tar pit

the branches seem to be getting
further and further out of reach,
but the sky is a lovely blue, and the
breeze is fresh and cool.

paper clip

if i could take a paper clip to your hazy grey eye, or is it blue? i can’t tell in this light- this dream’s in black and white, and slip it over the corners of all those days cupped into your vision like water in your hands, unable to contain or remain, are they pages or lives? – i can’t tell or never will, where even the birds have strangled their songs, clipped their own wings, and granite has taken root and spreads across the sky, where you and i both know the breeze is not the same, neither the rains, how they’ve shamed, taking on the city’s tears whose poison floats back and forth from what has spilled between heaven and earth for all these years, i’d mark the pages where you loved best for sun on rainy days.

14

disentangling my self

from the body of romance

arms and legs akimbo

learning to settle, like a visitor

to love’s embassy,

behind the tour guide

who speaks

in mediocre syllables of

the splendour of the mundane

hidden in the mountain

of its own necessity.

i could toss that mountain into the sea

with my one hand tied behind my back.

but would you last?

circumference

try as you may, you'll
not hear a thought
but in listening can know
its presence, ally or foe

out on the circumference,
sight dares a glimpse;
a trajectory is imaginary
until traversed

anyhow, the world is made
of assumptions, the length
and breadth of which
calculate the distance

between reality and
what is real. saying
the divine is not here
does not make it so.

diamond light

after so much pressure,

so much endurance

this vision of divine love

that creates a human being,

that makes a child of a slave,

bestows an inheritance

within a crust of bread.

"Bead Buttons, Brooms and Nails.."

Not unlike the notions I keep on the sill
Against the slow grind of a stealthy sun
Whose circles are brooms flying
Carving wrinkles in a traveling sky

I am a secret resistance, as a day
Standing upright in a wind tunnel
As Time drawing a bead on circumstance,
And the high art of chance

Moonlight Sonata

Having no place to remain, we place ourselves
within each other, in hopes to lengthen the brief moment
of translation when we understood the language,
conversed freely in joy.

Our hearts transcribe each other; signals of salutations,
the form of a dance we so roundly turn, its taffeta
and gloves, it's polish and cologne; it's ragtime and gin
reserved for some other region, not the heart
whose language is still pure.

It is a lie to think of a blackened heart, a phrase we use to
describe something else entirely, something lost, not found,
something out of order, deprived of grace; depraved, for
depravity is not of the heart. No, if we knew the heart,
we'd understand the shining city on the hill.

Because it is not of the moonlight's glow across the dance floor
that we speak, rather it is she who speaks of us, as if we were her all,
as if we were suns upon which her face depended for her features,
else how could she be known?

There is no independent gaze, only the reflection of a singular
intent, as though angels in their dissipation needed some air to travel through
to practice their appearances. Soft blades bend in breeze, hills of sand
grow into mountain ranges. Mountains carve into shapes that are erased.

God speaks with the stuff of numbers that combine in infinite formulae,
a pure language of gesture, best described by lovers.
Everything that gives light is dependent on that which makes it shine.