41

I have witnessed my first Romantic Painting,
in person, on earth.
I saw it in the burnt red
garden where Apollo and Dionysus
shared Homemade Moonshine beneath the eyes
of their own pagans,
but I never saw that which could touch me
not only in metaphysics but in the physical
realm, until on my ascent to
the top of Mount Diablo from the plains,
I saw light crackling.
The veins of the sky bore
a sacrificial slice
and I was to near the mass
that was to near me.

Ichor flooded the marshes.
As wind battered my vessel,
a spirit released rage in a light show
too alike to the way humans plow
lines in the the earth.
Uneven clouds dried and cracked,
dried and in contrast,
suck water from the earth because they,
like the desert, know not
when we will once again turn to
the mystics.
I watched the invisible hands of Zeus
dance the strings that carried
the destruction of lifelines.

Who ever thought that the bringer of life
would snip the thread of fates?

I refused to look away.
I reached for a hand, your hand, and
I found in you something to anchor me
to the earth, but
I knew I had to
stare
into the bloodshot eyes which possessed
the power to strike me down
and burn me into the scorched earth.

I was blind to believe
awe was beauty.
To be faced with the unquestionable
question of the hand that holds the thread
and see the blade glint like a star,
like a gem on a slender finger, is to
bear witness to the sublime.

Remembering the Bulls

If I wash my clean hair with
the same coconut scented shampoo I used
when August heat sent me running
From the sun,
I can crawl beneath the comfort
of the sheets on my bed
at an old home, and when
Like The Dawn begins to swing,
the notes aid me in imagining
My blades still graze ice in the morning,
and I will drive into early afternoon
and I will read Hemingway by
the fading light of The Sun
which Also Rises.
but it will rise on a different time.
I will welcome it's glow, and I will bear
My forearms to the stars
hidden and unnamed.

on traveling three states in one day

red dirt rivals red hot sun in Palo Duro.
Earth paints its own sunsets
on rocky drops, burrowing,
deeper, towards the core.
Texas rejects the sun.
gathers its own heat from dirt
turned to dust that coats my soles
and soul.
this land is a star in itself,
sees no need for that which is not its own.
pride keeps bluebonnets thirsty
keeps the Devils River cracked
keeps Gulf Coasts drowning.
this place
must have discovered
the secret
to the fire girl
in the sky
for it takes
an eternity
to
escape.

colors burn beneath the smoldering kiss
of a sun this undiscovered country allows
to intertwine silver rays with
dried golden hairs on the top
of volcanos
and with trails of liquid fire.
Capulin and his siblings seek warmth
not provided by flat earth policy;
they, their empty-eyed allies,
and soft-petaled plants are the only ones
who have basked in the light
since before clocks.
we are foreigners. allotted a
moment to pause.
given time enough to catch
breath lost on the way up,
snag a few misty beams of sun,
and shed sound in silence before
the kin of the killer of Pompeii
invites us down
to where once again,
we can race through stand-
still time without
setting our lungs aflame.
it knows we know no better.
it ensures we move along our way.

the Rocky Mountains demand
that you cease your demands
of the world. it mutters:
you do not need that much oxygen;
you do not need as much space
as you wish to conquer;
you are not creators;
you are earth-art
and you move as the land commands.
The Valley of the dead and the wicked
ensnares moonshine and churches,
but there is nowhere to flee
save towards the sun.
mountains press tight,
press us towards pale gold
locks, and blonde arm hairs standing
on end.
on end enough to with newfound comfort
twist pinky fingers with the land
and promise to give us light,
life, in exchange for
the grant to settle within
uninhabited hilltops where she may,
after millennia,
witness the something within us
that sparks in our minds the delusion
that we may not need an eternal to
cultivate our souls.

Daffodils (And Other Things She Allows)

Half the words that shine from her lips are false. 

They’re lies she uses to twist people 

around, make them think 

she likes them. 

Make them think she understands 

them, deeply, in ways they cannot

understand themselves. 

She doesn’t understand 

the world doesn’t always fall 

At her tipping of the globe that resides

in the old study, in the history hall

where she speaks of Friedrich Nietzsche 

In 

Every 

Lecture

Like she’s read Zarthusrtra. She 

Doesn’t even understand him

because she is, in her mind only,

The Ubermench who carefully grooms her sheep

— then, like the Savior 

Possessed by Wormwood

sends them to slaughter.

The ones she holds dear always hold her dearer.

She caresses, and she kisses their lips and scraped knees

But they’ll kiss her feet

And she will stand tall, looking down upon them from 

Atlas’s mountain

And when she says it is her duty to carry the world,

the ones she love,

who love her more than she loves them,

Beg to carry it for her.

And she allows it. 

She will not allow the world to spin without her. 

But she will not allow the world to crumble 

At her hand

At the hand of her enemies

(At her hand)

Crumble like the dust of time sparkling, fading, whisked away

in whispers croaked by the clockwork father.

