Blemishes

Sometimes I think there may be something stained or shattered when it comes to what’s behind this breastplate stuck in place. I’ve sobered up, sworn myself off of snorting OxyContin, I’m capable of waking up without thirty two ounces of beer and a hot bath. My body works wonders once more, my hands don’t ever shake and although my bones still ache I look forward to my mornings. The sun comes up before me and splashes itself onto the sheets, the comforter, my feet and crawls slowly across my body till it meets my eyelids. I am exhausted though. I am worn down and whittled like wood into this different version of myself. The version that my friends see and think is happier, which I suppose I am, most times. I still crave the grave. I still find my journey to have been a fall from grace and cradle all at once, tumbling down into the tile floor, the blood seeping into crack and crevice. I’m still in the mountains with my brothers, our machine guns and the enemy afoot yet always two steps closer to their goal than us. I’m back in that crater left by almost ancient ammunitions, with that cup of chai in my hand or still floating above my bed after smoking heroin. My flesh is fooled by the soft textures that I glance against, be it sleeve of a shirt of undergarments gifted by a lover. I’m consistently tricked into being present for a moment here and there, instead of sand or rock or tile I am met with freckled skin found on the inner thigh or ceramic cups for coffee. I teleport, I think, between the times I’m here and when I’m there and I don’t handle my decisions very well, often in a fit of lust or jealousy, often In combustion. I think I burn things down on purpose when they get too unfamiliar. If it isn’t gunsmoke or burning flesh from dogs we shot there in the burnpit, if it isn’t my mothers curling iron resting on the back of my hand or the leather belt my father tried to break me with, I don’t know what to do with it. If it’s flowers and vanilla, I am lost and found only naked and painted with the latest lover. The latest craze that hasn’t deemed me crazy yet or that I haven’t left out of disdain. My spirit isn’t one as free as I am always making it to be but one that howls out at the moon in songs of yearning, never quite learning the keys correctly nor the pitch. If swimming inside a woman isn’t working than it’s usually the drugs that I resort to or a mix of both. In Tahoe I saw God, he’d sketched himself out across a long length of wooden fence and used the knots and blemishes to tell his stories. I saw red hair and blonde and black and brown. I saw trees and bushes, cacti placed accordingly. I was shown my life and what it might become if I were to continue treading water. I’m always kicking and thrashing and crashing like little waves against little rocks while the women that I love have learned to only ever dip their toes. My love is porcelain, easy on the eyes but if you knock it over, you’ll never find the perfect angles to put any of the pieces back together. My love is a glass cannon, intense when loaded with spoons and rings and other little trinkets you might find while sitting at a table in a park. Intense and yet too difficult to stuff and light and aim, so if you don’t hit what you wanted to the first time, it’s best to walk away.

There are moments when someone has chosen to allow the burning wheel in my chest to find a moment clear of turning, to rest and sometimes even slow its motion to a smolder. I’m allowed to place my head to softer chest and let loose the breath that I’ve been holding since the war. It’s in these moments that I find my life to be a tapestry, one woven like that fence but one composed of true events that I can swallow. It’s in these moments that I am at home, instead of up to my head inside a hole meant for killing men. It’s in the grace that someone gifts me, it’s in the choice to hold me close, it’s in the necessity to surrender to these little things. The things that piece themselves together to become something you would never leave behind.

Sometimes I think that I am stained and that the many pieces that I come in haven’t aged as well as I would hope. I think the people that I ask to love me can’t even begin to bother. But when I’ve figured out a way to stay here, to remain inside the present and I put these pieces back together, I hope they see that I was still complete. I just needed someone who could talk to me while I bled and bandaged, yet still managed in my chaos to place the angles properly.

