Versus the Uniform Directive

There are hairs gently brushing the back of my neck
like fingers curled
around something they enjoy: favorite food favorite drink
favorite body
body part
body language
the hairs sing my body electric
tremors set loose along my spine
nape to hollow
charged along the crests of each vertebrae
a wave
all nature and uncontrolled
like those hairs
that always seem to cross into freedom gently
to remind me who I really am.

So She is Written

I started to write this poem, but then you called
your sultry voice like honey drizzled
against my eardrum. Lost in the thickness of your words
I realized you were the poem.

Simpler Than I: Self-Portraits

I.

There is graphite and skin

caked beneath my fingernails; I'm either destroying

or creating--

The talent comes in doing both

at the same time

II.

A lone dread swings across my face

dissecting my vision

My concentration falters hypnotized by the falling.

III.

My heart is on showcase behind

barbed wire

sometimes it strains erratically against its boundaries

and I drown internally

IV.

There's a poem sleeping on my spine

out of reach of my itchy fingers

I'd scratch for it until I drew blood

and in my bloody picture I'd see self revelations

V.

Thorns and roses grow wild

on my tongueinter

weaving in monstrous beauty

VI.

I look past my reflection

to my shadow piecing itself together

she always proves herself simpler than I

Continental Drift

We tell time by the movement of our shadows
and mine is shifting ever so slightly away from yours
through tangled lines of miscommunication
you misspoke or I misheard.

Our truth will be revealed in fossils.
Our voices imprinted on our petrified teeth,

We wasted fifteen millennia letting this rupture widen
now we’re deformed masses
or metamorphic rocks forming moreso to our molds
or breaking them.

Moving past each other our frictions scars the surface
erodes a little of both our composures

Decades from now life will be less shifty; cooling from our fiery formation years
I will peer across this divide: a deep-seated trench of misses; at you
your surface a scar I barely remember.