Snow Moon

New Orleans is a shipwreck masquerading as a city

it hovers, horizon of worn time

i would lay down in fields of warm settings & if the moon

says i need you, cresting the rooftops of abandon 

where we travel to be able to breathe & below sea level still

high enough up & you can see the whole bend in the river

ghost barges stirring up February fog round the edges of their cut paths

call & response from the next roof over, we’re all out here leaving 

something behind, write my name on it for a lifetime, for this life 

folded into you, the way some of us get left out of the picture 

crosses the choice that some of us leave on our own if love

isn’t what you think it is: You’ll never be as free as when 

you let go of all you think you’ve learned here

asphalt shingles held us to a gripping, if you want to be inside me

under that full moon, we need to be high enough 

that i can see my city, the way i tied my life to her

the way i could come up under her, a rushing of water

is where my life spooled out, a rushing of wanting to feel everything 

there are types of desire that undo you, then there are types of wanting 

that carry you far enough to find them— some of us live in the interstices 

knowing all of this is temporary, steal what you can carry  

plunder the rest 

Time is Always the Crossroad

in 15 days my brother dies again, time is illusory

disasters shape language, once we were water line 

now we are abandon of a season that shapes our survive

in 15 days, the city will be lost of traditions that float us shore

to shore, we who thrive in the chaos of undone for each day numbered

a costume, a song, the way we arrive at the river in droves and will 

you play for me, will you dance with me, have you ever hungered so much 

in your life for a city as i have hungered for her to be reborn, repeatedly

in 15 days we take the shape of mourning, i don’t know everything suicide 

can do yet, i don’t know everything loss can be, i don’t know if holding ‘

together is a possibility, but here we go out on this lonely flight of what else 

can we drop into those waters, palms painted morning light & for every death, 

some life clings to us, or else we would have to admit we can’t see 

at all. Can we admit it? Can we convince grief that timing matters, or is it true 

every song cannot be unsung, so deep in the threading, is the walk we take at dawn

from the house to the river, and my brother will be there walking from our mother’s house 

to our father’s where he will get the gun, will you lay me down to sleep, for every walking 

wake we keep, i am never alone now. Ever i am with you in time, we travel doubly bound 

find me near the shore on the morning of no Mardi Gras and i will show you how it looks  

to carry all of it, angel of break, to poet is to never heal completely, for i would hold 

until there is no shape, till the burns of time erase, the flood inside me sharp with learning 

in 15 days, ask me what it means to crossroad these deepest pains, for that too we sing. 

CRUMBS

For those that think they are monstrous, i speak for you

Uncanny we wade, so water a trembling sign for will you

                 uncaring in outcomes but i did want to be shattered 

You can’t have everything and they mean it when you find 

Having traveled far to seek some answers you end up inside the box 

                  Tell me what your wish is, little girl 

We have to suspend belief that beauty can love such horror show

But, birdy, we fly don’t we, when loved, when you get to be one

                  of the lucky ones 

You have to remember we come from this island of misfit 

It’s not like you can just locate New Orleans on a map 

                   inside you there is this breaking that never ends

I thought you could see me in all of this mess, inside this chaos

I fell a victim to this dream, that you spoke the words i choose 

                   Too and listen, little echo, little warbling chest space 

All my life has been less than, and less than that to hold on to

Try to bargain even now, let it be this last time to get it right somehow 

                   that merry go round moving so fast and you think what 

Is real in a movie about our future selves, plastic trinkets pawned to history 

We of the B sides, the news bytes, the recycling data of gossip 

                   Tell me what am i surviving since love is off the table 

Whatever darkness darkens, and i am there. Wherever fate is forgotten, waves

Lap from memory and it is a thing they do, like us continuing, as if we should

                    Time takes us anyway so what matter you chose never to try 

Is it true, if no one wants to hold on to you

You fly away, in one’s city, broken apart, is it true really

                     That you never really cared at all if i was here with you 

        

 

Carnal Evaluation

 Carnal/Eval/Uation 

I am about to make the other speak.