Rivers

I myself am terribly afraid of not getting what I want. I think I’ve conditioned myself over centuries, as one soul in particular, clawing my way out of one lover to the next in attempts to eventually receive it. Sometimes I can almost feel the people I have been in the past. Their presence scratches like fingernails under my skin, seeking her, searching and destroying everybody but the one they want. I cut people down at their knees, like an axe inside a luscious forest. The nests fall out and splatter on the rocks at my feet, often I can still see the speckled paint upon the eggshells. The mountains know the song I sing and try to stifle it with second winds and on occasion, a third. I yearn for the touch of someone I’m not sure of yet, an unknown passerby, someone already picked out for my fingers. A puzzle piece that doesn’t fit is what I find most often, even after breaking off parts and pieces in succession at an attempt to make it work. The colors never line up and the pictures that we make are made of limbs from people that don’t go together. Like the figure of the horse made out of men chopped up and nailed to the barn. Like the books that don’t look right when set up on the shelf. I’m always trying to choose what looks good beside me, what feels right but they never do for long. My arms contort and shatter in the dreams that come my way, bending ever backwards toward a woman that seems to love to stay just out of line of sight. My legs buckle and I am forced forward, to the ground to worship footprints in the snow, to crawl through ice and mud and shit left from the elk on some interminable convoy. One of perpetual rage like a wooden wheel that melts all but the drift of flakes from high above, each one made in its own separate image. The flesh of my belly is chewed off bit by bit by stone and root and crevice. The bones that form my neck seem to be filled with sand or surrounded by it as I turn to drag the other cheek in my pursuit. I imagine that I leave a less than pleasant trail, one of dried blood and teeth and hair.

I myself am terrified to come across the spirit trapped inside a body I will not be sure of at first glance. I myself am mystified at the fact that such a journey may not end inside this lifetime. I myself am haunted by the thought that I press onward, into the next vessel, through a different pass and down through different valleys. Doomed to repeat the same steps that progress slowly to a squirm until the worms consume whoever I am next. Perhaps I’ve carved out the paths the rivers take in search of you.

Passersby

I care for her in a way that is unfamiliar to me, as in the past, when it came to how my heart worked, there was selfishness and mostly so. Not completely, yet it was tethered to the actions and the words that came out of my mouth. I care for her in a way that I think speaks volumes of the change that can come about in us as human beings. I want things from her but they’re things that I can go without. They’re things that mortal men ask of mortal women each and every day, things that you can put in your pocket or wear on your wrist or hide when you don’t wish for passersby to see. Things like adoration, affection, respect, intimacy both by means of bodies molding together or minds thinking alike. If you were to pluck me from this spot or that and place me far away from her, my lungs would still take in the air and my legs would still march on eternally towards whatever grave awaits me. I might be distraught and feel as if a damage had been done to both soul and ego and yet the birds I write about would still awaken each morning to thumb through sheets of music, wet their lips and sing. The wolves that I embody in my works would stalk and slash and sink their teeth in rhythm with each other, into flesh and fur and fat and bone. The world itself could not take notice of my plight, nor would it yield in its continuance of motion while the stars watch from their picket fences and broken mailboxes, capsized by comets and flotsam. I would want it to, at first. I’d want to feel some sort of special there, spun up and wound around myself. I might cry myself to sleep, soaked in pink sheets and lilac throws, my legs at different angles but always one out in the open air.

The things I want from her seem so softly and so quickly to do little more than pale in comparison to what I wish for her. I wish for her to catch a break, to find some end to neverending waves that crash and in their turns erode the supple spirit that she stole like spoons from many moons. She’s made of bits and pieces of the ones from Jupiter and Neptune, of Io and Larissa, of Proteus, Callisto. The things I wish for her are things that men like me can’t buy, a mind made up of peace, a heart that beats without the ups and downs of daily life compounding with it’s pendulum of pressure and conditions. The things I wish for her are things that people smarter than myself compose in the early hours of the night. The hours that the owls are out, when deer lay in the grass and chew the blades and sip the dew. The things I wish for her aren’t frail in the hands of Gods and Goddesses. They’re things like painted skies across an afternoon spent walking in a park, the grace of broken stereos that still deliver just enough of that Feel Good for when you need it most. They’re things like orchestrated bugs that cut across the path and seven member families that ride past you, ever cautious of the small yet still existent chance of someone being tossed into their path. The things I wish for her aren’t things that I can recreate or write or form or cook or act out in the fashion of a jester. They’re not things I can conquer with a sword or halberd nor press against her skin like lips or cheeks when I am much too tired to do anything but fall asleep inside her presence.

I care for her in such a way that I can accept the simple fact that I may not be good for her, regardless of the word Want or Need or Beg or Plead. I care for her in such a way that what she says is what will be. Even if it means that what I’ve got is all that I will get.

