Someday, The Trees Will Sing

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For those who wish to continue reading...

Check out my Wordpress at onebirdspeaks.wordpress.com. There are a couple of remade/revised poems you’ll find there. Also some new ones not featured here.

Look out for my novel, Below Torrential Hill. I’ve yet to submit anywhere, but I will dream it real until the day it’s accepted. I’ll then announce its publication here.

See you at my other blog!

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Still looking for beta-readers!

Message me if you’re interested in reading my fiction story (a little over 20,000 words) and giving me honest feedback. I need people who read literary fiction often (and preferably writers) and aren’t intimidated by lyricism/know my work.

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For those reading after all this time, for those who have ever read, thank you. I love you all. It’s been a very long time since I’ve been active (see: writing and sharing often). Time, as always, did not simply pass through me but birthed new regions in my soul in its wake. I am older, but I’ve found so much youth in the last few years, once buried in the dunes of my darkness.

I wrote a fiction novel and am looking for beta-readers. It’s a lyrical story about a teenage boy who feels his family has fallen apart, with magical realism elements and themes of grief, inheritance, and the nature of god in ourselves. It’s titled Below Torrential Hill and is 93 pages on Word. Please message/email me if you are interested ([email protected]).

Beyond that, I am reaching out to the literary community for tips/resources for first time novelists who have just completed their novel. I’m hoping for something more in the direction of cover designers, lit agent, knowing the right place to submit, etc…

Any help / suggestions is 100% encouraged.

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I Wrote About Comets

If I were a comet, I would grasp the universe in hawk’s claws, clutched tight to my chest, hurtling. Still it would be slow to me. Underneath it all escaped a dimension entirely sea; and ever my heart, where millennia kissed, will never die. I would steal it all as tide filled in, whispering forever in my drowning, nothing else.

I give you my hands, I give you my voice, I give you my eyes, I give you my loss.

I was a comet. I walked on air, touched tips of cherry leaves with her at my side, ever like a shared dream without end, or walking on the tides of the sea, or the timid moon uncovering from daylight, or safety in a language we understood by wisps guiding in each other’s eyes. Like the boy’s wish in the backyard, I am the safest in the room where three hammers meet, punctuated brooms of mist rise upon my shadow. The loss, the beauty, and the lift away.

From our apartment door, appears a denizen of bruised light. What if it was me, somewhere else, in another time when my happiness is not undying? I cannot see for the dissonance, yet language forms first at my feet, then the fingers. Sometimes it does not reach my throat, but it means I love, and you.

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Verses Pulled from Blood

Delana. Here you are, evening imbued in rippling curls, lanterns quiet and nightswept. I feel I’ve always known your brownest eyes.

Isn’t the weather always new? And won’t you tell me your latest comfort? Like how you bestow our favorite words inside my wrist, to sink below skin, to bloodstreams, to this blaring engine or this thicket of veins; will you share your happy, your true happy, with me? I fear I haven’t spoken enough, love how I haven’t grown enough, lost in dance surrounded by Wonderland’s crowd—the tide’s roll no match for our gazes’ chain and anchor. You— the meaning, I—the asking, all at once everywhere and nowhere, but here.

Do you hear that too? The window has unlocked beneath my breath and all my past winters wriggle up, yawning through— and they finally melt away. Everything I used to be, everything I gave up being. They fall away.

I was once too afraid, and learned to trust my heart as it peered the corner. Found the lowest shadow, and turned it over like a sheet of paper to the sky, and lost my eyes floating in the sun. And you’re holding my fingers cautiously, lest they too turn sand caught by this sea. And now you’re sealing all your wandering upon my lips, lest I forget your soul. Never, my love, never, never.

Delana. Was it you who roused the street alive when we left the bar? I see every pebble turn, every shadow crawl to their feet to stand and watch us finally arrive home. Each moment was merely waiting for the right words, when our old lives shivered in the background, and we’re here—strident—shuffling centuries of realized dreams with our lips. So still, nightswept, quiet, rippling—here we are. I swear I’ve always known your brownest eyes.

