Otherself

The giggling aching otherself

rising up in Celestine octaves

like a tidal wave

lifting through my lungs and brain.

The flesh of ruins

is easy to pierce and mark,

we make our own living pictures

upon the moving canvass

of virgin skin.

The only way to out run the past

is to remember,

to look back and know

where you've been.

The lambs of night

blow out the lights

of vigil candles

adorning forsaken alters,

I mourn the vanishing flame

by virtue of the inevitable dark.

A stranger among fine faces

in the emperors robes

goes privately parading

down Sunset Boulevard.

It is not the love songs sinking

into the magma of

the fabled tell-tale heart.

Unborn Ferns Breathing

she moved next to me

like red wine circles

staining the ivory silk below.

it was like an exhale of clove smoke

and the dialog of mountain sheltered wolves

singing to the amethyst studded pine branches.

and dangling from her lips

i struggled for breath

in a fist of urgent demands and fingers.

giant glaciers pass indifferently

through the harbor,

engulfed in the reverberating fog horn colloquy.

03:00 is beating a bounding heartbeat

just beyond my grasp somewhere.

I am ambling

through the chambers

where shadows ascend

and love can take you out

with a one inch punch.

I rose up on the vapors

of night time movements

now climbing and expiring,

and raining down over my head

like black coffee

being stirred by a spoon

in the absence of cream and sugar.

Starlight

fireflies are the guardians

that keep vigil through the rain

their steady glow must undergo

the things that never change.

Starlight is a bride of June

she pushes ivory after dark,

the songs she makes

the things we take

and plunge into our hearts.

There's nothing left to say today

no turning back this untimely dance

no regrets, just cigarettes

in love and war

and games of chance.

My beloved,

are your roaring, darling?

are you mending summer's dress?

your stow-aways are numbered days

in this madness you've confessed.

In passed lives you took a world by storm

touched by angels in the sky

your reprieve and reverie

continued when you died.

Starlight is a comet passing

she's goddamn brilliant on the page

and timeless through

these things we do

as everything begins to change.

Collide

Just before I engage in dreaming

I can hear the angels scheming

Voices from the trees cry ‘follow’

Within this medicine I swallow

My hands betray me in their writing

Because I can’t control what I’m igniting

Worlds inside me now colliding

My mind a mist in heat subsiding

The unrequited verses astound me

As my unthinkable thoughts surround me

Maybe I should just resolve to silence

be without this mad reliance

To send me into perfect dreams

And rise above this wave of screams

Maybe it needs to be let go

I’m haunted by these things I know.

Photography by Kore Gleason

Rise

In golden splinters of perfect timing

Carve me a new face and make me beautiful

Make me the goddess of angry angels

Make me a witness to no ones god

I want to be beautiful so make me dangerous

Like honey and sugar make me raw

Kiss my hands and follow me

To the crystal caverns where dragons speak

Where dreams are born and hours die

Collect me thorns from the lions feet

For tonight the ancient sphinx will pace

A wordless riddle with no conclusion

And bare her teeth to my face

For anguish and sadness seek no intrusion

So I must be reborn from the dark and the wild

Make me rise under your skilled hand

Take me away from this woeful world

Filled by a sorrow I can't understand.

Climbing the wall of discontent

Stars shed tears of youth misspent

Heavenly light, what world is this?

do you burn instinctively

do you burn to exist?

And what forlorn shapely shadow hovers

What darkness cloaked figure smothers

Embers in the cinders dying

Angels sighing, saints are crying

Crimson winged serpents flying

As my body just keeps climbing

Such woe is heavy of its own contempt

Alone in the crevice of ill consent

Blessed sweet eternity,

I hope she forgives

What glory floods the incessant life

If there not will to live?

Alkaline

and the river was a hurricane

beating along the shoreline

in song and fury

ready to meet her maker.

defiant and feverish;

she pressed me down

to the ocean floor

and begged me shamelessly

from the infinite crevices

only darkness fits into.

slipping and gripping

beneath the alkaline tides,

i am crushed by the days

i dream on the sly.