Wanderer

My body yearns for structure, the kind that’s shaped around empathy and intimate investigations. I long to be questioned completely, seen and heard as though these notions I must feel and in turn say might matter in the scheme of things. Not just little ponderings like how my day went or the size and shade of what my mood is like. Not just questions only ever complicit in their surface level seeking. My heart heaves heavily with each breath drawn in and sigh released when reciprocating energy is deemed to be distracting. I want things to be as perfect as is possible. I want things to feel as though they’d matter in one hundred years. I want love that spits out blood when teeth meet tongue, when tongue has taken leave from cheek. I want love that shifts like plates below our feet and brings about eruptions full of soot and embers I might watch fall flat. I want to kick and scream and feel the air begin to sting my lungs as fire formed from passion churns below the surface. My hands were made for tearing things apart and placing this piece against that piece, for taking what might work and forcing them together, in lieu of nothing new under the sun. My soul is simple yet so much so that I am often mistaken for some type of wanderer, some senseless creature. I can sense the scent of silk and sweat and swear to stay until the seconds soak my skin. They feel like uncertainty and pools too deep for me to reach the bottom. It’s sink or swim with me. It’s black or it is white.

Sonata

I think of how your skin feels in between my fingers, of how your nose pressed against me makes for calmer seas. Of how your hair finds the paths on the inside of my hand. Each strand of it is akin to those wound around a violin, a subtle sonata kept closely there in the inches you might measure from your ear to my own sternum. Surely little moments like these that I find pacing back and forth inside are meant as messages, letters written in calligraphy by shifty spirits. They say to stay and yet I never listen. I am held in contempt in the courts of butterflies and warm hellos, I am both the turnkey and the lock itself. I leave when I feel that it is necessary, when my demands and tumultuous circumstances cast clouds above that pretty little thing that they call love. Your skin sends lightning through my muscles when I touch it, when you’ve granted me the right to run my own across it. Your body reaches out through space and severs every aching inch of me, into pieces I am split and into pieces I remain. I crave your tongue below my thumb, I crave your back bent and contorted, flesh melting into flesh and steps one after two into the river. Knee deep in you is where you’ll find me. Swimming circles with my breath held, swimming circles on my back. Knee deep and slipping slowly up until you meet my neck and jaw and lips alike. I can feel the fronds and cottonwood, the frogs and cottonmouth twisted up in one another. My lungs, they fill with water, with you, but from inside where I might drown from lack of care. I crave another moment with your fingernails fighting for the grooves. I pine and slide right back. My body stretching in the sun and into you, each limb a master of its own demise, broken and battered and bruised. I’m tossed this way and that, through the current, through your precious schedules, crashing face first atop the rocks. My bones are broken in the seconds that you don’t decide to give me, as a gift or as a blessing.

I beg and barter with my heart to stop its beating when it seems to only beat me to the point. I cannot tell it what to do nor ask it gently or with anger in the notes and tones I choose. I am a song still sung long after everybody in the audience has tossed their plastic cup and driven off. I’m the speaker still left humming underneath the awning. I’m the one that started this and I’m the one that smells the smoke that sifts through bramble and the branches, down through valley after valley. Commotion comes and all the animals begin to cough and wheeze, the frog and cottonmouth release each other after all. There’s trees that splinter in the wind and gusts kick up to uplift nests where babies rest. A firestorm arrives and I am caught with rabbit out of hat. No magic tricks to save this lovely thing I’ve found. I pull my body from the water’s edge and wonder if it’s best to run. I wonder if it will always be this same exact occurrence when I find you in the other lives I’ll live. If finding you means starting forest fires. If finding you means losing you again.

