The gravity of what happened

Out in space, the tears

don't fall

down her face :     t h e y   f l o a t

around the eye that cries, the ear

that hears someone say:   I see your   p a i n

like I see Earth from far far

away :  the pain/the earth-- both

as round, as blue as they say

Sleep, like a mother

Sleep always pulls me back

hard, back into itself:

(a mother

trying to pull the wail:

shrill, extension-of-self back inside

her body: mother who wants to feel

alive again: life kick

inside harder

each day: wants to feel a second heart

thumping inside her cocoon-

of-bone-cocooning-bone--

her baby a dream she wants

to make something

beautiful out of Darkness,

she wants to make something

beautiful without having to try.)

You use your hands like your mother

The memory I can not place, can't finger with my beautiful

hands, a man once said, you use your hands

like your mother, took years to understand my hands used

to pick, pick on self, on skin--

musician I create silence, sensation

to the microscipic tune of picked raw

picked liquid-red.

My wife gloves me to break

me as though I were a horse unridden,

a child again-- the discomfort of clothes

scratched on skin till I can go on

without a body I've never liked

a barrier between me and my naked

touching of the world. He was right,

like your mother in that silent picking

way I've watched her pick off bites

till the scab and bleed, re-scab, re-bleed--

finger-dance she's done

without thought of pain (the held-note

she holds to in the background)

those days sky is wholey grey--

grey, coupled with Silence that bears,

presses out amplified Ache

she closes her eyes to

kick into a swallowing sky.

Overkill

I am reading a poem about a God on the bright

rectangle of my phone-- squinting from white

light when I hear the sound: one lone

shot echoes down the hill I say a prayer

for the deer, downed with eyes still open

blinking water. Without my eyes I see her

this poem overlapped by this dying pain

that grows, about God, about God being alive

in the form of a fag-- not a stick bundle

but a person who has been taught to hate

himself, hate the way he grows to be

with a man swells and swollen it's

all too much for me, I put down

the phone light all I can see

is the deer, the deer who in this moment

is dying on the ground, the leaves

around her she never saw coming,

too young to fear people the way

she should, I draw circles

with my pen, over and over go

the same rounding line till the circle

becomes a sphere, becomes

two spheres (so neither sphere

is dying alone) the deer is sinking

down now into my throat, chest:

this is how we go on living inside

each other, these times the worst/

best we kill the innocents, the easiest

ones first, put their heads on

our wall and leave their eyes open

so we can be dead when we look

into them.

A Meditation for God

Let's light lamps, sit on a warmed

blanket in the presence of earth-breath

puppies, sleeping with necks crossed

over each other. Let's send a letter back

to God, knowing we could never compete:

     Thank you for holding my hand

as I breathe, you are like a candle to me:

in your presence I hum in light of your

flickering silence, I am safe. Your love

is both shield and sword, both in light

and dark, you shape-shift your love.

I live when I feel close to you. You change me

and make me new again and my joy

in each discovery is the fossil I find

buried in effort's dirt.

     It is hard not to imagine you human:

it is the human in me you forgive. You are

in every where and thing I feel you near

in the sound of rain the roots and I

collect you and curl in the satiety of you.

I feel you near when ear presses to her breast

I hear you inside the cocoon of her bones

around muscle: you have created

something so beautiful that through her

you bring me to knee with closed eyes, 

and a gratitude swelling for all she is,

all you are.

     I feel near you in the eyes

of others-- other creatures, other humans

who like me breathe to know you, remember you,

recall, call out for you. (Surely you know

if you press us in the right place, we will sing

and fill the holy cave with blue notes

of ache and praise.) You are like the

song our mother sang to us in womb:

you are both the womb and the song

we know from Universes ago,

we return through you again and again,

swaddled in your holy echo.  

What is to be learned from ash

Floors creak, the attic sounds

swollen and swelling: I am quite haunted

by myself. I want to bury seeds

into my very real knees, sprout gerber daisies

to spruce the place. I try not to remember

the scarlet rows, bruises I once inflicted

on thighs and wrists where skin was paper:

I am haunted with how

do I forgive myself written on the ceiling in ashes

that fall into my eyes and answer:

the Forgiveness will happen gradually-- a sprinkling

of salt into the folds until a day it's happened : saturated/ you will float

in water you will no longer wound yourself like a clock who needs

to be wound. It will be an Aegean kind of existence-- the salt-forgiveness

so dense you're wombed

again. This time quiet. --No padded thud of fist: no absorbed

anger. You know nothing, again : you know everything, sizzle

new knees, eyes form and all is cloud, halo and edgeless

you rest your comma-body below her rib. And the world is paused for you

to be let in. The ocean is unknown by you yet you are a part of

its blue-filled, holy goes on and on, silver spirits flick

through your endless yet contained inside the borders of your mother-land's pulsing.

Migration

Rough-- as in a manner that lacks gentleness.

Violent. Rocky.

“Last night's migraine was rough (pitted, sandpaper)-- stretched

into the new day, throb of

a star in my brain wants out, as if it could

pulse its way through the pit of my skull.

what are you trying to teach me, God take the pain away

but the wretching till my head splintered open and I prayed

Light, you know I love you but please don't touch me now,

cloaked myself in a box of darkness to the lone sound of the pain's beating

heart:

She's a doll

she misses pine cones    beach wind she misses

soft carpet beneath heels and food she misses grapes, pears 

(an emptiness inside her so vast you can hear the penny

of longing clink inside her)   she knows

without desire she is dead as a doll

but that's what she is--

doll/angel

at the top of a tree in a room

somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere

she bites her lip till she can taste red

in her mouth   you'd never know

by looking at her with those feathered

wings    gowned at the tree's top

that descendos into her needles

and all no one

ever gave her a name she's spent

her life looking out

through the plastic of an attic box

the occasional scamper

of a mouse    the sound of voices

below laughter below   so bright

she wants to become it   wants to move

as it does:    fill a room

with the sound of the beating of a body

that will never be her own