A city cries when it rains. Nature pushes it back inside itself. Left naked to truth we can only hide under the blankets of guilt and derision. For it we who have built this beast called city. On cold rainy nights I would ride the trains. Back then you could buy a day pass for two bucks, but some nights I didn’t have the money, so you just crossed your fingers that the fare inspectors wouldn’t catch you. I would ride for hours, watching people, and watching the movie that ran by outside the window. Humanity stretches on forever in the frame by frame awareness of how the earth has been conquered, reshaped, distorted into shapes that allow profits to become gods.
But we who were left alone to wander through the heap piles of profit and gain, speak in the tongues reserved for starving souls. The only thing you can bleed out is a truth that is tethered to a truth that not even Plato could conjure up. But in the hollow of that emptiness we come to understand who are the fortunate, and who are the slaves. Spit bitter and smile at the face of nothingness. For we are the ones who are free….

The nakedness of spring
We were raw and ******
What the winter had drawn from us
Went into hibernation

Turning the soil was fresh
It placed us back into
The lineage of mother farmer
Of both love and dying
The scent of being human

I always dreamed that she had dark hair
And brown eyes
Her dress would be of summer
Standing at the end of the field
Free of undergarments
And bleeding into the earth

We would lunch on grass salad
I would crave her lips with every bite
But dreams are blind

She carries her heart like paper
Creased in folds unseen
and unread in paragraphs unwritten
Her poem is scattered and misunderstood
Words crawl back into words
Desire pierces through the veils of her desires
Tasting what is real seems a pointless walk
Through what is and what is not
Her truths are scribbled in the margins
At night she
Tucks them into the cracks of her soul

She carries her heart like paper
All the while knowing that
It could burst into flames at any given moment
Any given kiss, any given touch,
any given word or any given glance
She only pretends that life is not so fragile
But she knows that the fragility is what binds us all together
It is written there somewhere in the preamble
That someone read aloud before she was born
It is the subtext in all her poems



She carries her heart like paper
As she breathes heavy in white mist mornings
The most alive as she can be
It is silent as she walks through herself
Peering through her heart
She bleeds her water in the rain
It washes through the fabric
Of her beginning
Leaving her soul fresh and unwritten
Individuated from any god she could create
She blends into the fog

I trespass again, into that sanctum that harbors everything we are
Yet we can’t know what we are
So the rooms and hallways are only a softly lit maze
Where tender and dreams and resolve and fear and breaths and sleep and pain
All rest in undefined spaces

I sit under a large tree, not knowing the species
The park is quiet and the bench is cold
A girl passes, strangely intent on her direction
As if she is pushing forward as much as she is push something away behind her
Her lips, a bright shade of red
The way it reflects in her face
Suggests
She is always wearing that shade of lipstick
She has always had bright red lips
And what corridor led her to that constitution
Where does she keep herself
Do her rooms look anything like mine
And how could we ever know

On the phone last night L sounded lonely
It was in the way she let her guard down between words
Whether either or both of us wanted it to be over
I knew we no longer knew
We speak too often
And fourteen years has its own constitution
Its own balance sheet and its own life
There is a room where the two of us will always exist
Just as there is one for my father
And my mother
And that beggar child in Guatemala
So many rooms

I laid my phone on my chest after we finished talking
And felt its weight hold down my breath
I wanted to sink into the earth
And disappear into the strata below
Wishing I could crawl into spaces that exist in between
A part of life I cannot live


The girl with the red lips comes walking back
Her pace is exactly the same
Is she looking for that room that harbors her relief
Her freedom, her future
I am relieved that she has not noticed me
“We” do not exist
Nothing of us has been exchanged
She is only a part of a poem
A canvas that I can sketch out a view of a landscape
That we crawl over
Day after day
So many rooms

This winter is waiting
The old limb sways in a rhythm with the memories
I wander through
The storms I weathered within my heart
Burn the calluses into fleshes forgotten
The winds is whispering wisdoms
With the breath of my soul
We exhale what love could never have been

This winter is waiting
I would weep a song that brought flowers
To all those I have loved
The dust in my heart and the dust in my soul
Lay in a repose…. the strata lines are made of the pains  
For all the things that slipped between the cracks in my heart
Some winds drown out the songs that echo within
But I suffice knowing that they are there….

