Use me, you say.
Only, the coat
doesn't wear
the man.

I'm no actress.
I could love you
without intermission:
but I'll never even try
to learn a script and I
have a habit of firebombing
wardrobes.

It gets messy,
staying in character
while sleeping, while
shoveling ash, while counting
tithes to your memory of self.

Every button buttoned,
fly
down.
Wears its terrible
poemteeth
like costume jewelry:
says nothing
in the most ingenious

Fascion.

Mocks movement of spirit
(plebian),
proclaims communication
neither required
nor permitted
in this medium.

If you tear these pages out
and burn them, they'll combust in alien
spectra of light, and no
heat.

Who writes these dead ( Read more... )

I very nearly joined the ranks of the superstitious last night.

At the group home where I work, one of our clients suffers frequent seizures.  He has a marvelous device implanted in his chest, which, when a strong magnet is passed over it, sends an electrical signal to the part of his brain that sustains the misfire of synapses, thereby ( Read more... )

This quiet landscape is a deafening tempest
when self cannot empty self into the bowl of the sky.

I woke crying and estranged from God.
He came back whispering patience over the radio:

The large hadron collider has been activated.
Strange comfort.

If inextricability is the letter of the law,
inquiry is its spirit.

A few things are simple.
Fewness, itself, ( Read more... )

 Remember the jeweled lizards
we collected from the falling barn
behind our sliding glass haven of rattling
A/C and Benny Hill reruns, our six-month
summer, our green hell?  The wood
strangled for miles, dotted with frogs
like mildew on the wall-to-wall carpet
of chlorophyll, the tunnels of shade
reeking of leaf mold and wrathful spirits:
murdered slaves; ( Read more... )

from the Gospel of Thomas:

70)  Jesus said, "If you bring forth what is within you, what you
bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is
within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."

1.  I belch flame so that I will not burn.
     The ragged veils of your objections
     are flammable.

2.  What we didn't find under ( Read more... )

what
protest of crickets,
what fear?

i couldn't love you anyway:
not
after
bleeding
to death
on the sword
of your spine.

i hope you find home.
(i do.)

please stop
sending postcards
from my grave.

i'm only writing back this once.
it's just an empty envelope
addressed to you.
                                                            for Michael    

1.

stop asking me to prove you're beautiful,
like asking me to prove there's a god,
as if anyone were big enough to question it.

you have your own two hands
with which to cup the grail of your face.
there is no grace in me, that has eluded you.

perhaps i took you wrong.  perhaps
you only asked me to repeat myself.
woman: you're a song, an instrument, a ( Read more... )

.
it is you, my wood sprite, my
shimmering leaf and strong
root.  don't tremble
(unless it is the earth that moves you,
unless it is the wind, unless it is the bloodsap
thrumming in your concentric heart)
come slip out of your safe house with me
unseen on warm nights.
you've watched moths crowd an incandescent
light, and wished yourself the moon
( Read more... )

for Erik

Deluge.
My cup runneth over
and over.  I can't
remember why I'm holding it.

Debris swims
around my knees:
there's the shelf my son made
in shop class, still unhung;
there's the heart my friend
keeps slipping into my pocket,
thinking I'll knit it a sweater or
gild it for display before the
not-friends she covets;
there's the ( Read more... )