some haiku.

Old, tired dreams fall

Softly; distant thunder on

Lightning-tattered trees

Cold

frost sets in to my fingers and wrists

stiff fingers fumble with lighter and cigarette

blue climbing up my arm

spreading like frozen gangrene

it gnaws its way down to my bones

sucking out my marrow, poisoning my blood

I feel it worm through my tenderer organs

when it reaches my heart I think I'll die

I came to learn to love the cold,

to fear the hearth being burned there

to hate the heat the murmuring inside

the crackling of a bonfire of hair

Ice on the wind clawing down my throat

harsh as the first few breaths of the drowning

cold air on my cold lungs

going down like cheap whiskey and cheap smokes

Ice in the tumbler, Ice in the whiskey

and drags off a menthol cigarette

I take a few little sips of death

it warms me.

Elegy to the Open Sea

I never used to be so scared

of the open sea. I’ve seen

so many of my Joys disappear

over the horizon to die the slow death

in the fog or dashed against the rocks

like so many whales— shepherds

of those lost, deep places, beached

ragged-beating hearts, bleached

bone-white like secrets burning in the sun.

I’ve spent

so many of my Days in lighthouses

reaching out into the night. dimly groping,

calling them home. waiting.

hoping. watching the horizon,

the endless waves, the sky looming.

from the back porch of the carousel at night during a smoke break

Between the gently murmuring crowd behind me

and the soft, empty October night, stretching

So smooth so deep so dark

and so close it swaddled my eyes

I made those faces that you make

to your reflection, making those nobody's-watching-me

faces, with only that infinite intimate

emptiness for a mirror. Thoughts drift away, smoke

curling from my nose my throat my lips

curling twisting writhing into the hush of coming rain,

Like silent faces, unobserved, into the void.

Oh, My Sarah, How I Love You

Partly inspired by a true story, I am planning on revising this piece for spoken-word competition:

OH MY SARAH, HOW I LOVE YOU,

his last letter read.

scrawled in the dark

“Oh God for one more breath”

dissolving sprawling

deteriorating

a charcoal stub

a sheet of burlap

a mile of earth.

“Oh God for one more breath.”

Somewhere a soldier’s writing home

“There’s nothing I want more than to grow

giant wings and fly to you,

Oh my Sarah, how I love you.”

cold in his bones

blood and shit in the water

in it over the boots

a maggot in his right big toe

prays for the whistling before

the thunder shakes fistfuls of soil

on the half-buried dead men

on the half-dead buried men

they can’t go down any further.

In Pamplona the crowd

in his ears

sunlight, sand

sweat in his eyes

blood in the back of his throat

and the bull, wheeling,

Bellows

Drinks the last dregs of his life

the speed

the strength

the sword.

Nothing.