Lost Lines #7

I have loved myself only in the names of faces that have escaped my memory.

Night Chills

I was cold, but
  I couldn’t move to
    take the headphones off

for fear
  of missing a note

no minute, no
  melody skipped

just night chills
  in the drift, open apartment
    and this
    song, my open heart

I’m always falling into things, like prayers of old enlightenment, in dashed nostalgia to remind me it was real...left in the short space between my fingers grasping for air.

Deviation

here is a traveling noun
and I am a traveler
on little deviations,
options, adventures

through the inescapable
map shifting about the
carpet, laid
up close a thousand paths

here is a traveling noun
I’ve had too much
coffee, laid here
long enough
and I’m tired of traveling

New Color

the color of morning
filtered by three panes
the sun fills the black of
my early narrow eyes, 7am
the dirty sliding door shows
dog prints of the day
multiplied
the empty glass in my hand
held up to the light, smudged faint
in translucent coffee brown
to fill the glass
to borrow heat from the glow-orange
of my fingers to the day
only to return in
the color of morning 
filtered by three panes

Long Exposure

something about the summertime
and running the creeks long legs
in the endless light of the solstice.

something about the heat
and dirt in the east coast air,
swimming through it
so it sticks to your skin,
soaked, sweaty hair across the lines of your face
where salt drips to your tongue
through the corners of your mouth
earning years of dirty youth.

and lightning bugs at dusk against the grey,
green lawns
humidity thick on our voices
screaming out of breath with
a thousand false flashes across
the street trailing our memory in yellow
streaks and long exposure.

it’s February tonight
the streets are quiet in my headphones
and I miss the summer sweet.

Futile Swearing

You chase it in spaced out seconds after your favorite songs because the lyrics left you reeling. Traces of enlightenment in every stranger, flecks of gold in your field, the light between two eyes in passing. There was the thought, yours but only loaned out. There was the stunned space, and a long forgetting. There you are in weeks, afloat in the same rooms reciting prayers in the same melody and flipping switches on the off-white walls with your fingers crossed. You seek the same lighting and a trance, futile swears to something from hot breath frustration. Maybe it never happened. Maybe you should light a candle, the flame glow and the plants shadow thrown to the wall haven’t been tried. Maybe the state of questioning is the only soundtrack you know.

Songs On The Internet

I’m checking my junk mail for notes lost in the cracks. Those telltale signs, those brief attachments, couch cushion of the universe kind. I’ll lose sleep over these, and other sad songs on the internet, and other questions I didn’t ask, and other truths I’ll stretch to frayed ends to satisfy the silence of mixed vibrations. We don’t lose touch anymore, we choose to disappear with sigils of the 21st century, into the new salt of the earth.

I’m always falling into things, like the little space between two of my favorite words posed together, floating from bedlam behind my teeth. 

A Little Red

a little red in the wrong glass
nights like these, i don’t like the stems
but it sips right
it’s just me and it’s early
its getting late
the dog is pacing, pawing at every wall
so am i 

it’s nice like this
but sometimes i just
want to make it through a night
without the longing 
of another life
stiff in the winter arms 
of the trees across the street

Alt Cinema 7

I walked your flowers to the streets edge
reds and yellows
pure from your hands, fragrant
and I fell into
the soft cup of the earth
dampened, low
on our tears together
and the knowledge of wounds that
soon should heal

Like a Portal

I’m summoning a portal with my plants
a half-moon congregation
a hallway that wasn’t there before
like the ones in House of Leaves
and extends into everywhere else
a darker black and a couple greens
Fox stares into the ink
his eyes two starry pours
we’re scared of the first steps

Indesicion

I’ll carry a coin now
and flip for every indecision
The weight of two cosmic faces
flung from my pocket
And I see my futures
in flashes of sudden memorial

Snooze

Seven times a week I wake up different. A quick look in the mirror, a five-alarm snooze. Still recovering from the night that I watched 30 planes fall short of the runway at the same time. Still staring at the sky and the wings with the orange glow. Still grasping aimless for the polaroid I lost I didn’t know I had. I woke up in another morning, I woke up for the green grass. I woke up in the same sheets wrapped for the winter. I woke up with the same name but needed to be reminded that the picture pieces of dreams are only altered cinemas of sleep.

Limbs Electric

I am a body full of wires, strung in errant Christmas rows 
and the subtle energies of the matter run the circuit open. 
There’s something more to this, like learning to let it go. 
Like shaking my limbs electric in ode to forces I don’t know. 
There’s something more to this and my heart just overflows, 
always full submission to voices of my own. 
I am a body full of wires, criss-cross overgrown. 
I am stumbling disposition, and happiness is a few seconds I’ve never been comfortable in.