Insomnia

I'm mesmerized by fireworks and thunderclouds, lying on a sinking island in a swamp of navy and sepia, alert as you sleep, crushed, failing, falling as you rise. Overcome, as always, by hesitation, there's something hooked behind my solar plexus that won't let me go.

Caught unanchored in the center of a counter-current cyclone, I'm adrift. Catch me, my cavity; collapse.
Pure lymph, pure ache, purely hollow.
Collapse.

AP Portfolio Concentration

[To be read sequentially. Click a photo to enlarge.]

Cold

We are traveling forever, crushing the ground with fibers so much more efficient than gears, sanguine levers greener than cylinders, feet more silent than wheels.

We run endlessly across Antarctica, and the only sound is our breath freezing into glittering clouds of ice.

We laugh soundlessly, and the night sparkles.

Endolymph

The walls are breathing as I lie tilted and tumbling slowly in the cotton darkness. I can feel your arms around me like ghosts, cold with waiting. Lids close down and the universe shifts twenty seven point four degrees left and sixteen degrees back right as I jerk ahead and stumble over a crack in the floor that your dripping faucet forgot to mention as I crept across the cramped and crumbling tiles in search of a patch of air to place my potted plant, somewhere where the walls don't steal all of the air to sigh it out, chilled and empty, against my blind and blinking wrists-- pale, taut and trembling, always waiting. I focus my retinae to needlepoints to create a tiny one-moment, one-centimeter void, a lack of sensation, a relief on all fronts; potassium gates locked, pumps off. Sighing out to acidosis, concentration dropping, fingers twitching, pulse racing and nerves crackling. My bones release sounds and stiffness into the soft shoegazed abyss, but they leave energy with no will, windows with no shades to cover the unfortunate exhibition.

Winter

I'm getting lost in static snowdrifts
Waiting, wandering, shivering
Straining my tired eyes, trying
Trying to see through the miasmatic flurries
The frozen fury.
I can't feel my toes
Can't bend my knees, anymore
As roots creep down, twining
Out of my hips, my shoulders
Sinking into the ice, into the asphalt, bulging, twisting
So
Very
Slowly.
Lethargic nostalgic squeezing
Unnoticed, unconcerned.
Undiscovered.
Steadfast and wondering, I wait
Beneath the clandestine streetlamp
With my back to the night and my face to the wind.
Squinting, tensing, waiting
But you're never coming, are you?

We were turning cartwheels, barefoot in the snow

It was a year ago today, though I'm sure you don't remember, that you offered me your gridlocked graphite heart stapled between a plaintive fold of green. It said everything I'd denied in our twisted fingers and heavy heads; everything I refused to look in the face drilled defiantly into my ears. Maybe I was stupid, maybe I've always been far too literal, but I made myself believe it in my frenzied eyes and the lines down my back.

Yeah, I'm pathetic--yet I still don't know whether I'm regretful... but everything is emptier than ever before.

Acres

everyone lives trapped in a revolving industrial garage with five-ton caution-striped hydraulic doors.

--

there's a black hole in the rearview mirror
as we drive out of nothing, into nothing
the world materializing fifty feet ahead
and dissolving as we pass.
we exist in a circle of definition
going nowhere at fifty-seven miles per hour.

