Lay the Needle Down in the Groove.

It comforts me to listen to dead people.
With the ghosts whispering I hear,
their spirit talking with the still walking.
That record continues spinning
long after the button is pressed.
So death took them.
So the living still have them.

For years you lived as though
you'd just woken from a dream;
snapped to with a whole life
on the tip of your tongue.
Yet you could not recall the details.
The specifics eluded you.
You knew it was epic,
and it was long;
you knew the river was long.

You left gifts.
I got what you meant.
When you said,
your heart is living forever,
isn't it?
I said,
it seems that way, yes,
I agree it seems that way.

I don't know where things go when they leave
but when they do I go ahead and grieve.
The records all stacked up with notes to cry to,
the letters he wrote to live up to, at least try to.
I remember he said I would be successful
with whatever I used to make my head full.
He said I was a good travel companion.
I took the trip his head unraveling demanded,
and in the eventual I held his cold stiff hand.
I sat and wept with what was his end.
Though he passes far and away,
his world is just as mine and does not decay.

Do not misinterpret the signs.
What falls away is only the flesh.
Their are many kinds,
than just the bodily form of death.
We are not watching memory decay,
but witnessing legacy find it's way.
And so,
farewell father in body,
hello father immemorial.

Roots.

Booking flights to where I came from,
I am going to see who I came from
so as to see where I'll go some day.
The underneath from which we come,
and where we go to when we leave.
Complete circle.
He left a while ago,
on vacation, on leave, on business.
It was not by choice but it was natural.
His body of work kept being left
scattered about his body.
In the infancy of my adulthood,
there were fledgling thoughts
that forced themselves into questions.
If I left would I know where'd I'd left.
If I left how would I get back to what I'd left.
What's left when you lose it.
What's loose when the wind blows into the darkness.

Out there in the whispering
where the trees stand
the branches do not resist
the wind that pushes cold
across their sticky blood.
The tapping of their trunks,
the tapping of the needle spinning:
side A is over.
When we break fast and pour out their insides
the horizon cracks open with light.
And the b-side gets up as an anthem.
We can say it is cultural,
not to think too hard of where things came from.
We will reassure ourselves.
Where things come from are fully left behind.
There is no thing with nothing left behind.
There is no thing with nothing.
We assure ourselves.

Color Theory.

something like cowboy.
something like feeling.
unable to figure it out.
something like a horse.
a horse carved out of stone.
the myth shooting me right between the eyes,
and coming out of the television.
tumbleweeds and dust mustn't make me sneeze.
the desert is vast and symbolic
and the sickness never comes to light
because we are legends.
we won't experience death.
we pretend with the end.
we see beauty.
an exquisite corpse,
such an exquisitely dead body.
the wind discontinues its ebb.
it never stops pushing and pushing
so as to keep
the black horse
rushing further and further away
from this blank sphere
we all spin on.
when the lights turn on
there will not be white,
only shades and shades
of yellow.

Business Grief.

Even though you place
the plastic crown on your head,
the thoughts still leak in.
You binge on self awareness.
You still, self aware mess.
And you'll still abuse your body because of it.
Waking up and noticing
that the water is deleted
from the map on the wall.
Walking down a lonely alley,
stooping to pick up a piece of paper.
Written in lavender ink,
You keep telling yourself 
you are nothing
and you will be nothing.
I'll dance.
I don't give a shit I'll dance.

Empty Light Pouring from Some Holes.

When the roots took hold
of everything inside me
I knew that I'd have to take a tab
to keep myself lit up.
And when that happened,
all my hues and tones
were filled in with neon anxiety.
Poison plant lay your underpinnings within me.
I am nutrients.  I am support.
I know the out there in the darkness.
Where one tree sways unlike the others.
Where one light shines dead matte black
while the others twinkle.
Where the singular planet wobbles gracelessly.
There are deep wells like empty holes.
Chalkboard coarseness scrawled
with random scratches of light.
The whine of the camera after the flash,
the red light bobbing in the after image.
I am surprise when the india ink tips over
covering everything effortlessly.
The whirl pool that stands
perpendicular to the marble hallway
is faster than your quickening pace.
The man just outside the window screen
is asking to be let in.
There is an air conditioner on,
no one will hear him slip in
through the hole in the wall.
And he can hear your footsteps.
He'll stroll amongst the parts,
the reoccurring nightmare,
the empty universe,
the ever present discontent,
the twinkling beauty.
Can't you see what I am doing?
What I am doing.
What am I doing.
I am a wasted guru.

