collector of instance

i am a collector of instance

i deal in contraband moments and places and times

my days are spent hiding sunlight in armoires and dust beneath sand

i can never quite close the doors fast enough;

constructing dioramas of Atlantis at high tide

while color escapes cracks in the lighthouse walls

i am the demon who left the fruit in the box for Pandora to find

i search for vessels:

glass, wicker, plastic

to hide things which yearn to be opened

so strongly they refuse to close

and go on to vanish in a collision of symbols and sound

each moment a raindrop becoming a hailstone

plummeting with bent heads and prayers for snow

as piety rushes outward with a dull hiss.

once in a long lifetime things start to blur

as the Colombia collides with the Hindenburg

and a hurricane hits Appomattox

and i'm suddenly left with an attic

full of tightly sealed emptiness

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.