Category Archives: Poems

A lie is a state of movement. It has a before and an after, cut into the now.

Wait, what is it?

“I know it when I’m not asked”

But our fathers never told us what it means to lie. They never asked.
Could we say that our fathers lied?

But what are these lies really
And this haunts Augustan

The lie as rooted in time
There is no dependency on movement in time, when Jericho stops; there is no movement.

The lie in motion is made different by its movement
Like a set of wipers onto the world.

That was a lie

I used to beg the Buddha

To change my windshields

Mascara

I’m pulling off trains track by track
There are purple emissions above my head
Each of her lashes are brown dewed with black

The Martyrs song is sung by the lamps
And the mosquitoes fear to go
The air stained wet by the look of mascara drips
Her cheeks pale white rusty amber
Encased in my pocket is the thing
Tarnished from generations

The streets tiled brick
The alleyway home to great calamity
A century brought change and sanity
On the eve of a revolution the low candles burned
On street posts without glass pyramids

The wind had taken those candles to gas emissions
Aside from the dewey after-effect
The wind would not reach them.

Henry

Inside the rail stood patient Henry

Holding out can for duct tape donations
She brought back two dimes
The southbound beeped, beeped and laid him down flat.
Before the caboose had arrived
She held him in the shadow
His head had gently fallen over the tracks
His will restored: nothing.

Plane Ride
When we embarked over the sea
The trees had taken a dip
The garden was open to the future

Each part of the system had been broken
Her feet dangling above the trees
The long-faced noun had jumped them
Scaring him into submission

Outside they knew a place called “twenty-four bridges”
The rumor had persisted
Our global reflex persisting
The moon no longer resisting
Her smile dim and fading
The other night I performed the scissor
We pasted her face inside the oranges
They brought her a migrant to beggar
Each time we stopped along the river her head would pound like a trigger

Each night I lay awake happier in courage he
Walked with the lions

Each time would bring harboring sick and forgotten
The truth of the matter
Is less than scattered but equally important is what comes out after

The river would hover inside her dark shadows
Unusual odors had ignited his mattress where mares stood glowing
Perplexed and ignited to join in the garlands of beautiful magic
She would not hold onto the any(one’s game).

Animal Packs

The bouquet stacked seven to one
The wolves packed under stone

Rumbling

Empty notions hover above the street
The dry drip and drap bone lick
Of flesh and birds setting off wired silhouettes

Sway

Priests huddled for air shoving
Heat piled on stretching out to space
The sonnet of roses wilting
Protecting the elements
Like a soul warmed under radiated beds.

The end of motion
across the sky rushes

Indeed its death moves faster
and draws me out like an empty sillhouetted
Picture of trees.

How I long for those lonely suburban days
When the sky encircled above
All movement was eliptical
The distant motor hummings and commotion
Deposited in a beautiful center
Around my cul-de-sac

I would sit upright like a rigid frame
Pretending the overgrown grass
Had blew falling specters

Whose shapes were deified by then
they would droop across the sky, like sad tendrils in the wind

Dream

His white beard had traveled there too,
Under the sunset
Before I tripped on the lawn’s sprinkler
And fell onto my back,
I stayed there.

Watching the vision,
The refracting bright swirls of light
Reminded him of the infinite consciousness
That thirst for reinvention had brought them.

He’d turn to stone there
Waking on the lawn to the sprinkler he had realized
How ingrained his artificial madness had been.

And the panoply of
Heroic correspondence,
That literal lust to know

“Had been”

The terrain now so full of sin,
Blew his vision back out across the sky
Until their specters had fallen from the horizon
Forcing the sun to form another lonely ellipsis
Back around the earth.

The recycling time of one self
Is wrought trough time

Time’s proven the quantifier of
One’s progress

Whether he starts the journey ahead
Or behind,
His body is owned by time.

That the cycle extend it’s time in set intervals
Merely depends on the breadth of the suffering
Endured from each

And the time that he owns in his mind
Plays tricks on those cycles
Placating one against the other

After cleansing his own mind
His time presents and holds him from becoming
Ensuring the cycle’s independence from his will

And finally when he is forced to body the other dimension
The chains break from they’re source
Sending the object of his soul
Back into space

Where in time the two elements that compose him
Meet in unison,
The return of his cycle begins anew.

Every Day

Every day since you appeared
So vividly on my porch
When I awoke
Feeling cessated from my body
And that surge of clear adolescent energy lifted us
Up to the roof while I followed
Reaching for that point in my heart
You wouldn’t let me touch
For you had informed my body for the first time

Of intangibility

And how we sat
Smiling,
As that dim incandescent glow
Faded into the rain
And dark forests around you.

Every day since you haven’t allowed me to forget
Only momentarily do you show me your many faces
Sometimes etched along the skyline,
Opaque like a faint vision, you tickle my tired eyes

Or near our old parks you enrich color and texture
All of our spots and points my canvas
For these brilliant dreams of you and me
Sometimes sullen
Sometimes green
Each vision you bless with the most treasured gift
No lock/no key
All I have to do is see
The infinite possibilities
You left me.

Every day since you left I trace
All of our connections
Like intricate tributaries,
Ruined from a perennial rain

Each experience a tentacle
Scattered, isolated in alluvial flow
Now charting new ground
Unhinged and pouring
Outward like wicked fingers reaching

Forming spontaneous patterns, new shapes
After mundane dormancy how soon we find
These connections now firm
And beautifully fragmented

One time I thought these channels,
So worn and rutted
Revealed you nakedly, inert
For all to really see.
In that perfect design, my savior:
Nature has chose you to lead the awesome system
And has equipped you with the momentum of a collapsing hillside
To gently cover ourselves in that complex blanket
Until we gel in your omniscient design
Here together in this sad paradise

My eternal image of you,
Weaving the dry earth at the head of the rivers current,
Forging your destination ahead of the changeless followers
Propelled by some translucent storm,
My savior, my phantom

Summer River

There is that far away glow to the river the mild aridity
His heart in motion, gauged by the tired tread
Angels swam sadly outside that day
In an imagined ellipsis he felt them.
Through the material so artificial he would not have realized
It was all borrowed and that they all pretended to operate
Fluttering because they must have in thought
Yelling vicious epithets, borrowed from eternity
He still cast his thread into the tranquility of the past
Slaying the temperate façade,
His little community, a textual heaven
What he could not write was alive and coiled
Unfurled through the swift motions flow
Locked away there in the winds representing
The hearts trajectory gone and etheralized somewhere
Fixed like a pixel on the outer edges of that summer.