Grief Funeral Procession.

We can make things less empty
if we all pull up the wreckage underneath.
We can turn it around in our minds
and let it completely unwind.
We can let the body burn slowly,
let the tears at our edges mend knowingly.
We can get the loss to recede in fits.
The sun wedges in our broken heart as a stint.
We can crystallize and turn into pink ice.
Our organ no longer an over used device.
We can get the cold.
We can lose to it.
We can come back from it.
We can live further then die from it.
We can be laid to rest.

The Bog of Eternal Insecurity.

I know you are a monster.
Your monstrosity has nothing to do
with why I want nothing to do
so wholeheartedly with you.
Within you prowls creaturely anxiety.
You shoe gaze to assume some sort of piety.

When your milky violet eyes
creep over my skin
the fog of the lagoon
turns into a blanket
and I get damp and sour
with your gaze left like dairy
on my skin for weeks.

I am sorry for you, monster.
Sympathy without sorrow.
Empathy rotten with malevolence.
You are a monster of the heart.
You are beautifully deformed in your emotive strikes.
My hands grow wild with decay as you stare into me.
Tears leap from your eyes as flames do;
the lonely descent of a suicide falling from the ledge.
The smart phone notifies, forgotten under the hedge.
My feet sever their ties, yet no farewell to the ankles.
You drill your eyes into me and take core samples.
This layer is empty.  This layer is full.
This layer looks all crossed out and null.
The bog has lain traces of itself all along your skin,
fissures of silt stratifying the stupidity forthcoming.
Something that is wasted without knowing it.
That breath, that voice, that fear of showing it.
Wasted for everyone to see you unclear.
Your struggle of expression leaves you further rather than near.

The middle of the earth just wants to give you away.
And the outside just wants to take from the middle.
And that is life. 
The transfer of electrons.
You give it and I don't want to take it.

There is cowardice in feigning internal struggle.
Hiding behind yourself, your emotions are a muzzle.

The Heart Run Skyward.

There is a steamer trunk with all of the things in it.
Oil rags piled on the lid, it sprawls next to the wood stove.
The soft fuzz of the fire sheds upon the room;
a gauze of snake skin fog drawing a cataract across the entire vision.
The trunk holds all necessity.
Whatever is in there should be.
What isn't shouldn't.
His gaze pours from
the slivers cut out of
the leather of his face like kerosene.
It lavishes the lacquered wood,
the gilded edges flicked with rust,
with an amber attention.
There is a play premiering in his mind every day.
No one is watching but him.
The writer of the fiction is psychotic.
His eyes twinkle like distant planets as he seeps into the dead room.
The moon lounges in the milky daylight,
it's chalky eye desaturated by the desert glare of the auburn steppes.
It is peeking in through the cigarette burns in the blinds.
He pays no attention.  He has no intention.
He has blood that runs when the cops round the corner.
His organs swing from ropes.
His eyes pace the hallways within him
and the delinquents skitter back to their places.

A transistor radio slurs out rust at a cantor.
Whatever song it sings is no matter.
He hears Tom Waits,
"House Where Nobody Lives,"
despite the tune the station plays.  

And the things inside the trunk.
They are ideas left tangible.
It is as though the plains were burned away into nothing.
Only leaving the roan horse spinning blindly through zero gravity.
The breath quickly zipped away to leave a vacuum in the lungs.
The fleshy walls trembling in that split second before they collapse.
No matter but the singular entity lost within itself.
No way to interpret itself.  No self perception.
All these things in the steamer trunk.  All the things.
Who ever he is.  No need to pry.
Where ever he is.  Do not linger long
What ever this is.  The space does not matter.
Why this is.  Try not to fathom.
However, a twinkle through the curtain, out in the bright:
The moon whispers,
It's okay, it is okay to find out.
The moon offers,
It is okay to simply see the outside of things,
and make up a different part for the inside.

Holding Against.