Freckles

I myself am several things, fearful being one of them. My feet have yet to fail me. I’ve walked away from Mother, from Father, from Son and Daughter when it seemed the best thing I could do for them. I’ve walked and walked and spent a night or two inside a bottle, every week, in every month, for every year since seventeen. From shoes to boots, from streets to Hindus I have traveled. From clean white sneakers to the blood of soldiers, the blood you cannot scrub out of your soul. I’ve walked through borders down in Mexico, at night in deserts with a rifle. This life I’ve lived is little more than movement, little more than spruce and pine and loose leaf tea when coffee wasn’t readily available. I’m capable of leaving now. Of walking out on my own story, even when the man that stays out in the dunes says that I cannot. I’ve walked and ran and kept a pace that some would say seemed graceful in its truth. A pace that keeps me tucked away from hands that may or may not hold me still. I do not want to run. I don’t know why I do it. I know I do it when it feels like second winds and the second that I’m off I’m right back where I started once again. In circles, big or small, in circles, to the point that bone and pavement sleep in matrimony. A slave to my own second guessings, for nothing here on earth is ever evident enough for me. There’s questions I can’t answer, there’s possibilities that feel like acid on my brow and flaccid now my hands they ache. They ache to pick up laces in their grasp and for whichever set of fresh belongings I have gathered in this period of time. Sometimes it’s just a handful of complaints and sneers and jeers and rage. Sometimes it’s death and doom and placid people I am due to suffer through. I walk to get away, I walk to be alone, I run when things feel out of place and nothings set in stone. My heart bleeds through the fabric of reality and shirt alike, I burn the bridges when there’s no one left to fight. Nobody fights for me so feet find bike or feet find flight and feet find me outside at night. I walk and walk and walk. These lovers that I lay with pray for things to matter to me but they don’t and I won’t lie to save a bit of face or faith. My creator pulled me from the mud and muck and handed me machinegun, pointed to the path and pleads with me to listen closely to the sound of man. To sound out what it meant to be a man, whenever I might reach the top. Yet there’s never one to come across, no end in sight or common clause. The when, the why, the who are always up to be debated on.

Yet when I came upon this little thing, of freckles, a body like a temple and a voice like Spring I looked down at my feet. I begged them to be still and still they kept themselves for but a moment. I awoke, as if from out a dream and dreams that lasted like eternities. She pulls at me and sends her hands out in a search, not to destroy but to command my own. Adversaries so it seems, her limbs and mine, almost always tied up in each other, squeezing, so close to being free of one another yet totally combined. Fused to her I find the self, while looking down from up inside the trees. My body bends about the branches, I can feel the leaves and bugs and birds confined out of a fear for this intruder. I am not meant to float and yet I do, tied and tethered to her finger. A shoe that dangles, a foot that screams out in terror at the thought of losing it. But my gaze fixated on the shape of breast and neck and wrist and ankles. I think of her subdued and tender in my grasp. I think of her tied up tightly, lips glossed, eyes glazed over, cheeks reddened by the sheets, embedded in a moment with myself. To see these things before I have them feels like cocoa on a wrap around porch, like lightning bugs and thunderstorms and sticking my toes into the sand. Like staying for a bit. Like finding home, like lying still, like this is what love is.

Timber

When the day is done and the sun sets is when I miss her most. The moment that the bats come roaming through the woods is when I think about the pound of flesh I wish to take, with both hands cupped and placed together. I wish to take a sip and lay there on my chest with lips to lap up drops that slip down thighs. My limbs are made of timber where the critters creep or so it seems with how my skin begins to weep. My head below a blanket fort, her legs propped up by feet that taste like earth and clay and sage. I take my time here in my mind and trace out music notes there on her pretty pieces. Circles shaded in and lines drawn in between the dots. She sings a subtle song that falls on open ears and this is where I take a moment, taking it all in as cherry blossoms graze my nose. They tickle but a simple love is best. She tastes like rain that trickles down my facial features, she smells of thunderstorms and cupboards boarded up. She feels like second winds and every second I spend in her presence sends me sailing to sea. The waves all rage and crash and thrash, these sheets a polyester prism. I find it comforting to take a break and rest with cheek to lips and then my own begin to kiss the insides of her thighs. Each freckle facing an interrogation, each inch exposed to tongue tied poetry. The journey from these places down to just behind the knee, a hand with fingers flexed and then a curl upward cast a spell. I’m always underneath a perfect moon for speaking magic quietly, the kind that only she can hear. A candle lit and matches flashing in the early hours of the night. An empty coffee cup, a shadow dances in the light. I lift with tips and kiss the hidden spot behind the curtains. Two lips like tulips, sweet and soft. Her breathing rapid, fingers scratching, back arched and waiting for the dawn. I am never good at letting up. I’m never one to quit when muscles ache. I am a thing of burning fire, turning body over, yearning for a plunge. I take a swim and sift my hand through hair to find its place upon the nape. I hold that nape in place and whisper words, whatever comes to mind. A pretty thing, a soft and sweet reprieve.

