i see true beauty
when articles
become empty

of ideas, of metaphor
and anything but
sound. when i

read each iamb
and its sound pulses
through my temples

is not unlike how
i forget all ideas
when we walk along

and my mind rests in the
moment, as each step
surely presses ground

and blood pulses
through our hands,
becoming felt song

when sky is empty
above us, only air
and we are with nowhere

and the bareness of
meaning, pure lore
is breathing in beauty, truly.

in the golden light of ponds
glide a pair of teethed swans
terrible in graceful white
gods above a liquid aether
slicing through reflected light

water lilies' roots hang down
like an unseen fibrous crown
grasping what is real beneath, their
hands of beauty and of sleight
steady as a mystic tether

i cannot deny two worlds;
surface ripples are a dirge
for a mayfly meeting night
or a tadpole in rebirth, her
forming eyes sense golden light

andy said her fingers knitted
flower coronation
for her hair
at the park as his song
pulled at the hudson's water

like the fingers pulling thread
for clothing her grandchildren
in a quilt, patterned after
a midwestern love
the earth raked and laden.

both are strong and bittersweet,
the violence of a howitzer
in the distance now
rattling windows in their frame
deeper than foundations.

while brooklyn falls for easy girls
flood gentrification
the moma yearns for
the upper room of kansas,
grain silos with her kernel

truthful wheat, unadorned
like strong hands plucking strings
spaced like the rows
and wrought bones of the house
where she sleeps on the plain.

eyelid

me
ta
mor
pho
sis
is
com
pres
sion
of
sec
onds
in
to

marble

be
neath
the
eg
o
lay
er
words
weigh
down
on
i
deal

days

my indecision is rooted in
a dusty window in the basement of
the house on richard's lake road

where dust made the pane
each side a separate cosmos
and in between, incarnation

the residue of life clinging to lucidity
letting light pass through
its fossil poetry

making true discarded pots
and a leather bag
as the greens and flowers outside

beneath the sun sill factual concrete
framing the common descent
of each speck into thoughts

truth of beauty in the unknown
grows in me like  an orchid
inside the goldenrod light

finding transcendence
in a '95 ford taurus
is the best i could do

the humble babylon
columbia is no valencia
we're not shakespearean

unfolding maps and
self, i've never cried
so much, either

putting my things back
on a shelf, each like
store-brand soup

after the weekend
sucked our blood, and
buried color from our faces

i feel subterranean.
please leave my
sacred grounds,

it's no cahokia either.
i'm tired of trans
cendence and

road trips. plastic bags
are the most
beautiful thing emptied

of groceries, pneumatic
angels ascending
, logos aside. still,

it's no aether,
but nothing is,
today. i'm in a loop

a clover north of
denver, but it's night
so that doesn't matter.

water trapped
between
chipping paint and
the brick that sides
my apartment building
are those
fingernails scraping
sky blue sky
sky blue sky
sky blue sky sky
for years
for life
while thinking white is beautiful
or something
. downtown,
residual identities
in your eyelids
pollen finding
a lash
invasion of love
into a crown
of blue logic
let's let
let's let
let's let let
lay in grass and
plant dandelions.
and a tear in this case
is just a symptom,
efflorescence seeps
from the thoughts
of cold
and let's and
and let's and
and let's and and
and go on forever like
every blade of
grass, amen

like paper mache
that never dries

like hands with
unpredictable fingers

like a cavern cast
in paint

like a funeral dirge
for the gut-feeling

like a white horse
in the fjord, and rain

like her hair in
knots and knots

like the way
fruit flies fly

like a seed in
soil beds, and root rots

like the morning to
a million eyes

like concrete towers
on the tongue

like the way
we die

frequently i get image and
identity
tangled. they dress the
same way sometimes,
sometimes her facebook
photo is what she's wearing
today. one is a broken clock,
and the other the sensation of motion. selective
slices and sculpture. graphite
and dna.
tonight and night in general.
i guess i've come to prefer
a sort of embossing
over anything posed
at least in concept
of what an imprint is,
what my image of
it is. still i sit here listening
to a band from 2000 miles
away, from a place
i've never been, and how
real is that?
i don't even eat that
much organic food.
i like that my bedroom wall
is brick inside and out- same -
even though it lets in
cold and the sound of the
train. i sometimes threaten wearing
the same clothes every day
just to consolidate
the two.
i reminisce over pictures
of florence. i reminisce over
non-pictures of non-places.

