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it's like this thing was devastating.

it's probably just that i've been alone, and thereby unguarded from my own ridiculous propensities, for three days now. but something about...engagement with making this series of poems into a chapbook is hurting. it's like, i look at it, and i'm proud of myself, and then at the same time it hurts, and i don't have room to feel anything else. it's like something's been ripped from me.

which sounds cliche beyond words, but it's true.

so weird. so weird.

und drang

agonia

how to describe what's in my head today in regards to you, sweetest veronica,
lodestar to the pull of words, muse to tidal blood
and its half-oxygenate longings, maker
of this my heaven and my earth?

loved one, and dearest, and mistress
of this lip trembling like
a breath of air passing through
a vocal fold. my mind does often
vision others, beauties rising
on their beds,

but as things stand
i am still very much
your metaphor, and hence either
they are all you or
you are me and i them.

bewail this inordinate flesh and its thousand passions!
sigh for me, o angels, and sigh for me, death,
and let this ship rock
in its unforgiving tide
and dream of love denied.

ARRGH.

citrus fruits, moon and blood:

i am rosy and overmastered

by thoughts of your passion.

laura, beatrice,

eurydice,

those traces they left

in the ground,

root-bound buds rising for air

from dirt that once

was red lips...

in similar yet non-literal fashion

veronica

remains on me.

i need no other lover

to write of.

autumn is time for cogitation

songs my mother taught me

no less beautiful now
than i ever was: this
may not be saying much

but it means something
untrammelled--

that thing within
that passes show,
green, still, on the vine,
or yet in bud, tight-furled,

but not static.
taut against every
slight ripple
of wind:

bent sometimes
even to ground

yet never
quite broken.

petrarch faked it too

autumn mouth

i unfurl.
and in so doing turn away from light.

darkness calls forth colors
unfamiliar
to a light-stressed day:
light pours down in day
and swells the seen things
with itself alone,

but at night,
like perfumes released by heat,
things radiate outward
in private display.
this is why it's stranger
and more filling to see
a racoon emerge from a dumpster
by the light of a sodium lamp
than the entire grand canyon
on a clear day.


the thing that never happened, that is, you,
i am able to mourn at night,
able to worship at night,
and to return to the stretch
of night-lit sidewalk, in memory,
where my mind broke its teeth
for love of you.

punch me in the face
o moon, o stars.
walk the corridor of my thousand doors
and allow them all to open on love.
let my essence
spill as if there,
the color, rustling, plural, near-tangible,
of devotion.

borges-style arch

stratification
from hart crane

side by side with a memory--
the scent and taste of rain,
the wetted sexual concrete and
the frictive proturbance of cloud against cloud
against cloud--

there lies that physical moment,
as if it were a body swathed in satin,
post-sepulchral, nearly present.

the hollow that i made myself,
the echoing flesh i fashioned of myself.
as if but a stroke of yours
could, belated, slacken, somehow, or tauten
my strings
to vibrate in strange patternings.

stand quite still and let
the wind blow its note in me.
the red blossom grows in me.
do what you will to me.