And then I wake, from dream into reality. I go about my day. I trip too often on my way to pour that cup of coffee, to see the shadow on the wall, to please when begged, to take and take and take.

Atoms

I came across a woman that could tell you of your future, yet when it came to hers, she left the pages blank. Whether some were sheets of music, others torn out of their spine and used for spells she didn’t wish to know. There was a quiet calm about the way she wandered. There was sadism and masochism all wrapped up into one unsettled storyline. I found it hard to swallow her at first, as if she was a spoonful of sand and of gravel. Yet each bite I took went down with just the slightest bit of ease over the one before, until eventually she came in sips that met my lips with wonder. She filled my stomach solely at the sight of her, a plethora of beating wings from bees and butterflies, from hummingbirds and albatross. At first I thought that this was something I might trap and capture in a cage, with golden bars but bars all still the same. I’d see the sunset in her gaze. I’d see a winter that would put my soul to rest if I were so careless as to grip her tight. I’ve learned this woman to be something that you follow, not something that you lead with ball and chains that drag around her feet. Yet here I’ve found myself, those same anchors wrapped around my body, thrown out in the ocean of her everlasting warmth. I drown in her and then I wake each morning, cold and callous that I’ve reached the surface. On purpose I decide to reattach the hefty metals, to careen with madness on my heart to see the world clouded by her outlooks on it all. Like colored glasses fumbled with and placed upon my face, these cogs and belts and oil dripping seem disdainful in their own existence. As if upset that they turn perfectly, one after the others, eternally entangled. I find it freeing, if I were to say the very least, I find it subtly serene if I am to be earnest and honest with my words. Her way of living leaves a sense of urgency behind and purged of these quite earthly things I find that I am opened up. Split with axe as if a stump and from that crevice creeps a stem, a stem adorned with more than thorns this time. I am indulged and I am meek, I am empathetic to the squeeze of lemons for the sake of tasting juice. My hands have found themselves surrounded by the soil, my legs uprooted, quite suitable for travel as I traverse from universe to universe. To you, the Milky Way could never be a palpable condition, where to me it is the space between the freckles scattered on her cheeks. I can trace from star to star, I might kiss each planet placed by whoever deemed it fit to make such things.

To be reborn as matter strikes my mind like hammers to the steel. To be set free from failing in my attempts to gain control has aimed me like a weapon at the enemy. The clock itself runs in new directions, an ever stressed and fearful entity. It melts and drips in drops that I can smell. To track, to hunt, to devour in the early hours, the hours themselves, the minutes lose their meaning and all crash like atoms in a fray. To be touched by her is to be broken down into a thousand pieces, pieces you can pick and choose from when you wish to write yourself anew. To be touched by her is to be washed inside the sunlight, starved of everything you think you need and scattered into space. I came across a woman who was no woman after all. I came across a different way to live and in this difference I am predisposed to sin and imperfection, almost as if that is the point that my creator wished to make.

