Poetry

Salt

In the song I chose today
it’s the ocean
three times
that carries us out.
É o mar
É o mar
É o mar
que carrega a gente
para a gente pescar…
but today it isn’t about the fisherman.
Or the salty seawater,
or the tears on shore.
It is Tides. Today
It’s about the Tides.
Beyond our sense and best interest
there’s a whole territory
of salt.
Castles of salt where
he’s deposited life
in salt forms.
So much so that
if the light refracts right
It’s furious and pretty.
The tides must have
arrived and receded
a million times
to leave him with
this much material.
But it wasn’t all his doing,
or the ocean’s three visits.
There were friends
and oceans came from their eyes.
How kind, to include
me among them.
So many of us
still not sure
what to do…
with all this salt.

Chain Reactions

Some people should
have set off chain reactions
Some 4th of July meet
science lab shit.
When you meet them
some people are
magic, like that.
You begin and end with them.
It is this eternal
kind of quality
that has some kind of nerve.
You know, I don’t remember
how we met.
The day probably
left adrenalin fueled
and looking for trouble.
When I draw a blank
about the inflection in your voice
instead I remember your crooked
good-for-nothing smile.
Like Russian roulette
I’ll pick up another hot gun
to draw a blank.
What was it
you wore that day?
Instead I imagine the curve
of your spine
and how it dictates
the way a shirt
settles on your shoulders
square.

Crowned

“We all must
learn to accept
the departing nature of things”
She says crowned in the
leaves of her bougainvillea
that emerges from
a million places other
than its pot.
“Eventually we lose
even ourselves.”
She makes it seem
so calm
as if the idea of…
dying might be
the way a leaf settles,
changing form
to become another leaf.
That is her lesson in losing.
We’re a transitional period.
A period
between two transition periods.
And just like that
we’re losing and finding
each other forever
in a house where we
walk in circles.
You are too real.
This dust just
couldn’t settle.

Black or White

With cloud cover
these empty spaces
are so loud
I can’t find
a rational thought
among them.
Every room is a revolving door
circling around
black or white
until everything is gray
and reeling.
It is a barefaced kind of swindle
such stunning showmanship,
he hardly reveals
his comings and goings
until the unshakable is broken down
and I’m left
teetering dangerously
on the edge of
his mouth.

Sleep – unfinished

Sometimes I will
my consciousness to slip
and it wont,
like it has some tacky life of its own
or it doesn’t fit where it used to.
In the mornings
It has this graceless dance it does
as it comes back into four walls, some sheets
three dimensions,
slow and formless
as if to say ‘sorry for last night.’
It settles into the backs of my eyes
and checks its size in the mirror
like it had a body
that’s different from yesterday
some form of excess
that doesn’t settle
into its own shell.

Early Fall

The season shifts a gear
as I pick up
and realize it’s been some time
and only now am I settling on
this one shadow.
Seems by some unfathomable violence
Fall arrives early this year
and in a darker costume.
I guess if you look hard
good starts to be
absent-eyed.
And I guess I didn’t even know
I could watch
seasons shift gears
for a few boys as they take
one too many falls
and two lives
to leave a late summer
feeling like a hard fall.

Setting

It is nights like these I feel that metallic stuff
settle so heavy in my stomach
it weighs the rest of me,
my heart becoming
a muscle tired from lifting
such heavy lungs.
It is this same dust that makes
sunsets so impossible to breathe.
And instead of driving west on the highway
I’m finding him.
Ten states away
in his Mother’s kitchen
with two years worth of afternoons
wrung up.
I wished time would give
this edge of loss a brittle lightness,
but an attempt at forgetting
can only ever sting
so much
as driving headlong into the sun
realizing it is most brilliant
because it sets.