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The snow is heavy on the cedars they bend under the weight they wait for spring with patience in their boughs like me they are waiting if I could commune with them I would tell them what I have seen I would describe the smell of the air in distant lands tell them of their brothers and sisters and cousins that grow just like they do and shade me and shelter me in the same kind ways I would tell these trees look now far off in the distance endlessly beyond what you can feel in your leaves there is a thundercloud I met and she is coming I think someday though she may never actually arrive I have seen her riding high over the ridges in the north lost and lovely and brimming with rain but she may never come she may fizzle out where she floats now and that’s okay too the trees and I both know that the rain always seems to fall in the wrong years anyway never when it is needed or wanted or pined for there are rings of drought within us all I cut myself open once to check and sure enough there they were every bad year diagrammed inside of me for all inquiring eyes to see but now we stand together the cedars and me bending under falling snow in this oppressive yet thrilling weather we are imaging a spring that is not that far from springing at all.

The dog has come outside now carousing in the snow he leaps and rolls and wags his tail a majestic yellow hurricane he has taught me much in these short days of play of spontaneity of being just being here now now now momentarily and forever present these are things that had to be beaten out of me beaten out of all of us by that sham of a life by education by jobs by relationships the awful cross they nail you to called responsibility but it is not responsibility at all it is a nasty trick that takes so much joy out of living out of loving out of being and I have a hard time understanding it now the way everyone shackles themselves chains and restrains themselves they call it freedom in some backwards wisdom that escapes me but everyone else understands somehow they talk about it like it is something they possess like it is something that can actually be had I do not believe it can be but I am learning which is to say relearning some old tricks happily receiving instruction in the ways of being wild of having zeal for life once more and I thank my blond four legged hero for his joyful simplicity for showing me what life really looks like without the ostentatious playacting of humanity without the garish decoration and false charm of my slavish culture hanging over everything I am shouting thank you thank you thank you from the highest peak of my heart as he turns his head to me saying woof.

I respond in kind I always do but I must return now to the trees rooted and fixed they are so unlike me though I suppose they are in essence like most and I am still a little bit sorry or should be sorry for never planting my feet like the rest of them for allowing myself to go where the wind blows entrusting it with my body and my soul trusting it perhaps erroneously but generously all the same I look at the trees and I say you know one of us will not be here when this snow melts when the robins return when the flowers climb up out of their graves and the green comes back into everything I will give myself back to the wind though I hope to see and speak with you again someday but if that never happens we still had our moments these moments wilting under the weight of the snow cold and doleful I wish I could share with you the sensation of the wind growing impatient with me perhaps now how the chill runs up from under my jacket climbing the scaffolding of my rib cage with wet crinkled hands before throwing itself down my throat with the snow hoary and tingling it makes a mess of my pink lungs in my mind I know there are things you could tell me too I want to know everything I do and someday I will but right now I see the icicles growing inside of me I have decided it is time to go indoors but as always the dog may do as he pleases and he does and in doing so he shows me I have still a long way to go I know I know woof I say to him smiling as we both wag our tails and break for home.

the night slithers through the trees and
the palms droop
with the bad news

I am still here, bloody and
picking my teeth out of the gutter

still wearing my grandmother’s necklace
the one she made out of piano wire and neglect and
never properly tuned

it sounds somewhere on the scale between forgetting and forgiveness,
depending on the temperature, the humidity,
the barometric pressure of doubt, etc.

but it never quite fit me and
I will probably hock it soon

and my mailbox is overflowing with love letters and pipe bombs and
rejection slips and
those poems about fault lines
all the overblown formulations that never could pin down and describe
the clumsy wild trembling of a human heart
or the need for matter to burst and blow itself apart
momentarily seduced by entropy and the finality of doom

easily half of those packages are stamped
“RETURN TO SENDER”
but my delicate eyes don’t recognize my handiwork
and those rhyming couplets and complex fuses
strike me as too dangerous to defuse

besides, my fingers are broken
swollen and blushing with violence

I couldn’t disarm a tea kettle now

last night I hammered out every fleshy digit
trying to nail down my new theory
concerning the arithmetic of loss

this morning I managed to fashion ten crude splints from the debris
what little I could salvage out of the wreck we left behind:

some wooden popsicle sticks that you compassionately sucked all of the chocolate flavored splinters from – thoughtfully leaving the knock-knock jokes intact, somehow (thank you!)

cotton I tore from the comforter we made into a canvas and covered heroically with broad sloppy strokes of sweat and cum and grit teeth, our endless exuberance and so much cheap wine

the electrical tape we jokingly bought when the pills lost their efficacy and even dying seemed played out and hopeless
hoping we might finally bind the faulty wiring of our brains with a material we could feel between our fingers and tear up with our teeth

all of the rainbow-colored thread from the sewing kit your older sister gave you
that year you finally crawled out of bed after a whole savage month spent speaking only of scars
and gravity wells
crying radical new theories into pillowcases
about the physical properties of light and the definition of obtuse

and I’ve buried these purple-casket hands of mine
inside the mittens you knit for me that winter
when the cold marched in like a conquering army
and warmth was so fucking hard to come by

I remember wearing them every morning in the kitchen
fumbling to make the coffee without the free play of my fingers
never once regretting the mess or trouble caused

it was that same winter you tilled the soil of my self for three days straight
your feverish tongue raking through muck until you found all the better parts of me
and finally explained through exhausted, enthusiastic tears how you were planting a garden in there, how you wished for me to bloom

the dent is still in my side from where you wrenched your foot into my ribcage
and earnestly pried your muddy teeth from the collapsed mineshaft of my throat,
all those greasy fluids of love gushing onto the carpet with your relieved squealing laughter

I am laughing now, too, but in a different way
I guess it’s just funny how far away some things can seem…

here, from the lopsided seat of my grandfather’s recliner,
where after surviving two wars and three children
he finally succumbed to the violent plague of day-to-day
and smoked and drank himself into an ambulant grave,
I pause for a moment to ponder the staggering mass of stars
and the impossible heights of
absurdity

from where I sit, I am starting to perceive living
as carrying an incalculable weight
down an unlit staircase of hushed instability
struggling to balance each fragile moment,
every choice and attenuate consequence,
with no light switch, no railings,
and untold miles of snagging nails

it all seems so unreal to me

I suppose I know all that I owe
to trajectory
to chance
to fear
to the chorus of crashing of branes

which is nothing at all,
and plenty never could be

but there is this sense
that there is something I still owe you

some price I have yet to pay
in a currency I have not discovered

I will keep searching

in the meantime,
here is hoping

that this

may count for something

 

 

 

It has been ages, I know.

 

 

 

The deer outside watch me
with their large,
sad eyes.
I do not know
what it is
they are
thinking.

(My eyes are open
but I am dreaming
of long blond hair
beautiful legs
soft laughter
apple pie
and Halloween.)

The deer outside
watch me
as I swivel
my seat
and offer my throat
once more
to the rough hands of
mediocrity.