no more

I cannot bear this light. put your hand

over my eyes and tell me the sun

is no more, hold the pennies

in place until my blue eyes

are stained green with the thin urgency

of grass growing in the moonlight. tell me,

do the blades hunger any less for softness

.

crush

crush the fruit of your lips

into me before the last

breath of this land is gone.

kiss the mouth that lies and

drink the new wine.

maybe I'll remember
your name, maybe I'll scratch
new lines in the dirt, or
maybe I'll find an ax so I can reach the noose.


let's boil this down to a better purity
of malice, two small deaths
irredeemable to any surrender. Lets
be relentless in our mistakes



 .

tonight

Tonight the only headlight squints into the desert passing at it's own pace. The motor thudding a fetal rhythm. White lines are faint suggestions while mile markers peer out of the darkness, specters to remind me of the distance between two ends of nowhere.

I didn't mean to steal your necklace, but you hair had tangled in it and my hands were convenient. While you complained and danced I opened the latch, and pulled the hair until it broke free; you were gone. A gold filigree heart now spins from the rear view mirror catching the pale light of the dash.

The speedometer needle shakes in the vicinity of the truth, the gas gauge refuses to give a fuck and has fallen through the red becoming less than empty, and the clock is satisfied with 3:36.

There is a styrofoam cup of of what used to be coffee, I rinse the residue of smoke, stale booze, and pointless talk from my mouth with a swallow.

Your mouth a red blur drunk on laughter swims through the stream of your hair. Wearing the dress that shows your collar bones, arrowheads shaped from shadows indicating the direction to your heart. I cannot afford to think that smile will ever touch me, my poverty is complete.

The animals come out at night, cloaked among the weeds that encroach on the road, colorless beggars skittish in prayer for any meal

A pile of rocks marks the turn into the twin ruts through the barbed wire, the place of bomb craters and wasted munitions, the place I sleep.

.

digging

digging holes in the permafrost
on nights when mosquitoes are
lost in the wind.
I am hoping the mud
and ice will restore the rawness.
my hands have been
too long in the sky hunting
the light that curved around you,
they are stained a kind of blue
that is lost anywhere else.


the wind tugs at my beard
almost pulling my gaze past
the past, beasts frozen in their
demise waiting for release
from this idea that the past
must remain



.

the burden buried beneath skin

1
under these pelts, somewhere beyond
the prodding roots I am untouchable. the undergrowth of a new skin
knots itself to the virtue of darkness,
safety from the suffocating light.


2
a kiss between weeks and the weight of warmth, the dream of lips and legs held in the embrace of winter.


3
like the sand, wet
from the rivers tongue your skin hides things as well,
there are the stones gathered in your softness, worried
smooth in the fingers of lovers, that knew how to remove edges
but not the weight of desire.


4
I hoard what I can not take; more emptiness,
never arbitrary in its completeness



.