Commute

I often see the word "PRAY" 
carved on the seats inside subway cars.

It feels benevolent,
less like a command,
more like the way your mother
reminds you to wear a scarf
and honey make sure you're eating well and
have you been taking your meds?

Pray, sweetheart,
it's good for you
and there are leftovers in the fridge.

I never pray,
unless you're willing to count
my ceaseless hoping.
Unless you consider my wishes
equal to pressed palms.

If you could be so obliging,
then yes, I pray all day long,
I am always praying.
I am a human being,
I am a human praying.

Happening

The shoes I threw away two months ago
might be walking down the street
somewhere.

The peak of the mountain is still happening.
The clay is always reading his lines aloud.

The sea could never stop.
She is probably exhausted
from heaving onward,
churning seconds into shoreline.

We have found
unceasing
semiprecious
crystalline minutes
tucked up into our sleeves.


after reading T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets
poem - March 2014

Boundless

Our lips broke away
with a crisp sound
akin to an egg
cracking in your fingers 

on the lip of a bowl.

Your noble shell
engulfs my scattered sun.
Hands hold the both of us -
your serrated halves,
my could’ve-been.

Love is porous sometimes.
I am filled one moment,
then you, then me, then you.

My love, boundless egg,
we were poured into the same heat,
became separately.

But look,
now, here, somehow,
we are one sky
with two suns.

poem - March 2014

I heard her say: "The lights are a little out in my brain today."

You are exhausted, aggregate;
your mind is made of dunes and traffic.

The earth knew you once before:

an Egyptian noblewoman - your brain was removed, 

discarded, beside the painted canopic jars,
the mummified cats.

Your bulbs burn out because your brain 

remembers the ceremony, the shredding,
the brilliant lobes of you

irreverently dismembered. 

I find you beautiful and handsome.
I long for your metronome lungs,
your amethyst heart.

Long have I counted your worth.
We have found coins of comfort
we’d forgotten in an old coat pocket.

In love I am mostly helpless -
there is a rustling in the soles of my feet.
It keeps me awake. 

Sometimes I stumble over nothing. 

Sometimes we lie about anything.
We are demented and it is good. 

You do not mind - you want me.

I do not mind - I want you. 

Come, jump inside, climb in with the detritus.
I will hoard you until I can't anymore.

poem - February 2014

here's why I said 'not right now'

I cannot be yours, my love.
You should not be mine, my love.
I'd burrow inside your earth.
You'd live off my creaking words.
Termites are never ashamed,
but I think that we would be.


7-syllable experiment
form poem, October 2013

come fly with me

In October
the world is both
garden and cemetery.

I drive home to Sinatra
singing of flying away
inside the velvet evening
among dead things
and living things.

In autumn,
I am much
more alive
than dead,
more within
than without.


to my second-favorite month
poem, October 2013

they were

She was a rock,
worn-in and sun-bright.
He was a river,
full of mud and overflow.

They both just were
until the rock was canyon
and the river forgot the sky.


for my parents
poem - October 2013