Twilight Zone

And no, they did not die from solitude;
nor did their branches bear a sterile fruit;
nor did their unhealed flanks weep every spring
for those four yards that lost them everything,
as each strained on its shackled root to face
the other’s empty, intricate embrace.
They were trees, and trees don’t weep or ache or shout.
And trees are all this poem is about.
-Don Paterson


All pain is a warning
The hardness of stone
Slumped shoulders rising only to shrug
A finger pressed between a car door--
Clicking closed
Compacting skin and blood
Swelling.
An ache--
The only thing felt
Through the numbness

Hurt murmurs
The lights shutting off
In violent echoes
The hardness of stone
Teeth connecting with flesh
Wide-eyed revolt



Probing grimace
Steel splinters
The hardness of stone
Waking in the night
Gingerly rolling over

Turning into impact
Momentum acting as fate
The hardness of stone



Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction.
-Albert Einstein

Crash Course in Mistakes

Well--
all things turn bitter in the end
whether you choose the right or
the left way
and--
dreams are not a bad thing.

-William Carlos Williams


I didn’t want to be here
Outside of comfort
Shouting through the dizziness
Holding hands in a sign
Of goodbye
Rolex face
Marred with running glass
The sidewalk twisting away from us
Taking our hopes of communion with it

When the red pond fills fish appear
When the red pond dries fish disappear.
Everything built on the desert crumbles to dust.
Electric cable transmission wires swept down.
The lizard people came out of the rock.
The red Kangaroo people forgot their own song.
Only a man with four sticks can cross the Simpson Desert.
One rain turns red dust green with leaves.
One raindrop begins the universe.
When the raindrop dries, worlds come to their end.
-Allen Ginsberd


Desperado-danger-deceit-disappointment-sorry

Louis

Hide the face. Chase dirt with an ugly stick. That sinking sensation, a sponge dive. Brush off scum on some well scrubbed mission. It's slick to admit, motherwit and grit ain't groceries.
-Harryette Mullen



Why did the earth glow red? Was there meaning in the way the night seemed to move? Illusion or truth? How did they wiggle through wire? Could they fly, could they pass through rock like ghosts? Was it true they didn't value human life? -Tim O'Brien



Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence. -Ralph Waldo Emerson


I am tired of the slow life
The sickening of friends
Delusional that they are alone
In their affection

She is wrong to be touching your leg
Wrong to be pulling you into corners and speaking softly
See how she clutches her phone?
How she grumbles when I interfere
The blood is poisoned
Cruelty repeats itself
Affection is a sign of
Uncertainty
There can be love but there can also be fear
And when the two mingle
You run



We can't all be wedding cake
-Spoon

The places I've seen and the people I've been

I, like a flower clipped
realize my mortality
but the trick is in blooming
in the opening to emptiness
the display of colors and petals
despite the tenuous moment
of circumstance
-Steve Garber





In a month we'll be dizzily older -Elizabeth Willis



No such thing as peacetime romance,
we are always in the trenches
afraid to lose our gas masks
and catch a scent
of something
that smothers our insides








'So gods fall to earth with tender irritation. What we love in time kills us, poppy dear, sugaring our skulls with backward music' -Elizabeth Willis


The world buzzed below us and we,
Sticking our noses
Into empty air
Were terrified of the precipice


Ride the lightening until it burns your skin

triangulation upon returning home

Full of noise and lust they fled the city for the shore
-Graham Foust



We fell asleep in the early morning
The blinds hastily half-assed
Sunbeams peaking onto our faces

She stole the comforter
And I woke up shivering
Clutching fiercely to a sheet

We had lay there talking
My Fingers pacing the length of her leg
A smile blurred by rum and weariness

By noon we were back to back
Dreams drifting us apart
Once entwined we had deviated to the edges

As friends, I had always let her sleep a little longer,
So she could wake up to pots banging in the kitchen
And pretend I had spent the night on the couch



But we had teetered over the precipice
Children dancing on train tracks
Whispers that had not faded with the buzz

She remained the same creature as last night
Slender, proud, stubborn. Even in sleep
Her hair her smell her lips. The same

And I remained the same
My desire my fear my feelings
But much had changed

And I’m afraid we went somewhere
But left our spirits behind
To follow footsteps quickly sinking in the sand

All the warm words lost their meaning in the afternoon
When I woke up cold and alone in a bed of two
And I wish we could have swallowed our feelings with the booze


Seawater stiffens cloth long after its dried.
As pain after it's ended stays in the body:
A woman moves her hand oddly
because her grandfather passed through
a place he never spoke of. Making
instead the old jokes with angled fingers.
-Jane Hirshfield



Eros, you son-of-a-bitch why can't I have them all??