anelle

"Aut virum aut murum oportet mulierem habere" (a woman ought to have either a husband or a wall) So pull the pink and yellow tones from my blushing skin, and with a brush, wed them to warm Barcelona walls; I will be her bright bride until the Spanish sun peels our paint, swallows our brick back into the mountain, and migrating swallows cool us with their passing blue shadows as they remind us how everything grows in shifts of breaking eggs and bleaching bones. Turning, and turning, and turning, together, the seasons slice us into sand and sigh us down to that Mediterranean coast, where we glow white and wet with the same moonlit

a sea of houses comes rolling in rusty roofs bending breaking, crashing shingles popping like fireworks (expressing their independence, they die) while you and I (nothing more than genetic flotsam, now) turn our eyes from a shattered-glass snowfall and dream of the winters of our youth this will be the end of days ... this will be clouds folding into the earth thunderstorms growling from foxholes rain tumbling from rivers as a clumsy conflagration stumbles into our skin stealing our silhouettes painting our ghosts on walls (oh, had only we learned such passive resistance) as you and I (only numbers and figures, we know)

I have carved a route through convoluted (be)causeways (just)express(ing myself)ways and subtle by(the)ways stolen signposts you let fall from your soliloquies yet I am not sure whether I stumbled into this bare, undulating crossroad one hundred or one thousand miles ago for you keep your scale hidden beneath face-down photographs within journal entries and underneath loose floorboards ... I wonder if I have traveled anywhere at all … dead cells flake away from my touch your indulgent fingers twist into my hair feeding me stories of Pessinus and allowing me to believe that I have transformed you but you are ten

            I was like one of those music box ballerinas. I moved my limbs stiffly in practiced, predictable gestures along an imaginary track as I walked from the end of my register, behind the conveyer belt, and into my little cashier box walls made of grocery bags to the left, register keyboard in front, and computer screen and register drawer to the right. In the background, tired old nineties and eighties pop songs echoed over and over through the grocery store aisles.             My painted, plastic smile greeted a cu

how are you today? … in between red lasers and barcodes we were waking on a Tuesday morning or, rather hurling our hands to crash languidly against distasteful reminders of closets, curling irons, and coffee we stitched a selvage counting threads and individual skin cells leading the needles in our nerve endings with smeary fingerprints and curling toes as we invented words to drown out the morning … within a snapped-open canvas bag and the clunk of cans in the bottom we were slithering into nylon skins temporarily joining two halves with plastic and grinning teeth mocking the thunder, a disgruntled polyester

II. six guitar strings that whirred under your hands like sweet mosquito wings seeking my blood and that heart that bore it III. one shoe swallowed somewhere below the water-rafting bridge; the movements traced by our joyous limbs stitched into its flailing, free laces IV. eight cassettes that buzzed through steel wool speakers in their scratchy eighties' voices as our car rolled down puzzle-lines of scenic summer; each mile allotted us one thousand words V. not once have we pretended to have one another completely deciphered VI. three loads of laundry that flapped on humid cords of June as we threaded our to

When I die, I want my bones to burn and dance with tar in the funeral pyre heart. I will crack with laughter and blacken like all of those transient stars we connected like hands. With my glowing marrow, pitch, tar and other content (like the first letters you ever sent to me and the screw in my knee I earned when we learned to dive from those cliffs like sea falcons) I will be reborn. One day I will live as the signature of a letter, or the curl of an eyelash in a portrait drawn for a lover, or a memo spreading softly into the lines of your skin. I will live on forever.

when she             sighs she tastes fire and betelgeuse ribs creak with an overload of hydrogen, expanding until she splinters into scattered consonants and vowels for a moment she could overwhelm galaxies if she would believe she is more than degenerate matter ... although she can be viewed by the naked I, her core collapsed long ago and it seems I am living on borrowed light ... but when she                   smiles breathing in swirling infrared tendrils of tarnished c

It's always my right boot that won't come off I hold it in my left hand and it jerks like a worm dangling off the hook of a fish pole about to plunge indenting red claws across the peak of that majestic hill my calf like the American flag conquering the moon and I beat the heel against the floor and wonder if I'll break the man-made leather and if man-made leather comes from man-made cows and my leg sits there between the boot and the floor like a dead thing in the road making us feel guilty for running over something we couldn't possibly have done ourselves and my calf is free and the boot lies there against the other

