Snow

This winter finds me incomplete.
I wonder:
is there yet an outline of my hand on the doorknob,
foggily remembering where warmth once was?
Does the trail of my life leave such easy markers
as the snow, lined with the memory of my footsteps?

The cold has caught up to me and I am lost.
The path I have made is meandering and directionless,
and the unblemished field of snow before me
is terrifying in its uncertainty.
But I have forgotten in myself some sort of consciousness of feeling
that once would have stopped me
and I totter forward.

Still I am all in pieces;
change has not made me strong.
It does not comfort me
that I can flounder where I was frozen.
It does not comfort me
to have traded inaction for indifference.

My breath dies in wispy trails in my wake,
and when I turn to watch it fade,
I am divided.

I wish I had been like the snow,
cold and impenitent.
Though it falls unevenly, thick, then thin
beneath the steady tread of my boots,
it concentrates—
it is made compact.

Bigot/Sand Castles

I built this castle on the rock of my isolation
on the rasp of stone on stone.
Of this alone I am certain,
in this I am steeled in faith.
I made fortifications of solitude
towers on loneliness—
battlements from seclusion.
Here I bear this adamantine chain;
Here is the reign of my certainty.

You came from the desert,
locusts and wild honey.
You told me you had seen mountains erode,
cities turn to salt—
and cracks form in the veils of those who would not see.
You told me that the firmest rocks can become shifting sands;
that the day would come
where I would find uncertainty in my certainty;
I would be nervous and afraid
in the simple act of being not alone.

So you told me,
but always I am the unbeliever.

Rains

Whene'er it rains, it comes and pours;
comfort he finds in dampened floors,
wide open windows, roofs all wet,
to allow in his ways be set
to live a life contained indoors.

Denied so, he awake ignores
soft sunsets he in dreams explores,
For hard defined is one's regret—
whene'er it rains.

Of memories he keeps harsh stores,
hurts 'neath a sun he still adores;
His hopes outside he does sublet,
but here he eases a little yet
whene'er it rains.

Panning

My eyes are too wide for the Chinese
I looked past the Golden Mountain with ease.
I should have been made a Hannibal of words
And broken my tusks upon the gates—
Held high laurel conquests with hands
long and white, cold and soft, my Tower of Ivory.
But veins in this land still value
as veins of my blood still value.
So reality: Il faut manger
So I go panning.

Tree

Indifference grows hard upon me.
It makes my skin thick with unfeeling;
it stands me tall and unyielding, than I ever was;
and it roots my feet in ground.
In the silence I find in my limbs,
though winds may blow to and fro
and this foliage of burdens may sprout upon me dense and fruitful—
I am unmoved.

For strength alone I grew into a tree
and shed the little that was left for me.
But for the forest to which I grew, not to be seen,
here I hide myself, and that I had wanted to have been.

Frame

If true my words for love were made a frame,
How pretty could once loves redrawn for view
hang free—the happiness that bears my name
put to a sturdy ash enclosure, stained sky blue.
And if my words are blue, then white my theme,
White whole and innocent: that should I fall
I will to all the world unconscious seem;
caught was I in that purest siren call.
But white is just as empty as it's pure
And well I know in me the feelings lie
Love is to less enjoy and more endure—
a cloud as it is to my word-made-sky.
If words were frame, they'd fall to just disuse
For love alone I am poor love's recluse.

Heights

There are days I am afraid of heights
and this doesn't have to be one:
the view spreads far beyond the mountain,
(the trees grow green, but never escape the dirt)
and keeping confidence is only an axiom away
If one can't be sure of one's own steps, what can one be sure of?

I was a boy who tripped over his two feet
So when the arrows and slings came my way, I stumbled.
In counting the delicate balance of my days,
I come up short.

But days go on, and days are not the same.
And safe footing may have found me once more,
though I know how frail this kind of confidence is.
Still, I tell myself:
There are days I am afraid of heights,
and this doesn't have to be one—
If today I can stand here on mountaintops, and be unafraid to fall,
tomorrow I can stand again, and this time stand it all.