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The Water and the Well

Once I crawled on the lawn and knew it to be okay, residing there in a mirth of filtering spores and, of course, the roaming life within (and every disparate seed below), where I settled into my skin and breathed in patterns against resplendent sunfire, its witch-fingers and all, and relearned my name in the earth’s restless accord of terror and beauty. And so dropped a vision into my organs, a loose portrait of events, melting as it slithered over my guts and sank to the bottom of my heels– I captured some details but the rest drained too deep to revisit.

I peered above the man-made world and fought with the thousand mirrored faces while they screamed at me in a language only I understood. In their eyes, there survived a ghastly realization of some shared past and (maybe) a recognition.

Love tells a lifelong story. I asked a dove flying over my heart to come back someday. It stole something from me so long ago, but I was too young to remember. Perhaps it was never mine at all.

(Love watches your body turning towards. Your body falling into. Your body unfolding to sleep. You listen to her breathing before you dream. And does she know something about you that you will never know? Love watches too. And when she promises, “Of course, of course you do, of course you will.” Shower down to the grass, every season at its time. And moving faster into the burning brunette light, forever closer to.)

I heard a tremor from the earth, and from the dirt, it traveled across the boundaries of my flesh and drifted close to the marrow, by and by, with yellow light waking an internal poetry, alive in my place on the lawn and knowing everything, finally, to be okay. Admittedly, I could not savor the feeling long enough. I ate it entirely as my appetite for assurance was ravenous.

Somewhere along the way, a song told me, “Once a cave carried me away, now I carry it with me.” Here too, a warm cave resides among the honeycombed hillside climbing my heart. It allows me rest, but offers no other kind of companionship. Is there not a place like that in everyone’s life?

Delana came to me unfazed by the way we just get older, and some names disappear altogether from sentences, and the possibility my return to the city we met might lay the soil under our first home. She learned me entirely yet knew me from the beginning, and until the end. 

All of the while, I remembered this is my truth, when she and I would become. Exiting the old cave, I gazed my city’s sky for another falling star and instead found a dove that swathed its wings above telephone wires and treetops, shakily swept across years and parkways that belted beyond to an endless mainland. I know everything will go on, and the other things sink in between, but–ah–they still swim lovingly, slowly, and I still feel them.

I feel it. In fact, I believe the sensation will never stop.

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'Due Tramonti' in the Rain

Timberland shelves of forestry hide the horizon. All the times I’ve lingered this way, a sheet of skin beholding highways. Are we not one in the same?

When I was younger, I missed my family’s footsteps in the morning, sunken in the air, my legs dragged to the room across a hallway, ever-slowing before a long pharmaceutical bed where they kept, merely sleeping beyond waking time, winding limbs like twined root. And I, a television croaks, and I.

Consider this: my hands receiving the sky for a little less than twenty years, their due colors mapped in palm lines and housed under cuticles. Do I come to learn love? I was only a teenager. Love was the mightiest growl in the pitch of C, a sound somebody told me I’d make not with my mouth but with my shape, and yet, shouting anyway, I retched like a phantom floating from my back porch, on and away, orbiting a rind of smoke till become dust. My favorite riddle returned me to my own heart unfolding, shy but unkempt, insides wrinkled to a varicose sky-like blue.

Now two warped memories speak back. My father cries at the kitchen table after our Grandma Molly passed. The shaking would not stay in his throat. It was not yet his time to turn to tumbleweed.

My mother might have kissed his hands.

Alone, but with myself beside her, she drives nightward propelled into harsh rain, and it’s vast, a bestial drumming born without sense of time or sleep, a lost threnody from one million years ago. The pelt of fallen sky is a shelter of its own, a place I feel safe enough to show her a song. And it doesn’t take more than a moment, as she holds the shaking in her throat. She cries, warmth clutched close to her chest.

