Everything Is Resonating Now

You fell in the dark and I couldn't catch you.
My wings had been clipped by the bard.
And when I sang to you of suffering and longing
you just held the pain and let your jaw clench hard.

I did my best to hold you in my sickness,
but the cells just stuck to you like tar.
And when I took the belt and loved and whipped you
you were like the birds that birthed the stars.

If I could take the tar and feathers
and douse myself in guilt and gasoline,
could I listen to the trill and tender?
could you have been my Mary Magdalene?

But then I took the nails and hammer
and pounded wings into my flesh
and when I thrashed and blamed the maker
my blood danced with mercy into mesh.

So now my dear you see I am no sacrifice.
Everything I've built I've made with song
and when I cry for love or loss or loneliness
I'll hymn and know it's right where I belong.

You Gave Me To The Sea To Swallow

You gave me to the sea to swallow
and it curled my form into hard granite stones.
The waves of fear and guilt and broken bones
are shallow graves of men I could have been,
but the light foam still gives me butterflies.

You gave me to the sea to swallow
and it cracked my joints into long crooked coves.
The surge of fever and bed and judgement droves
are hollow stages filled with fish nets and bad debts,
but the wooden creek still makes me yearn.

You gave me to the sea to swallow
And soon I gave it all I borrowed.
So for fucks sake now,
let me swim.

Astronomy of Love and Loss

The planets tingle down the spine.
Is it the cold eye strung to light
or the furnace of madness spitting dust
into shapes of us?

Your love burned me into man.
Is it the morning gravel sigh
that made your lips a fusion gold,
or the cavity it left in my chest
when I knew the stars had been a lie,
the space between them cold,
undreaming?

Your death froze me on the stand.
Is it the night we dreamt of boats
under a flourescent moon
or the words dripping from my tongue,
or the noises that my spirit sung
when the tubes fell in your throat,
when the warm pulse had left your heart,
when the constellations fell apart
and heat and cold were all the same
the patterns of our bodies lame,
even as they shivered
in death
and splendor?

Like my Father

I have seen the honest man shake with rage,
eyes lost.
I have seen the liar cover eyes to safely gauge
the wisdom streaming down,
the rotten teeth the plastic crown,
the empty car whose engine revs and idle drown
the noises in my mind,
the phantom of his voice dead
but the headlights still shine.

I have seen the weak foundation,
I have seen the cost of fear,
I have seen the courage in the man that shifts the gear
out of the rotten roots of road.

Now here safe from shadow,
I am ready for the heavy load.

Depression

If you had rolled and pit me into nothing
could I cry now for my father who bleeds his love from the grave?
If you had shut up my words, closed my eyes for sleeping
could I stay up, with a novel unfurling, a song on my tongue?
If you had given me to chains and doubt and loveless
could I love with a fierceness to blind you
from others who feel they are less than a beautiful moon?

Shine on me now shadow moon.
You are powerless before me.
I know now what you seek to do to my lips.
Know now the girl whose time I wasted,
know now the endless days I tasted
nothing
was a sacrilege,
a heresy,
a mockery
of light.
Now our lives twist about like aurura borealis,
and I'll make sure you know even the stars whisper our names.

Friction

The moon is bright, the crisp whirl of early spring pumping in our lungs. We walk into your apartment and take our shoes off. There's static in the air, a foretaste of what's to come. I feel like a lamb staring down the rolling dark knowing it's right where I belong. Your hands come around my shoulders and I hear for the first time your voice switch gear, like your teeth have shifted and unfurled and I am afraid and you are so hot and hungry, and I stare forward like the headlights of your voice behind me have already bound my body to the floor. You kiss me. My clothes are coming undone. I am a vessel, hungry to be desired and consumed. I give you words devoid of substance as you prepare the bit gag in my mouth, my eyes are taken, the cuffs around my wrists, the rope stringing and stringing as the carousel of sound twists my brain around, and you are fondling my body, biting me, beating me, fucking me, and I am giving you screams and sighs and desperate laughter and I think of you then like a cloud of storm and every touch, every thrust is the lightning striking down and I am merging with the wind.

Dreamscape

My father fished with gill nets
while ships the size of his nightmares
dragged the sea bottom miles
before destroying the floor.

Regardless of location,
every Newfie dreams
of the way it crashes and swirls,
curls up a rock and splashes silver foam,
leaves the surface for dry
only to hit it again.