Bags of Bones

I think I’ve always struggled with love. I think it’s been one thing in the books I’ve read, the cinematic versions that men and women capture, an all together separate story than the ways in which it has shown up for me. I tend to want the same love you find in poetic pieces, in the bags of bones that people throw around and drone on about. My own experience has been tedious and less than stellar, if I am to be completely honest. My Mother said she loved me, yet threw jars of baby food across the room in my direction when I cried out for sustenance. She burned my hand with the same curling iron she’d use later in the day to primp and polish one look after the other. The knives inside the drawers were used to strip her pound of flesh from my body. I think love is meant for other people at times and that I exist to be cut and quartered, diced and splattered up on walls like canvas, like tapestries. Drawn from one end of the room, draped above a kitchen table with scuffs left from coffee cups, to the other end. Spread thin and silky. When my mother lost me to the state I thought that love was abandonment, this idea reinforced through foster homes that had no clue how to silence a child that sang in wails and distrust. This idea that love was torture came once more when the man that helped create me set his anger on my skin like flaming logs pulled from a quiet fire. In hands that crept around my neck and squeezed like gears that grind and grip, gears meant for distorting dreams. I’d lie awake at night in perpetual distress, displayed to the moon at a strange angle, one that she would have to fight to get just right. There in my bedroom with the window open, she would sift herself through crack and crevice and sit atop my comforter to comfort me. The sun itself seemed eager in approaching when my feet would hit the concrete, Summertime and blades of grass between each toe. I think that love comes in a language that I struggle with. I think that love from others comes rolling off of tongues and lips that lie as if I don’t hold value at the end of things. My Father loved to strike my face and liked the metal parts of belts or wooden spoons or heavy hand. He almost broke my back one sunny afternoon. I’d pronounced my dissatisfaction with the ways in which he treated me and little boys with voices tuned that way must be reminded. Reminded of how great they’ve got it, how things could be much worse, as if they weren’t, as if they kissed my cheek in soft array instead of lashes and scratches that kept me up at night. The sting and redness kept me from my classes, so the books began to pile up and when the Moon saw this she cried out from a place of jealousy. I’d found a place to pour myself that wasn’t somewhere she could reach as easily. I think love has tried to make its way to me a time or two but I was busy bleeding. Busy hiding from this person or that monster, quite curious to if there was a difference in between the two. Busy in complaining, in moaning from the pain that would ensue had I felt like speaking up. I think that love might be the only reason I’m still here, the sole denominator in this problematic existence I find myself in each day and in each night. I long for safety and yet safe is never quite the same from lover to lover, from brother to brother, from moment to moment. I think that war felt closer to the heart than other times. With bombs and bullets and climbing up and down and through the mountains, into valley after valley, out from belly of these beasts. My heart is a tender creature, yet she is callous and creased and porous and pleated. She tosses and turns until the Moon burns her like phosphorous. Until I figure out what love is not, I imagine that I’m doomed and maybe even doom to those who might attempt to show me what it is. I don’t think I care. I don’t think it matters much. Time tends to eat itself in one big circle, tail meeting tongue. I think that I devour everything that fails to stay outside of my reach. I think I pull these things in and dislocate my jaw to swallow whole the foolish. They taste like metal and flesh and when I wipe my lips and chin I see the stains that I have made. Stains of red like those my Mother left, stains that match the colors of the Earth. There’s solace in the peace of the night for maddened men like me but I tend to sleep right through it on my way to find another meal. I think love keeps me at bay at times. Not every flower must be picked, some exist to watch in wonder, to water and replenish. I think I am the love that I have looked for, when I scrape away at people, when I throw back the sheets and Mother Moon is there to see. I think that love is what you do and what you don’t. It’s what you wish for it to be.

Jealousy

I think the universe was drunk on jealousy the day it made her. It combed through libraries and little shops to pick and choose from poetry and trinkets. It saw the raven’s eye and chose a dappled garment hanging out to dry, then draped it on a supple, nimble frame. From a windowpane it stole an apple pie, from pantry came the cinnamon. It took vanilla from the cabinet, it snuck a dash of herbals too. There in the garden peonies were plucked and dried and placed in an array. I imagine that this mixture looked quite good on paper, maybe even lovely as a sheet of music but I wonder if the world knew how different life on Earth would be. The rivers would have reason and the will to come down from the melting mountains. The cheat grass aiming for the sun and goat heads lying still in wait. The wind itself would grow and grow until too bold for little boys with hats atop their heads. The passersby would have something to set their eyes upon, for eyes left to wander fall asleep. I think the universe knew sadness when it grabbed at random all the aspects it would take to make a woman of her capability. She wiggles like the worms when notes and tones are present, with hands as soft as milk and silk on skin she spreads a love too deep. I find that when she walks the world stops. I find that Time himself commands the arms there on the clock to spin a little faster. Too fast for me, it seems, as I cannot keep up. A step ahead or two is where I find her. Always with a smile on her face, so much so that a war machine like me can stop to think. I think of all the dreams it took to mold from clay a person this peculiar. I think of how Time would have had to wait and Mother Earth complained of something prettier, of how the pantry sat all covered up in dust until it was decided that the rest of us weren’t good enough. Someone would have to give a purpose to the Moon, for goodnight to have a meaning, for weeds to need their roots pulled up and wolves to run instead of walk. I think the universe knew beyond a shadow of a doubt exactly what it wanted and paved the way for her to take her place.