-Barthes

Nor did the war ever end, i could not stop the flow 

Bled out, i colored the right bright love of the red winged blackbird 

Best believe in the magic of— pier roped our separate water crafts

In calm waters and spent, smeared lipstick stains cloud shape 

On the interior of the mouth coverings, falling in space

Like love, garners a series of questions 

Participation in the others’ hallucination of you 

Line the poem with broken facts

Each heart a haunted place, be not what leaps if leaps 

Confused, fashioned as monsters of old 

Every tree trimmed with faces, a sadness 

Always remember the brokenness i tucked under 

This necessary keep: What is your allegiance to

To be an American poet, the response of the nation 

If you know what you are is better than what you want 

Space is negotiated by resources, the way the lines of the poem 

Take the place of where we would have been real to one another 

I think sometimes if you would just call my name out loud 

Like that story, the whole world could begin again 

Yet the Frame Held

When the pitch falls, who sings for you 

To have a new feeling in the hopelessness of now

& no outside of nature, memory is how we keep time 

Flowing, the constant and i would wait for you 

Power is the dream of consciousness mattering 

You take your bones out and form them into a cave

A wander in the shadow of play till we make slaughter

A normal every day entertainment and when the experiment 

Goes black, what is the echo of could you pull me back, cornered

i see the walls of structure, ghosted remnants where we curled our signs

i existed once upon a story in the well of caught light, in the mornings

Of sorrow where you are not, in the burst dam of i broke through 

The smallness of my own wanting, and i came here to be with you

Again and again, till the quiet overtakes us. If we write what is already 

Understood, we stay rooted to this terror, i would ask impossibility

and call it love. i am asking you to architect your escape from progress 

for we shall sing of things not yet come and of things of the past

we shall let the water of language wash it away. 

Raw Towns

 

For Bill Lavender

In the heart of deep hearts, no voodoo dolls

The shape of days, the hours we met and disappear, time

So fast it takes your breath away, how you can build a city 

But still be a stranger in it, the way a story of a man floating in flood

Waters in a plastic pool will image carve into the crenellations 

We call recollected history, in one lifetime you will have conversations

Barely recalled and words that turn swiftly the whole course & we 

Gather here, patchwork defense mirroring, look i have unthreaded 

The straight and narrow paths of arrival and departure: I would bet

Infinity in symbolic play, the truth of how any art meets and stabilizes 

The future namings, you were the only person who dared say it

That maybe it was worth it to abandon the safe measures of prescriptions 

That kept me numbed to wanting to die, imagined the length of travel 

Insanity must venture & if love is not our place than why do we come here

If love is not how we see one another, why are we paying attention 

I shed every safety net designed to cage in a whisper of what 

Could your mind be missing, to be set apart from self possession 

Campbell says, is the point of participation in a festival, the ritual 

Of disassociation masks so fine, and even in the knowing that 

We wear it, we revel in the apparition of this mythic state 

This state of how we crumble from fearsome field to invulnerable 

Abandoned structures, the shape of belief trembled along the loose 

Sounds unspoken for in any quantum reality, once there is

there is no undoing, the error of our lives was never 

Sleep’s frail hold or survival in the margins, it was 

Never seeing clearly how deeply the coding we designed seeped

The barycenter pulls the eye to a centered light but the burning 

Of that bright, unequivocal eye is as gentle as the sound of breathing 

Not to go gently, but that we do not go is the line’s off course entry 

Stand Closer

 

i bet this place is a bone silent whistling 

under stars, the vowels of time, a constant 

we made it this far but not very far from where we started

from up there, the horizon is a tone less 

like i sd, we’re going the wrong way driving away from it

every poem is a trying to steal, i let you wheel 

turned up, i ask what i can of you

if i show you this childhood, what does it seem 

neighborhood drowned but my memory sharps against 

i was hungry so long in this life 

held inside, does love become a burden 

blunt mouthed to stop speech, the corners of this living

fold down, i do and do not see you clearly 

when you say i know more people who’ve died 

who wins that standing, there were more photographs 

than hours and more ways to never say what we mean 

if we could just stay driving and never arrive, if we could 

umbrella softest bits, struck match tip, it was this need inside 

me to choose burning over ever just making it home 

Fire the Poem

who can fire the poet, she says

but i'm quitting all the time

i wanted to retrace a cause, spool into time

this measure of what i determined a quantum fixt sound

to be soul to soul bound of karmic disasters or what 

is measured as in relation, i found myself wrong

about more than i was ever right

i'm exhausted by left hand margins 

& a departure from

how cute the use of line breaks

while people die of easily preventable 

things like hunger and poverty

how much longer in the charade of scarcity 

of resources and wealth is our requited participation 

 