They never hurt me with their hurt, only lent it to me. Know there’s beauty in the tension that hangs between two rooms, between rustling woodland and a hidden sun’s sleeping chorus. I know they love me, know they needed their rest too. I came across my mother and father holding hands in the sun the other day. I don’t want to know the words they were saying.

Sometimes it feels like I found love floating like a dust mote on a sunbeam. I was walking somewhere and stopped in my tracks to look up. There, adjusting to my eyes, tiny cities frail enough to ascend on the tails of my breath’s dimmest hum. And there love was. And there it was.

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A Prose-Poem Written For You in Skydipped Ink

Delana, morning rims on your body’s limits. Where there is turned blonde along your arms, ripples far our sun. Love you terribly enough into eclipse, but Delana, you move closer and closer everyday. Nothing fastens to strong winds like you– and then there is the wind, but it isn’t like you. No hurry to your heart, you watch the trees’ tremble learn your fingers. Your softness speaks for itself, reaching for me in longest dark. Our voices wrestled the old drunk, the old lost, the risky (to steal behind old sweatstained faces and pull our eyes close) in old youthful din. We wore tossed skylight above the old American quad and silenced a confusion by seeing each other shine. And at night, I would have sung you a lullaby, but I’m only a small instrument, but I’m only a lone stripe on the oldest highway. I’m a boy, and you are Delana, with every continent carrying water to your kindnesses. So in the morning, let sunfire kindle your skin in painted freckles. I will peel their beams 30,000 feet high, bury their gleam like poetry in my pocket, and find you waiting to see me the way you’ve always seen me– to take love to you that you’ve already known.

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To Spill

Trouble slinking into the doorway again. Just wanted to see your face still there. I’m a faucet begun to spill, a lighter, a tape recorder with your name written on the front and back.

It’s a Sunday, somehow morning, baby-blue falling outside my window, and you’re walking across the street.

I feel better when you’re here. I hear them building everyday next door. You touch a glass of cold water to the bridge of your nose and you say, I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.

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All of the While

My girl warps her voice to sway like the Atlantic, reminds me the meaning of Same Drugs & goes awash in her phone’s daydream like a gentle breath in a pile of quietness.

And comets the sun sparks in big brown eyes.

My girl calls me hers, knowing.

Science created our language or was it the other way around? Never mind, never mind.

My girl always kept an eye on me.

It’s the simple things, you know. The symmetry, the staying, the resonating, always rings & rings & rings in her hair.

I once said live in the moment & the moment became my life & it was the best thing I did. And soon enough new morning slicked aurulent & fingertips brazen & colored caramel & your perfume rose & sapped to molten sundrip spattering deep inside my lungs & so I breathed you like water in between the seconds & it swayed endlessly a rhythmic Atlantic & so & so & so you made me yours, knowing, all of the while.

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A Moment Not Gone

Trinkets clink here or there but still plain earth shouts, that blue bowling ball, the endless racket and fever. Day’s hands will hold my face and fix a bastard’s sonderlust back inside me (Back! Back, I say!) and cut the crying from spilling outside. He was once an old friend to me but sometimes during consistent times, enough is enough. Up and down the street are churches, libraries, theaters, and holes– all waiting for tedium abound in these passing moments. Love me most in the winter. Love me still into the spring. Slow my car before the passing birds. And tire my eyes gracefully for the onset of night.

Well the rungs in my spine pull old, and tomorrow pounds over the beat of my heart. It is no spirit–no ghost–just tomorrow. What’s more, the livestock are again searching the fields for an exit.

Here I’ll map a sadness that nestles and dreams in an estate I’ve built outside my body–part of a loyalty I no longer remember. Perhaps it’s truest to unearth myself beginning at the dark, but my mornings are not sheathed with curtains, and across the street oldies resound beyond all cluttered speech and worry. Our vegetables roast every night, fragrances caught under a sailor moon’s climb. And soon my girl’s sleep will murmur like the flicker of finch wings. Listening, becoming, and returning (Oh, that endless feeling) to linger nearly awake enough in the curling clouds of her brunette.

