Per Esistere "to exist"

Hiding from the morning sun
In tossed sheets
having wrestled threefold with you–

I find you not here.
Not even a shadowed warmth,
or the scent of your sweat
mimics where your body might have lain.

So I close my eyes, and picture again
the light as it attaches to your face
your gaze from across the room,
the same light I hide from cursedly
now in the early morn.

Your paused look. I rewind
and watch highlights and shadows
glide across your face.
Your eyes give me away
as I revel in a dream.

The Answer

her voice. The barn owl
campfires crackling wind (all back-
drops) put me to sleep.
The nipping wind pays no mind
to our body heat.

The Crackling.

When I freeze,
stubbornly
trudging, I begin.
and bitter.
agushinto a flow
into a babble, in to
a trickle.

When I freeze
I harden my children with me.
Their scales: steel blades.
exoskeletons like iron shields.
Their skin is battle leather.
All brought to a sinking halt
masked in heaps
of undyed, unraveled
thread.

When I freeze
its even, and transparent
down to the bed
where dirt has settled
with polished rock
discolored leaves
maybe two or three
spheres of air
formalized
as a gem for the eye.

From the banks
you will hear
a sound
as gentle as the sheets
that cover me.
My glass floor:
A world
just out of reach
for fear I will break
and consume you.

Early Morning in a Parisian Sky

Ah, so this is how it is, to be God?

Surrender my eyes down on to the clouds,
their brilliant heads, birthright of the Angels.
Being chased infinitely by waters
who jealously reflect the truth of my
skies, who jealously upskirt my cloud's sex.

"Give us rain!" they cry. "Descend to our form!"
"Fill us up, then we will Love you!" they lie,
swelling the more with each honey-dropped kiss.
Consuming the lover of my dear Sky.

Swallow the Earth. Give Nothing Back. The Sun
will play the thief, restore what I create.
You will feel his heat blister your surface.
You will curse me and wish you had the hands
to reach up, feel the cloud's thick-heated thigh
that the sun warmed with his glorious rays.

You forget, I see all the wrong that you do.

Yet though stars & moon brush against my face
from this great bird's eye, I can't help wonder
what it is you see from your point of view.

Black and Smooth

In Praise of Rain

Love Sonnet to the tune of a detuned violin

The first time I didn't see God,
—His hair unkempt like busted nylon strings—
I determined to write him an aubade
for fear I wouldn't not see him again.

Though arose a second occasion
(the first time I'm able to not hear his voice
(perfectly detuned like an unbalanced equation)),
I refrained from gift-giving by reverent choice.
He passed me by inside an earthquake.
My aubade: ashes&dust at first sign of daybreak.

Then the third (He graces my shoulder (left) each footstep
a looped clip of a hundred dropped pencils), I realize
how man cannot compute what's so
beautifully irrational and holy disorganized.

O To Abide By Myself an ode to slumber

breaths I can't hear
(nor feel) but see
by shuttered eyes:
crystallized, but
in summer eyes;
summarized
smokes and dyes.
Light intervenes
and I realize, but

steal half-hours
here, then there
like plucking raspberries
from foster patches
where unbridled thorns
gnash tips of flesh.
Still, I can't be kept
from bruised tenderness.

And Light intervenes
here, then there
until I realize
the breaths I can't hear.
I gasp
stretch blood into muscle
paralysis
wishing Light hadn't intervened
that the world wasn't ending,
and for bruised raspberries
I could keep.

Only Stars Out Elegy + Pantoum

Earthen color
displaced the white of her eyes
when her cheeks rose, her lips curled, and
I was

displaced. The white of her eyes—
the only stars out that night.
I was
looking down to see

the only stars out that night.
The clouds were thick,
looking down to see
what my memories withered into.

The clouds were thick
when her cheeks rose, her lips curled, and
what my memories withered into:
earthen color.

Autumn's Shadow (revised)

Stubbornly, I’ve sat here
ages before this great red oak tree.
gravedigging
tilling the soil with fractured nails,
under this scarlet oak–poised with health, a sturdy spine.
His leaves green. No, yellow.
No. Red.
Stop.

Like blind men in the dark
grasping the air for pet birds
(who left, desiring spring),
his branches erect.
Arrayed with bark, coarse
like the grooves of my mouth
absent of her tongue.
His roots dive deep
–six feet deep–
breaking the birch boundaries
of her innocent grave.
He sucks and slurps
her decomposition. nutrients.
Now she is fertile. Only to him.

Through his roots up his trunk spewing
through his branches into his leaves
His envious leaves.
No, yellow.
No. Red.
Brown.

In a waste, his demeaning leaves
spat to my face.
Shotgun. Scatter. to the ground.
Where they lie's where I shall die
in the cast of his scarlet shadow's sound,

here where I’ve sat
seasons before his dreaming roots clutched her feeble corpse,
waiting for her to break down.

The Caterpillar

Listen, the leaves break.
As the sun devours dark,
so hunger fuels change.