No Place

I’ve been searching, fast,
for a couple words to unravel
the traveling I’ve done

to no place in time
to the spaces I like to forget
the car seat cracks in my mind
where all the pretzel salt collects
and the toothpicks tell
resurrection stories

I choked back an ugly cry
miles above the Pacific
between glasses of red wine
lost on a few hours
of foreign wandering

Spiral

When I was a kid I did things for attention
When I was an adult I did things for attention too
Currently a former hypochondriac
Currently a spiral, gently
Now I listen to stories about myself
As if they’re memories
But the scenes are laid inside my brain
And if you emptied my head
You would see the stained glass
Reflections paint the walls
And know who I was

Alt Cinema 6

I was wild. On the sea, alone, by golden boat with high walls to peek past so your eyebrows are salted. Just enough to burn when the sweat wells up in the corners of your ocean eyes. There was a voice. There was a warning. A gold-skinned shark, swirled in orange-bronze that spoke back to the sun in rebellious little winks, screaming that god is a torpedo. The boat shook, and I splashed to the black-blue in hopeful atonement. I grasped the pine, and the pine grasped back hugging me to the floor to face the ether. I’m alone again, by golden boat, with the voice in my head that sometimes isn’t mine.

Hobbies For Ghosts

I have a lot of unfinished business
for someone with all this time on their hands.
Ghosts have unfinished business,
(and time)
and that’s how you become a ghost
and everyone knows it.

In this case all of my unfinished business is
really just unstarted business,
so I’m ahead of the ghost game,
and if I pile up hobbies I’ll never start now
then I’ll never be bored in the afterlife.

Future ghosts have it made.
Future me is going to take 200 years
to carve a first draft wooden spoon
that no one will ever use but everyone
will get a splinter from
until there’s no spoon left.

Future me is going to write
a 1000-year memoir
about being sub-par
at hobbies you’ve been doing for 1000 years.
It’s a self-help book for other ghosts and
a masterclass in mediocrity.

Future me is a ghost,
with too much ghost time.
What comes after ghost?

Airplanes Are Not Meteors

it’s the empty wine glass. it’s the ash trays edge in gold, and sacrificial tobacco. it’s the time tuned out, spent anywhere but here. it’s two decades of missed music, catching up on old moods. it’s being empty for the wrong reasons. it’s a false pursuit. it’s a flightless bird in a past life. it’s pure conversation. it’s a mid-august meteor shower, but it’s only an airplane again.

Initials

There are names in the trees, carved in.
Time and place under the canopy.
Brisk, the name of the leaves,
And the deep breath of the tree’s bass on the wind.
Names, old as the root, old as the heartwood
And the horizontal rot still gasping from the floor.
A chorus of initials carved since ’86,
So the tattoo repeats them in shallow marks
Through the gentle fingertips of admirers.
The old names of the forest live.

Monday Humming

You’ve been asleep for years. The deep kind where you can’t tell your asleep anymore because you’re awake by all biological standards but according to the soft blacks high on your cheeks and the wall of disassociation prizes lining the inside of your eyes you’re a walking dream. Running it down right out of the movies in your head, right out of the darkness of your bed at 2am, right into the slow crawl 40-hour morning of your life. Right into the words you’ve begged to sing sparks electric in your body for a chorus worthy of Whitman’s refrain. Waiting on a call that wakes alive your bones from false ascetic. Along these lines is an edge of indifferent panic, sleepwalking til you slip, quietly crossing your fingers.

Old Animals

All of the bones in my immediate view are friendly ones, nothing like mean bones. Nothing like closet bones covered with other beautiful baggage. These bones have stories, and I found them out when I found them in the ground. Found out we were all the same because these bones are also incomplete, and even if I piece them together the edges will never meet. As we sit pasted to the walls of the canyon across the room in admiration, greens and light in between, shadows in the stark white.

Travellers Notes

I’ve been having dreams that don’t feel like dreams. I’m waking up, I’m walking out of space into memories I no longer remember, wandering into something I didn’t want to. But it’s not the scenes, strange as the leaves telling fortunes in the bottom of your tea. It’s the dread trap crisis coming from the bottom of my half sleep heart. These dreams of isolation, dreams of going back. These dreams of fucking up, dreams of living in restraint and everything I lack. Dreams of walls so tall that time can’t even crack. And I wake up scared each time from travelling despite my senses fade from black. Out of breath on the bedside, out of time, left to sync. Present to the light thrown from the top of the curtains to the seven circles on the wall, and the way the mirrors reflect them back and forth in three realities.

Alt Cinema 5

It was all grey and grain against the sky. light purple eerie, sneaking with smoke ghosts. I was out from the elevator in a direction more feeling than navigation along the bones of the building. Open doors behind me, slow and steady, to the skull on the floor. I’m chased, I’m trapped, I’m awake. 60 years left to 60 years more.

Mute Morning

The air is still and sticky, and the birds outside my window don’t seem to realize that the sun has barely risen three hours after it promised. A mute morning. Lying in bed considering every praying mantis I’ve ever met, and if the ringing in my ears is a signal from the universe that I choose to ignore. It’s loud but I can drown it out. Maybe I was a flightless bird in a past life.

Alt Cinema 4

I was in a house on the water. Not by the water, on the water, and out the window all the whales were close enough to high-five. Airborne split seconds at a time, now the house comes down, now sprint away outside. There’s a whole neighborhood floating, but we all just stand and talk about it, suspended so in a way we were all floating too. A whale also died but I lost my thought about it.