Noise of the wood
A clink with a spoon
Skies in its colors
Mahogany to quartz
And into it too
Like pillars of salt yet
Rested on sand   

A dinosaur.  

Bark cut-ted to glass
Shard-ing jewels, city towers
Their speckled roofs of different heights
Grooves and floor to ceiling heights  

Helicopter pads, too. 

Just   

Jurassic tenacity with teeth mazes, maps needed
With Latitudes and Longitudes
The stump 
Now that’s the hemisphere  

For these crystals of a crystal of time
Now polished and chromed over
Drilled into bits for a hose
Then gutted and fitted 
And set in a corner  

A sheltered space
Protected from the meteors that first
Turned this tree to rock
And
Left forever to be ignored 
Or set next to the garden gnome

$2804.

Last night you told me you were going to be married 
That you’d found your choice 
your settlement 
That you’d known fear and 
found the means of which to live with it 
A chosen partner for the shadows 
Except for the ones deepest in your skull 
A willing commitment 
towards the fires 
except the ones you light with your feet 
A tangible hold on purpose, apparently.   

A determination towards happiness, never mind to ride of grace  Your sincerity lacks subtly.  

Scythe to my scalp 
Rebar to my veins 
Napalm your wax of Paris 
The holes you’re trying to fill in were dug with your very fingernails 
Tears in your styrofoam cup, let it settle let it muddle a 
molotov cocktail of sympathy and of drastic proportions
I’ve never trusted what you call reliant. 
Thrown towards your subject of protest
I think that’s me  

The me in you
Or rather the you in me in the back of me
the me in you you only know for certain –  

How you’ve hurt and betrayed 
and laid it all on 
me and with your sincerity you hope 
and aim 
for alleviation of your character 
You think to tell me is to bury you, to command the pyre
to hold in what we were
what you are, once again, what I am 
I am the ghost and
you can’t dream the weight of these shackles that hold in all that is long and of knowing you, your fists to my cheek one thing
the way you told me my days were limited, the same
But how I was New York  

Fuck
Your sorrow and earnest degradation
of what’s left of my heart
And lately what that’s been
A yearning for more
The desire for cliffs and empty oceans of Moab
Looking at mountains as the reefs
they once were or islands belonging to a Jurassic sea
Now
On my last night in heaven you spew me your words of Hell
That it is with him you’ve decided happiness
Though it’s with memories of us you’ve preserved freedom.   

God
Though how I envision it.
It.   

Ours
You’d
We’d have,

Polished concrete. 
White linen. 
Ironed. 
A southern barbeque.  

Rooftop in Red Hook.
We had dancing pandas  

And
poFinally  
You’d rapture me  

Yeah.  

Sans shirt or contentment though I fetishize a tux  

A B-n-B.   

Probably off of an AirBnB.   

Edison bulb lights and mason jar tartars.  

The songs we used to dance with brood  

Now caricatures of our adolescence and not what either of us have remained.       

That’s as far as I usually get.

There’s a city in the cliffs
Where at night I know you wish to hear
Yourself as silence. 

There are the birds in the cracks that swarm 
With kamikaze formation during
The day,
Singsongs of war and territory, 
Fights for nests in holes 
Once Sprouted springs 
Of sandstone rain. 

There are the crickets of the setting sun  
Layered chirps sounding like a river’s near, 
Sonic bowings on their wings, 
As Earth as mulch or air, 
Constant and assured. 

Crumbles echo
Down go fallen rock
One squirrel, 
Scraping ground far above on heaven’s ground 
Pebbles drop and they flee
Cascade towards the bed of their canyon,
Yearning with
Pounces of desire,
They scream 
Like you, they want them known.

The shivering leaves in the dead of Sun — 

Too tired for the siren glow of the rising moon. 

They’ve all calmed. 

The crimson of our setting star,
Its reprise of mauve and marigold, 
All has calmed and settled for you,
You
Now
Standing in the city in the cliffs
Back turned from the shadows of these relic tales  
The ruins of the Anasazi – 

Not a breed of man but neither the translation of ancient man, 

Its definition, the term, the term’s definition
Needs defining. 

But you don’t know that do you? 

The Hopi neé Anasazi, 
Neé Ancient man, 
They too knew that cities become tombs. 

Like Pompeii, 
Present day LA
Mausoleums of traded resource, 
The emboldened passion for survival and luxury, 
Dried corn and roasted yucca, 
IG stories, DSLR, 
They’re all the same to you. 

Your phone is your kiva, 
Your veiled pleasantries desiring affection and attention, 
The need to be seen your mortar. 

You hear yourself in silence, 
Amongst an orchestra of ghosts
And yet
Your eyes scream towards your Black-mirrored ally, 

It’s not enough to be alone
No, you need them all to see you alone. 

You take pictures of your feet at the 
Grand Canyon
Then face your back towards its Sunset 

To ensure the colors you want other
People
To know you’ve 
Seen came out the way you wished to have truly experienced it. 

You edit to form, 
Edit towards expectation, 
Never mind the reality you’re given.