaked and bloated.
A curiosity.
Until you’ve turned
the lights out.

The ones who saw it
no longer eat. They feed.
They stare at everything
like meat.

It, of eyes,
of bated breath.
Something watching.
They still exist,
for us out here.

Unthings.
Beasts.

Sometimes
they wash up
in Montauk.
In summer.
Dead.

Unsubstantiated
claims.
Calcified
breathings
of monsters

buried
in the sand
and staring
also.

Caveat

The first thing he remembers is standing in front of the mirror.
He is trying to sound out English words:

CAR SPOON THANK GUNMAN ILLINOIS

He pronounces Illinois with a hard S at the end and cannot disguise his accent no matter how he shapes his mouth.

He has no idea why he remembers this.

He thinks of one of the rotting fence posts, frosted solid on one side from wind.

The relevance of this memory too is lost on him and he is made aware of the forward movement of his body.

He thinks unexpectedly of Hedda Parnevik. He does not know where he is. Perhaps a wedding? She speaks to him and he doesn’t hear her.

There is a sudden change in the inertia of his body.
He is flying.

He realizes this, and as he does, he is visiting Oslo for the first time. He is not afraid. But he is uneasy. He knows he is a baby because of the chair they give him at the restaurant. He gums soft pea paste as his father wipes a fleck of something from his eye. He is sure he has never thought anything before this moment.

He is grateful for the pea paste as he hits the glass.
The crown of his head is pure white pain and he is trying to fill his lungs with air, but nothing comes.

They each got him something that had to do with the ocean or fishing because he loved the water that year. He loved fish. He catches the branch of a tree and dislocates his left shoulder. He is sick to his stomach and still flying.

He studied at Karlstad for three years. He wanted to be a engineer.

There had been many great Swedish engineers.

Ernst Alexanderson
Fredrik Ljungstrom
Enoch Thulin
Carl Daniel Eckman
Rolf Mellde

DUCK TOM CRUISE CALIFORNIA CHAIR… CHAIR…

He cannot get his voice to sound like theirs. After a few moments, he goes back outside. He will not learn English for another eight years.

He never, he never, he never, he never,

There is a smell of candles, and he is walking to school, and he is sleeping, and the moon is shining, and a crib is chocolate, and his hers is theirs, and this—

He sees it, and then he sees nothing. The last thing that occurs to him is that he cannot remember where he was going.

He hits the brick wall and his skull fractures like an egg. He remains conscious and bleeds out in unbelievable pain.

He is standing in front of his mirror. He is practicing English words.

LOBE MALIBU GRACE LOBSTER CRANE

Only Fathoms

They
have discovered
a new source of fuel
in the Arctic.

Love for rust and carbon.
Crumbling pumice.
Who builds monuments of this?
They are bird-like in their delicacy.
Otherwise
they are much like shrimp.

Researchers, restless and wandering.
Cutting ice blocks for a living.
Anything.
At all.
Is better than this.

Three chords play at once
and make a perfect brown noise
of everything.
Almost a human breath.
The crystals collect
themselves inside the heart
and through the veins.
I can hear you inside me know.
The sensation is strange.
What are you saying?

We have set about an excavation.
We are going down.
For science.
For reason.
For drink.
Invertebrates twist at these notions.
Fresh disturbances of ancient graves.
Not in desecration, but out of fear
for the wide unsmiling face,
ever-staring, snap-shut
down the barrels
of blaring radio towers.

On hills
and over highways.
Everything is so
very
quiet

except for them.
Something mercurial.
Changing.
All spines and mandibles.

I promise,
we will escape them.
With reason.
With conscience.
With teeth.

The abyss is truly
nothing
to worry about,
only Fathoms.

Just another mix
of lust and terror,
as
somehow

the animals get free.