January's a blue moon rising

and Wednesday is no one's child

the notches on my headboard says

it's all been worth the while.

Anywhere But Here

anywhere but here, my love

take me far away tonight;

because i thought to tempt the darkness,

tears have taken out the lights.

drive me through the shooting stars

make me forget this no face place

take me within an inch of my life

i believe i need

your finest face.

2:22 and i'm pondering you

fingering the comfort

of the things i once knew.

it's haunting

and taunting inspiration,

crushing lyrics into baby stars

go stumbling to the liquor and perfume

and fight the physics

of who you are.

complicate me until it’s simple

pull me together with your threads

sew together the soil

to embrace the sun seeds in my head.

because i know the sun will rise

and i'll be on that train,

but if you come to me tonight

nothing will ever be the same.

there's gravity between us

chemistry loose above

it matters not

this woeful world;

we do not choose,

we only love.

Latitude

The marauding puppet show before me

chases chariots into dew drops

and your slippered sunrise

makes my sunset reckoning

fold into the shapes of doves

departing from the olive tree.

Delighted by the charcoal snake charming

and the foothills of ivy shadows,

I delve deep past the obvious

and into the echoing chambers

of felonious thinking.

You so graciously sculpt the bones

and I humbly start to write

on the ivory skeleton

of vertical Moscow latitude.

Joey

the cheerful clinking of coffee mugs always reminded me of how my keys sound when i’m coming in from the night or the rain. joey always hated jingling noises, said they reminded her of words with too many syllables. josephine elizabeth walker schlaeganfritz especially hated having a name with four parts, let alone the fact that it ended in schlaeganfritz. so she went by joe or joey which i thought was cute. it was like she resented the loss of precious time every time she felt like a word was unreasonable long. time lost was a sin to her, and she spent much of her time on the road to redemption. time promised away in carefully decorated boxes was foolish. time saved was a precious commodity and digital watches are of the devil because they hack into time, chopping away in digital silence. god knows she’d much rather spare some change than spare the time.

but i remember joey in the garden of roses and lotus. her laughter; something about the way her soft, white belly would rise and fall while she was on her back laughing up at the roaring stars, fireflies kissing her eyelashes... i swear it made all the blossoms bloom in the dead of nightfall. hell, her laughter could make blossoms bloom during nuclear fucking winter. and it was her kind of beautiful, uncompromising and altruistic. the hurricane season brought with it an indian summer and i remember the matchbooks from dive bars in the city i pilfered with a fake id. we use to layout by the train tracks after midnight to feel the ground rumble beneath us while we looked for shooting stars. when the perseids came that year, i was flat on my back in ripped levis with a bottle of jack daniels in one hand, a joint in the other, howling at the moon until my voice gave out. we laughed and laughed in an out of breath rapture. she reached over and drew what felt like a word on my arm. i pushed her hair out of her face to see the moonlight on her flushed cheeks, she put a hand over my heart and then we succumbed to the silence.

sometimes i think back and finish the paragraph we were unraveling. i think about that last word, stretched across my skin. but that’s what makes us poets, and as poets we are kin.

Rats in The Walls

So I've decided to go back and start hammering out the short stories and fractured fairytales...

somewhere out there, in the cloak of dusk to twilight, an insomniac is drinking black coffee.

when the train left, it shook my windows and left me listless on the platforms. my mind was betraying me, racing back and forth between empath and psychopath in a manic depressive fervor. “whiter shade of pale” is inexplicably ambling on in my head, flooding my senses like cold iridescent neon around soupy saxophone solos. it reminds me of being sixteen in Virginia Beach. i’d bought Annie Lennox’s Medusa album with money i'd saved mowing lawns. it’s a song that washes over people in a way that makes everyone beautiful by the understanding that true beauty is the acceptance of the ugliness too.