Like those who love her,

she feels a duty to her art

because she feels a duty to her universe

To create.

To leave the earth with something it did not have before.

She will leave her memory earth

not to be known as one who shattered empires 

in order to craft her own, but 

Rather as one who buried her work with the grass of 

Her people. 

Her people, to whom she speaks 

with words like daffodils — not grocery store bouquets, 

but sun-kissed flowers all the same.

Her lips tremble

afraid that she will speak out of her turn

Of the sun.

Afraid she will mistakingly say the thing that will send them 

Careening to the center of the earth

as if by hiding from the heavens 

and reaching the iron core, they can 

Recenter themselves on their own axis. 

She cannot save them from all the way down there,

as much as she may wish she could;

she has no duty to those who feel no duty to their art.

She has a duty to the stars

For she has sacrificed her mind and soul to the muses

so that they may inspire the universe

and give humanity a poem 

For which it is worth surviving.

the rose reading room

There are as many muses here
trapped between frail pages
as there are souls alive,
flickering, in the city.
They whisper from the sarcophagi
into which they were laid,
dressed in flower petals and kissed
to an in-between life,
by careful curators
who stand by as they fade to catch
the last breath of their birth.

The entombment commences
in the way that humans dream
of burying their brothers —
not for death, but for a soliloquy sleep.
One that allows the rightful king to
slumber through sorrow with a heartbeat
and awake to something known
rather than an entirely undiscovered country.

The murmuring voices wait, wake soon
when the proper soul slices itself
from the artificial lights
and the blocks of strife
and to this bound.
Soul revives long-locked soul
from the curse of darkness brought
by the burden of light.
They will hear the muses whisper
over the roar of the never-
ending
city, and set her,
even if only in half light,
in half life,
through ones childlike ability to spin the globe,
free

Sun in a Supermarket Ring

When I saw the Sun as God
and death as a man with
a scythe and a pen,

I needed the city.
Holding books to my chest,
I carried them through Greenwich
and nestled them
in the bricks of Wall Street.

I had been awake since before the birds.

The billboards made pitch darkness seem
like the day, so bright it was
as if the sun inched closer to the earth.
I underestimated
the neverending spectacle.
In the way it convinces writers they can
become poets, convinces readers
They can write,

It Convinced Me that
at the highest point in the city,
therefore the highest point in the world,
I too could reach
the manmade heavens sprawled before me
in scars of white We have carved into the earth,
and I could fill the blackness between star-bright lights,
if only
i reached back.

When the planets melted in my fingertips,
I let them drip onto summer asphalt.
I
drowned for eight days.
I
washed up in the Hudson Bay.
The salt scrubbed my skin red, stung
my lips sticky and yellow.
I was a sunflower.

Prowling the streets, I determined to
create
a new set of scars on the earth, but
I saw names where there were none, and
I asked myself if I preferred
HomeMade Moonshine or The Church?
without questioning why
there could not be an
in between.

For one who is at home
in an airport, I failed to wonder,
almost failed to see
if
there is an in between.

I face the island once again.
It pulls. Not as it used to.
To see the civilization not as
the key,
not as a breath of life
is all I can ask of myself.

Somehow, I filled the space between stars
from two and a half thousand miles away.
With sledding and open windows,
supermarket rings and white petals,
satire and The Mysterious Forces of the Universe,
there was a clearing in my eyes
-- was there not?
and I saw that the sun,
not the city lights,
as eternal.

All That Remains

I have found in you one with whom 

I can be tired

as the oil paint globe we spun at dawn

creaks past the golden age,

Into the sunset,

and begins 

to settle.

I have found in you one with whom 

I can be afraid

as the rises and falls of our bodies, like waves, 

ever so often are 

unison, in breath, 

In the final breaths,

of ourselves;

of Neptune; 

of Apollo;

of Atlas

At the hands of Prometheus. 

You are teaching me to sleep. I've never known

how closing eyes and minds to the sorrows of

The race we created 

can settle, ourselves, into the always fresh

Ink of the heavens.

How it can settle our creations, who

No Longer ponder the existence of Gods as 

they fade 

Like the morning fog that from their sight

veils us.

The novels I wrote will rot,

unfinished, to be finished

by the earth. In one gulp.

The music you made ceases on a tenor note, 

made to mimic a tenor voice,

never quite able to capture the tremor of the muse.

Pages written, pages unwritten;

it ends on a dissonant chord

I have found in you someone who will 

Remain.

When our patch of The Universe has been 

cultivated to dust, you

will meet me over our grave. You 

will say:

— With each empire we rise, we must fade another.

We may not have saved them from 

Not saving themselves, but 

I have sent those who fight only on

Behalf of the art,

and you gifted France Napoleon, 

gifted Napoleon France. 

I reply:

— C'est la vie or Carpe Diem?

Both are to thank;

Both are to blame.

You will take my hand. 

The earth we created will open up,

and like the heavens,

will swallow us whole.