He came there to **** him
The setting sun made the scene tranquil
Bathed in light unguarded
We were festive… and simple

The shots rang out
The shots tore into his chest
The shots tore through the village, through the hearts of all who knew him
The shots tore away what we were

The rain has washed away the blood
But can the rain drown out his wife’s mournful cries
Can the rain fall through us
Can the rain wash away what we are now

We are driven harshly
Through the storms of our love
The rains pierce the skin
That covers our hearts
The rains
Wash away the blood of our dreams

Those tattered edges bleed  
The regrets of passion and its fictions
Are we that much alive
What is laid before us
To feel….to grasp
The thorn ****** to bleed

Scales falter
When in nights we clutch ourselves
In both disdain and in desire
Which blamed which
Self or fate
Or the simple fool

But blame need lay fallow
We must compromise ourselves
Letting those parts of our soul
Know the flesh
And the fire
Until the rains come again

I fragment thee….less a cloud than the rain
the portions we partition ourselves from
remain un-sketched
we are merely grasping the edges of an existence
we struggle to know
but in dreams the murals are painted vast
and there
we are whole
I fragment thee….less a cloud than the rain

Night runs through your veins
Alone with the stars
You cut a path into the heavy damp air
And pull life towards you

Brushing by silences
That whisper truths into your soul
Shadows become other worlds
You dissolve into

Pausing to breath in the night
The smile in your heart
Replenishes the desire to be alone
You exhale another chapter of yourself

Starlight shimmers on your skin
You pierce the solitude of darkness
And move ghostlike
Deeper into yourself

Heartbeats pound in your chest
Leaving the used parts of you behind on the path
Your footsteps become a rhythm
To this song of being alive
With the night

“The salt of unrighteous tears”

We balance our hearts on scales
That are void of a truth within
We cross universes seeking
But the formulas of existence
The one’s that make sense of loving something
Fall in between the spaces
That stretch between heartbeats
We weep tears as salty as our oceans
And pray to ourselves
That flesh and love
Swim together
In that sea that knows
Why….

Loaves
(the last harvest)

Dust and poems
Philosophy and the buzz of grasshoppers
Grease
14mm on the sickle guards
Hawks diving on snakes
Blast furnace winds
Dreading and craving rain
And double pumping to facilitate finding third gear

Old Red and I
A 1972 Dodge C600
Pulled those hills for years
Three hundred bushels a load
I loved her eight cylinders and glass packs
She was a throat-y *****
No AC…No radio
Just combustion, torque and a five speed transmission
Zen and the art of hauling grain

@Twenty eight million five hundred and sixty loaves….

The dirt turned to memories
Stories that pulled the decades from the hills
And laid them out in the prayers and busted knuckles
Weathered hands turn to volumes
The hottest sweats of summer
The coldest winds of winter
Were rituals endured
What whittles away life
Sometimes need be loved



The land had taken him in
And together they had farmed
The solitude kept the humans untouchable
The hills became his lovers
Years turned over into decades
He did not know they were the last seeds
But the world had become a madness
It had exhausted his will
So he left it….to be his last harvest

As I waddle through the heat
I wish for knees from which to pray
The sun, the progenitor of this fruition
Golden we harvest

The hills whisper an ancient call
I grasp the earth between my fingers
Here the dirt and I are one
I cannot let go of her

The sheaves surrender to the sickle
The soul is sown
The soul is harvested
Ancient mouths rejoice

Harbors

blast furnace wind rolling off the prairie
the kind of wind that makes you realize
we were all born alone
I hugged the river hoping to find
some untouched ****** breath of cool
but ****** the **** for indifference he is
offered nothing
I headed up Hawthorne
wading through the souls
of the beautiful desperate
and the wicked surfeit

looking up I caught her eyes
hanging out her window
stretched out between
where love lives
and love dies
she looked down
peeling away the layers of her soul
offering a shade
that harbors the most twisted and distorted
remnants of love

later
on the outskirts
we watched Orion’s futility
our hearts gasped
as we touched
which was the hunter
and which was the prey
trembling
we fell into love
as the wind softened to a cool breeze