sometimes when a someone dwells in your for so long, their fingerprints grow on us like thick, gorgeous ivy behind our eyes. you have to be careful to not let that lush green spread and spill out too wildly, or it will completely overtake you like rats in the walls. i have resorted to finishing the final chapters caped and masked in the night somewhere, dreaming of typewriters. and i still want to put her face in all my pictures. that feeling is my penance and my personal heaven and will never ever be gone from me. she will be why i am never alone and doomed to a life of sleepless nights. she was no demon lover, she was no friend of mine. friends and lovers come and go predictably. she comes and goes as she pleases.

the november sky held out like something better was coming along but december and january entombed Baltimore City in the white shroud. i was spending my days eating things from cans and watching reruns on the internet signal i was stealing from the neighbors. i’d tried writing but it barely made a dent in the daylight hours. it was going to be awhile before i’d truly write again and i knew it then. the word “dry spell” makes the whole thing sound a lot worse than it really is, i think. it makes a recess in writing seem like it could be compared to a large atmospheric phenomenon creating oppressive weather conditions. there are times for writing and times for living. i don't live through my writing, my writing lives in me and it took me a long time to realize that not everyone is like that. sometimes the world sings back to you and you can devour all that beauty in heaping mouthfuls, but sometimes you have the search the dust for the smallest trickle. i don’t think she thought the words were coming back to me, and i was too low in what i’d conserved to spare the extra words to try to explain it to her. it was a hard winter, and one in which i had all ready resigned myself to solitude. i wasn’t expecting her to slip through that trap door down to my doorstep ever again, but i wasn’t surprised when she did. it felt like a benevolent ghost of bad timing. i frantically searched for the words and the rhythm, flailing around the platform as the final boarding call is being broadcasted. sometimes i think about sending her ten love songs and note apologizing for being late. she was begging me to dance with her but the muscles of my mind had turned to tar. by spring time she’d had enough and left again, wrapped in a letter of unnecessary regret. i have learned that the words come back in their own time like spiders scheming in the corners.

Doppelganger

love holds no regard
for anything but it's own interests.
she is an extraordinary machine
of exactitude and fire.
what cradles us is also
that which swings the blade.
she will offer
a brave new world
steady things of temporal importance
and she will burn your house down
faster than a New York minute.
love is a doppelganger;
just when her likeness comes into focus,
a careless blink
will wash it all away
.... and the feeling she leaves you with
you will chase after like hell.
she burdens herself not
with the responsibility of proof
because her existence is lawless.
but you can find her attestation
in the placement of things;
a lion in the ocean,
shoes by the bed,
the blood in our flesh,
and the tessellation of our souls.

Skeleton Keys

On the train and feeling perilous
My mind slides
and I am precariously on your breath;
don't hide, my love
don't hide my love
Forge it into new shapes
like skeleton keys.

I miss the burn of moonshine
but I'm am fingering the bottle
and tasting for tremors
Guilty and giddy and so far gone...
Inhale deep of dewy dressings
as I drive the clamoring to your chest.

Exhale now,
as I draw the poison out
and lick clean the afterglow.
I write of you and me
in the sycamore tree forever
breathing deep the mayhem
like the sweat of our souls dancing.

I run my blade against this friction
and I draw
the blood of fiction
you're made of feathers
hot sweet addiction
as my body strains to listen
for dialogue caught in the crosshairs
for an echo in the empty
my breath is ragged
from sleeping alone at night.

I grow tender in your hands
as my own smash things
I shouldn't be touching,
and I don't want to be better
I don't want to be tamed
I don't want to be reasoned with.

There's nothing in this sentience
that could hold me back
from screaming out
and prying into your name;
feed me to the beast
bury me in the surf
take up with me
and the fireside piano
when the liquor and night
has been
unkind.

Begin

Lay your weary body down
gently over the marigolds, lover.
Exhale the turmoil
inhale this solace
and then let me take your breath away.
I would like nothing more
than to slide down the railing
and spoon you like ginger;
Weave my fingers into you,
we become each other
as I cradle your body
with my heart.
My skin is your skin
against all odds we begin
...again.
Who could have expected this?
The late nights
the flickering light
the will to live
and dying rites
kindred spirits in a world
of star crossed lovers.