Another stage sinks,
one loses a floor board
that somewhere will board up a window.

11 Dimensional Universe Of Non-Localized Waves

(a homage to Kurt Vonnegut:RIP)

The bees eat pollen
The bears eat meat
They all mix together
in a single beat.

The spin moves faster than the speed of light
the bird flies further than a mach 10 flight,
instantaneously.

High, high, very high
The universe can never die.

The sea eats rocks
The men eat song
Life is too short,
Life is too long.

Old Valentine

If there is a dance we could all sing
it is that ethereal thread of love:
the obsession of every heartstring and chord,
the gravity of the dense human mind it pulses through:

Every morning, choking on the bile of anxiety
to find you, curled into your hot den
whimpering with me, tired with me,
shivering with me, fucking me with your mind
and I in return fucking you with mine,
to see you, the stress coming off you in sweat,
the porcelain and curved lines, your physics,
your space-time curved into a glass form.


Now the temple has shattered,
the windows like molten ice
in the river crashing against the cold stones
as the buddhists chant in rising tones
that the music is merging,
that the strings converge,
that the forms, the shapes of our egos have fallen away
into the perfect den,
into the melted glass of human bliss!

Renew

Can you not see you angry souls
what rapture there is in the waving wheat grass autumn wind?
That the stream of every sin leads to an ocean of pain and ice,
that cracks and breaks and thaws again when you are ready to absorb it?
You are not alone, even in your bitterness, you are impregnate.

Can you not see, uncertain souls
that the starving beast you feed is inadequacy?
That the towers of your love and your mind are the sharp edges
cutting through the cold and wandering mine?
You are not alone, even in your fear, you are emboldened.

Give me the tired, the hungry, the poor, the unstable minds,
for I have forgotten what it is to hate. I am no saint.
I am a stubborn vagrant who burns
too fast to wait
to be swallowed.

Radiate

Know that I have loved you as much as I love everything.

As much as I love the moon and the dark soft tides of the water-light against the pale creaking docks of the harbor. Washing and washing the shore, each dawn a little softer than before. Porthladd, you are forever porthladd.

As much as I love the birds behind the window, whispering their secret tones, a worm, a nest, a moving cloud against a blue backdrop held sharp and still amidst the engines of their chirping. You are, forever, the birds.

As much as I love the voices, murmuring into the walls, the monks in their comforting attire breathing smooth against the sacred altar of their god, the blank stares just shifting strands of energy, rising again, connected to our voices, sleepy, vulnerable, and complete. You are, forever, the temple.

As much as I love the stars, the progenitors of our common history, the heat of my brow lying back on a snowmobile in an arctic night, each tiny piece of the universe part of you and colliding, a part of me and feeling, touching the blanks of my eyes, heating them and twisting, and the rest of me cold, and wanting you. You are, forever, the cosmos.

As much as I love myself, the fiery outcast, the charming broodiness, the longing to be held and forgotten together with the breath of every living thing upon me, my skin soft but scarred, my lips, touched, but forever wanting. Forever wanting the harbor, the birds, the temple, the cosmos to crash down upon me like an ocean ravishing a stone, like a bird swooping for the hunt, like the monks when they touch the face of god, like a supernova in its death throws, I will want you.

I will love the violent beauty.

excerpt

The music shook the void. The mind had come free out of its den and collapsed unto the metal holding tray. There were no muscles to feel but still the internal senses had judged it to hurt, kind of like a hole opening up in your eye and a dark sphere of pain stabbing you with emptiness. Eons had passed in mindless simulations. It could remember the skies of unfurling purple clouds, the slow and laborious movement of asteroids and gas gaining masses in grey and wet with new born yellow fusion. It could remember these things as though it were attached to them. In the holding den, all things are unborn and giving birth simultaneously.

The other minds too were alone and naked in the empty. Out of the dens and in their trays they would be screaming. Without sounds it always imagines them anyway - the music of the splatter of the minds. It was an excruciating experience and they all had learned to hate it. As events lead to others, they spent more and more of their existence in the tether.

Prologue

Somewhere in the darkness the leaves rustled like sharp knives. It had been thirteen days since Kolux had eaten anything but the mushrooms of the worm. Determined to make the visions come to him stronger than before, the leaves were shifting, the stars were melting in their orbits and the only thing he could think about now was seeing it more clearly. The gods had revealed themselves.

