in the range

Breath me.

Through your nettles
crisp and fragrant--
Breathe all over
me.

I want to feel creek spray
tiny droplets come to rest on my skin,
rushing inside my bones
and caressing the bump
in the middle of my chest
dripping and tripping over stone and bramble--

drip into me.
clear and cool on hot skin
I want to wander through your meadows
a hundred blades of sun soaked grass
staining my feet all sorts of viridescent
pressings--

Press into me,
your dreams
light them into me like the memory of moonbeams
of starshine in black skies touching an indigo range

Touch your skin to mine.
I want to know you like sipping birch bark
branches
like positioning lips
on pine trees and drinking it all in.

Put me in motion.
like the wind that moves us--
pushing, rolling, folding

fold into me.
almost like a flame
curling, tasting, burning
waking in the morning to lightness and shadows
odors of crunching dock
and unruly sage.

In one breath I can feel you
pulsing in my fingertips
dancing on my tongue
and expanding into my chest

Breathe me.

Untitled

The cracks won’t hold
they’re leaking
viscous rivulets of lives bled out by
hate.
Rushing downstream, they seem to percolate
quicker, now
    what does it take?

Would those posed behind the upstream
perpetrators
clinging to their cold metal supremacies
those authoritative barrels
that represent their idea of America
hollow, industrial, automatic
would they so readily defend
their idea of what it means to be
\a US citizen
if it hadn’t been.
       
        fifty people in Orlando, dancing at a gay club
nine black members of a congregation
dozens of students
three individuals exercising their belief in choice
    six worshipers at a Sikh temple
three-hundred people at Wounded Knee
    black men fallen by the hundreds in the streets,
folded into the bloody fabric uniforms of a racist
police state

their idea of America is just to take, to take, to take
land, space, resources, lives
so long as they can keep exercising their right
to represent
their upstream dreams
they dream up our
nightmares.

and my heart hurts
beating on like so many others
beneath a pillow of grief
incomparably so
to the weight that rests
on the chests of many
that have lost so much
felt the lives of their lovers
their children, parents, sisters and brothers
be swept away.
I think of my heart, suffocating in every beat
and I think they must feel that weight
as heavy, immovable as a mountain range
although those they loved were removed
as if they were as fluid
as a drop of water
as if they were as light
as a time-worn feather
as if they were worth less than the price
of the right to carry.

They
those with their upstream priorities
They won’t ever taste the exponentially rising
parts-per-million
of copper and heartbreak
they send rushing down
down
down
no they won’t ever taste
But take a closer look
at their carefully constructed
dam
manifested fear in concrete
it will burst
riddled with bullet holes
gaping absences of all the souls
taken in the name of what those few white men
think it means
what does it mean
to be American.

Il torrente

The river running beneath my window
murmurs at the falling rain drops
entering seamlessly in the waves
and it sounds like a morning we might have made
together
I can almost feel your heat thread into me
the insistence of your arms around my waist
and the blue grey light would wrap our bodies
still tangled in ends and beginnings
but this was a chapter from last night
when my memory mixed with mystery
and the night showers brought my mind
to a sort of dreaming that shouldn’t be allowed
I had become skilled at silencing the loud
aching of a heart that serves only to make a beat
for all the rhymes I pretend to be only dreams.

Will we ever stop this wondering
of what would happen if we were to
wipe the dust from the illuminated covers
of little books that we wrote together
on how to live a life unrequited
could we scrub the dirt from the eyes of our dream
we buried in the yard in the shadows beneath
the big oak and the knobbly white washed beech
they used to see everything
these eyes that opened for the first time
in the wake of a love
that moved the Earth in the grasping Ides
of the March of my first kiss
is it possible that we were blinded
by our own unpredictable plot twist?
Or maybe that we never even wrote it
the resolutions that we never saw
so we unraveled, we untangled and rolled
up all the love in our little world.

I wonder often if you are scared
because I am terrified of waking up alone
with the midnight memory of what happened in my
dreams
we once almost succeeded in creating something real
a drop of rain that perfectly intersected a wave
a story printed, bound, and saved
a stitch that brought together a broken hour of time
a dream that is a reality as much as a rhyme

I get this feeling that I could never let this truly unravel
so I spend my nights dreaming in time travel
hoping that when I wake we are finally together
listening to the outside songs of the weather.

Red Rocks

              Crankset clinking disconcertingly
in a downpour as familiar as the trail

it’s been raining for months now
so a glimpse of sun feels like

something out of a dream.

               We were in the mountains
our feet digging into red rocky sand
and the sun rays lived inside our
pores.

On my clinking bike in this storm
mud on my face and gloves soaked through
I can still feel that heat inside
me.

This love from a dream.

The Body

Who would I have been
without my body?
a whispering breeze
through fire lit autumn leaves
a tender moment that tickles your eyelashes
and recalls the playful peace of imagination flashes
maybe you would never have dreamed
of abusing the air that skips through the trees
if I had been simply, without.

but I return to the moments that defined
who we were when we lay
murmuring about the trees
how one day we would be as free.

Then I feel out of my mind
imagining what you could’ve been thinking
but it must’ve felt good to control such fragile will as my own
I’m sure if you had been listening you might’ve known
that my body and my words were pleading to be heard
you might’ve felt the rush in my blood and my throat start to burn
all the while I had thought I at last had found a home
but I was always finding myself alone
pondering an absence.