If I knew what I was doing,
I would not be doing what I'm doing.
You can always play the guitar like it's silent:
lose the loss and not the intent.
Please hold it against me.
Dot your eyes and cross this T.
Hold your love up close to my heart.
Hold me down so as not to part.
I want to feel it close, velvet,
deep level vibrations like a threat.
As when I felt something back then
without questioning the sensation.
The black holding the stars together,
the sky holding up the weather.
The black of which you talk of,
the tantrum of sparks of which you balk of.
To make a little decision,
to disavow with such precision.
That black is just as flat
as the endless expanse unwrapped.
That squirming little worm,
the smoldering ball defined carelessly as a term,
made out of construction paper,
to be pasted on the wall a bit later.
That worm that gets to change what you see.
Until it doesn't and you hold it against me.
Unquestioningly.
Done breathlessly.
My arms spring upwards into action,
thoughtlessly enacting throat protection.
It is involuntary and I do not want it.
Hold it against me and I'll flaunt it.
 

Your Eyes Like Bullet Holes.

Staring into the mirror I see
that tension of life with its inability.
I've got stars in my eyes
and they make me look dead inside.
My house is a ghost waiting to be built,
the cascade of the river side silt.
Nothing is ever perfect as you go.
A trust in severed vectors foregoes
the precision of choosing
with the decision of losing.
Wherever you go just get there.
Get aware of your leg loose of the snare.

I shout bullets from my eyes
and punch holes in your head with surprise.
The wounds open up and the pupils in there
like jewels glitter and milky they stare.
These hands handle smoke to construct the forest
out of words and nothing and your caress.
There is not much else but amber liquid.
The wings of a horsefly whirring undid.
This ammunition you have here is innocuous,
with the bullet casing spinning I become delirious.
A slow, slow walk, the trees talk with a stutter.
The wind blowing away a memory of another.
Whatever, don't care, it happens to be no bother,
Too bad I'm so secular that I can't understand the proverb.
.

It Must Be Death to Make Life Simply Gruff.

You took me apart
and now I see
that just as a start
I give this piece to thee.

My heart dripping honey and rough.
Staring straight eyes and make me tough.

Our dads are dying
and the fits come and go.
No use denying
of what each other we know.

It must be death to make life simply gruff.
We take up below to just lessen enough.

There was honey where things fell blank.
There was sunlight where flesh sank.
There was something other than nothing to bank.
There was laughter after the empty tank.

The universe asked, do you know
what you are doing to her?
My  purse tasked with sorrow,
blood, and hemorrhaging girth.
She circles one millionth of me
and yet she is all I can feel inside.
A purple sun fulfilling entropy,
such order forcing chaos to hide.

Getting Away From Getting Away.

sometimes there is no difference
between getting away with and getting away from
rays of black light illuminating the darkness
out there in the empty of the universe
clever ferocious and made up of nothing
so that I may reverberate it to sing
how could this matter with all that cold?
out there must die forgotten I've been told
because you must get a perspective
you must sit still to detect it
we are spinning at the same rate
and time and life demand to dissipate
a lot of contradictions piling up
dead soldiers on a mountain of doves
get me to get me out of here
a love of thusly seeing unclear:

this song reminds me of breaking hearts
and I am sick of faking arts
there is something to taking darts
there is something to moving parts
these words will get you into trouble
you pour them in and get muddled
only to get them back out won't be possible
you divide them and they'll still double
I imagine as a sun goes down on another planet
your death does not occur if you plan it

done and gone already:  eventually empty.

He Walks Very Slow.

The airport blues get you when you just wait.

He turned to me.  He told me.

My heart is living forever.

I said it seemed that way.

The body is skinny and brittle.

The mind left a note on the counter.

Paper stretched over a skeleton with drugs to exacerbate bruising.

Scrawled in wrinkle the years dance.

No one under forty has experienced the chill outside.

Ice and sand where a hole was dug for a cellar.

Us caretakers,

We climb in to test our belief in a ghost.

The light hangs with beer cans and cigarette hands.

No sign is given, we drink a bottle together.

I'm listening for the best last words.

I want them to be profound so I can erase the indignity.

When you just wait a glimmer of expectation dims slow.

I think he knows that he has been here for a long time.

I think that he says he doesn't want to turn around.

Because he doesn't want to turn around.

The continent of discoloration etched upon his brow.

That does not look real.

And the hospital bed,

 and the broken reservoir lid,

 and the grinding teeth,

 and the diapers,

 and the wandering eyes,

 and the smile,

 and the brief shine,

 and the ambiguous loss.

And not knowing where he is.

It is all right because he is home.

He left and we are waiting but he is home.