When she was, he was, twenty, thirty Leanin' on a pool table, a high cove hidden at the back of the bar, cryin' Bobby Dylan can't shriek like momma on Sunday but he'll tell me right from wrong, he'll tell me Drawin' in a ball of smoke, a genie's tail enticing-- her hips swayin' to the rhythm of an eternity he'll pray to keep, he knows the words, and so he sings forever, forever stay She is, he is, forty, fifty Creakin' bed as she stands buried alive by her weight Sits at an edge, scrapin' loose flesh from her feet And she is always singing old songs over and over telling herself it's all right, all's right Lightin' a match t

My love! Although a thousand miles and all my wisdom speak against, I'd spurn all of my common sense and trudge that distance, for your smile. Ha! Proud and scornful of such verse, I'd thought myself above cliché, an artist in a higher way, yet here I pen that which I cursed. But if so naturally come clichés to mine and countless other tongues, perhaps some thread between us runs and similar blood runs in our veins; from every mouth these same words call. Cliché is not, then, lack of art: the common patterns in each heart make dreadful poets of us all.

 The shock of solitude had finally begun to sink in. Earlier I had looked upon my furniture with no thoughts but "we often sat and talked at that table," or "that was her favorite chair," as though in some way she still lingered in this house, though she had taken her leave of it, and of me. For a time I could not even sleep in my bedroom, knowing my wife and I had lain there, full of joy, and what I'd thought was love. As my mind settled, I moved back in to my room, but a different thought plagued me- "this bed is unutterably empty." At first there was a feeling of haunting togetherness, now, an almost palpable separation. My house was a vac

How pure we were, when born from ore: simple and untainted, a metal of one shade, stainless and whole. But now I am a makeshift alloy, stronger perhaps for being made complex, but having lost all shine. And stronger only in some ways; for my parts are of differing qualities. I have been left in peace, and so I rust at varying speeds, my heart tarnishing and arms thinning while my legs march on unaware. I have been too long undisturbed, and thus decay: I am beyond upkeep by oil. I creak with the desire for mallet and anvil, for constructive demolition. I implore the ancient Smith who set us forth from our molds- bring coal and

The Sun is far away and looks at me coldly because I am not Close, I am not Warm. I can feel the molecules shivering on my surface, even though my heart is Warm, but The Sun cannot see my heart. The Sun loves all of her children, all of us whom she has curled up out of the empty. I breathe out and the wave of my exhalation fans in all directions, and sometime it will reach The Sun, and she will know that I am here, and that I love her and that I follow her, fall around her, and my heart is Warm, like her. My Close siblings exhale Warmth and it passes me by on its way Away. Away from The Sun, I do not know what is there, I do not care, The S

Oh, there's no question-she's the prettiest of us. She has the kind of beauty that pulls- that every cell in every human body knows to love. But no, I've never envied her. I've seen the way her blueberry eyes watch, panicked, as the landscape boils and sways and leaves her behind. She listens, but our exhalations do not speak to her, our words are worm-eaten-I know, she has a shard of ice in her eye that turns the air to brick, and our voices to brackish filth that flows past her ears and gets caught in her spun-honey hair-oh, but it's dark now, with dye or dirt; I'm not sure. And that cherub with the pink mouth and the feath

There is a rush, a whirl, one in, one out... I dream Our noses are nearly touching an invisible pane of glass Misting the ghosts of droplets and handprints back to aspect Handprints of the millions who have been here before us. We're not exclusive, Just lucky. I cannot tell whether I exist, or, If I am only part of the colour you breathe. As the longest, smoothest, most precious sigh Echoes up from my heart to my head I am only colour Your face zooms out until you are only a star A mere point of wondrous light Hanging Floating In the dark.

Above my head, one Streetlight shimmers with the rain. More clouds are gathering now. Not far to go, but Better is that I know soon I can be curled up with you.

this is the story of the butterfly. he paints rainbows of loveless reds. of                                        fallen purples and