I could’ve sworn we were making love
I believed that it would happen if I could wait
and if I could just keep breathing you would see
that you took more than pleasure from this body
I believed we would find an acreage of gentle peace
that was somehow lacking between you and me
but in its absence you took up in arms
I was looking for a home where I would only find harm.

and I can’t get it out of my head
the way you would tell me maybe you didn’t love me
after all the nights I let you hold me
glowing red and bleeding raw I let you see
I invited you into my most intimate of dreams
but these nights I felt something about you was strange
and you uttered those words and I filled with shame
then you decide I’m worthy, maybe you do want it (me)
but I don’t want you in my bed, I don’t want you in my body
you invite yourself in and I am left to consider just what
it takes.

Because I loved you even after you ignored me when I said no
even after you didn’t stop until you realized I had woke

Who would I have been without my body?
the answer doesn't matter anymore
I will stop searching for something we'll never find
I must continue to carry this body although I was left I was left I was left

behind

The Earache

The Earache

I was in search of a listener
someone or something that would
understand
a two way street of clear passage through
an unlocked room with an open roof
a scrubbed wooden two top table
as I wandered my heart pulsed in
concentric, propagating waves
a pebble fallen in a pond with no one
to watch it sink through its vibrations
before they disappear
just waiting for a sign
that someone had picked up its message
on the other
side.

I then found harbingers of peace
on the underside of olive leaves
a shadow of periwinkle, a swath of dry green
it was in this moment that I heard a faint calling
an echoing sound from inside a rusting tin can
positioned just under my breast and
attached to a string that stretched even as it frayed
from months of disuse.
At that breath of peace found in the ancient signals
from an olive tree
this aching reverberation comes calling through
the static
as if it has heard
every single word.

My breath catches and the hour seems to freeze
because I’ve been waiting this whole time for the
yearning to cease.

There are some people who listen intently
and buried in the depths of this intent
is the reality of the scene in which you are
struggling to communicate.
It is as if you are standing in the middle
of a street full of people who don’t know
where they are going or from which direction
they came and you scream out what you must say
and your listener, they are standing
on tip toe, searching the crowd
cupping their ear and nodding as if
they heard
every single word.

The minutes tick by and no one seems to realize
that the speaker is in fact praying to a god that never came through.

There are people who will will lean in closer
and listen like you are locked in a room
they are pressing their ear, hard
against paint-peeling wooden doors
with wrought iron key holes
and you have no idea if they understand
all you know is that they are there,
poised, waiting, on the very brink of
hearing every single
word.

Trapped in a communication breakdown the listener
tires of searching for a buzzing in a meadow of queen ann’s lace.

And there are people who do hear it all
they are seated across from you
at a table set with linoleum linens
nodding, hands folded
crystal clear yet they pick and choose
from what they hear
your words are two dimensional
squares that when pieced together build
a paper prison for all the things
that might’ve been understood
if only they were listening
to every single
word.

Perhaps we should hire therapists and doctors
to heal our aching ears and straining hearts.

But there was a time, I swear
where I would look into those eyes that hold
all the clocks on this Earth in a universe of
shivering meadows and bursting valleys
and it was as if we were naked
you were pressing one ear to my heartbeat
to be sure you understood
and you held your breath with the
other ear slightly tilted away from my chest
so that you would register
perfectly
every single word


and you needn’t nod and I needn’t pause
and after a time words were never even said
because we heard
it all.

Every moment since when I thought that maybe
the string can system of communication we left
with one can over my heart and the
other over yours had been damaged
the string had broken and the cans dented
left forgotten in a gutter in a place
we never knew we had been
in the miles and months and minutes we’d missed
and I am ready to resign myself 
leaving my words and all the words I had been saving
to sink into the muddy ground
to ripple aimlessly through the sedimentation
I then hear a faint voice
a heart beat echoing my own
almost like a hello..

i could love you

i could love you
i opened this page to write you
a poem that isn’t about your heart
but a million words made their own start
flowing from my hands into this book
and i couldn’t help it but I took
them to mean i should write this about
you.

i couldn’t find the words to tell you
that i think you might be p e r f e c t
and i don’t know exactly what that means
but to me that’s simply what you seem
a special way your eyes shine in the moon
the lightness in your heart when you try something new
makes me want to dance

i couldn’t find the form to write
the words that wave over me about your shoulders
that carry everything, everyone that might’ve sank
they have such grace in their rounded strength
and the way your mouth moves when you tell a story
i could swim in your mannerisms, honestly
but my fingers would prune.

i couldn’t find the way to show you
that night when you put your hand on my leg
that really i think we should just sit
and maybe press our mouths, our lips
together for hours to memorize
how our spirits change as our bodies thrive
but the motions for our metamorphosis never came

i couldn’t fall asleep that night
without thinking about what would happen
if we pressed our bodies together in time
your soft skin and long dark hair on mine
your eyes flashing those long lashes while you lie
on my belly and my thighs
i dreamed a thousand dreams that night

i could love you
but i couldn’t find the reasons to justify
these feelings that i let run through
because what we shared was tender all the same
and sometimes there really is no refrain
and so what if i could love you
until my fingers shrivel into prunes
and forever feel my feet hurt from dancing
until we have evolved like monarchs in the mountains
and dreamed a life into being

i couldn’t write you a love poem
because i couldn’t even conceive
how my loving you could be

i could love you.