Careful

Your tread is as delicate as a factory needle and your wise guidance is as bloodless as every other man's attempt at conquering his dreams without ego.

Careful.

I am over fathers. Fathers are all the same.

Dear Child

I am afraid to write. The tapping of these keys will surely wake you.

Tomorrow I will see my daughter.

I have been like a prisoner that no one cares to hear the pains of.

I am a bad mother to allow separation at all.

I am the Earth and the depression of the sky is my dutifully accepted failure
while the night is my scrambling apology.

Microwave your puppies in my dream time.
Destroy lives with the flip of a wrist and have your heart broken over endless knees.

Love.

Just let me love you as your mother and all will be right.

I have destroyed myself in every way, on every night since you said goodbye

And tomorrow, I get to make it right.

Charred lemons and Vented gas cans

My second stepfather accelerates carefully from a stopped position and makes a relaxed dumb face as he doo wops notes and echoes the sentiment with his thumb on the steering wheel. "Boy, I'll tell you... the Moody Blues were underrated... "

My first stepfather would roll down his window at an intersection and tell the guy next to us that he was a jackass. There wasn't any music playing, because it was an older vehicle and the radio was never needed.

My mother may have played the radio when we took the car. We only took the car so that we could buy groceries. We drove from the country to Kleins grocer and sometimes we had two carts, and I always felt strange about that. Like, why are we buying so much food? We bought so much food because we were only allowed to go into town once every two weeks with my stepfather's permission. I would be rewarded with little debbie star crunches. Not a box of 12 to last 2 days... A box of 12 to last two weeks for all three or four of us.

My escape was scooping a bottle of powdered gatorade and licking it slowly out of the scoop in front of the television afterschool. There were 7 channels. Scooby Doo was the real deal.

Stepfathers have nothing to do with the struggle I am facing right now. I only mention them because.. they do matter in the scheme of processing wtf is going down here.

My younger brother is .. well... my little brother is very ill. I don't like to say ill. I don't even like to say what his affliction is, because if I say it... then no one knows wtf I am talking about and even if they do-- they have no fucking idea what its like to deal with a loved one who suffers it, let alone try to relate in any real terms....

I am a mother.

I am a ripped apart mother.

I replay images of my daughter touching me with practiced reassurance to let me know that she is my only daughter and I am her only mother. She is miles away, with her father as we institute this visitation for the first time with me losing since a dissolution.

She is amazing.

I know that I have done the right thing to be here. I cannot imagine being without what I have gained, but every day that passes seems to bring with it haystacks of loss that needle me with incredible guilt.

I maintain at a job where boys a decade younger than I exercise their "superior" fine dining talons and humiliating me is par for the course. It's not an easy surge for them, because I will scrape the walls of any sewer if everyone can breathe easier and I will pretend that a beet is a radish if it means someone else will feel bigger for just one second in a day, because I know what it means to feel as if you have lost.

I received a fortune today when I ate. "Your love of Life can Carry you Through any circumstance."

What will my hate do for me?

With a daughter thousands of miles away, and a young brother who depends on me because the entire Universe is trying to capture and torture him.. (and I do mean the entire universe).. it's hard to swallow a bite.

I can though. I can swallow, and I continue to bite, because I have you.

Tomorrow.. Anger and the usual, until I talk to you or see you.

Do what you will with my memory. Everyone will know it was yours to do with whatever you wanted by the time it matters.

Handsome Thoughts

I think that one of my favorite things to learn about a new friend, is that they don't have children... because their dogs are their children. You know. Because having a dog is the same as having a child.

Leonidas

A thunderous applause leads our hero down.


like a wrestler with harder drives than the road allows
take my love--raw edges and all, with romantic abandon,
into the catacombs.

I will not only allow him to hate you, but I encourage him to destroy you .


and not an invalid swallow inside his throat, could scratch it like I will.

I advised you. Just then.

I can't put my finger on it.

The people who say certain other people shouldn't write, are fucking dumb-as-shit A Holes.

Topic change.

Next, you'll be mowing down whole tribes, but first you hunt the community.
That's original and you can eat your own proud shit over it, all fucking day.

Topic change.

You'll roll over and play dead. And I will revel in that fantasy with you.

Am I angry? Is that poetry? Is it news? Is it, I'm sick to fucking death of being the cause of every inch of pain around me for miles on end? Bet on it... and what would you bet on it, by the way?

You want to drive me to a reaction?

I would die in torture before throwing out a fraction of the bile you did yesterday in the name of loving him, but I'm not you.

And you sure as fuck ain't me, Sugar.

Cry over that. Its all you'll get.

Make your way.

Sometimes you have to be beaten within an inch of your life, to appreciate the days when you just get your face kicked in.

gulls

It takes forever for the sun to set.