we aren't taking care of one another, she said

the day we took MDMA and voted

i have a right to be a happy citizen 

given that our time here is infinite

why all the anxiety about right & wrong moves

we misremembered parting and departing 

a different set of codes

 

the night sky partially a drowning of dead light

but drawn as we are to a shining, we pretend

how many ghosts are inside us now

i mean inside this universe and well, of course

this climate of mean observations

 

Dropped of Desire

i'm going to take notes as we go under
as it capsizes
i'm going to small
in the terrible light of design
i'm centered on amaze
central to backing

there is a body in the building
is it recoverable
can you identify the design
of contamination, do you know how many
bodies were in the room prior to the diagnosis
of death: i am as statue. i am as prisoner.

i am attempt of constructed misjudgments
this song abrasive, undone of timing
i would sing for those forgotten

i was never going to be what you wanted
and that was hard for me to hold
i wanted to make it to the other shore
blessed of survive in how we held each otherdown

but here we are: adrift
i have to let you go 

i have to watch everything
i love
be taken by time

 

Passive in Revolution

grief sharpens us

turns us into the ghosts we are

slap happy in the world 

you can't survive living

i have adjusted my expectations around you

i have retrieved the significant bytes from previous dialogues

i have attributed values to the 1s and 0s used in each string

i have typed these symbols in the text box [$#!?]

i have anonymously answered three questions about myself 

that only eternity can hold 

i have become incoherent passive in the revolution 

as predicted by television 

i have telescoped my thoughts to the smallest diameter

i am winking at you across the borders of declension 

have you had enough water today 

right shift + control: delete your notions of absurd

it's taxing to be a poet

in baseball season. and without. 

amidst a pandemic. or without. 

we write about the moon. 

but it's not like i really want 

to end up alone there.

Bite Down Hard

i imagine we ship off

imagine we stow away 

i imagine the barges come and go on the river

we stalk around undetected

we slippery rats among the rocks

our tails a dead giveaway 

that we are alive still

searching borders broken 

i imagine i held my finger 

 

to your mouth 

& you bite down hard enough

to draw blood

i am a feeding to you 

 

i never wanted to be rescued

but devoured. like any proper

woman i would you let me know

you love me 

by removing my eyes, my tongue, ears

cut off my hands and leave me

senseless

i will know then i am one

of the adored

one of the precious

one of the salivated for by the masses

put one part of me on social media and with 

enough likes, i become a real girl

a real girl, they said, oh yes

everyone knows if you want to be worth anything

you have to have followers and likes 

enough to fill your days

that's what life is really worth dying for 

 

what else could make us the inverse

of god 

Solid as Wave

you've been nothing but bounded your whole lie, i mean life

to speak of it

i have fully embraced giving up 

boundaries risk nothing and are inevitable

everyone will bet on them

high praise slap on the back 

for wielding yours. but what an imaginary

what a way of concealing 

to think being human makes you 

so spectacular and not just spectacle

i'm not trying to craft poems here

i want a record of break, of fail, i want to insert 

into time the memory of how when you try 

to repeat, you are making a bargain with less

you can't go home again

but you also can't do any of this twice

do you understand what i am coding
you can't see clearly 

because our way of perceiving is being 

co-opted by what we consider acceptable 

ways to be in this level of program

and what we have allowed allows for no clear

management of the dream's taking 

so we barter and trespass and i want you 

to recall love is not a thing you can give 

or take, you have nothing and you get nothing 

dead or alive, we top the cascades of erase

you've been nothing but bounded your whole life.

the way we love one another is so particular

no word yet exists

what we call failure in this life is a lie, what we 

call success is a lie, what we call progress is a lie, what

we call history is a lie, what we are doing is actually 

nothing

Ashes from Ashes

 

 

 

we'll get to it, what

this. 

this is a what.

this is a type of

 

a burning. 

a what. i mean. 

it's calling. 

calling what. 

not what. a who. 

you mean. 

