love, the anxious mind is such a natural thing—

haven’t you ever watched birds love what they love?

they're so beautiful chirping and skipping

eyes sparked and open with fear

(I love feeding small animals because its their only

happiness)

I have no idea what I love until I love it

but even the plainest of birds

glows green

in the light

Leave a Dent in my Jaw like a Car that Backed Up into a Stop Sign

Sometimes you want to free yourself from the language you've tanged yourself in, like wiggling a leg out from a blackberry blush.

Oh god, I love you. Or I love life, and it continually breaks me down until the enzymes have made this meat as soft as cotton.

Places I have never dared to look. And when I look at them through this love. i see that they are just me. They are just you

I can't write our desire,
there is only one: to live and die at once.

love is not good

love is not good

the way our eyes or stomachs are not good.

they just do what they must do. 

the way animals have no need for goodness.

Love is the way the mouth salivates.

Love is the way the body sleeps heavy or not at all. 

Love is how I have a bowl of sun inside my rib

I am a Man

I am bear god
I am the physical night
sane leather of sweat
beard of fire

I am a roof
a boat
open rock
wolf window
out to the green sea
I am the architecture of family
old yellow molars
cinder and pipe growl
hammering tears flat

I am the painted father
copper in the dead sun

At the Laundromat Yesterday

And then I hate them because they can't keep their guilt
Out of any moment.
'Stop staining the bright sun with your laboring'
I want to say.

It's lovely the way loneliness
Slows down time.

His eyes were as blue as a baby
As Christ's.
I'm trying to hold every moment as if
It were my own child,
But of course I ignore
The little thing
And it stands alone at the window
Every moment is innocent
And every moment passes
Without my love.

From Undoing 2013

The black heat of god
The final field
Skin of her
This love is the mouth of a funeral
The breath of our old endless sea
The uncoordinated bites
The swords of morning light
Coming into our eyes
Our disease
Our mistakes

Come out of the grave
With the religious stench of earth
Come out from under the blanket of sin
Touch the gloss of this heaven
Back to the young prayers
To the bliss of slippery gut of fire
Oh! Beast! You are an inevitable circle
You are always weeping the salty night
You are the love in our secrets
The love in our families:

in response to Z

Mind is before us, that’s why we are always confused because we are trying to trace a face of a thought that is always before us, and it’s hard because we can never turn around to look at her eyes.

Memory and passion are so connected because we are trying to remember, as to grab our minds which are always before us, but because it’s before us, we can not remember it. This causes pressure, and pressure causes heat, and passion is the heat from the pressure of trying to remember what we can never. I love you, I love your face and your voice and yoru story and I need nothing from you. You are a piano, you are a cart of flowers. You are a sky that is straining its face for loving us. I love you perfectly but I don’t need anything from you.

I am complete, so there is nothing to look for. There is only remembering. There is only the remembering of our truth, which is the movement of water flowing and never angry at gravity or moons or currents. I am water and so of course I want to absorb you

Human wisdom. Science. Spirit. Human. Nature. Fear is wisdom. Fear is sun. Fear is a light. Water is fear that does not fear itself. Water is empty. Water is alive and yet it has no wish to speak.

This love is alchemy                            This love is alchemy

This love is alchemy

This love is alchemy

This love is alchemy

This love is alchemy

This love is alchemy

This love is alchemy

This love is alchemy

This our first straying from truth which allows to wake up and bleed. This is a direct route to roadlessness. This is water. Moving with intention towards nothing.  This our wounded psyche. Oh wounded mind which is weeping before I am here. I want to love you. Omg I love you.

This is our manifesto. We are trying to remember what we have never met but have lived with our whole lives, all of them again and again.  This is the thing we are trying to say trying to write trying to fuck trying to hold trying to name. this is our manifesto. We know what we can never know.

Soft as humor soft as dream soft as water soft as waking up naturally this is our love. This is how I love you dear. You are my whole world. All of you all of us who are reaching out for what is before us. Soft as creek soft as melon soft as water.

