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.

Dark Matter

Aidan reads bedtime stories under a nightlight from distant galaxies
an imagination sublime
he, too young to be forced into the confines of language
deciphers the stars from God script;
despite his limitations, into expressions of his heart.

His father lives within the confines of the ordinary
holds Aidan’s hand on the walk to school
all the while trying to fully capture what it is to be a man
to explain it to the son of a man
who was never his father’s son.

Aidan never thinks about his invisible grandfather
his father bends light to his form constantly afraid
of his ability to follow his father’s deformed path

—unseeable—

His father walks carefully
leaving what he finds of the universe spread out before Aidan’s wide eyes
marveling at his ability to piece together the shadows of the world
how he curves the fabric of space in his miniscule palm
and presents the world with an image
a moment where the secrets lying behind the universe of his eyes
take form
in incredible elegant strokes
to a picture of his father, a man
the most reliable hand he has.

Annular Rings

The natural light angles through an open window

little five finger smudges

streak downwards, vanishing growth marks

they are taller than they seem.

We are older than we look

our reflections, pasts outgrowing futures.

Speaking in Subtitles

Inspired by M.E.

She says we reconnect worlds in dreamwalking / another instance of smooth-talking the pants off of creation / at war with a saner self / someone saying: Stop! Backwards talking / in circles // I'm too dipsy dizzy to make sense of rollercoasters / too off the track to flip for what's fashionable / a moment's notice / a moment's gone // this is a time for insisting on the inferences: // the assumptions of a living past / a ghostlike present / and the tendrils of our future floating above your head // reminding myself of roads often traveled and traveled back / there is no time for recasting old parts / new script, new director, new scene / same plotline, new twist // you translate my subtitles // to understand and not underestimate / your dialogue / you read my mental diary / and left me a hidden note // I leave u an open invitation / and you’re stamping return to sender / unopened / another wasted 41 cents / another walk of shame to the mailbox: // head down, heart open / I should be head up, heart hidden… / re-checking the/path of my footfalls / I thought I was sitting asleep / I'm running awake.

Map of Dreams

My dream had a voice, a body, a third eye
a seamless idea of how the world was suppose to work, but didn’t.
See, my dream was a visionary
Took day trips to the mountains for Karmic meditations
un-distorted her harmonic balances during morning shower
Her destiny:
A patchwork path laid out at her feet. I mismatched my footsteps
to her rain-filled footprints.

Always in need of a home, I sleep naked in her entranceway. She leaves candles
burning to guide me to morning
and I follow half waking to the cover of night.
A wish. My dream. Fulfilled.

Longing (A Never-Was Poem)

In my dream am standing right here / you were by the window / gazing at something more interesting than me / I was reading you with distant eyes / like my favorite book with folded pages / I have highlighted you / as important / and you have me down as nondescript / a black and white photograph fluttering to the floor / I've faded into many backgrounds / a moving shadow watching light from a distance / You are light from a distance / and I am all to ready to be your darkside.

Kids Are an Inspiration...

Baby, Go Soft

He blows bubbles
thin fingers gripping the wand and huffs hard

the bubbles reflect the overhead lighting, refracting
and I see visions discriminating themselves from the soapy sheen
how many times we’ve blown bubble before
and we’ll blow bubble after
or I’ll put my lips together, paused to blow

he’ll learn through imitation
though my fingers gripping the wand are bigger
and the lips hold in harsher sounds
that’s the natural roughness of surviving life, sometimes it pays to just be more gentle.