 

don't all talk at once. 

it's a calling. 

we'll get to it. 

we are getting closer. 

to what. 

to the beginning. 

 

now what. 

 

let me tell you a story. 

 

 

do you remember the caves we lived in for so many lifetimes. in the before. in the skins and furs of when we spoke the languages of all the living. do you recall the way we read the smoke. the way echoes danced inside us, our heartbeats as wild and free as the sky itself threatening to swallow. i am writing to you from inside the caging of a matrix that was designed to destroy all memory of what we are. how we traded freedom for an empty promise of safe. and there is no safe. there is now less and less safe for all. 

 

once upon a time, we slept in the crook of fear as sweet as any babe because we walked with death, our ancestors held as close as a whisper. do you hear them. do you know it was always just us in the cave. it only holds room enough for one. but from the flames we made shadows of self enough to dance ourselves into a frenzy. we began to believe in the closing down into disparate parts. and also we thought we were the burning. 

 

sleep now, we are almost there. 

 

we have called into the deepest dark, and the only resolution now is extinction. and then return. for there is nowhere to go beyond. the universe is exact and ever expanding, annihilation and ruin.

 

Don't Be Afraid

this is the us of our country. the us of our diligent courses. the us of financial disparity. the us of consuming resources. the us of hoarding. the us of instant gratification. the us of short attention spans. the us of enslavement under different names. the us of concentration camps, of prisons, of anything but freedom, home of the brave.

please be brave.

capture as blocks of time. i was in the moment listening. i was in the net, internetted to notions of lovely, shaped by direct messages & alerts and not by touch, the sound of your voice is a memory but i have scrolls of words that will nail you into place. 

 

this is a story of failure, the ways we collapse collectively. 

found our discomfort is what we call every day. 

 do you feel historical today, i mean, hysterical. i mean no one can work. no one 

can function. i mean how do you not marvel every day at the psychological 

warfare we're being asked to exist under

 emotions are the entertainment of distraction

it's when you feel nothing anymore that we can begin 

to deprogram you 

how long is this internment? 

 or what is the length of your belief in time. 

 

 

 

Return to Begin

i had to bring you back. 

to the first photograph, 

so you can see. as i see. 

the world dusty

stained with fingerprints 

the way everything human 

to me is trespass

collections of sound, the detritus of energy

all of which is to say: i cannot clear it away 

enough. this coupling, this charged center

the heart's core of incomplete

i would carry this wound in each iris

i would lens light to a trapping

tell me what i can't do is keep trying

like i will not surrender 

us

i will not be made to give over

in some easy gestures, told that miracles

are minor accidents, or try to swallow some 

time spent in between make and imagine

when we held the keys to every crystal chamber

the mind colluded to create in us

i would you whisper to me before we leave 

this place. at least once to delight me. 

use the words we chose in silence, tell me 

we did find something together here. 

 

No Surface Shatters

 

no. i'm not ok. you can't get this far

and be ok. they won't tell you that.

i can't figure this part out, i told him. 

you can swerve so far off course, he said

than you can still come back.

i'm stuck in a loop, i confessed. i keep trying.

he can't hear me because we are on separate time 

lines now, once we traveled together. 

 

that's all you get in this life

if you are a traveler. 

 

if you are lucky, for some short trips

you won't have to travel alone

 

but now it has been many long nights

and days and nights and days and life times

 

here in this location. 

 

i don't think we could have known. i don't think 

there's any way we could have known. 

 

but i've been wrong about so much.

 

we are ever at war. of course, we say

that is why we are here. that is why we came

we are ever at war

 

we are ever traveling here. 

 

 

look, i will one of these days

feel as though i'm getting it right

write exact

 

that blue. that sky. that sound of the river.

layers of concrete. holding us like magic.

 

all of it magic. holding us up. 