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I’m walking on my street where blue pistachio nuts sit on the fat fingers of branches.

It's her quietude that’s warmest in me, not a meekness nor a sorrow. But a peace lingering in her nature, reassuring and-- and it's captivating. That's not to say her heart doesn’t swell, but it knows beyond her body’s movement, that the world is a green well-lit place. And it's served me a kinder trust in time, and in myself, and that's redefined me entirely.

I can’t say for certain if I know much more about the stars. They still seem foreign, but there’s a certain click in their speech-- but fast on the current it carries. You can hear it slicked up on tree leaves against the heaviest wind’s slash, and there!--that’s it returning back to us. Like a wish you silently make to yourself while in the middle of reading a good book. Maybe I get ahead of myself. Maybe I’m right.

The true earth is inside me and it’s growing everyday. But with the sound of becoming, there’s a solar system forming, and I’ve always wanted to fall, and fall, and fall in love like dust-tails constantly swinging into candlelight, pouring and drinking calmly as shadows would from my white walls. I asked you to live with me. And you always reply, yes.

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If I look up, then I will see it.

Between groves, a cedar’s arm in silver sleeves poises frail, like an eyelash bridged across the sun. And to walk its length should burn us both. But if I learn its tenderness by its stable breathing--thither, lo, patter... thither, lo... I might remember an old shame that once moved me, unfamiliar now.

And there the cedar branch stirs…its whisper loamed with ancient pulp, drawn from desert sand and seashell…every word truth devotes itself entirely. A tiny glowing tone, when focused on becomes the very sound of listening.

If I look up, then I may see it.

And I notice: here I am again in the hallway of the world where I will watch the city streets rise. I will tremble knowing it is a pulse, and a theory untested. With whispering hands built from clocks and soil, I will rise up and arrange my veins. Complicate; release. Always cautious, so in dream softly the animal spirit dies, slow torches flocks of honeybees abound and throw my body before the writing on the wall; sing to me everything is alright, everything is alright, everything is alright--so I can see. Everything is alright so you can see.

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Rattling in the Dim of Me

At the top edge of a banister rising over vast yellowing shadow, there’s the Arkansa sun, a rat-tail star stealing the wind. There’s a pull here towards… and an aggravated sinking back into… and if I imagine Delana’s name carved into the clouds, each letter reads slicked in spring-born dew, the color of before anything ever happens. Breathing long beside the wheat fields, I’ll hear the air unfold into the crawl of a rich expanse. Where it feels like the road doesn’t end, and my legs carry light that always seems to crowd my face, and my ears mount consonants into pitches that strike holy, a long long wait for familiar sounds to reassure.

The silence has a rim that guards it, a liner of dust and malaise. And before I sleep, I move my hands to carry it, careful it won’t spill, gently from my lips to my bedside, into the lampshade’s mouth– to cast its dull lure, selling myself to first and final words–a reigniting mantra of solitude: the soul spreading outward, a vessel for this beautiful quiet. Here I may perch in my lonely (child with a southern drawl, son whose vowels fall along, boy that carries on) and find the tenor of my voice turn beige like wheat, a whisper pulling across the blanket, drawn close to soil and still stretching to a blinding sky.

In the restlessly dark world where the tires stop screeching, I’d come home to you with my body still reassembling from the rippling scorched waves. Behold my silence, a well and a fountain that purrs as it spits. A constant “come home” in my legs. Still yours with eyes deep as canyons; yours with wings of the crane fly; yours with no poems left singing in my heart, only the simplest murmur keeping, a silver sound pulsing your name.

…but the rat-tail sun isn’t without rest. I hear a clicking that summers away. The rest of the landscape dries like sandstone, all brushed in hazel and corn roast, blue-black campfire scent. And drifting into the sky, and closer, no matter what, to you.