Do we have room for our Lord? Did we make room for music? Do we have room for full lung, for wind, for dread, for many deaths, for irrigation, for faith? Oh faith, you are an empty room of silent sun, an empty room made of bone which is bleached by sunlight and its smooth and hard and will hold us when we shatter.

lie

[the lie] is hard and the color of it stinks and the thing looks like it could never belong to you. This is what alien is: alien is when you are unrecognizable to yourself. The queasiness of de ja vu and the dangerous lonely having a child in front of you

dreams...

i think I'm pregnant, so i tell my family. it's less hard than i think to tell them. i also can't remember how i got pregnant, that is a tricky part of the story. i go with  all my family and friends to the doctors office. there are like fifty people there, even some kids from work. The nurse practitioner looks like Greta Gerwig, and i like her immediately. everyone crowds around a cheap white table in the middle of a huge white room while she asks me questions. She tells me that she needs to pluck some of my eggs to see if there is growth inside them under a microscope. I get on the table in front of everyone and she goes in with a thin long wire.  I have absolutely no sense of shame. Everything about this visit is routine. She pulls out one of my eggs with the long wiry tweezer. it look like big purple raisin, or a shriveled red bean. I wonder if that is what they look like in everyone. I think, there might be a baby inside there and fill up with mystery and delight for life. It does not occur to me that the baby is now outside my body or the dangers of such procedure.  all of my friends and family have a party while we wait for the results. I am secretly hoping that I am pregnant . I start to fall in love with the fetus that is growing in the bean I made. I move around the party like a bride trying to connect with everyone. I even tell a kid from work to behave herself. The Greta Gerwig nurse comes back out and says, "you will be glad to hear these results, they are so exciting!" I blink with joy that I am going to have a baby. She says " you're not pregnant, of course not." 

More Dreams

We are driving around on a spontaneous get away weekend.  I think we are sad. We drive around neighborhoods to kill time, and we see a house for sale sign out in front. 2bed/2bth. It says its open for viewing. I say "lets just go in to see." We walk in the front door. The house is suburban with a plain white wood front door and a green yellowish lawn. Inside there is not much furniture. The floors are glowing golden wood, and the house is filled with morning light. " Hello" the owner says. He looks like he's only 19-21 years old. He's also wearing a black football jersey and it laying down on what looks like a hospital gurney. He's blond and stout and has gelled hair. He looks pathetic. "So you're an athlete by trade?"  i say. " Yeah..." he looks proud. I roll my eyes. We chat about the house and how he's buying a bigger house and he tells us to look around. You keep chatting to the D while I look around. The kitchen is blazing bright, with yellow tile and a beautiful wood island. Then there's a long hallway back to the bedrooms. First the bathroom. The shower looks like a giant blue mosaic urinal. quarter sized blues and greens and sea foam glass tiles up the wall to the ceiling. it was dizzying and beautiful. "i thought, i guess no baths...or showers?"i walk down the thin hallway some more. I see a beautiful bedroom which snakes into another long sunny room. and i think immediately " this is where i can write, this is where i can do yoga." i run back to you and the D and i say " this place has a great layout." the i notice the other bathroom behind him. this bathroom has even more tile and is bigger and brighter and is twinkling like a sea. There is a huge white tub. On one end the the bathroom, to the feet of the tub is a huge window. I look out it and literally hugging the house is a giant 300 meter swimming pool filled with older swimmers and babies and water aerobic moms. behind the pool is a giant green hill, and beyond that a brick downtown I think to myself: she can swim every morning and walk, she will be so happy, and I know that we could be both happy here. I'm coming running back to you and say "lets put in an offer". hes asking for too much: 323,000 but I don't care. I know were going to get it. You already have all the info we need. You even have a giant pink check on it that says 300,000. I am proud that we know what we are doing this time. everything is in order. we walk out of the place, and you say " we don't even know where we are!" I notice a giant sign behind the house that says: ORIGAMI. The town's name. My brother is there with us all of the sudden and says "OMG look at that park!" we didn't notice before, but across the street from the house on the other side from the pool there is another giant grassy park, with rolling hills and oaks and lakes and geese for as far as the eye can see. i am so happy i could die.

