The First 20 Stepping Stone Poems
Threadbare
and love is too small of a word, I fill my tongue with a billion versions of that word, to try wrapping kite string around Jupiter , no bits of sound will do justice to the tiny earthquakes that run through my body when I see your face or think your name
Into Winter
because the sun grows less tolerant of us, and the fingers of cold come I must drink more coffee before I venture out to do all these human things to keep a grip on a job that holds a tighter grip on me
we live in a gentle place, but in my 13 years here, even I have found it to be cold I have lost my mind of winter, forgive me , Wallace, it stays preserved like Viking rations in eastern Oregon snow
the entire city froze in its tracks last week, the threat of snow that came only as a sneeze of sleet, even the clouds are laughing at us
I qualified as an old man before people started telling me I was young, the sky is gray and heavy enough my joints swell to birthday balloons , the back under my skin a stain glass church window in the evening , I envelop my wife as I am a coat of frost and melancholy
let the outside world be nothing tonight , social concerns and scattered responsibilities sentenced to hang on the coat rack , tonight, let there be only the hiss of a space heater the solidarity of cats and two people who escaped into the warmth of together,for a few hours more
Re-Shelved
go to sleep hoping that all of today that hurts will be put away on the shelf in back of my mind
headache and sore back the feeling of aging a few more broken trophies above cob web covered bits of past anatomy , on a shelf in a darkened corner
A Small Fire
I will avoid the ocean waves of epic love poems and just say she is a small fire that burns, providing the carbon base that makes me a life-form
Back to Forward
something stays here, in the broken glass world of my memory my blinking eye looking back because all the sharp edges of the past keep my walking ignoring wounds I move forward only because looking back proves that I never should have been there
Something More
Poems sometimes are never enough , just a hunger falling from fingers hiding in paper pretending to be a statement the less you write, the more relevant it is
Lascivious Grace
1
The art of growing up is teaching your skin to become a mask factory All the orifices stuffed with paper , tainted with vulgar poetry
My transgression is to pretend a part of me is still innocent calling back to my own instinct , be as dead as a statue
2
Some nights, I am left in moods I thought I have left behind , guilty feelings over my wife mopping up the mess of my self-evisceration
I remember as a child I would feel bad for standing outside obstructing sunlight from a boy shaped patch of grass
now, in my mid-thirties, a part of me still has not grown secure,
wanting to stay quiet about wounds, who still sometimes feels the echoes
of being told how worthless I am , at nine after harvesting a whole onion field by hand,
or the times younger
left with the responsibilities of alleged adults, the pedophile who hated his life and fatherhood ,
or the mentally ill woman who would't get off the couch to do anything except kill my pets in front of me when I was behind on chores
they are the ones who called themselves farmers
and they have left seeds which I have tried pulling out of my bones, but you always look insane when trying to circumvent your own skin
sometimes at night, I can feel a bumper crop coming on
3
Because I love to be not loved
they will ask me what my damage is
and I will say impiety is a comfort
when one was raised with grace used as a weapon
my future is a success if others fail to make sense of me
4
I learned what innocence is,
birth throws us into a world gentle and illiterate ,
we age, hording weaponry our skin turns to armor by reading sharp edges,
this is a world of broken glass streets every human soul a bottle ready to fall off its shelf
Because I Watch The News
keeping yourself alive by believing in the gorgeous cause , the idea that justice is real and that you can see it
But then, you actually pay attention and these things you hoped for become stained glass portraits in church windows as seen by Atheist eyes:
dedications, so very pretty, likely to nothing at all.