--

We walk along fallow fields, jumping marshes and wading through reeds. We walk along the hedgerows under a leaden sky, into tangled apple trees whose withered fruits lie bleeding and frozen in the mud. All the trees have claws, here. Fingers reach across the pond, eating its icy casing, dyeing it aquamarine, dyeing it blackish and brackish as it starts to rain, and the pool becomes a drumskin, every drop a ring of sound, rippling into our eyes and our ears. We follow the memory of deer up the hill, into true woods. The moss and the ferns are rebels, survivors, verdantly alive in the monochrome scene. Our boots crunch down the slope, over stream and through brambles that tear our skin and clutch at our hair, onto a landscape laid belly up, open to the mercy of the sky... I wander in a daze toward a fallen cloud, a bit of still-frozen snow...? Through someone else's eyes I see the dead goose, its saline feathers sooty and rubied, strewn across the clover. Ornithinian ribs tear at the leaking sky, the ruined head tucked under one mangled, outflung wing. I sing a lament as I walk. I can hear the hunter in the woods; I am dressed all in brown. I sing as I capture the tiny hooves, scattered limbs, the pile of skin, the empty shell, the head, still erect. I sing in the sunlight to the open sky, to the strewn feathers and whitest down, the tangled intestines, the empty eyes and crushed beak, the crumpled feet. The shots ring, ever nearer, and I flinch; I wander, stagger, and weave; I scatter.

Condensation

words forced out
are spectres in the air
hanging.
they crown your head
circling like vultures
eat me eat me eat me.
feathers twitch in the cacophony of silence
as you give up
and lay your head on mine.
we are a city
a picnic-blanket landscape
strewn with cherry stems and eggshells.
we are checked--
red-and-white
back-and-forth
black-and-blue.
swing swing swing push.
there you go, now just hang
until your arms give out.
I'll catch you!
I promise.
sort of.
it's reciprocation, after all.
give-and-get.
I lost every receipt, love
so now we're just jumbled
piled between the bricks
of frustration, of desire.
...wait, what?
but you said...
damnit.
no.
collapse into our blanket cocoon
our pillow canoe
our net of limbs
our net of lies.
tumble back into the haze
of tiny bubbles
of criss-crossed crystal
of amber energy.
melt me.
yes, I am a puddle of mush.
sliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiding.
let's make it a shindig
we'll be slush in the streets
dissolve in the heat
of tumbling truths
that haunt your mouth.
there are ghosts in the air
spirits on the windows.
every apparition staring me down
with their empty accusing eyes.
it was a failed exorcism
that only forced your spectres
into my ears, instead.

Drift

a magnet with no opposing poles
pushing closer and pulling away
caught in a tangle of electricity
spinning, spinning
with no direction at all.
a ship sails a cerulean sea
I watch an island through a spyglass.
stranded, not for lack of canvas
but the wind, listless
spirals out and down
and carries me nowhere.
bruised by crystal and brass
the compass never rests, these days.
as sable spreads outward
from lids heavy with thought
dripping with apology
drenched in regret.
lashes whip the room
freezing to stillframe
every smile
every kiss.
stomachs acidify
my basest thoughts
so I can stand here, neutral.
yes, I can look you in the eyes
and not even blink.

Wandering/Wavering

the highway is beautiful at night
a ribbon of flowing lights
mesmerizing
and I lose myself in the drumbeat
drowning in the bassline
pretending it's your heartbeat.
consciousness flowing through
the empty passenger seat
dissipating out into the air.
it is twenty eight degrees outside
and I hardly notice.
I'm eighteen miles ahead
and seven months behind
walking the razor edge of ambivalence
as you slip in and out of focus
flying past
lingering, maybe
but only for one grasping moment
so I'm left again with only air to hold.
you're my cloud
but I haven't found the sun yet
what is it that burns you away?
I'm sorry that I can't feel your vapor
waiting for the rain
or another sunny day
I'm assaulted by mist and fog.
she twines her hand in mine
and I...
twitch.
what is this silence?
I patch your holes with scraps of plaid
but you're wearing so thin
and I'm almost out of thread.
weave me tartan from your hair, love
it's brazen, oceanic
just the thing for mending this
unless I'm illiterate
unless I'm deluding myself
into thinking I could read the words
you traced upon my arms
so I'll sit here calmly erasing you.
I know you didn't mean to kill my balance
but I'm tumbling.
if she catches me
does that make her mine?
alternately pushing and pulling
it's go limp or tear apart.
I stare out my spiderwebbed pane
with mendacious clarity
hoping the shards hold
always just a few more weeks.