I tug at the edges of my reality
Just to make sure I am alive
Braking apart all the constituent elements
Of what it is to be human
That core mix
Of passion and reason
That yields and taxes
That starves and surfeits
What is more the soul
Than the flesh

Blackened skies yield truths
The way the winds drive your heart
In every direction
A poets vein hungers
For the needle of perception
That paints the picture
That may someday cure
The poet from being the poet

I’d spread myself across your canvas
If there was a certain amount
Of indifference agreed upon
At the outset
To start from zero
Releases us from the assuagement of resolve
Does anything need be more than zero

And I would open up all of I
If it were not for
That it has gotten old
And knowledge knows no religion
And I have no god
So the colors would run
The canvas more used than used
It would become faded and forgotten
Hung in repose
In the halls of a gallery that only admits
The sightless

But I would fall from grace here
Espousing such false and grandiose reflections
Silence begets silence
Words beget that…. resolve
For
It is the poets job is to kick indifference in the head
Until it bleeds some semblance of compassion

And so
As to not to end up praying to some small statue of myself
I will drip what I am across your canvas
Letting the colors bleed into the fabric of what we are
And if hung in repose
Then hung in that fragment of time
Where the poet grabs at some infinitesimal aspect of life
And breathes something
And breathes something
Into this…..

I had been tearing off little pieces of  my heart
And leaving them on the ground
Like a breadcrumb trail
That I hoped she would find someday

I had been whispering out into the space left between us
Simple words that rose from the void
Left by my leaving her
Hoping that a lite cool breeze
Would carry them to her

I had lain awake at night yearning for your her presence
Wrapping the imaginary her in my arms
And breathing our memories into the night
Hoping somehow, in her night
There was still some part of me there

There are some words that splash up against your heart
They gather up all the threads and fibers of the universe
They weave love back into the shapes that
Are once again recognizable

Sitting on the bed, her legs tucked up to her chin
Looking down through her heart
She said, “can we talk”
I said, “yes, what about”
And with all the gravity and weight of
Every word spoken anywhere, ever
She said “Us”

What it is that derives from us
Remains small
Stashed in dusty corners that are cluttered
with history and unread poems
We call on something within ourselves
To weave the entropy into a fabric
that we can wear throughout our existence,
colored it would be, but neutral in what it would evoke,
keeping us warm when the vicious winds
of love and hate rage through our village.
And yet…. allowing the coolness of joy to permeate into our souls
when such is laid before us.

Tender we are in these moments
Less than something
The sum of which is incongruent to truth
And our beauty
On that last page where we traded away our child heart
For the recognition of being something
We never wanted to be
Why did we ever cut our hair
The dirt at the bottom of our feet
Were prayers of acknowledgment
Grateful for how the gods assembled us
Tender and beautiful we are


The stars cross the sky to get a glimpse
Of this creation of duality
Flesh and soul
The spirit sings while the corporeal begs for its fodder
We are juxtaposed against harsh sky
Lifetimes ago we came to understand
The gods must remain indifferent to their creation
For the two must become one
They say the sun has a drumbeat in her heart
This is how the two learn to dance
Shedding the skins assigned to us
We are tender children here

This rational disordering
Pulls from the hollow
And makes love to these words
As we sacrifice ourselves
On alters hewn from
The roots and branches of our dreams
And yet the ashes are rejected by both the heavens and the hells
Could we not sip from this life ….the ambrosia
Equally ours as theirs
Did you know that a billion trillion stars love you
We are a precious gift that they gave themselves
For it is the soul, the soul, the soul…..oh precious soul

The sand washes away when the ocean touches me
But nothing really washes away
I walk distances from something
It is you, but I didn’t want it to be you
There is a moon somewhere that we carved our initials on
If I looked for it
It would only put me in the docket of fools
Nothing really washes away
I’ve learned ******* memory before
But this heart is too worn out now
I will construct a point that holds all things still
And reference it when I start to fall
Nothing really washes away

I was the tender shoot of grass that spring
Brought from the darkened earth
I reached for the sun as if it were
The wellspring of love
Too young to know what
The crime of wanting to be loved would be

The seeds scatter in the wind
The segments of dreams torn from dreams
Fruition is callused and naked
Winter drives us back into the earth
Yet with each heartbeat
We wait for what hope is found in the spring….

