Locked Out

I once saw a young girl
place her hand on the
inside of a window,
staring out
as I watched from the sidewalk.
The girl was locked in
and I was locked out with
this world, my companion.
If it is putrid or lovely,
I would not know,
for the road stretched like
spangles of a sea anenome--I
knew of nowhere to be
and nothing to see.
The curtain shut,
swept into some desperate arms,
and her face dispersed in an
explosion of butterfly wings.
They left a faint shimmer.

As I faced a well-lit street in suburbia,
I felt the ghost
of a carriage skirt the
nearest corner, or the
presence of a lingering friend
sweep behind a birch tree;
I felt both in my fingertips.
Light erupts and lamposts are
all space and time,
and as the girl's feet, buoyant
and filled with bounce, moved against
the plushness of a warm carpet,
I had to tear through the unforgiving
bark of my own roots,
growing into the frozen ground.

This night is mine in a
feather bed I frequently
share with my imagination.
I am both free and contricted unto myself.

The Surveyor

"I've never even heard of a barbituate,"
she laughed and told him to click
on an answer. Her nephew
played with REM and that impressed him
but I think it she handed him
a bag of bud it would impress him
more.

Sometimes it's hard to remember what things
are all about
The story of that old Lorax, the wild things, the
goodnight moon
God it's a struggle to search through
the past,
like finding a soft pair of hands in fog,
even for things that once meant the world and a
wonderful head full of dreams
I can make such a mess of a
memory by trying to fix it all nice
like I'm trimming hedges
Or sewing up an open wound--
plastic surgery.

Small Feet in Big Shoes

Buy pot, smoke pot
Buy beer, drink beer
Buy drug, take drug
This magnificnt
vessel of a body
is a lake
of polluted,
lifeless water.
It is still.
Stagnant. On my
last vacation here
I hooked a
fine, large bass
and it told me that
life thrives and
dwindles among the
sediment, yet
it cannot seek the sun.

We graze in a
feld of green
that will never
receive what it
needs to
flourish alone;
life is fruitless
or heavy, like
carrying a
suitcase full
of money on a
subway train. We
know neither
where we
take
it,
nor what it even
means. With
each step away
from the tracks
downward facing crystals
grow inside
of us and
they make us
feel like life
is weight.
They make us feel
like shit.

Where are the
the lilies blooming
this year? Not
in our eyes or
our souls, but
instead potpourri
the shores of
a far
away lake.
Nothing but a green
giant grows
within us,
within you. Jack
must face the world
from the peak
of his beanstalk,
and his hands
are cut
and bloody
from handling
seeds and
leaves, but he
continues to
the summit.
And where is this
virtue in
his (our) journey?

Weed, money.
A train
A web
A race--nervousness.
It is ironic
that such insipid
forms of inanimacy
are where the
weak find their
salvation.

Dark

I am dark matter
solid as Hades
transparent as the twirling
tendrils of ghostly
breath, rising like mist
from the river styx.
I scream questionable things
from the tops of large buildings
hoping somebody will look
up, not at me,
but the sky-
face tilted toward eternity
and an orchestra of
celestial beauty, neck exposed.
I am stable, yet also
exquisite in the looseness
of my weave.

As thin as a single hair

We leave this bed
and we are two goblin faces
standing in a debauched, crowded city.
This place is as empty as we are
and spirits whirl, whirl, whirl
spitting silk. We get all caught up,
malaise and tangled.
What was once a mosaic is now
graffitti, but it is
a painful truth, just as we are.
Strangers are people, isotopes of a solid,
a soft web of criticism and denial,
but friends are a flora, blossoming
under the light of stars. Here,
we consume
love, true love
what am I? A stranger, a friend, a goblin?
Or just a spirit, spitting the silk
that keeps us apart

The Stranger

Dear Stranger,
Come find me.
I am
lost, but
you are
strangely
invaluable
to me
even though
your fingernails
constantly
rip
at the quilt
that keeps me
together.