our bodies spill out destiny

liquids and meats full of luck

we can swell up with an animal

capable of emotional memory

our bodies and spirits are the guts of god

like the moon hanging low

and tugging on our tissue

like prey in the jaws of a golden lion

the traffic of our skin can cause life

to grow inside out

wrapped in promises so tight

a shelter is grown for our sleep and our fires.

Life cannot be measured despite the sense we get that measuring is the only thing we are wired to do. We cannot train ourselves to invite more life in, either it comes in ways we didn't intend, or we acquiesce and it can come in to our loose mouths. We cannot describe life. We cannot mimic it.

Color which is so wild and has its strong hand on the veins of our subconscious can destroy us or can touch us inside our cells

Sound, also shows us how our spirit is a cave that echoes for 1,000 years. The vibration is so extreme that our marrow is hardened from its gel and turns into a can of bees.

We have no idea how life has a grip on us--no for certain, it is not the other way around. I am tenderized by pain and for a moment know humility. It has charred away the reptile skin of my will or my judgment or my morality ( I have not felt the sun in years)

Warmth must be felt from the inside out. To love is to thaw out and it cannot be built or broken.
I am in love with the sun, how she has no self-consciousness, how it is nothing but her own body that cooks our hearts until they are soft.

I am riper than an august fruit.

ode to brussel sprout

little lime bud
alien heart
in half  I can see your yellow brain
but cooked you are a glossed green iris
whistled sweaty and softened

Delight

I am not laying each dark brick. No
I am letting the wind blow a ruin
& then I'm going to join the wind
in it's empty spreading
across surfaces indecriminately

pavlov vs. insomia.

For my father and his impeccable genes:

wild clock 

distended

                        populates

your padded night-land

grates the dark

sound to cinder

packs your black mouth

with prayer-bargains

but you know already

you can't condition

rest to salivate.

best poem i've witnessed in workshop so far.

oh bitch you worry bout' dying

oh bitch you worry!

ohbitchyouworry

obituary

they miss its black wings

laid inside their glowing drawer

embalmed fear is

a shiny nub of hope

like carrying a lamp in broad daylight.

caught in the sun

the way a woman’s hair

flips the heat out from its cold

a glittery cement after rain

for when britt got her new car

today notice how proud we are of each other.  we have each raised one another and today in our faces you can see it. we’ve watched how we have gotten mellow and faithful behind the face. how our bones have brightened. each of us has a little bit invested in the outcomes. if we succeed to grow happy and thoughtful; sharp when we need it, and receptive when we need it. if we do what we say and build something healthy—this will be enough to feed our whole family.

Theses Feces.

Thesis work is kind of like deciding to get married. It has littler to do with what is right for you, and more to do with your bravery--all the sudden, which you have grown into-- for all the things that may go wrong or  right, or to somewhere you had no idea existed. Commitment is about bravery and faith that you have hands that can hold more than you think.

Here is an example of what my Thesis might look like:

the rays simply,

the membrane kiss that

when it happens it all becomes wax—

when everything is made of skin

every stage a greater diminution of light

reptile brain beeping cheerful glyphs

opens completely into two

this turbulent space is a clean

hammered sky well

spilling into the middle when there is none

Crane Creek

I watch the sun run a sleep hand over her neck, all the blond hair running one way, illuminated. We walk between dry hills inside fields and decide together that the air which has brushed over this land for so many years has picked up something citrus, something fermented, like the tip end of marijuana or an old wine rim. We agree that it must be the combination of cow shit, the heat inside trapped in the rows of vineyards, and the dry grass shooting up wherever it can. The dense california soil underneath its fruit lets us use our whole palettes, we can take in both the deep and the shallow, both the bright and the glue.

As we walk, I handle the weeds. These tall grasses are capped with heads that mimic insect bodies. Some have small bleached bee heads, others have the long-dead-wingless dragon fly bodies. The last, some kind thistle, are dried out giant house flies, pears with tuffs of broom-heads coming out from its skin. Together these weeds blow magic into the eye--what a floating texture! It's too complex to see at once, we only stare at one patch at a time, because when we try to take in the entire space this nomadic tribe of blond whistles bowing and raising, causes the eye to melt into syrup until we have glazed faces.

We walk back to the car on the eroded road next to the vineyards.  She tells me a story of a women she met abroad who had orchards and vineyards and table grapes. They ate the grapes together out of a blue ceramic bowl--the grapes neon--yellow and red and purple. Each one tasting like a plum pregnant with a lime, or at least that is how imagine her face to look when she popped the pearls into her mouth. We stop fifty feet away from the car by the creek, where a beastly bush of blackberries is growing over the cattle fence. She is taller than me and can reach the top of the bushel, where the big bloated ones are waiting to be snatched by birds.  She bites into them like tomatoes, and I watch the spread of liquid purple river down her palm and puddle on the top of her canvas shoe. I wait for a sour one, but no come because there are no sour ones today; only sugar cubes--i imagine us with the straw mouths of hummingbirds, sticky and wet.

