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