sulky midnight poem for jessie

we should both be sleeping
I forgot to ask why you weren't
my skin itches
I peel it off in sheets and ribbons
play a game with a prize
where the prize
is less scratching
my head is oriented the wrong way
I don't know if turning around will
fix anything.
petulant in my corner
I long for ice cream and blue eyes
in the crux of a conversation
complaining of the noise
street cleaners make.

the owl

if I listen long enough,
the words will come
or the rough lullaby of the port
will lull the eluded sleep
into a false sense of security
so I may consume it

But you were never a sleeper,
and I wasn't either.
who could be among these
sirens of childhood and whistle-blowing adults
with the children who stay up so late
given sugar past their
bedtime

Another beat cop changes shift
and I perch orange-lit and glorious
for all Seattle to see
gazing through glass at
three branches reaching up up up
marionette strings
anchored somewhere in the sky

oh I am my mother's child
the moon is full and she tugs
at my veins
whispering something dark and sweet
and silver-blue

050608, 0338

Nora brings me back to Flagler
a fleeting thought of brass touches
sunned skin black cotton halter dress
too many cigarettes and sunglasses

Nora brings me back to my nose and
naked in the firelight and writing
spontaneous poetry but unable to repeat

Nora brings me back to fuck odes and air laced with sex.

Nora is making lists in my head of the things I should remember to bring
lists of the people I should remember to love,
minus one:
semper fi -- do or die.

Patrick brings me around again,
'thou mayest' and playground literature theory, atop slides and wine

Patrick who has left us for structure and
I can only pray that semper fi won't
take away his precious voice or hardened hips, or
his poets fingers sifting through ash,
trying to find that piece of himself he only sees in flame

I glance at shadows of laughter gracing bedroom walls,
I stare in each of your eyes in my dreams
I sleep eat feel breathe write the language we created
and I can taste that epiphany
on the horizon once more, just beyond
Admiralty Bay, just beyond John Gratton,
just beside the robot geese.

Your faces -- all my dreams -- colliding.

poetry.
give me poetry.

Come Across the Sound

grace emulsified and patented
lips in trails cooler fire a song
penetrating fingertips leading
the way across and down
the southlands,
warm/and/wet/and/ waiting
with gunfire
with need of revolution
with traps for the wandering
spines electric, pulsing
releasing vertebrae into
the open-aired night, starless and cold
fleece just long enough to conceal
unexpected flame
so what if the whole house
burns down
timbers smoking, walls collapsing
at the cry of
Freedom
at least it was destroyed
in love

Building Your Home

the ghost symphony is
leaking
through the vents and
trickling
into my ears its aural pleasure
steaming, sticky into
my brain where it
mixes with my heart's
songbeat and floods unparalleled
down down down my
shivery shaky shoulders
(may's winter in the pacific northwest)
coursing my spinal cavities
killing calcium with long-dead
tones and rests
my hips absorb sound
like the dirt takes water
I am muddied like adobe
hard-drying and unforgiving
to the floor
I am the floor.
I am.