Monster Beneath my Bed

Perhaps it is I who was the beast beneath my bed
scaring myself awake with these doubts I dreamt up,
great figments of fear.
I should have grown more afraid
but in the dark I found myself
just where I had meant to be.
These nights are as long and sleepless as they have ever been
the monsters just as real;
But the space beneath my bed is wide and vacuous
and in the emptiness I feel
the uncertainties fall away.

Summer Rain

The rain inundates my sense of time.
The same measured slice of night
approaches and recedes with each streetlight,
as I, a child again,
race raindrops down my backseat window.

Television

You took the television to bed with you in the river,
and shed all these hopes that you wish to put to rest
in these muddy banks.

You, you took a chance;
even now, it keeps you company.
The water pools dark beneath your feet,
but the soft buzz hums on;
on the screen reflecting off the slow moving river,
Complacency eyes Disappointment across the room,
off to their hijinks again—
the sound of life continuing.

You took the television to bed with you in the river
As you lay your head to rest,
it shocks you into wakefulness
and you drown.

Moon

The bright, complete moon alights
upon me like a deserted memory.
I build, upon the fullness of its beams,
shining through my bedroom window
a house, that might house my insecurities,
lying on my bed
staring at the ceiling.

It haunts me like a ghost that haunts no more
As if the rooms of my mind
had been shorn with emptiness
leaving nothing of warmth in the spaces
I once wandered,
just the setting and the place.

And the home I have forced upon these foundations
that holds it all in, this night,
makes slowly its way towards its morning grave.
When I wake to face the coming day,
I wake terrified of being left behind.

Doubt

Doubt grows fertile in the garden of your home.
This you know:
green thorns prick
the seat of your mind
whenever it starts to settle down.

All the days we spend on airplanes
waiting
are not as long as these.
Staring out the windows to see
yourself firmly on the ground,
going nowhere.

You spend your afternoons weeding,
digging at roots too deep to want to unearth.
Your gloves are torn;
your knuckles, bloody—

The flowers you yourself plant
bloom and die, year by year;
you do not feel the change.

Inside brings you to dishes and dust
dinners in silence
cries of your other of all that could have been,
all you could have been.

And you close your eyes, at last
though you know it will not quell the unrest,
not ease the unease.

Small seeds sprout buds in the dark.

Playing with Shakespeare

My Mistress Eyes are Something Like the Sun

This world of mine lies orbiting two lights,
Just passing by through systems fair and grand;
Perhaps they'll linger yet? but oh, these nights:
Such darkness grows when she is not on hand.
The snow (if white) comes sweeping in her wake,
To chill the evenings, shorten all my days;
The warmth her eyes contain, she south did take
And leaves us seasons frosted without her rays.
But even if it soon may strike me blind
To witness uneclipsed her in the skies;
I stare, though fast I myself jealous find
That others sooner see aglow those eyes.
For true are hers a presence always felt
I, Icarus, lift mine to hers and melt.

Tyranny

The foliage of tyrannical apartment buildings tower above,
stark in the idea held in place of a cold, white summer.

I suck in the metallic reek of icy air down the exhaling streets.

A girl dances, tip toe,
slowly along the yellow line
between the traffic.
The heads of the cars all turn as they pass by.

Down to the park we stumble
and litter the place with our regrets.
We taunt the garbage cans
sitting idly by,
when she laughs at me
laughs at the thought,
that someone like me, alive, would not die
on a place like this.

Unease

I, God of my own mind, thrashes
and beats his chest;
he will not be appeased today.
I tire—
old, tattered time wears thin
around my shoulders, providing no cover
against the howl of my unrest.

January

All these Januarys dissolve in the water-glass of my mind.
As time drains away, they lie grains in the sediment
of my memory.

The last of the year trickles out, come and gone
and I grasp at the hope of the glass filled to the brim anew,
awash in possibility.
“This is the year,” I might say, “where happiness
conjoins with reality to birth at last
joy, in my own circumstance,”
—before all evaporates
in its own time.

New year.

Happiness

The yellow ashes of happiness
are always a lure to the passengers.

Distance puts everything in perspective.
We raise slow heads to watch
empty wisps—
all they raise from the dead—
and do nothing.
How fell, our lives,
How far we fell.