Grow Selves

my I waiting for
your I
in the place
where you grow me

a forced bulb
blooming
unrepentant
in our warm
empty of a house

caught in lightness
they say
you don’t write
the new
sleep your words
in time’s anachronistic
belly

so what if
my I was backward
once, am
the I me not here now?
you show
me a contemporary
I
show me spit or
casual garbage

I bloom you
in the grown place
now you
then me.

I heart Bob.

I love you man.

shred of city

The press of you
on the drum
placards me,
or answers to some
question of presence

what let down
the soft no-squeak
of night
around us?
an emptied city
only bluish
on each edge

a street yawns
evacuation
let us fill just this
little shred of
sidewalk

on the prow, the press
when snow enters skin
or the slippery vertical
of lost architecture,

we careen
before ourselves
in a bloom of guilty
music, me
filled toward tomorrow.

Sestina for why girls love horses.

In the dark many gulps
are teaching girls how to drink with a pony
at the end of each hand, an artifice
that is not really there, something beyond rustic
beyond help from boys, who wish to advise
but find the impossible cornered in some kind of race

boys who are the darlings abhor the race
their fingers gently pass over borders, elicit gulps
of pleasure, or dream in European tongues and advise
the building of small churches, where at their altars stand a pony
and a virgin made entirely out of tattoos, of myths so rustic
they hurt. All those girls in the dark, bemoaning the architecture of artifice

wailing prayers to be or nothing or just horses etched in the artifice
of each church wall. In the dark, shouts teach girls about the race
riots of moths, silk burning wild bright, stampeding holes into garments rustic
and uncouth with splendor. Let them in, the stampede of gulps
undertaken in unlearning static motion. Pony,
in a gallop of fingers, she said to me: Seek, advise.

Or rather, if you are a girl (said some boy): pray, advise.
It turns out the boys are jealous, mantled in artifice
they suggest walls doors locks keys. They hate the pony.
The shimmer of category in the morning; they love race.
girls listen close in the barn, many gulps,
many perfect arches of the neck, are they now rustic?

They are first cavernous, dark, like Conrad says. Later on, rustic.
Left to numb and chortle, girls secretly advise
each horse toward the love of air in naked gulps,
and never believing in the act of artifice.
In the dark continues the race,
each morning the winner is a black white grey brown pony.

Each sunset, the dark finds a girl in the arms of a pony.
Is it then the boy knows her as rustic?
No. boys see only the race
caught in the throat to reveal how girls advise
the dismantle always of the artifice,
that old succubus, an ancient liar with all the wrong gulps.

But they are fastened to one another through an eternity of gulps
and the horses begin to squeal and advise:
beware in the dark, girls, the boys who love your artifice.

Mixed Media Collabrative Piece

Reading of "Wash, Show"

This link goes to a video taken of me reading the poem "Wash, Show" at Eastern Michigan University, December 2009. The file is large, so give it about 5 minutes or so to load. The sound is quiet, but its there, so lean in to your computer. Get to know your machine once again...Thanks.

http://www.legionisnoctis.com/lucy.mp4

Wash, Show.

show sun light from the day you died
if you came home
I would wash your feet, your back

wash me
wash your grave wash
your epitaph
wash suffering with
a linen cloth, fibers
soft and stern

show sun light
show blood show everyone
bullet holes and broken
wash their faces with salt
wash their TV screens
their newspapers their truth-tellers

show the moment of yourself
leaving yourself

wash me with belief
show belief
strutting toward eternity.

you died in sunlight

don’t come back through
letters wash me
language washes me
it is fertile it is never free
wash your grave
with language

If you came home
wash me wash each other
wash highways show light
show mountains wash rivers
all the places you were
wash them away

show death, wash life become
sacrifice become understood, shown
wash the sacrifice the feet of sacrifice
lavender water
sunset facing now and always
homeward moving.

Body of Water

Ocean heavy
Beneath the day,
Yawning light.

Keep moonshine
Under the pillow,
Hot white unraveling
Pushing through
Crevices, bad lands-dark.

Now in afternoon
A humming blank
Where we were.

Singing in the mirror
Coughing up music
Sticky, gurgling
Wearing the shouts
Underwater
Around my head

Daylight cuts swatches
Still yawns light
Still heavy
Ocean on top
Melting to keep
Moving.
Ocean heavy
Beneath the day,
Yawning light.