As Far as I Can Tell

you've lived your life on a canvas

leaving painted footprints on chests and

fingertips

and filling yourself in

with pencil and watercolor words

defining aesthetics in terms of light and sound

when viewed from across the room brushstrokes

disappear

and a whole becomes apparent

if you go past the rope

with a diamond lens

and steady breath

you may find fragments

layers of different hues and self

but my medium has never been visual

so perhaps there's deception in my eyes

and you were never felt at all

Silhouettes

It's that time of night

when the trees are

perfectly silhouetted by a sun not quite set

and we talk about coffee.

And work. And everything else

except for those subjects too delicate to broach

at such an inopportune moment.

We barrel towards a night certain to arrive

before we're ready

and find ourselves

constantly on the verge

of penetrating darkness

protected only by a cocoon

of headlights and fog covered glass

Light crashes over the road

and we trace dashed lines

with spinning wheels

unable to see anything

past the whitewashed asphalt

Our minds' screams

to hold onto one another

echo loudly inside of our skulls

while you grip the steering wheel tighter

and I stare at the darkness

The Space Between Dreams

You occupy the space between my dreams

And inhabit the distance between silences.

Our reality is hypothetical

because our relationship is definitively intangible.

In the instant I feel I can almost touch you,

you have already dissipated, like

a splash of warm water on my face

or the words

we almost said.

Though I cannot see you clearly

I am distinctly aware of your presence:

just beyond the corner of the blink of an eye

because I catch glimpses of your face

sketched upon the insides of my eyelids.

So I keep my eyes closed at night

and during the day sometimes too

while I try to convince you to invest in real estate elsewhere:

maybe move to one neighborhood or another

in either direction.

Because if I convince you to occupy my dreams,

I can find a place where I can finally touch you.

A muffled bang

She likened her life

to that of a bullet fired underwater

Her inability to proceed was born not out of individual decisions

but rather

the environment she was thrust into

with a muffled bang

and immediate deceleration

to a pace of another's choosing

The resistance encountered by her velocity

could not be surmounted

It was simply physics

Asphalt in Hard Pack

I could still see the marks they painted there:

echoes of exhausted efforts to extract chaos from the ether

and replace it with pharmaceutically inspired order;

striving for symmetry in a place where there are no mirrors.

They laid down asphalt in hard pack

trying to beat back everything they could find

with sticks and stones and steamrollers and backhoes

turning a place where everything goes into a place where everyone goes

So they marked it up and chalked it up as a job well done

and moved on to find more chaos to take

and keep locked away.

Later they found you can't wrap up discord like wires

and it became apparent that Pandora's box never got closed all the way

and pandemonium kept creeping out in to the disarray

That pharmaceutical syntax withered and cracked

as symmetry became immolated with chaos

and snapped off jagged and tumbled away

It was only then

that I saw a place where you could fall off the edge of the world

And streak through eons of white infinity,

Toppling wildly toward nothingness,

And never even know it.

As featured in the 2011-2012 edition of Matchbox Magazine 

Rescue Line

I saw her tell me that “impossible is trying to connect in this world”

through a monitor, thousands of miles and several years away.

I saw a moment locked in time and immortalized through electrodes in

which I was informed that our most difficult tasks

involved informing others of what we plan to do

The actions preceding it are irrelevant, as are those that follow;

In that brief and fleeting instant, our task is accomplished.

In that flighty moment, everything which is planned or destined or chanced to happen afterward 
       becomes unnecessary and dismissible.

That intersection of spiritual tornadoes,

in which electrical impulses from the brain become fast twitch muscle movements of the jaw and 
       tongue become sound waves piercing nothingness and find themselves introduced     
       to the eardrum and held captive in an unknown land for further study,

A rescue line cast through the ether in which two beings trapped corporeally become  inextricably       
  linked against all odds

After dog-paddling through a sea inhabited by everything imaginable

With no buoys in sight. No ships. No land.

As they find themselves drawn together, a sense of relief the size of the ocean in which they float 
       washes over them

And when they meet,they register a sense of shock that the line which drew each one of them forth
       was not anchored to anything remotely solid.

Just each other.

And then panic and disappointment set in,

Until they begin to realize that now, at least they have someone to float with.

Impeccable Tempering

I am no Alton Brown.

I do not carry a seed of nutmeg strung around my neck,

Nor have I ever deep fried a Thanksgiving turkey.

I do not own a collection of dishers of various sizes.

I steal recipes from him though,

once butchered a chicken while following his instructions on tv:

I did not use the same boning knife I saw on the screen

and I did not have a bath of buttermilk waiting for my bird once I had finished.

I wasn't planning on frying it, after all:

I can never figure out what to do with all that leftover oil.

They never show that part on TV.

Dessert was crème brûlée,

Though my utensils did not have my name on them, and

I most certainly did not see a camera mounted in the back of my oven.

I know the eggs I used were comparable, however,

And my tempering technique was impeccable.

The egg yolks most definitely did not scramble

and the hot water bath I used could not have been that different.

Our oven temperatures were the same, I'm sure.

My torch wasn't nearly as fancy,

Even if I did make my own vanilla infused sugar.

Poems

You

make me want

to write

poems

about

You

and

I

don't know

why

because

You

don't like

poems.