 

 

 

Center the Monstrous

 

What gets raped out of the body? What does the body forget in neglect? What is disappeared under the weight of every day annihilation?  What is lost in translation when we are never told the truth. Can beauty ever be enough. Can the belief in love ever be enough. What fills up the smallest cup we call our heart space. This is a photograph of a drowning, the space of this one drop can be filled with enough neutrinos to kill a person. It is in the smallest measures that we are risking every day. The algorithm of consuming to extinction is hard wired into you at birth. Is there a difference between touching your tongue to the burning flame and me telling you: The world is on fire. 

what we see is the poem orbiting/ the poet radiates/ a type of internal combustion/ seek it in a different 'light'/ infrared, global and music/ what is an invisible word/ between spectrum / if some of us had survived/ now all of this would be different/ like misplacing all of the umbrellas/ so you have to feel the weight/ of water on your skin/ the way you know you are alive/ or don't

the representation of a wish is the representation of its realization

 

what is spell bound in language

 

what an effigy for desire in the word. to say petal.to say bloom. to say flowered. we trade in the etymology of a softness and a vulnerable that hand to hand asks of us to fantasy how hard it is to exist here. magic was never about manifesting dreams as much as shaping the programs that hold you under this illusion that we could be handed the smallest pieces of the puzzle and still solve for whole.

 

 i have been warning anyone who will listen, to come upon collectively this never remembered space in the time line must surely believe we have never made it this far before.

 

but perhaps you recall the sound of my voice.

 

even now, you could sound out my name on your tongue and that might be the length of existence.

Extraction for Measures

 

these words arrive to you via reflected light. via the course from mind of design to mind of intention to the yellow brick mazing of never go home again. do you know what happens to a city that leaves the dead in a building for almost a year. now we do. now we know the answer to so many terrors. the way what we hold sacred can be stripped from us, the way we became history even as we sank beneath it. 

 

 

 

 

 

this photograph x-rays the photon’s expectation, it adheres along the edge. What is emitted from the core is a beyond the speed of light determination. Does the operating system of the universe run analog or digital we might ponder to pass the minutes. i can tell you that under survival such cushions are not needed to line the couch. you can turn the whole furniture over to float when the water comes. don’t ask me about fire. all i’ve know in this life is more and more intricate ways to drown.

 

Hard-wired to Birthing

 

 

lenses diameter light, cervix to the optimal opening of a let there be…. and what waters we trouble. shade or shadow, the haunting of areas long left of their one wild sorry. i was distressed by how unclear the damage was, kept asking you to help me see, but you put the console between us. you kept arm’s length and away, a shushing of my face in the wind. there’s no amount of fast between us that will ever scare me. it’s what you hide in plain sight that is a terror i would try to contain. like if you keep showing up, it means one day you won’t. it’s blurry what we are and what binds us. 

 

 

 

 

hydrogen and oxygen will bond to create water and what are we bonding to and to create what. we think it must be a maximum state of procreation, emotional intensity, sexual gratification or rage itself, but in practice, we are bonded to each person we meet along the way, to varying degrees we are bonded and forever entangled with each other.

 

i think if we could ride the timelines out long enough… we could see the whole diameter of how we circle round one another, how we influence and learn, temper and trap against. it can’t be accidental, the way time never took us very far from one another. and through watching this city drown and die in so many measures, some how we managed to make it far enough into the future to spend one last day wasting time.

Realization throws Bright

we are god and we don’t want to be. we want anyone else to have this task. it’s invulnerable. this always being a little light of mine to shine. this always being here but pretending like it’s anew. we want anyone else to take this steering. take the wheel. take the momentary lapse of judgment. take the last slice. take the initiative. take the risk and let failure lap you like a wave. take handfuls of similes and metaphors and drip them along the curves of me, licking it clean.

 

desire is what confuses us of free will. to know we have wants and the autonomy to access choice makes it seem as if we are moving through time with some awareness enough to shape reality. and not that reality is shaping us reciprocally, that there is no separation. it doesn’t matter what we want: half is molded by the attachment of what we long to have and the rest by aversion to what we wish to avoid; the maze from above is easier to solve. try to abandon resistance and see what floats.

 

belief is for living not dying. it can boat you shore to shore but once we exit this staging, whatever dreams we built here fade to dust. we are as moon beams, the hint of romance and then dissolution. everything we see is architected within the darkness of our skulls, caged in illusions, entire realities are constructed on this notion of collective dreaming. an eye is as adaptable as any other organ. it rests in the explosion of data enumerated to infinity. nonsense is the way we use language to make sense of minutes, hours and eternities.