Love Nightmares

I was roaming a brick city with my girl and an old friend of mine. The friend isn’t real in my waking life; I had never met him before this dream.  But in the dream, we had a history, a knowing. He was a childhood friend that joined the army and went to Iraq. We didn’t feel comfortable around each other now that he was back, but there was an unsaid faith between us that our friendship was deeper than comfort.  I wanted this friend to know I was in love with Mariah. I wanted him to see what love is. When we got back to his apartment, the walls were half painted and most of his things were still in boxes. I knew when I walked in; it was going to take him a long time to let somewhere be home. He brought out a box of pottery. He said “ I made these out there, and somehow got them home in one piece.”  The bowls were crude and neutral toned, and I loved them. He may be broken, but he brought something home that was intact. I saw that these bowls were the things he was basing his sanity on.  In my mind I said, “ The moment is now!” I took one of the bowls into his dark carpeted bedroom and then took the ring out of my pocket and placed it in the bowl. I came out to the livingroom with no furniture and got down on my knees. I said,  “These bowls made it through a war because they were made from love, and I want our love to be that strong.” I lifted the bowl with the ring in it to her waist. She blushed and picked up the ring. The ring was the size of a bracelet.  He stood like stone, she didn’t know what to do so she held the ring between two fingers. And it flopped heavily between them.  I cringed at the sight of it. I had ordered the wrong thing. I tried to mold the thing in my hands to fit her finger. Everyone just stood around quietly and watched.

 ***

Last night I had a dream that I wanted to hold you.  We were with your friends at some cabin on a northern beach. It was a vacation or a party or a celebration—something with potlucks and balloons and people who haven’t seen each other in a while. You let me hold you for a minute; your wet bathing suit soaking into my shirt, the hot of my body and the cold of the ocean together was the best thing. Then you ran away into the steel cut waves.  I followed you.  But then you wanted to move over to the side of the beach where the waves were a blur of blue and green mountains; crushing the sand like a thousand drums. I told you I was afraid of waves like that. You swam out to the tall sheer walls, and I waded by the shore. I was pining for you, and watching you in the distance when I saw an older man floating face down in the water. I slushed against the waist deep green sea to get to him. I turned him over, and screamed, and screamed and dragged his body in slowly and sloppily.  He was so heavy with water and muscle. When I got him into the gray shore, the young men medics were there and they noticed he had a welt on the back of his leg. One of the boys said he had been licked by a poisonous fish. The poison rots parts of the body one by one and spreads with contact. IT IS VERY CONTAGEOUS! I saw that his legs were black and emerald, his ears and parts of his arms. They said, “You shouldn’t have touched him, you shouldn’t have touched him!” and I said “ Are you saying I was supposed to watch a man dying and turn away?” I looked down at my hands and two of my fingers were black and charred and ready to fall off.

***

I didn’t care about the creek. I had heard that it was getting polluted and that sketchy things were happening to people trying to speak out against the corporation dumping into the creek.  My boss, who was a student of mine earlier in the year, was there. The creek ran behind the college where we went.  She was trying to tell me how bad the creek was and I was ignoring most of it. Then she said, “ Just come to look at it.” I walked with her down the grassy hills to the creek bed. The creek was a puddle, muddy with trash and sheets of Styrofoam and giants objects damning its thin brittle waters. I felt sadness well up in me. I felt shame.  I felt called to action. I went home and drew up letters and speeches and maps. I was surrounded by paper with notes and sketches on them. I needed a disguise in order to keep anonymity from the big corporation. I drew up a superhero’s uniform. The next day I crashed a city meeting about the creek. I was wearing a painted motorcycle helmet. I started shouting over the speaker. I said, “ Denial will kill us.”

Manifest Reading Series 4.14.13

I read with the Darling Lindsey Boldt. I read with love in my heart and envy in my eyes.

*

Is the plasma in our blood the same plasma in stars? The non-solid, non-liquid snot that carries our milk and blood must be the same thing that holds the sun’s lava syrup to its arched back. It makes sense to me that the eyeball of starlight and human glue are cousins.