I stop to pee behind a lichen eaten oak and I relish in the event of peeing outside. It's something I love, the sound of the metal belt thudding against the dirt. I prop my self by palming the dry ridged skin of the tree, and watch tenderly the grass below me dance under the yellow-eyed stream.

mantra

i am a child forever.
i am a child forever
i am child
i am a child inside the sycamore
swaying with wind as myself
i am a child.
i am child forever despite God.

mariah in a free write

when she is in the kitchen the movements are slow, as are the breaths, the exhales are long spoons. she knows a bean, what it will make in our bodies how it grows she washes them and the pleasure is in the mystery of sustenance nothing about sensuality or thrill. each plate has color, fills it up like cattle in a pasture. no plate is wasted. her side of greens looks more like she is making temporary shelter heaped tall and built up with pieces of other scraps, carrots, onion. when we sit down to eat she looks into me before eating. settles the bones up against the chair. she lets me chat my way out of my nervous animal body. when I have found my mouth, and hands, and bare feet—she can begin her story of the day, which is usually short and funny and sturdy as if she if building furniture for her mind to sit in. so far my tasks have been to light the candle on our table, pull out the chairs, and stack up our day in a corner so there is room for us to sit. when we are done, I put away the spices and sauces, she without any language at all picks up the sticky silverware and plates and takes them to the sink where she will end the ritual. I won’t ever get myself to like the fermented smell of dirty dishes, or the grime under my fingernails. The act seems to be a separate and not of the whole and so I want to rush through it so I can land again. But she runs the water till its warm and suds the plates as if she were bathing our children’s backs. I leave her, and piddle around our room until she done. Before bed I count the day winding down to its lowest volume by the code of zippers and Velcro and the sweep of fabric on the wood floor. She is packing her lunch, her bike locks, ironing her shirt and pants, and then hanging them on the knob of the front door. all of these steps so that she can slip out the bedroom door at 6:30, with no sound but socks, and leave me heavy and stretched and sweaty in our blue sheets. The sheets that in the morning I will air out its bed breath, caused by its tongue of two warm bodies by pulling them down to the floor and opening the window as far as it can go. Before I get up, I roll over, instinctually I guess to the side she has been sleeping on. Her side always seems less tight, more worn, and smells like her hair and her face, almond and citrus and bright salt. She gets up and stretches the miles of her limbs out on the floor of our cold living room until the muscles have warmed and opened their eyes. She puts on her work clothes, followed by the reflector vest that she wears on her bike. She ties up her hair, brushes her teeth slow and gently, then using her pink rubber gum stimulator in circles over her bubblegum pink gums. Her mouth is a temple of clean nuns, each tooth is a face of paper. Her mouth is so tidy, I look into it and make plans for a bed and a desk inside a shell. Night is time for my mind sneak out of its room and roam the places it sholdn’t; I heat up with worry, I am both the teenager and the sick mother, splitting like wood from each other. I’ve tried sleeping pills, all sorts of pills, aromatherapies, watching movies, reading books. but at night the mind winds up and spins like clockwork. when she gets into bed finally, she picks up her book, lifts her elbow and lets me in to the triangle of her arm and shoulder and torso. This is the only place where the mind will rest.

dream

I see her hair blowing—that’s the first thing I see. I see her tan shirt blowing over the tan sand. She turns to me. My skin has finally unclenched the fingers of its seems. My eyes have misshapen back into water. My mouth has gone to its childhood, transported back where a mouth was a red leather. I’ve spilled, running through a granite groove. the mind has been evaporated leaving only the warmth trapped in by the sun and the window, and not the window itself. Nothing but convection. she turns to me, and every word between us is spoken in the loose fabric wrapping, the shoulders a perfect arrow and the chin a compass turning the day into night. my feet are at her feet and I reach out for her but she falls into me. the way you tug on something ripe enough so that the gesture of the reach is enough for the give. I kiss her. The movements are from one source, one movement. And I am kissing the darkest part of origin of myself. I am kissing the beginning warm and old without anything to hold it or hold on to. I m standing in the center of the center. The sand is drained, I am drained. I am joy, I am resolved. I’ve let go of the deep wish that would have risked my life had I let it speak, the secret that I kept in the gel of my atoms where nothing was sharp enough to rip. I’ve let the membrane get thin by despair, I’ve let myself get soaked and thin so that the wish could leak or fly. I kiss her. I’ve consented to disappear. I’m gone/ I’m home.