The meat grinder component of loving someone….
Good thing there’s still *** in my glass….

The comfort of understanding
That you’ll never be understood

Praying for the forgiveness
For being born

What is this surrender
That betrays the heart
Love too often uttered
By mere dreams
Only dreams

Does this jester soul
Cut the shape of you
Into this touchless entropic
Landscape

A single barren tree
A single winding road
A single barren heart

Praying for the forgiveness
For being born

unearthed from the wood
witnessing the light the bleeds into the soul of man

in the fragrance of earth and bone
I tasted the distilled essence of we

bitter and alone the blood wine stood
the tongue shuddered at the knowing

distant heartbeats roared
the fallen still laying there

at every crest
at every nightfall

and we
both abhorrent and beautiful
grew calluses and moss
crawling back amongst the wood

I…. the dichotomy
the brutal staggering darkened scarred poet
who cannot love that songbird enough

We are entrusted with a brutal existence
Left to reconfigure realty
In a way
That allow a few hours sleep….

my heart pours out like water
I am frozen in the time we had
and shattered by what we no longer have
my heart is melted
by the tears in your voice
I gave birth to your pain
Nothing I am…. can heal
I am the dust that the winds are blowing from your life

goodbye

disjointed

the heart thuds in a distance
that keeps this unreal
the pain and doubt
are too real to breath
to feel

what lays on the other side
is this whole again
a soul that breathes
in morning and night

shed the skin
shed the touch
shed the tears
shed the dreams
shed the fight

I know *** isn’t going to solve this
but some nights it helps
how do pull yourself out of ten years of caring
for a human whom is now killing you
I think they write books about this ****
but I know it is just up to me
I’m sure that at the bottom of this bottle
I will do what I must
and call this a poem…

halfway to existence
someone says
here you go….

I was born the product of two broken souls
my mother held the beauty of living alive
yet she only pushed away the pain
my father, too injured by humanity
cut me to the pieces
so
what is good about me came from my mother
what is strong about me comes from my father
I have no complaints….

girl…. you and I always knew the edge was close
we always teetered
gasping our breath at every breeze
this was no common **** story
frayed fragmented fear found us frothing
for this entangled mass
of passion and sweat
driving ourselves deeper with each
stroke of this swollen brush
reaching into the drip wet nights
and afternoons
living and dying all in one hard driving ******
of an existential existence
thus laying fertile the fodders of
of beauty and its pain

for how could one grasp so much
as their own
the vastness would beg to differ
as to our meager needs
of love
perhaps…. she said
it is simply getting ******
that is real
for our love
betrays everything the soul
hungers for

except……(the moon softly whispered)
for the one deeply harbored truth….
you see…. the constituent element of the soul is
love

I was gentle in my dust trodden world
but the echos of the treachery of living
filled the unheard
both gravedigger and poet held a tether
suspending me in the aether
between my flesh and my spirit

calmer when winds blew
and echos were pushed across the hills
to a distant chamber
the taste of the dust was truth to me
I played with the poet
and set my spirit free

Bob Carrey drank his coffee
out of an old tin can
the faded label said sweet corn
it was a mystery to me
he had this way of acknowledging
and dismissing you at the same time

he lived with Gloria and Richard Hier
all part of the mystery
but young people
needed guidance
I suppose

he listened to the Twins games
on an old transistor radio
he tucked it in his breast pocket
with the cord strung out ahead of him

when I get up to mix another drink
I put my iPhone in my breast pocket
keeping Spotify alive
the cord of my earbuds protrude out before me
I become Bob Carrey
I could give a **** about the Twins score
but Lucinda Williams
well …you know

the social skills of indifference
are difficult
self generated algorithms
tend to fail
if one is be true to thy owns self
it does not take away from the beauty of these poets
and this site
however….

