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Tag: poem

  • undertow



    Maybe in undertow, I’ll find your shape,
    From coral hollows, learn escape.
    Through cosmic maps where tides collide,
    Find hymned frequencies we define.

    In the haze of this forgotten place,
    Let me find your friendly face.
    Your silence draws topographies,
    And our echoes, new mythologies.

    ‘Cause we’re crest-lines, fading light,
    Whispered promise, fatal flight.
    Forever sun, my haven in the night,
    Longing still, give me fight.

    The distance wears your name,
    It stokes a longing flame.
    Once unburdened by the bourbon—now,
    A love song, wild, untamed.
    Maimed then tamed, my strings remain,
    Burn me with your sweet refrain.

    Drift me down where silence hums,
    Through wrecks of all we’ve come undone.
    Stars dissolve beneath the foam—
    Your every light leads me home.

    The distance wears your name,
    It stokes the longing flame.
    Once unanchored by the ocean—now,
    I’m clinging to your frame.
    Maimed then tamed, some strings remain,
    Burning through divine refrain.




  • went East from the West

    Went East from the West
    looking for some respite from the true,
    kissing North of Winslow 
    with no relief of recess,

    Save the buzzing void of Heat and 
    Record scratch of gravel,
    the stillness and the 
    breathing wind; roughed lungs and mourning doves,
    a sniffle. 

    As alone as the locomotive loud,
    that drained knowing the city’s made me tired as I wonder
    why I ever go back. 

    And I know the answer, I know it’s for love,
    not the love I finally admit I have but a love
    for that basin, its cigarettes and coyote hills,
    loudest when it’s at its quietest,
    yearning to be heard as it spits you out; 

    A love something paternal for a place that’s been a proving ground
    for someone still there; long gone. 

  • wallabout

    I remember Heaven when you held me
    at the middle of the bridge and
    showed me where the river made its bend,
    after the Pier K Dock and at the Wallabout Bay, 
    some time in Autumn when the Sun went Crimson into Marigold before the Mauve when your stubble grazed my neck;
    some single moment of some single place maybe you didn’t know I’d still keep tonight,
    with the Vincent Thomas thirty miles away
    and your embrace sometime a decade ago.

  • unshakeable feeling

    of holding you inside of you
    and offering myself the glory of liberation –
    the freedom of bliss, a physical love
    the embrace over weeping
    may be a thing paternal but also a latching belonging,
    to squeeze and not to thrust
    to clasp but not to choke;
    Release,
    the most glorious of omnipotent offerings,
    beyond pain and anguish for in the shadows of all failure comes
    the giving of pleasure,
    a world fulfilled and pain gone extinguished –
    no longer tears but the trembles of frailty
    atop crisp sheets,
    all of life so suddenly alive,
    Life, the All of it suddenly so clear.

  • the say-nothings

    We sit with sandwiches and talk about the cheese
    or the way things used to be, old homes, the weather
    and the city or how the trees give us oxygen
    but not enough for us to breathe 
    and try the re-try of ditching the yesteryear to
    return to promise of whatever’s left
    before the silence finally consumes 
    and we become living relics
    just nods and ‘Sure’s’ and Yeahs
    and Yeah and
    all there’s to say is that we tried and failed
    Say-nothings into do-nothings 
    Father-son’s into guys and dudes
    Brother-bro’s into men
    Mothers-Children into wanderers lone and 
    longing; lost resigned.

  • Katherine

    I miss Katherine from the Quarter
    That night above Street Chartres where she’s
    flinging cigarettes from the balcony
    for the bums and bros and biker boys below and she’s
    slinging sweat until the toss of her hair
    it
    slows
    like syrup against the railing, you know the kind,
    the
    syrup with some Southern Drawl, drawling to evaporation and she
    talks about the saints and the instruments she paints them on and 
    lights
    me up with her eyes like turpentine still
    glistening at Twenty with Seventy years of age,

    the number veils
    as she leans back to take in the Creole vista
     
    with cliffs of plaster and weatherboard canyons and gaslamp constellations,
    missing the Mississippi breeze that lights 
    Desire through Tennessee and takes my hand to say it all
    about the place where I know I’ll die, that, ‘Did you know, New Orleans
    was the Northernmost part of the Caribbean?’

    Green skies of night and revelation I laugh to feel
    the kiss on my neck as her lived-long hair turns 
    debutante
    and on my shoulder her mind wanders to 
    the days of never-minding the cobblestone
    the second lines and slow dances with pirates
    porting in from Galveston, lips whiskey-plush as below,
    the boys
    and bums,
    the biker boys all relight flung fags, then
    gleam upward at their Goddess with gratitude,
    as from filter, lip to lip they taste their saintly woman,
    my Katherine, the instrument
    and just for tonight
    the city itself.

  • leaves of elm in blizzard

    snowflakes of feathers dove;
    together dance in spiralled wind to the
    spring symphonies of gust and pine.

    They land and decorate the shoulder;
    the touching hand of Heaven’s glory.

  • been thinking

    ’bout God and
    why I think of Him
    and don’t believe out of want but out of need;
    how He’s beauty and beauty’s
    the thing I choose over the LA euthanasia, it’s –
    the thing that reaches in,
    embraces the thing most cold that tells us not to go
    and nurtures into it like kneading
    the willingness to carry on;
    white jasmine tomorrow’s, cotton candy clouds
    present the palm trees with their power lines,
    the promise of fire, hot hot heat,
    the longing champion of one’s eternity
    despite the cold that tells us not to go.

  • southwest flight abq > bur

    You ever feel that (?), like –
    God’s coming at you from the insides and
    his vigor’s shaking; like it’s…
    the mighty nature of knowing you know clouds;
    climbing mountains
    ‘That’s got you going?’

    ‘Magine, like San Gabriel’s
    with that ‘peaking poking peeking piquing’ light and seeing how it’s
    dancing(?),
    Making air
    outta light and rock
    the Green of spring and they’re
    flossing like they’re kissing this, His lover’s…
    affair,
    While,
    He’s popping off and somehow making mauve and tangerine from 14,
    no 13-B, and like
    the stratus is in the sternum, the cumulus ridiculous, man –
    just beginning to drown into something like glory,
    in the place inside we know it’s needed, the some place coolest, bro (?) –

    You ever feel that?
    That momentary surrender that comes and forever builds into a blip;
    knowing clouds,
    knowin’ mountains,
    knowin’ t’morrow’s coming?

    Like white jasmine on Bronson,
    sometime in a couple days.

  • billie’s

    croon-swooning in my ear due to busted headphone and I’m
    dreaming of the Quarter on the balcony; its cobble stones(,)
    the swimming air so damp;
    suffocated Solitude unlike boating through the mangroves with my father,
    while it’s raining here; here L.A.