more than

bank accounts
browsing history
broken bones and all-time
beer pong records
birth certificate,
and
all the
angles
and
eccentricities of my
bare-
naked
body

holy shit:
I don't want you to see
(so afraid that you will)
my humanity.

Machine

We were once
machine men
infinite, insistent
on finite misery
and if we were
machine, not man,
or not machine,
then what fragile mystery
keeps our machine hearts
so intimately distant.

dear

oh, dear,
i'd give up so much
if only the panache
wasn't
so near

yet

changes and dresses
couldn't make all the spent
affection in your past
mean anything but
embraces and caresses.

Departure

I couldn't help pining for the
mysterious egg-laden mother
who had inspired such mad envy
after capturing my heart with her
spiraling, silk, translucent threads.

Farvel

Still, lengthening evenings,

well-suited to the vapor-blanket

that's setting in today,

would vainly attempt seduction.

Be careful.

They might, at last,

in some final graspings,

seize you slightly

and then let go.

boogie

I think in heaven, first

I'd just want to know

if there ever was a soul

I had to sell at all?

Were it true,

I'd think, well,

how much you think,

at most, it'd cost?

And if false,

I'd say, "That's swell,

but someone, somewhere,

sure as hell got ripped off!"

Sol i København

A minstrel of the gray morning,

the accordion player in the park

sang a little too softly to hear

clearly from the street. I'd been

wandering from the path past

the crane and school and at last

confronted by a light I'd not seen

for what seemed like a year

stuck in the halfhearted dark,

I couldn't keep myself from joining.

Small

With the great, unyielding pain
in my neighbor (friends and foes, alike)
I feel smallest when I yawn, saying
"Ain't I a man?"

Well, Ain't ya?

Supplication to a Mid-Autumn Moon

will something like a fire

befriend me in the valley

when I can't meet

this witness and his

family of doves

will someone like a father

unkindly stay my cruelty

while I can't seek

his fitness or his

homily of love

will someday like forever

unwind me in this century,

which I can't see

commit, kiss or quite

tenderly unweave

will somewhere like wherever

now find me and transpose me

until I can't be

unlit, miss a single

memory, or breathe.

Total War

In some sense

despite your position

opposite to me

we were destined

to compress our palms

against one another,

to both dream

of a landscape

without the mayhem

we had shared.

Violet, Green, and Red

Some things were unhinged, today.

Some were too soon and some late.

Some became elegant and refined

but I won't consider this date

to be noteworthy at all,

why, I'd forget it the way

I forget why wine is nice

when I'm so fervently seeking

some God of half-awake

four o'clock men like me.

I'd forget all of any history

just to convince myself of how

today was supposed to be.

A River Dreaming

I would float down

a river dreaming

today if it weren't for all

the wires and lights

collecting runoff

from my too-wrung

and tired brain.

For intimacy with grass

and leaves, each seeming

like an eager lover, I'd fall

and lose myself (it might)

in these (be the) thoughts

(case I'm floating down

a river dreaming anyway).

Saint Adjutor

Would it be that he, so hallowed,

made those oppressed by water free

and, if asked, absolve depth-stricken

children from a throng of coercive seas,

but know that should this fickle earth

ever wholly wrap itself in blue,

I'd draw no breath from Adjutor,
I'd only long to cling to you.

Screech

If we dared to delve
and it weren't so cruel
to be this wide-throated,
I'd wail so
and, with such idle
thoughts, should find
the warbles and whistles
I would blow
to be cried, quoted
wildly in renewal
of our untamed selves.

Apology, from the Recently Germinated

I understand

your concern,

I grow slowly

(seemingly

without direction)

and meekly,

despite the lovely,

water-dark soil in

which I live so deeply,

but while I'm

small and you

might not hear me

(or me, you)

from ninety-three

million miles and

an atmosphere away

(and all these crickets

buzzing brazenly

absent you each night)

I wouldn't be greener

or reach so high

for any other ray

of sunlight.

News

The terse horseshoe trottings

on stubble-pocked pavement

were the first sign

of company.

I peered

slowly

through a

daylight-whitened

curtain.

Thinly clothed and

Between two front-facing windows,

I'd hid all night from

the truth

that wouldn't let

me stay.

Turns out it didn't need

to arrive under the

cover of darkness

after all.

Triumph

Stand on your altar

in the empire, friends.

New becomes old

and old became so new

as we declare boldly

that nobody's gonna tell

us how to love

on this day or ever again.

a gardener disquieted

I once could call each bud by name,

stems all aligned and lashed

together to be counted and arranged.