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Timid Children

Connecticut Avenue reads through the tree’s fingerlets the night’s braille. Your body, my body, are like pupils dancing in drawn light. The oaks fold now. Shadows pass the pavement, bare moth’s wings clapping over the lawn. Slow-becoming sex melts in our ears. Linger, leave. This is an echo in the well of our nation.

A cartoon man gets elected president in a room of silent friends. The image of his eyes rolling backward, limp mouth, thrown dinosaur arms, brute imitation of the disabled, repeats. We’ve stepped away from them now.

Neither of us know where we’re going– wander like deer of the wood, schedule a flight to Austin, tape a book together of my poems about you, ask quietly in your bedroom lamp’s shiver my sleeping heart’s question of staying; the sky does rinse our hands. I love when you are in my frame of view.

I dreamed the end of the world happened underground. Another earth was waiting, but I needed the right song to help climb me out.

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The Sky Does Rinse My Hands

I lost my language after when I was riddled in tree stuff, caged canary singing

it’s Tuesday night the long drive with my brother in the passenger seat

It’s supposed to be a circle, he wonders with his hands up at the moon like kids riding rollercoasters we slip

into final shadow the same way black stripes on solid earth steer beyond the sun

When its wash looms around, I look to my palms rinsed in gold, feels like knowing I am born once then again, and.

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Writing on the Walls of Your Closet

When you were young, your soul was saltwater on your forearms. Inky wrists. Scabbed knees. You forgot how your father shut the door to his bedroom. You wouldn’t hear him dreaming his life away. Each cloud peppered with sunlight and every year swayed hastily into sea wind. You believed in love. Love is, love is. A fast car flooded in loud music, an exposed spine, morning’s dry-heaving, a goodbye said tomorrow afternoon. Love slipped over suburbia, the inaudible arguments of bored siblings, juggling wanderlust over your pale streets. It dripped softly like rain. You watched several summers pass. And below your bedroom carpet you heard your mother and father’s whispers. You gazed at the ceiling, washing ashore a canvas of your thoughts. Listening carefully to harmonious tremors in the arrested white, a thrum in your heart became this falsetto in your throat.

You watched a film about two people who weren’t meant for each other in the nighttime, and you ran straight into your backyard. The surface of the sky flexed over the lustrous expanse, stars roiling into shafts of bright shadow, and time tangled in spite of midnight’s clarity. Don’t let the island crawl over you, you wished, but don’t let it swim away. You were not yelling for love, but because of it.

That was when you waited for your father’s long night to pass. When you watched your mother watch him. You saw the walls of your bedroom turn white, writing a final message in ink in the corner of your closet. Something you learned when you left your first home.

Love feels like a place you live in; love should cast a sound through you.

When you were young, you nicked your ankles with tree bark, climbing to better catch the rain. Your soul was swallowed sky water, burning quietly under the thick dredges of all your love. Under sagging organs that pumped thunder out secretly, love spoke this much louder.

Does she still love you. Will she still know you. You’ll write her a wish, give her your fear. Remind yourself not to forget: don’t hurt, don’t hurt until it’s done.

You kept awake to the heavy weight of it all. It sold you strength– to run longer, to shout further, to keep your lonely closer. In the district, you wrote Fall Away on your arm, found her a ball in the bedding, holding nakedness like candlelight. You lent her a name: the rasp around the sound of Delana. Every syllable blooming. You were afraid they’d disassemble if you spoke too soon, yet they stayed with you like your first home.

Her breath fast; her sleep deep; her palms damp with the moss of Peru, golden from the grain of Chester County, sentimental for the rise of the Atlantic Ocean. Pain steeped notches in her spine and her speech yellowed highways in a race far beyond you. She called you Jonathan, and you listened.

When you were young, your hands learned to keep and let go. To keep.

When you were young, your voice learned to soothe and stop. To show.

When love scoured the summertime sky, you watched it take everything everywhere. It went wherever light painted pavements below.