Writing Wasp-Eggs
poems come from the abyss one always hopes to fill, at least for me , no lines from heaven
behold the joy proposed of being an artist worrying that you really did fail in turning your soul to statements
the true nature of what we do , unknown to us letting the decay of sanity sink in, we hunt beauty by way of letting logic fall to abstraction
close your eyes, let the right line and word and image be a piranha hand goes in the water, hoping for a bite, for something to latch on so hard you can pull it away with you
the loving breast of an artist allows eggs to be planted inside it, only for them to devour till fat and mature, to burst away and take flight, as far from you as possible
No Matter,No Statement
No matter how many love poems I write,
Or times I try explaining all of it to you
None of it would be as effective as if I were to simply place my heart on a platter
and that would be an act whose gruesomeness would be profane,
no statement is proper no statement is effective
and you tell me that I don't need to try explaining it , but then sometimes lying next to you, I am afraid that I am draining too much and not opening my own floodgates
Gray Fragments
stars, forever shine,unburnt * fast melting eyes of ice cry * this heart bruises itself with every beat * I will survive my dying
I Am A Barrier
1 writing to devour time as time devours bits of me, wrinkles are gaps
2
I break through walls, barriers made by saying only human, if enough bones break I will heal to inhuman
3
after a while, you see yourself as territory others walked over,
by this age, you seek to reclaim yourself, now, obsessed with conquest
Swells From A Dream
it will start
as a dream
slowly rotting to
a memory that
you can't burn
from your mind
it sticks to you
like it did to your skin
and no matter how
nice life is right now,
still it will swell and show
that you are
a basket for shrapnel
of things you survived
but
don't worry,
there is more
than just surviving this,
there is also the joy
of just knowing you aren't dead
and that maybe life can be great
despite the fact that you're still in it
say you're at risk of becoming a partial optimist
just rest assured that this likely isn't a terminal case
Animus Headache
There is a football game playing and I'm sitting in a nice chair
Faking serenity
Behind my eyes my neurons are a forest lightning burning off all the branches
Tell them everything is fine because they can't smell smoke
Hooray For December
Fighting the flu leaves you embarrassingly brittle
and thinking of yourself as little more than a dump of old sensations stained and barely felt
night is coming , to make it easier to hide all the wreckage that makes you ,
grab your hot tea, and go under the blanket, hoping tomorrow makes you less fevered and less introspective
Yeah, That
the cold the headache the shadow of my age the melancholy that seeps in the soft winter that you still hate the unending backward flow of thoughts the swollen joints the cracking back the lungs like cement covered balloons the fact that whenever I talk about it, I am whining
The progress of poetry
Poetry and it's need to be born is a speeding car, unconcerned about how much roadkill it creates
Some nights it finds itself on a back road of porcupines
Cut-Up Reality (Homage To William S Burroughs)
institute despair here, just here.. there.. invention light seem long as flowers , in the world-wilt you , silently hollow Promise such strength , unkindness lays upon the world,a curse to leave it be This wooden ice ... melts to splinters Still seem at gently/ violently calm and you silently rock your mind back to farm days In the horses straw No circle can counsel , you cannot hide from anything making enemies just by being alive though enemies the high deserts , the sand that creeped into your bones and became a soul,your body is just snow that sets upon it, pretending we have actual seasons
The stars of winter's poem is riddled with parasites
is wistful of passenger such by their injuries
it all makes sense if you just stop thinking about it
Serenity
because most often there is very little left to write about other than my obsessions which usually just focus myself and the likelihood of my failing something and I try sleeping with this kind of internal shadow putting frost over my innards despite the calmness of my life now the obvious reasons to be happy, but really , you never do shake the things that birthed your trajectory, a trajectory you stayed on for so damn long feeling like you did not deserve any better and it is even hard to say what kept you there, what made feel comfortable, after all, you had already changed so much had already let the scars of your youth fade away, hidden under a new blanket of numb skin that was too old for its age, but at least it was far removed from what it had been, I swallow my scars and feed my ink-sickness , puke out the viruses onto a page and call it writing , and it is winter now, the time when sickness is at its yearly high and I am calm with this, I am contented with this, something like the happy that I am, except this goes deeper, into all the puncture wounds and cigarette burns and razor scrapes and times I screamed my hatred at everything holy, living dead, and Imagined , until my vocal chords snapped like kite string tied to two different cars, and I simply ran out of hate, and people to focus on, serenity is not a state of mind, it is simply a state of exhaustion, where you no longer are able to cause all the problems you felt comfortable doing
Old Again And Again
Can feel the rain in the window about in my mid thirties and everything is swollen and rusty and I don't complain I allow myself the stigma of seeming distant because that which fills me most is the urge to complain And there is no value in that it shows you to be the rust , the weakness the baldness that was once a man as firm as an Iron gate, If all you feel is ache, do not admit to feeling anything make your mantra a stolen line from a horror movie I am so exquisitely empty