Everything Comes and Goes

I saw a poorly defined man lasso an entire world

underneath the train tracks

every morning on my way to work.

He looked like he was struggling with it-

As much as he looked like anything-

But every time I thought about offering him help

he would say,

to no one in particular,

Everything comes and goes

And continue to grapple with his universe.

It was a colorful place;

an artist's delicate touch made sure each face felt comfortable

because she hoped that they would be there awhile.

The homeless man's cigarette smoke didn't seem to bother them

And every time I wanted to ask about the trains in the sky,

I held my tongue,

because I knew they would tell me

you get used to it after a while,

because Amtrak runs on a schedule like everything else.

I thought about drawing the man with the lasso a friend

but by the time I found my sharpie and stencil

he had already come and gone

leaving his universe to float for a while

like a fish on a stringer

One morning I found the colors of those faces spattered with gray

and smoothed over like freshly laid concrete.

The universal cowboy's lasso faded into the wall he called his home

like everything else he once held.

That afternoon I bought a can of spray paint

because when a tunnel becomes a canvas

it can only stay blank for so long.

As featured in the Winter 2012 edition of Nameless Magazine 

silt foundations

our thoughts took shape

when i recognized your presence

shrouded in salted steam and haze

i wanted to cover the floor in sand

and gorge each grain with the shame scattered around me

while i clawed at the blinds

and inhaled ash and smoke

and citrus

we stumbled from window sills

chasing broken glass

and dislocated ourselves on thumbtacks and drywall nails

jammed through insulation and skin

we built scaffolding on your hips

and spanned oceans with our sinew

and i choked on the barbed wire of your lips

and your flux

our collisions toppled power lines in rain storms

and cracked silt foundations and pillars

while we disregarded stop signs

and raced sheets of rain and nightfall

we coiled ourselves around streetlamps and tent poles

and stared at stop motion blood and emotion

spattered on the walls

and sidewalks

Signifiers

I constantly want to erase things

like the sun,

or people.

but mainly words,

signifiers.

There is an inherent strength in the ability to smudge things away.

I don't mind leaving the echoes of communication etched and

    indented everywhere.

Even if it means someone else only needs to trace echoes to recommunicate

    what I have unsaid.

Sometimes I write things

just to erase them

and leave reblanked sheets of paper on doorjambs

and windowsills

to find out if anyone is trying to rewrite myself.

There Are Times In Which We Must Fade

Let's go disappearing.

Sometimes I just feel like we need

to go and bury ourselves in darkness and distance.

We'll wander hand in hand in to the hands of the night

and find our lives flung across the hills and into the fields and through the stalks of corn and 

   grain and growth

We can scatter ourselves and see what grows with water and what grows when starved

Let's skate down gutters and become runoff

and filter through grates and pipes and dive in to the ocean

and disperse amongst particles that are just like us

but aren't

Let's climb to the canopy and scream.

I see lights in the distance and I want to know what they are. Lets go

find them together.

I don't know where they went but they can't be far.

I think we should find a thunderstorm and ride it

to see what kind of fires we can start and where

and when and why.

Ascent

You built a home in the timber on a mountainside

Torn down by volcanoes and meteor strikes.

The carnage in which you reside suits you well:

You planted olive trees and saffron.

When I met you I told you a story

while we built a fire of steel and bone

You sat on my lap and listened

I scrawled a note on the wall in charcoal and
   something that looked like blood

I think I apologized

If nothing else I should have

Charm Bracelet

One of these days

I'll write pages about you;

books upon books taken from your skin

and lungs.

I want to collect all you've breathed in

and held over these years.

Let go

I'll place the words you've inhaled

on a charm bracelet

and keep it somewhere safe and quiet

because that's where I never got a chance

to hear you.

I'll take the pictures I never painted and

the music I never wrote

and build a gallery around your self.

It's okay

I know you can't capture a soul in a painting

but I poured in as much of mine as I could spare

I know it's nowhere near full

But that's as much of you as I could

be without becoming myself again.

I had to compose it quickly before I crystallized

and froze again

and became trapped in a mould forever.

It's like flying

Maybe if I plunge myself in to your flame for long enough

I'll be able to brand myself anew.

I've already heated your charm bracelet self enough to

sear each word in to my wrists

45 Minutes

this is a place

where blades crack and refuse to cut

and the heat of the sun was never feared

collisions sound less dense

and silence is only momentary

and monumental

they say it only takes 45 minutes before

a completely soundproof environment begins

to drive you insane

in total isolation you recognize insanity

you are arbitrarily beautiful and there's no one to tell you so

Empty Canisters

if all of our dreams are bad dreams the how does one define a nightmare?

we never played back the overexposed film to find out

our answers were disregarded and canisters of snakes and cellophane filled the shelves

the commercialization and subsequent disposal of thoughts was comforting

in the same way that the end of the rope almost seems peaceful a few moments later

when faced with the quiet post-riot gravity which glides in softly to feed on carcasses of rage and 

    carrion men

how long before flames can no longer destroy ideas

and arson only burns things?

will our thoughts be digitized before they find us dangling from the rafters of a charred and 

    ancient library?

can our nightmares survive if we never choose to speak them?