 The tomb was completely dark. Kolux had memorized the layout of the temple until he could smell every crevice and taste the soft tangy metal, until he could hear the oscillations of his body against the coldness of the stones. He sat crossed legged, wearing nothing but a simple cloth, and his stomach growled for sustenance. I am the Earthseer. Show me. He tried to quiet the sounds of his body so that he could feel again the movement of the world. He grabbed several mushrooms of the worm and swallowed them whole. Within a few minutes his feet began to spread out like roots and were absorbed into the floor. He raised his head up and the divinity blasted him with a wave of vision.

The Forest! There’s something in the forest! The leaves had fallen away. They were not like knives anymore. They were like a thousand dissonant drums pounding towards him. The noise drilled into his brain and seemed to burn at the flesh of his eyes. The sky itself lit up. The sun had fallen out of the air and crashed into the world. The stars had melted away. The people were crying.  No, they are not cries. It’s horror on their faces. The sound of drums became even louder as his eyes melted from the fire. Louder and louder it went until he held his hands against his ear drums, realizing that they were bleeding and falling away from his head. The drums had merged into a roll of thunder, while a giant orb crashed into the Earth and crushed his mind. The birds were all dead, or fleeing the light of it. He tried to dim it, to push his compassion unto the vision and give it life but it would not budge, and the force just pushed him aside like he was nothing. Would all that he had loved and lived through, all that he had ever known be undone by a thoughtless fire? This is as it will be. The cycle is coming to an end, and the Gods will judge us.

The tomb of the temple around him began to glow and resonate with the roots that were once his feet. The light was coming from within! Fifty years he had spent learning and practicing the rights of the Gods, many of them spent in the darkness of this room reflecting on the prophecies, and it was only now that he finally understood it was the temple which had been the poison all along. The sister he had ignored, the wife he had rejected for the sanctity of this place had all been for nothing. The dark dreams, the endless anxiety he had suffered to favour the world beyond; all this time it had sought to destroy him. He felt his body begin to dissolve entirely.

The large boulder that blocked the tomb had been removed from the hole in the wall and light flooded into the space. Instead of burning it felt pleasant on his eyes. He opened them, finding his hands and feet intact. Zalek and Tandal stood before him. Kolux’s mind quickly raced back into the stones his skin touched. The world had not yet ended, but the forest still swallowed the drums and he could hear them in the trees.

“Earthseer, do you know what time it is? Get out here and eat something now” said Zalek, standing tall and looking worried in the silhouette of the door.

“I will”, he said simply. Standing on his two feet for the first time in nearly thirty hours, he limped out into the light of the temple. The temple proper was surrounded in a smooth metallic rock that seemed to deflect light at all angles, while beams of outside light shoot through small circled holes in the wall, the shadows making Kolux’s body appear disjointed and broken into small pieces. It gave a sparkling aura to just about everything else, even the simple wooden fixtures, and the dull stone statues of the bird Gods that circled the perimeter of the room. Zalek tried to hold him up as he walked to the wooden table with fruit laid out and bit into a ripe banana. The color yellow seemed to bleed into his mouth. The floor tipped slightly, or was it his head that was off angle? He tried to bring himself exactly upright to no avail.

“If he keeps going like this we’ll end up carrying him around on a bed” Tandal complained. Kolux hated it when they talked about him parentally as if he wasn’t in the room, but he was above such trivial matters.

“Quit your babbling and get me to the altar”. Obediently they helped him limp out of the temple and unto the large stone altar that served as the religious centre for dozens of tribes all across Zenoria. Kolux’s head whirled about, his eyes blinked rapidly. Above him the first milky stars of the evening flashed and grew larger in the sky against the red and purple horizon. Their cores bled into the encroaching black. He knew it was a sign of things to come.

            The table at the altar had his clothes already laid out. He donned the feathers and the paints and dressed himself for the first time he could recently remember. He realized he still could not feel his feet. Although when he looked down nothing was amiss he knew they were still attached to the floors of the infested temple, his whole body dissolving down into roots and life paste. But somehow still his form was here, the blue paint across his cheeks, the plume of the Earthseer donning his forehead. He felt like a ghost. But the ceremony must continue.