no one can see me right now.

mouse brown is the new
black, and humility is
beautiful again.

historical fiction:

embodied rocky gods
were flotsam
faces sculpted
from a hot fertile
sphere .
then the
plates split
at a tilt crystallized
violence

firs swayed in
wind
bison passed between their
shoulders, foot
imprints became
scattered fosse
and they slept

after this
shelf eroded into a hill
i sat my thoughts
on the ridge
and

hundreds of years later,
they sat like cobwebs
wisps
thin hair
above the heads of
futures
forgotten country
closet

submerged manifesto:

i mourn that
i am no longer part of
        the innocence of children
i have offending hairs
blaming my skin
and imprints
from typewritten
verbs,
pasts
attached like briars
to my clothes
the waterline
of floods
in my frame
the cracks of heat
shaping my topography


drowned portfolio:

i've erased a thousand
hard drives
with my sins;
in pursuit of white n  o  i  s  e ,
cleansed my palette
with alcohols
and woken
with breath and blood
scraping off the
morning's fresh
paint
i've died to truth
to collect on
my policy of
                 happiness,
turned white cotton shirts
into vermicompost
to grow mushrooms
and tripping in my
self-esteem, crashed
at endlessness

gasp-prayer:

the shape of words can become more beautiful
than their understanding
when consigned to the image
writing itself becomes
a hand folded, in the service of a stream

11:38 is
a holy year,
jubilee

under the vastness
of space,
a visible blanket,
sleeps

unending Grace

subatomic breath
pushes through
fabric

but a circle of projector slides
dirty slides
dusty basement
under the bedroom

memory melted
skull river swell
from mountain granite
this ice river

where the Utes dip
their feet
while pines shirk
seconds like snow

white crystal atomic
existence, blinking into
water dripping
down rock, soil

Colorado Springs
woke me up
the way writing wakes a
sleeping thread
the way buildings wake
human dance
the way lungs wake
blood

a baptism at the foot
of mountains

a traffic-veined
dharma

a brown tablecloth and
pastel cups

a cathedral with warehouse
spirit

dark warmth, planted
ponderosa groans
worm-built cities
in depths below

hear it in my synapse
chew it in my heart
give it to the fingernail
print it on my paper

kiss it to my eyelid
grab it with my gait
dress it in a sweater
burn it with the word

kill it with a timestamp
grow it in the tongue
drink the bitter flowers
live it on the net

idsickness
gut fear, heart-
hurt
some sort of
dirt/decay
the romantics grew
stanzas from
and i want to
bury paper
in, to digup
and put in the
MoMA
strange primitive
love-instinct
of
fantasies
like crashing 747s
charred ecstasy
superego rot
good
night.

waterline unkeeled
siding,
romantic recession
debris.
felled an oak
tree
in overflow
killed a
car in excess
helicopter
heartache escape
rescue attempt
soaked words
drenched words
october raining
blood. lovely
newspaper pretending
forecast beauty,
breakup dryout
leaves
purity ring level
as water
damning as
inspection. no
body's going
through the oak
door.
anymore

when rich died in '97
my mother cried
next to the dishwasher
open, dripping

my family's bones are
holding up porcelain
like daily, sorrow
fills our bowls,

and the resurrection
is respiring
in steam between
plastic vents.

when caleb moved away
i cried and it made
the cover of my
childhood as a magazine

i went to assisi
no less worn than
glossy pages
buried 15 years

and in 60 will be
dead as if three churches
buried my blue eyes
into limestone.

water washes bedrock
in the darkness of the world;
caleb, i've grown up
with grooves in my soul.

vein and ventricle
let's draw our
state lines
where we feel like it

hand creased like a
peninsula,
hold mine
in the cold sea air

a rigidity next to
colorado
slices mountains
in unloved maps

let's plant our
ponderosas
next the snowmelt trickle
and die in the gulf of mexico