my tears have shaped me
they have cut the edges of my heart
that finds beauty rattling around
in the places deemed
too broken to know

my tears have cut the canyons
that echo
the songs and screams
of my knowing how deep this life
can cut

my tears have watered the gardens
where someone still plants hope
even though hope is something I avoid
but offering it drought
would be the shape of something cruel

tears the blood of soul
running from my eyes
across the landscape that is I
washing the wounds suffered
and the scars I have won

if we are alone
then live alone
what of you believes
what myth tethers you
to the hunt
is the kiss that deep
what do we betray
when we lay in beds
with lovers we do not know
or can ever know

the voices too thick
the heart too pure
for the war between
alone or not alone
and some cold winds
remind us
that we were all born alone

I spent my last hundred dollars
On a really nice leather wallet

………..

Coffee grounds
Grounds for divorce
Ground up bits of your soul
Offered up in trade
For your freedom

a word farmer drinking ***
in a jungle
smiling back at his pain

the ocean pounds the shore
his heart feels her power
and beauty

the trees sway in rhythm
with the hammock
he takes another sip

the banister was the barrier
looking down on my world dissolving

my progenitors
at war with themselves
and the entropy of the world

but then
the rising sun offered some promise
mistrust becomes a drug
repudiation sustains

was it arrogated
or torn

a thousand thousand years from now
will the pain exist
and ten trillion years from now
will existence still exist

refuge my heart
the storm drives me
piercing
this world of love and pain
am I hungry enough
to thirst for truth
do her heartbeats still
reverberate within the walls of my soul
am I desiccated enough to
forget her
refuge my heart

Some souls are looking for love
Some souls are looking for peace
Some souls are looking for nothingness
Some souls are looking for their gods
Perhaps there is a soul that is still looking for me….

Some hearts are deserts

I used to sit and watch them drink
the prairie had sculpted lines in their faces
that told tales of time and its erosion
and how every dry wind
became the sculptors chisel
their dirt stories resurfaced as a
prelude to old scars and pain
and some of the things I heard… hurt
they kept pushing money across the bar
and drank more than whiskey back
I order another for my old friend and I
he drinks his quickly as if it were something precious
then he tells me an old ***** thirties story
he heard in the old bar
the one that stood here before this one
he talked until the wind outside made him mad again

if someone were to hold me open
to that last page
where I stood alone
on the precipice of
love and its pain
then a story could be told
or a poem could be written
if someone were to hold me open

rack up your heart
against a western sky
as I drip off the edges of these hills
I roll in the dust with the coyote
and stand shadowed by a world
the thunder beckons from a distance
somewhere in between the moon and I
I am so small
so small
so beautifully small

she tore the stars from the sky
and read their furtive message
softly she spoke
“time only supplants what we really are”
“for really….we are going nowhere
we are always here
we have always been here”
"coffee"?… I suggested
“on one condition” she said
“at the completion of such,
our souls should be torn to shreds”
“it is how the naked see truth”

I’m not living for the obituary
I’m living for the life….

emily tore herself
from a grace
reserved for all things of beauty
sorrowful spirits
garbed in vestments of the
deeper wisdoms
gathered on a plain
of redemption
pleading for her return

she plucked from her heart
the pedals
that had worshiped the sun
looking back
she expelled a breath
that once spoke of love
wrapping herself in her arms
she stepped into a river
that meandered alone

from on up high
the loneliness of her absence
turned the firmament gray
and the gods begged
for the cup of hemlock
that would rid them of their creations
how these humans
refuse to live
with love and kindness

one day I stumbled upon a query….
does the dark keep your soul tucked away
from your tenderness
so ubiquitous and clean?  
she said no….. the dark keeps the light from dying
I thought you knew
I was born an angel of light
but my soul was arrogated by a gang of ******
“I think they refer to themselves as men”