Love will grow in me sideways, a supine pine
sapling, shoveling mountainous glaciers of stone

embedded into my boiling erosions, melting
the anaerobic hot mud into a calmer froth.

We may kiss at the precipice of the abyss
our love has inevitably chewed through itself.  

And I will likely palm our weathers
into a river-swallowing sea

and you will hate me; desert of a future
companion’s ship—can I

swallow my dominance; that devotion
could bloom from this love’s wilderness,

foresting in perennial fullness,
prospering in the shared bed
rock we have carved into orchids.  

At the place where I will bury my bones
in the murderous entrancement of another,

taiga could storm from the soft ring of fire
between twenty interlocked evergreen fingers.

It smells like loneliness outside.
The smell of a hot dog on a grill after a storm,
mingled with propane and cigarettes.
The smell of solitary.

A string of “cold and broken hallelujahs”
no longer dulls the senses.
It’s senseless anyway.

I eat my brown rice in front of the sink
and I am reminded of the taste of Play-Doh.
It’s funny how loneliness creeps in on the wind,
the cars’ wheels in the rain,
the braking of the bus,
scuttling of squirrels...

Maybe a hot tea or toddy
(maybe something stronger)
will keep this autumn-ness at bay.

poetry does not sleep in my hand
and kindness is something I value as
half true almost as often as people
mistake what I am now
for what I will be when I
am neither magnanimous
nor synchronized
with what I was before
in the circular continuum
where I am flailing on all
edges and slopes of your sea
like a valley; on all fours,
all aspects of me
are all aspects of me
and I am whole
where I am gentle
where I am cruel
and where I, a pacifist
ignite these wars between us
I am digging these moats to embody
and receive all we drink in
each other that is chaos and peace
will always be there to refill the cup
of your heart as my purpose in life.

words are dying
painfully
in a hairy storm
of electric eruptions

beckoning winter’s
deathly tempest
rampart
like an iceberg fist—

—My fires have been talking
far too closely with my waters

of how our love
could be a rock elephant—
a temple, whole, or magnificent
like an incantation
on a balanced leg;
but you, scissor-cat
of forget-me-nots;
but you—favorite
flower eating our paper mouse:
pining affection is thin
and imbalanced inertia
in love is a bolted door.