There are no street lamps. No stars. No moon. Just blackness. In the distance I can see a red light and a green light at the entrance to the harbor set out for navigation. I catch glimmers off of the water when a cloud ends, until the one right behind it takes that glimmer away.

It would be peaceful were it not for the sounds of a riot taking place out in the blackness. Hundreds of birds from different families are talking to each other. Fighting over resources, fighting for dominance, fighting for a mate, fighting with their babies… Fighting. Their intensity is so strong, that I wonder if they couldn't just kill me if I crashed their tribal council this evening. If I just walked up the beach, with my pupils fully dilated and me still stumbling through the ebony, then out into the frigid sea-- right into the thick of them, what would they do to me? What would I allow? Would I have any control at all?

I heard wolves the other night. No chance of seeing them because it was so dark. A wolf howl seems to come from no one direction and limits itself to no harmony. It goes right through you and you feel it as much as you hear it. Every howl has a visual story accompanying it. The sound immediately arrests you and you want to hear more. The hungry choir stabs at your illuminated shadow in the doorway and you can make out nothing before you. So beautiful. So eerie.

When I turn to go back inside, I am like a child again. Chilled when I turn my back, I close the door quickly--as the heart races. It seems an eternity with the Unknown screaming rapidly toward my defiance, and I leave the night to work its potent magic without me, before the sun comes to radiate resolutions and exchange pains.

AAOx4

I bought a house on an Aleutian Island, on the first island if heading south down the chain from the mainland. I bought that motherfucking house.

Midnight and Dusk along with Tonight, crash delivered to me, a pitch black entry way. I peered out into the heaviest of ebonies..

I war intensely for keeping the glow within me going steady but still I find myself rapidly growing dim.

Drowning out the thud of an exposed and defeated tell-tale heart... I sacrificed my turn at Oblivian, under that blackness and I reluctantly headed out into that chill, because I was not prepared to be grateful if I had to wait around another 8 million eons and play cozy.

Voices coming from the cave behind me were swallowed into the fog as I listened and wished them each an eternal well.

I delicately fingered my way along that poorly illuminated razor wire into the safety of night. I didn't care who had sights or illumination on me. I do constantly imagine that I am in your salvage yard, and that's all I am willing to give on it right now.

Rust was my favorite color and navy blue.

I like the way light could always break through corrosion, and how the blues appear to be never overtaken unless by their own.

There is no love and no shade as volatile.

Now, every color and every silence drags behind it a Universal army of
Embers from you.

Embers of you.

You.

sea monster I

There are things about me that I have yet to discover.

In the past year I feel as though I have been all around the planet
swathed in clear & gauzy duct tape
treading muddy waters with heavy salt on the lips
keeping me and holding me hard against riding the waves
deaf to the rush of violence around me
every action peeled out is a thunderous sound-off
of richly technical eye witness.

Not quite drowning but sickeningly sure of the meter of every inhalation.
Seeing but not hearing the tentacles of enormously brave and destitute creatures beating
and battering static blue hued and vacant civilizations beneath a storm of torrid tides
just off of the shoreline... the jagged edges that smoothly outline my stabbingly desperate embrace, mean nothing-even if beautiful. Though my perimeter could be cried out as horrible when activated, at least it is certainly fragile. Inside, I am not truly terrible. I am soft. I am comfortable. I am sitting at the fire of my will. I am sure.

The creatures, their battle and their targets... are all my own. My very own. I call them.

Every exhalation is a drawn out pain that threatens each peace and me as it strokes into slumber the paranoid beast--with careful and crude tenderness... sleep. forget. die. and never return.

My God, My hope, My Word... and their dashed and peppered muscular atrophy grow imaginary limbs and pierce the sky with red red arms... in my head.

In pieces and eternally restless.. regretfully weakest...

I move with the sway. I step aside against the tide and it still goes right through me. I scan the horizon for landmarks. I prepare to die in my sleep, (though not from flooding) so that tomorrow I will be reborn-- after a night of battle in nightmares.

Fuck the ride. I lived to drown in this. I die with every dive but for every night that I have to sleep without you tucked deeply into my side

I rage and I kill and I fly heavy handed on heartbreaking rewind

into wall after wall after wall after wall believing that time will for once be kind and find me again, forever in your grace. Wrapped up in your perfect pulse and enveloped in your divine skeleton, I am forced alive and to wretching a distinct perfume from every pore. All the seconds I am given to convince your every cell, I run from, afraid of the last moments we will share. I am a factory for you.

Here I sit around the bonfire and dank comfort--fearing the blade of invaders--holding hand wrought spoons to the salty lips of our babes... swallowed by cottonwood smoke, and waiting for you under the weight of every last universal disaster.