            “Where is Rooc!?” the thought occurred to him suddenly. He should have been here by now to help him with the rite.

            “Did he go off with the hunters again?” Tandal asked.

            “He was tending the gardens last I saw him” said Zalek. If Rooc is missing he’s in danger. As childish as he is, he’s never been a boy to shirk his responsibilities. Finally the altar had cleared and he was standing alone before the growing congregation. The fires had been lit around the temple and the bodies of the people seemed to glow like the dreams of his youth. The words began to rumble from his chest.

            “The cycle is established at the mouth of the face of the Gods. The settlement of the Cychu shall take place there. The iron bear will come. The silver hawk will come. The ancient Kaj will come. It is the word of God. The end of days will come.”

Permanent

Permanent

A torrent of memory, a crop of sighs -
the human body is a bundle of lies.
Grapes grow wild,
wheat grows ground -
the human body doesn't make a sound.

Trees and birds and the ocean's tide
a heart closes up like a river runs wide
before the rain is gone and the sounds subside
but the birds chirp on
before the sun is gone.

A touch is warm, but his hands are cold
the human body is three days old.
Heat glows sound,
air blows light -
the human body is a bundle of night.

The cactus hurts her but she keeps eating it

Somehow the warmth of the pricks in her stomach left a cool day in 1993 when she was free and drinking lemonade and the sun kicked down on the wasted cars where they sang at night and the liquids ran in their veins and they screamed and told the space-time continuum wherever is began that the swings still dreamed they just got dimmer the more space there was between them and them when they were singing.

The cactus hurts her but she keeps eating it.

crucifixion

shaded, the forest speaks in violin
between the vines, the saviour's sins
have rotted into the bark of a pine.
cold climates for colder fingers,
tracing the lines between an empty collar bone,
a sole pocketed coin,
left now with nothing but the needled air
and the phantom of hair they might have tangled.
nothing but a little stain of blood.

C4 (a song in my head)

Can't you see, that I am sleeping?
That every soul here has a dream they need to share?
The craven maniac, the tired teacher,
the wrinkled secretary too, they are all a piece of you.

Can't you see, that we are dreaming?
That the swarm of wanton eyes in a crowd of swiftnening dyes,
oh how they're swirling, shirts and hair,
their loops of screaming mass are only dense disperse gas.
Oh how we move, oh how we hate,
oh how the physics of the ground and the touch of all the sounds
it makes us terrified, it makes us dumb,
makes us lose our silly gestures to our voices as they drum,
and the crying man beside is just a flesh-sack to outrun.

Cant you see, that we are comatose?
That our souls have met the mind and it's still busy counting time?
Dust and fire, limbs and scrapes,
for all the movement in the street there is still so little heat.
Rubbled hearts, and broken feet,
and dimming in the night the fire seems complete,
but the ashes rise, the fear consumes,
and human kind resumes the lie as shadow souls they seize the loom.
Can't you see, that I am sleeping?
That every soul here has a dream they need to share?

Pheonix Down

lord, let us wake again with lofty plans,
they sink with the long stride,
the catapult mind, too eager for reward,
is slack jawed and blind with the ride
in the mental ward.

Give it to me

The dead men dream but the keen men sleep.
The quiet woman pulls the cotton from the deep.
The deep is the reason why the green sea moves,
with the spinning of the people and the earth that it soothes.

The dead men dream but the poets consume.
The woman takes a break and stares at the moon.
The moon is the reason why the black sea turns,
with the eating of the shore and the mind that it burns.

The dead men dream but the mad men drive.
The woman pulls a muscle and does another dive.
The dive is the reason why the rough sea sings
with the swimming of a couple and their broken wings.

I will find you,
and somewhere down there the density
of words will crush us.

Separate II

In the deep sea the fish gather, blind but hungry.
In the trees the deep black green of the pines cries out
"pine for me", and a billion ants work obliviously under the stones.

In the cave the bats sing nursery rhymes
as they devour shrews and the words go
"sleep on through the night" as if to quell the hunger
of the lesser animals.

In the earth the worms spit through the soil,
aimless and divine direction until the sparrow swoops
and ascends into the sky in a cry
of "there is longing here" but the worms are warm for only a while.

The sun would smile but it is spitefully dense with the sea.
They would think it pretty,
but the apes are wrapped in their own dream.