Study of Loss


We spend our lives failing—and it's not failing—

it's getting good at something no one else

cares about.


Listen. While I'm down here

the coins thump my skull

in random intervals, like tiny welts

of fire.

As if I somehow ended up at the bottom

of a wishing well.


And I'm not tasked to lift anyone else's dreams

upward.

Not even my own. I'm just down here

to study loss.


And what you learn... in the end... is that you're never losing.

You're just earning the strength to give up properly.




A Way Through


When a rock earns

his eye because water

drips in the same

spot for decades,


there is a way through.


And if that drip is not

a constant tear,

but the sweat of a cloud

that never gave up.



Firelight


I am incapacitated

by the small stuff.


Like the rage of imprisonment.

So I dream in the sweat

of every monk

who remains


in the bedroom

of a mind's isolation,

chanting some primal

tongue into its own firelight.



Obscurity


Will there be a skylight in that place

to hear the rain unlock and shatter?

Will there be women smearing


gold across each other's mouths—

to indicate where they become the openings

to lanterns.


Or. Is it dark in obscurity.

With bows of cedar pinning the chest

to loam until


someone kneels beside you and says, Woman, please. 

Obscurity oils itself in the sheen of

ten thousand suns. All anyone has to do

is open a book and touch.




Part Myth


For now it's just me un-welding ringneck doves from my

throat, wedging crescent moon to collarbone to glow like the enamel

on a midnight whale.


I ache.

To pour sunlight upon your chest so gold it would tear

a hole right through you.  And the other side

would be part myth, wondering if you'd


need to pack your belongings into boxes, move to Mount Olympus—

is cardboard even allowed there?


I ache.

To turn these haunted years into libraries full of meadow

song, so when a reader enters he forgets the nonsense of

books and unravels over the orange of an open poppy.


But who are we kidding.  These years I've made a grave into

a boat and I sail around the yard inspecting the lives of magpies. 


It should end well.  It always ends well.  It's a poem we took

to a training class to mimic the sea.




Troubled Artists


Roll the piano off the cliff,

call it music when it lands.

Out of

my skin.

Lightning bolts weave drunk between teeth

or keys mistaken as mouth.


Smoke rises from lips

wrapped in prison walls of mahogany

shattered on craggy rock—


erased of longing.

To be elsewhere.


The green sea shackled to shore

playing the wreckage until

it is drowned.

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