I will take bullets and faithfully return to your chamber.

You are the roots in my clouded sky.

Demolition

The salt in the air has corroded every vehicle here. Each house sinks into the Earth at alarming speeds that the eye can see. Each year an inch or two of drenched and wind battered wood is swallowed into the ground. The owners of all these eyes who stand in front of all of these houses just watch the mud grow up the wall. Further away from the sky and working into a grave, they sleep at night.

For the years that I have lived here, I have struggled with the depression of the villagers. I have held my head up high and tried to bring light and warmth and generosity and humor into their homes. I gave what I could here. People say that they can't read me. Say that I always appeared to be content. How they can say this is easy, if they had no fucking clue who I was at all. I was despairing in my own home and behind my own eyes and under the same sky.. again.

I have never in my life made a decision or a move that carried with it such a gigantic fucking swell of effect, with the exception maybe of creating a life.

What I do here now, what I move forward to accomplish, run fast to receive, tear through years of memories and toss aside to capture IS something that I refuse to let escape me. I risk everything, but that everything in perspective-held against this amazing love is nothing at all. I do feel out of control and out of my mind at times. If I can just last long enough to fall into pieces in your arms, then I have done what I needed to do. What I always needed to do.

I have been taking pathetic swings to carve my way through a solid mass of greedy and selfish fuckers for a long time now. So long that I do it without thinking or recognizing that I have remained on the frontlines of this war for far too long. Now that I can communicate, can feel what I need to feel, can give what I need to give and be held completely captivated and in awe of a man I could never let go of... I'm not swinging any more, I am kicking that shit down. And as the bodies throw themselves around before me in a display of feigned loss and conceit, I will step over them and keep my eyes on you. Moving faster and closer to nights in our bed, in our house, in our city, in our love and allowing nothing to stop me from being yours.

Not functional

The end the end the end the end.

I am staring at this screen. Wanting to vent. Wanting to spill my black frothy guts all over the fucking 2 dimensional gulf that stares back at me with no dimension at all. I want to rip every chord out of every wall attached to every piece of hard and inhuman technology and cut it into thousands of pieces with my teeth until I have decapitated myself in agonizing.... ineptitude.

I swim in a sea that makes no bones when I am at "home". I flatly deliver goods and sentiments. I comb hair and clean up chocolate milk. I revamp a piece of paper that terminates 10 years of life with someone, and then I make noodles and pick up crayons, and cut off 4 inches of her hair... Her first hair cut, and I just bunch it all up in a ponytail and cut it off. I pictured her first hair cut to be so much different than that. I could have stopped myself. Could have built it all up high on
ceremony. Could have taken pictures. Could have had a scrap book ready with easter colored ribbons on the edge of a clean table. Not a table covered in things to distract her as I drag myself through this hell of divide and conquer bullshit that no one should have to endure.

But now, away, I can imagine laying beside a fire in the rain. Listening to each drop sizzle and evaporate, watching each drop steam and disappear, and the fire never dies and it never stops raining.

Until about ten seconds ago.

sweet

I just ate an after dinner mint.
I wondered what it would be like to have you feed it to me
with your mouth.

The Water

I have spent my life on a shoreline.

Creeks, rivers, lakes, ponds, oceans... standing at the edge of the bath. Each time I am with the water, I am filled with a sort of peace and sadness. I am always putting my hands in. Sometimes seeing my reflection when the water is calm. Sometimes just looking into it and seeing all of the tiny residents of life float with stagnant or wild currents.

I have been looking for you in the water forever.
I am a desert without you.

notes

… I will go in any door with you and I won’t leave the room until you do.…

How could I have let myself go so badly? Out in every direction, I went, but truly in no direction at all… Unless, “down” is on the compass, and it was.


I’m still down here, but my legs grew back, my arms returned to me, and someone up “there” is shining the brightest light through the thickest layers of debris…( keeping you from me. )

We started digging our way to each other, many times over the years, and here we are. Finally. Battered from our private hells, we are elated to know the other. Like none and beyond all others. Now we are one puzzle. And we handle each others pieces like we have handled our own all these years, except now we do it with loving and instantly expert extra hands…
a steady heart beat…
and

eyes that give me the fucking Universe.



If we read our love letters in fifty years, will we laugh about concepts like “email” and “planes” and other shit? We might, I concluded. And then we would hold hands and kiss

Life is so much easier when you never change your mind and can live perfectly high in the meaningless wing span of a falling jetliner…and look down on all the places you would rather be as you crash at my feet.

And that’s pretty much what I have to say about judging me to anyone who would be bored and crazy enough to even give a fuck about anything that I do or believe.

