Hilltop

Perched precarious, on the only hill in this town

Ask me to come down 

As if I had a choice 

Shooting stars are space debris 

Mostly falls into the ocean

That's where most Earth trash ends up too 

A composition of detritus and coincidence 

Some interstellar lazy art project

Perched precarious, craning to see further 

Allowing myself to enjoy every sunset 

With no expectations 

It's not hope, exactly 

It's not as if I had a choice

Except, if I did, I suspect I'd be perched here anyway 

Shooting stars strike the Earth every day

Seems like nobody ever gets hit 

Okay maybe a couple people have

But it's not us 

Arms slender and strong 

Bamboo shoots 

Burst up at acute angles 

They are social but like to clump 

Soon they'll be big enough to shade themselves from the brutal desert sun

Until then I'll fly shade sails 

To buy them time

There is only one left

Out of the seven

tephra in common

the volcanic fire was impressive 

plumes of ash and all 

slow settling pyroclasts

how you knew the true names of everything 

The hymns of their bodies 

their heartbeats little drums 

lapilii falling back to Earth 

sighing sleepy nestled home

pocket universe

my job is to be your pocket universe 

as you told me one mellow strange evening

to keep and tend all your stars and planets 

And keep track

of all the constellations you invented 

and all the names you gave me 

that have never left your mouth

And your vast collection of books and music

Two sections compete constantly to be the largest:

Your Favorite Books

and

Perfect Last Songs 

Integument Number 42

These scars are a gift

(yes it's maybe not completely healthy

to mix injury as optimism)

I leave my left side unmarked 

Awaiting your next creation. 

I will remain off-balance 

Asymmetrical 

Until then 

(which is not my preference but it's what I'm choosing)

My skin is a canvas of maybes 

A thrill of delight 

There's still so much of me

left for you

Every ending

"If this is an ending, it's a better one," I'd said on the last day I saw you. 

If we'd left it there, maybe it would have been. 

But I don't think so. 

"Endings are foretold by beginnings," I've said several times

To no one

To hear how it sounds when it lives in the air

It sounds profound

Which is why I mistrust it. 

Sometimes a story takes on a life of its own.

And we have to decide to persist 

Or rather, insist,

That this is not Our last page. 

relics

Scouring the globe 

Ocean to desert

For trinkets, charms, amulets, fetishes, talismans, minkisi

Whatever bits of captured magics that have survived 

Pool them together 

in a forest glen 

next to a moonlit lake

Chained with copper wire

plates of hammered zinc

Voltaic piles

under the right Star Signs

ancillary

perfunctory 

futile 

probably 

still, it's something to try

I've tried doing nothing

and that didn't work 

All that's left

is everything else

keepsake

She promised she would tell me 

If she was going to leave me forever 

Although now that I recall that moment

(as I can recall every moment spent with her) 

She never specified exactly how

Puffy white cumulonimbus shaped like an anatomically-correct shattering heart?

Sliver of moonlight breaking through a blackout curtain? 

A recall on my exact prescription of antidepressants?

Clever girl

She must have known I'd know her anywhere

And march on

Despair sucking my boots into the mud

Can't stop moving

In case I'm wrong

(as I've been wrong so many times before) 

And she's still there, somewhere, waiting

haunted houses

They exist, I'm sure, and will exist

Not that it matters much

What is time, to a ghost 

Nature will reclaim all houses eventually

And ghosts don't seem to haunt glen or vale as often

Property perhaps 

An imaginary bond

Spectral fingers clutching phantom deeds

Signatures binding fates 

Absurd 

That death would shackle us so uncreatively 

the tree

The tree in the backyard

Flourished like death

Blossoms all fallen

Bare branches Reaching upwards 

A reminder that the more beautiful the life

The fewer can have it

integument

"Integument" means my skin

It's hard to imagine a worse-sounding word for what it is 

My outer layers 

Adorned but unarmored 

Mostly soft but rough in parts

Poets yammer on about the feelings deep inside

But what about the middle feelings

Brackish, where rivers meet oceans

And the fish that can live in both

Their integument grew scales 

arid

In the desert, he survived on the dew of her memory 

and crushed dried mesquite seed pods

He knew where she was

To go to her unbidden would be...uncouth 

and he loved her too much to do that

He walked along the ancient crumbling brick canals

His third-favorite sound was clattering masonry

Someday he'd have a yard of 

cobblestone

red brick 

and walls of gabion

un-mortared so the grass could grow through the cracks

If it ever rained again

Soldier Once

i was a soldier once 

and War is mostly waiting

i saw lots of sunrises and sunsets 

and blocks of midnight hours 

a marathon of intermittent sleeps

dreaming and waking can blend into each other

if you're not careful

i didn't want to be a soldier after all

it turned out

but the training has been useful to me

there will be doubt and despair 

and hours lying in the freezing muck 

of a hastily-dug fighting position

fear is learned and maybe it can be unlearned 

it probably won't be though

the panic will push out reason

when the training isn't there

every army sleepwalks

bulwarks and rubbish heaps 

but War is mostly waiting 

over mountains, under hills

you're out there somewhere waiting too 

and I am a soldier still

Attic Library

Assume an archaic, dreamlike repose

Old bookshelves with grooves in the grain

Favored volumes wearing runners into the wood 

If every tome were taken

boxed and bound and bonded

The shelves would keep their memory

In the Morse and Braille of cell walls

A map or star chart

Leading back to you

Ambient loop 9

Listening to dark jazz and artificial ambient rainstorm loops

Makes for bad poetry and confuses the hounds

melancholy reverb hides the hesitation of the next note

the rush to get to right now

until it's gone

Fake rainstorm was a real rainstorm once

someone remembers it

recorded it, trapped it in the now

stuck like all the rest of us

raindrops strike steel cables

Makes for bad poetry and confuses the hounds

foolish symmetry

All the things I want to tell you all the deleted words they must go somewhere

chasing a foolish symmetry 

consistency will come later

every language is at least two

whirring bus wheels

the hiss of brakes

fraying

sepia streetlights make us a zoetrope

sleeping in each other's arms

I sleep less deeply 

yet I awaken refreshed

we only ever had the nights

warmer in the shadows

clouds are a bedspread

curling and uncurling in your hands

we only ever had the nights

the day so conquered

feathers in the breeze

rebar rusting in crumbling concrete

muffled laughter and a late lunch

nights are meant to be stolen

readings

I turn to you every night

my Book of Sand

lean close to feel your breath

to listen to the story of you

colder and warmer music lilting

while green-eyed cats knead the bedclothes 

birch-bark paper leaves 

strands of autumn red hair

bookmark pages I'll never see again

save the runes etched in my mind

in one of the thousand outcomes

where I'm found without you

Salvage

Free will became a list of chores

hurling sentiments against the lath and plaster walls to see what sticks

Or falls and heaps 

ceramic tile skittering shards

already cut me abdomen deep

gritted teeth

hissing curses

wading through what could have been a home

dragging detritus, whirling wake

eddies of possibilities, maybe

For someone else, probably

everything is useful maybe

just not right now 

Put pressure on the wound

resist remineralizarion

brushing soft against my cheek 

Liberated simple nutrients

someday, soon

just not right now

dream floating

Bedroom window shatters and purple flowers blossom from the pieces of broken glass

Wished we'd been together forever but I learned so much when I was missing you

Closing windows too early

Keeps the cold out

The drapes can be blankets

Erect a fort against the sunlight

Stuff the chinks in the armor

With crumpled pages

faded watercolor landscapes

and endless rough drafts