exit

i wake up
and there is an absence of light.
i stretch my eyes
and blink.

i'm not naked,
but i'm alone on the couch.

i stand,
afraid to go back to sleep.

reaching for the brushed nickel
of the midnight door,
i pour myself another drink
and proceed to enter.

everything but the blanket

as i'm sitting
at the center of the beach,
trying to figure out the equation
of how it all began,
i'll be naked,
as the sun pours gasoline into
the dryness
of my eyes.

"my sweet lord"
will playing in an orbit
around the axis of my head.

this juncture of the day will be red.
the twilight will be a darker hue
of yellow,

and despite the length
of everything i cannot remember,
this is how i expect everything
to end.

communion

the shingles are falling
from the steeple on the old church
down the street.

for weeks,
they have sat on the concrete
like a congregation of discarded beliefs.

i see the dressed people
every sunday
coming in
and going out.

you can always hear someone singing in gospels
like the building is burning down.

almost every night
i walk the dogs by this church,
when everything is quiet,

but the other night
i witnessed some lady standing by the back door,
drinking a tallboy,
waiting
for something else to arrive.

the end of prayers

it'll either be the gods
or the universe,

one of them will breathe on us,
and it'll be all patterns and lines,
lines and patterns dictating us
until we go blind.

one of these days
we'll be made awake.
there will be scissors between our eyes
with some voice telling us to look up.

and when we do,
we will be pierced
by the circumference
of everything.

arrhythmia

sometimes
the heart jumps
out of the throat.

it becomes a thud
on the hardwood floor.

you're not shocked anymore.
you just wipe the outlines of blood
with a paper towel,
like it was a conglomeration of water.

you're just a stone statue
standing over this thing,
swearing to god
you're going to leave it there
until
it behaves.

but it never does,
and at this point
asking for a truce
is just asking for another war.

so you scrap it off the ground
like it's a piece of dried gum
and you swallow what's left.

restoration

this house ain't easy.
before you know it,
there are cobwebs growing in the corners,
and no matter how much the attempt,
the plants 
look like they haven't been fed in days.

in the garden,
underneath the weeds and 
the mulch,
lies the bones of a population
of prayers.

every one of them is there.

when it rains,
this roof ain't nothing but a leak,
and the buckets you leave
were never big enough
to catch all the water.

but goddamn,
even through it,
somehow,
we try to restore.

migration

within the measurement of breath
you grab hold of a baby bird.
you weigh it
as a matter of contrast.

you cradle it
within the palm of your hand
just to make sure it fits.

you convince yourself
that there are no mistakes,
just some personal facts.

then
like that,
something snaps,
wings grow,
eyes explode,
a nest is something that cannot hold
this heaviness anymore.

a trajectory has been made.

social beings

in the dark,
we begin as strangers,
light upon light,
stacked all the way to our eyes
until they spread into beams.

in the dark,
your beam
meets my beam
and then we walk
in some order
that only you
or i will understand.

in the dark,
we walk with the dexterity of a drunk,
hand upon hand
hanging onto this glow
until
there is nowhere left to go.

anti heros

sometimes
we get puffy;
watch a show
and imagine plots
that never seem to end.

we want to win every once in a while
and be lean as a hero.

but
when the credits are written
we are scared shitless,
like baby worms before grown birds.

it's then
that we champion rewind
as just another category for survival.

anchor hitch knot

it's a tiny ship
constructed from a beer can.
you take a breath
and place it in the ocean.

it doesn't sink.
it follows you along the shore
and you have dominion
over the wind,
over the water's edge,
over this construct
that doesn't seem to end.

you look away
towards the surface of the land
and everything it contains shimmers.
the sound you hear
is just a lullaby
from an empty belly.

you fall asleep.

you wake up.
the ocean is still there,
but all that is left is the rope
from a life preserver
that isn't there.

design and review

we are all patterns
of the same junk.

we are strung from
the same clumsy hands
that result in
the design of knots.

we are wretched.
we are brave.
we are blind.

the wind
kicks us in the teeth
and all that we have left
is sharp bone
and the calcification
of everything that remains.

before there is light

we enter this life
on the back
of a box of matches.

everything is dark,
and that's silence enough.

we search for a sound.
we search for any speck of light.

we search for the comfort of shelters
where we can slip inside
as we wait for the friction
of god to occur.

a bottle

there is an new world
inside this bottle.
ships sailing to distant lands
without any paths,
in search of everything
but the treasure.

if you're lucky,
the sky is your friend
and the seas make your stomach warm.
you just hope that all the pirates
are asleep in their caves,
fat, from a previous plunder.

finally,
the noise grows to nothing but a murmur.
you lie down on the deck,
at the front of one of these ships
staring like a bug at the sky,
unaware of a hand
reaching for the bottle.

"as above, so below"

here we go again,
shooting for stars
within our arms,
within the glass bottles
of the universe.

we are stuck here,
glued within complicated philosophies
that none of us will ever understand.

we were never astronauts,
just a hierarchy of moles
making tunnels out of space.

one more

in that era,
when i was drinking a million miles per hour,
stop signs just never occured to me.

i stretched hours into days
that eventually became years.
i didn't have to flex.

i just needed to sit there,
at the bar, or
on a bed in any apartment i claimed to be home
and be perfect
with one more drink in my hand.

untitled

it’s just one long fucking song
that never seems to end,
and in between years
you can never remember the chorus.

it’s like you’ve been so entirely lost between the
notes
that the only beacons you recognize are constructed of liquid and smoke.

honestly,
it’s a chore just to remember this title
or that title in between the women
and the bottles,
it’s everything like being asleep.

it's not cool anymore

the puerto ricans
have been lighting fireworks
since
a little before
the first of the month.

tomorrow
will be the fourth of july,
the 7th straight day
of 90 degree plus heat.

someone opened the firehydrant
behind the elementary school
on kedzie,
and now
children wade in gutters.

you try to cut the sky
just to relieve the haze

but the knife melts,
and
nobody thinks any of this
is funny.

post haste

hi.

i want to fuck you.

i love you.
let's move in together.

i have dreams
that could fit the size
of
one of your hands.

and just before i give you the first one,
you will have decided upon a wall
in which you want to slap.

moving day

you win.
you have burnt
an image of your face
on the right side of my chest,
just below my crow and heart
tattoo.

it's now
that i decide to pack some scabs,
a white flag,
all of my belongings,
and a piece of rope
in a few plastic containters
and bring them home.

another definition

i've sat here before,
more
than a million times.

i believe in everything
when this room is quiet.

i trust the dark,
just as long as there is some type of
light
that i can hold,

and sometimes that light pulls me
to places that shine
on the alphabet
of the letters
that form
the meat
and bones
of something
that i am trying
to describe.