Let me just SHOW you what I fucking believe.

Fuck this house.

So angry so angry so angry.
Wipe the face of the Earth with me.
Drag my blood through the streets after
they have carried me away
from the heavy control of your pounded out demands
to spare the street cleaners from scraping
my flesh and my choices from cobbles with spoons
they beg you to stop
to spare them the labor of cleaning up
As it stands, they could haul me with invisible shovels
Into invisible carts pulled by invisible hands
to invisible ends.

I'm fucking sorry.

Subterranean

Though flowers do not readily fossilize
Two children turned to stone
Slipping from mothers' birthing grip
Covered over time
found wandering, malnourished, and alone
when the rocks broke into flight.


In the black black blackness
Amidst silent screaming and heavy footsteps
We conjure a calm breeze to sweep the mine fields around us
We glow electric on the horizon
And though nothing can be seen by any living creature
The dawn is clear to us
We stand on the horizon.


Allowing for no lights, save for one to pass through
The brightest, the most glorious, most penetrating rays and waves
lapping over every ditch.
every forest
every thing
and washing this temple
This altar in an unforgiving tide
We stand holding the other and laughing in a torrential pour of stunned acceptance
our arms, our endless branches
to hold ourselves above water
and close.



You flew across the channels and brought me to my knees
You wrapped me up in endless palettes of midnight
rested me on the stalks of the strongest flowers
and with power performed
Affection of a latticed ball held within and outside of me
One textile. One surface. One Purpose.

Ribbons of blood
Clusters of stars
Endless Altars
Highways of arteries
stopping at every intersection
to connect.

Through a riotous underbrush with a rushing in our ears
the madness slips further away
and we find a cool dry place
to cover everything night after night
Emerging, never.
Lined up in your gaze
is a battalion of saints
that elevates my brigade and shares your fire

In these sticks
stream billions of threadlike hairs
soaked through and served with gold
Laying quiet like thousands of nights before
but this time, with our bridge to bridge
we will live
for thousands here on and cross between each other
10 million crossings
until every last ounce of time is gone

A trembling ground
A severed sky
A flood and a fire
moved rock to rock
across a cracked and bleeding landscape to
rest against you
exhale
and move no more.

Sailing Stones and Mutant Love and children in a forest... The same forest?

So I have really been visualizing these sailing stones lately. I thought it would be cool to start putting them in my art somehow. Maybe even a series of sailing stones. So, I drew this sketch. It shows various sailing stone paths... Of course my perspective is total crap, but I think you see. And also... I kind of like the idea as a tattoo... I also drew the two mutants with inner children looking through holes in a tree that joins them all.. or out of a window... But I still like the idea of the two mutants, and the two children. I fucked up and made it dark between the larger one's heads and covered up the leaves or tree that was implied there.

blah blah blah...more blinding blizzards

I don't want to fight anymore. Sometimes I feel like I am walking in a daze. Totally confused. Not knowing what is coming. Lost in this gigantic shitstorm. AT the mercy of the most impossible emotional upheaval that I have ever suffered. In love and tortured. Completely tortured. And through all of this, I am trying to say goodbye to people. Trying to make them understand me, but everytime I open the door, I get a knife to the chest. Every invitation to dialogue sees me taking jabs. So I sit and look at the face. Look at the painful look in the eyes, and I have to shut down. I can't talk if we are going to talk about how I am leaving and how it is the most fucked up thing on the planet that has ever been done. Talk about how we have a daughter and we won't be living in the same town. Won't be able to just drive over and pick her up some weekend or whenever we feel like. She will be growing without one of us, forever now. And that is entirely my doing. Because, everyone else would have been just fine to live out this existence here. And to get through it, I have to be monumentally devoid of fucking emotion, and then everyone thinks I am a total cocksmoker. Seems like, here, that if I am maintaining then I must not be feeling anything, so it's time to poush buttons and make me cry. Because apparantly when I cry, that means I am feeling something, and then someone gets the opportunity to try and make me feel better by trying to hold me and tell me it's okay to cry. IT makes me sick. It all makes me so sick.

Slowly the house is emptying itself of my property.

She came to me in the kitchen and said, "Mama, Daddy's heart is broken."

He swears he didn't teach her that. Says he doesn't know where she learned it.

And I am so sick of hearing about how he is really worried about me. That is a fucked up head game sort of thing to say. Worried? Like all the years I was turning to shit before your eyes and you just kept on keeping on because you were getting everything you fucking wanted out of me? Worried like that?

And then there is my love.

Swollen and battered lost in this sea. Desperate to find its way home in this epic storm and sometimes the light is on, and sometimes it is off. But I will track ice in pitch black to make it there. Count on it.