Static Force

Our hands have become limp.
I guess this is when the leaves fall off the trees.
The Cascade snow fills the reservoir for my home,
but night and day, all I hear about is our rain.

Untouched Earth

It all falls away when building, the mind chiseling
A fever dream starting at the high, never getting down
To the low. And lower is the stair stepping away
Fast as a mare in full stride on open plain, whistling
Grasses notwithstanding, there’s a howl unheard.

Storms

Storms have no vows to speak,
refineries of ejecta and longing,
streaked with insurmountable ugliness and beauty –
polarities is what I’m talking about.
The voyeur in love with chastity, the bones unhollow
and growing on skin as hair,
light as a panther walking on the promenade.
It’s all to me, quite riveting.

Soldiers

And he blows his head open, because he is in the army; he does not
want to go back. He makes it clear.

I was his friend, when he was alive and in high school.
I am his friend again, now that he is gone and fading.

Towers

The towers, though goliath and glinting
all look the same, with four sides, four thousand windows,
four hundred workers all at their desks, clattering, and stretching

Raising Lazarus

Some say Jesus laid with Lazarus
the way turtle doves press together;

I am not one to doubt, love.

As I lay with women, a woman
in my own right, I am confronted
with a graphic depiction of a man and a woman in sex,
conceiving Kahlil Gibran, Galileo Galilee,
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Marie Curie,
Hasan Ibn al-Haytham, like points of light.

Slow(er)

As we walk our backs are low, our hearts pointing into our guts,
roll and hardened into seashells, gripped inside, the soft parts threatening
to spill onto the carpet.

We are not being defeated by malice – just absent-minded greed.
The foundation is removed brick by brick beneath our reddened soles.

Blinded

Cattle
set wild,
like gold fishes into the ocean –
wet scales
into unknown waters.
Literally.