Some set of wings gingerly beat,

caught my blessings flat-footed,

and no longer can

I enumerate

these fickle petals,

having been readily agitated

by the unrelenting

brightness of your soul

Inconveniences

You say you don't want to explain to your children how two people of the same gender can love each other.

I don't want to explain to my children how some people would like to make laws that prevent them from doing so.

Ode to William

I grew up indoors
and was a little timid
(but not quite
the kind of meek
you are). Still,
resolute shoulders
and rough hands would
deny any conjecture that
you couldn't handle yourself
in a tough spot. I remember
a sermon about Jeremiah,
and thought about who you'd
bring to a banquet and could only
see the sinners you'd worked so
hard to bring home.

I swear,
I never saw anybody take it
to Satan until I'd seen the
kind of living you did.

Supplication to a Late Spring Moon

Sleeping machine
whose nine is your midnight
sharpen these wings
to make the most of my twilight.

Leave your dusks at the gate,
give the meagerest of your means
and we'll seek out the holiest
of these cosmic winter-dreams.

Take these eyes, O moon,
now their emerald into grey.
Spin my sidereal irises
into tarnished gold again.

And should I see the dawn,
in your marginal darkness,
May I ignore that turgid sun.
May I always be your likeness.

not poetry

Messing around with garage band a couple of days ago.

Tallest Man on Earth's "Won't be Found"

Lines Commemorating the Birth of David William Hixon III on April 11, 2011

I felt I hardly knew the light of earth
when I sang Eternal Father, Strong to Save
at your grandfather's funeral. Life went on,
but I had felt true loss for the first time.

And then there were marriages, an aunt-to-be
wed a dear friend of mine. Your father became
something of a mystery, suddenly seeming so
much my senior, though forty-eight days younger.

He wed a praiseworthy woman, friend to one I'd loved,
and I stood next to him, despite certain doubts.
Then suddenly you were coming, and friends were
to be fathers and mothers, and I could hardly see

that all the life your newborn April brought
would find its way to me, and flood this heart.

Elegy for Oscar

Striking each raised ebony planck
with the elegance of a fine, tall
lady at a rate which only hummingbird
wings might beat, this rather regal
individual inspired the subconscious
whistle of my long jazz generation.

They'd go like that, and like that,
and we said he didn't understand
with his trapeze acts and tightrope
tricks and fingers all full of whip-
cracks and lightning and he knew
he wasn't meant to do what we said
he should (or could).

I found this stirring

"We open the successive doors in Bluebeard’s castle because
“they are there,” because each leads to the next by a logic of
intensification which is that of the mind’s own awareness of
being. To leave one door closed would be not only
cowardice but a betrayal—radical, self-mutilating—of the
inquisitive, probing, forward-tensed stance of our species.
We are hunters after reality, wherever it may lead. The risk,
the disasters incurred are flagrant. But so is, or has been
until very recently, the axiomatic assumption and a priori of
our civilization, which holds that man and truth are
companions, that their roads lie forward and are
dialectically cognate….We cannot turn back. We cannot
choose the dreams of unknowing. We shall, I expect, open
the last door in the castle even if it leads, perhaps because it
leads, onto realities which are beyond the reach of human
comprehension and control. We shall do so with that
desolate clairvoyance, so marvelously rendered in Bartók’s
music, because opening doors is the tragic merit of our
identity."
-George Steiner

Timepiece

that old
frog-eyed glutton,
cinereous stubble
spanning the topographies
contiguous to a
stern half-pockmarked
proboscis and I wonder
what he'll say when
I ask him
when
we must meet.

Claudia Jean

O maximal Madame X
of apple-almond eyes,
without a conscience
or conscious thought
I would savor you as
the wind greedily licks
off willow leaves in
their deciduous winter
weakness. I would become
a certain Norgay only
to climb your yew,
shout from atop your
auburn peak, and ask
if you would so kindly
(in the midst of spring
hecklers, birds, bees, etc.)
be my loveliest autumn.

Solid Objects

Spun into some
sticky-ended polymer,
I melted into a wide-eyed
sleep and farmed for false
crystals into which
I would etch my name.
Absent light, I would
carve into the air a song
of myself, mold
a crust and
inner core of prostrate
testaments, filled
with lives I'd
lead with no slack
given to gray threads.
And in the stone
transcribe a fate
so worth my martyrdom
that I should be the
most inevitable saint.