today

Well
there seem to be a few people around
and I guess that it is something like middle school still with friends and parents
but I'm wondering where people made their split from ridiculous aspirations
and just settled for smoking pot in the hazy shades of ruined buildings.

Are you still waiting for the cataclysmic Apocalypse?
Well, that still has to be addressed
but what I figure
is that it is there
when I stare at strangers' faces
and notice the dead eyes
sifting lazily around matters of chance and fear
that and I find their madness perfectly common.

We once drove through amber sunlight
in the emeralds of deciduous forest dew
and like the radio played insanity?
Let me ask you a few questions.
How did we meet?
Was it over dinner on a scarred picnic bench
that was missing its white paint
where the druggies had marked with vandalism
their separate lingos
with pocket knives and lighter burns
wondering all the while
how beautiful an elm could be?
Or was it in transit
on a grim bus system in the pouring, howling downpour of ash
as the punk rock lesbians
committed their different suicides without medical assistance,
drowning in a world of fair sex and shopping districts,
as though we were the few
who noticed the awful weather all along,
gazing in seconds at pink and blue skyscrapers
that seemed to hold yesterday's hues of sunsets
while the shaved men went to work
and chewed on fucking bananas for lunch.
Where ever it was, dear one
you could tell
that everybody else felt smug in their sunglasses
but I really wanted you to buy me jewelry
and maybe you did somehow
but I know that first
you gave black pearls to the wrong person
and why you felt the existential nothingness in that fact
is beyond me
when most people will just throw cash as gifts
and tuck it in their back pocket
while the awful world
and all its concrete sidewalks
heaves and moans
in the difficult orbits
of a less stationary sun
that keeps it glow and fire up there
like a legacy for the last lovers on Earth
to point towards
when the Hatred of Strangers
calls in ink black darkness as cold as a meat locker,
but please tell us one day
what it was that you found beautiful here
send it in the mail
send it on the phone
don't write it out in letters
and don't voice it out in words.

stars and ships and distant whorls

When the wren sang to space stations
in cold black suit of fumes
was when we sifted through our runes of sandstone
out in the desert with some massive comb
looking for speck of diamond
in all that sand
ignoring the process of labor
with vast black ship docked on concrete
piloted by men from across the veldt of stardust.

I was with you then
and I called out
all you could do was smile,
I figured that I would explode with warmth
like some long distant supernova
expanding in pulse of every dangerous breath
that warmed me then
and i figured that I could give you a knife then
without you or I being cut open
only sometimes I knew it was danger
and I held it then smalley like a dagger of stone
wondering what on earth we could be up towards
the heavens
or some kind of glowering hell
where we spent our money on purchasing cages
that wouldn't even let in the gentle breezes
on auburn days of autumn
from the constellation of Sagittarius
where we came from, once.

My life, upon meeting you
became this fiction that I ignored
because it figured
that my name had been common Steven
instead of those sweet gestures of labels
you held out to me

and the stars may be projectors
or they may be glistening eyes dewed over with beauty
but to the scientist
at least they are something beyond common wisdom

experimental stuff

Bound on a jet plane
through the worst war in hell,
i figured it was smart
not to work
under constant threat of radiation.

Well
the water is there and clear
it is beautiful.

I miss no one anymore.

I have nothing without you.

this is not past tense or present.

i am thinking fondly of those old friends we knew
who gave without giving
when i gave up on life
sitting there on a porch in sunglasses
wearing a bottle of whiskey around my neck
while nobody wanted any hash
and i thought plaintively lately
what happened to the casualties in college
so i looked them up
and boy.

Sometimes I don't think about much
and i find that it is better than being a cloud
stretched out up there in a nap against the glowing sky
and i remember my teachers
but who was more important to me all this time
was my heroine

i'd send you people postcards
someday
but I would feel like Kevin Costner in Tin Cup
and this may be odd
but it is the one golf movie i haven't seen
that and i hated that movie Caddyshack
with Chevy Chase bumbling around

i miss the old ways of virtue
and i have to say
that sometimes you and i
have had to raise our swords
to lightning instead of water
but whatever the paranoia was
it went
and is gone
i think i left it in some broken CDs I had in college
when

sea

Crescent bay
penninsula
reaching out with open docks
and the wood stained silver by salt and sun
in slats that measured the distance of feet
to sea
where those old drunk voyages came to light,
a twelve year old intoxicated on a dram of rum
and sleeping in a hammock made of sails
in a musty foreward hold.

Rigging eloped and misplaced cannons,
yards of silk and antiquated lanterns
swinging in the skies frail song of ghost breeze
in certain latitudes transected by the equator,
we used to know
the grim solicitudes of landings
with anchors and wet chains wrapped in seaweed
where we would send the long boats out
to meet certain merchants in harbor song
of Western pubs.

But aye, the sailor's curse and superstitions,
warnings against leaving on some cursed Friday
out to that horizon
that nestles with sky,
or the untold misfortunes
of having a lady aboard
with all those greased grunting men
and those rough hands
made into tallow from pulling rigging
when we could have had a floating house
made from white marble
if the technics had been right,
a ship made by an empire's fortune
but not of planks or timber,
crafted from stone
and sinking and rising with thunderous waves
carving through storms
without the steel gunwales of famous dead dreadnoughts
that volleyed shells across the reaches of Jutland
during miserable WWI.

Some days a sabot,
tilting against the wind
with sail stretched taught
bobbing like a cork.
But one wondered about the old man steering it
if he did so out of joy or escape from his marriage
as the storm heads settled in black grey
coming in from the fjords
and asking of those sailors lost in the seas
if they were ghosts or corpse or drowned
or simply intoxicated with the depths of the sea,
leaving their Navy
for the mysteries of the Afterlife
undone in knots of bowline and figure eight
treasures of Life sunk five thousand fathoms
as the sea's surface whipped in froth of ocean's foam
and asked us imploringly
if we really came from such a setting,
all those reaches and gybes
for the sake of finding our undesignated island
where the palms harbored coconuts
and sand crabs scuttered
across those desert isles
mapped by colored inks by imagineless men
who had yet to view their fate in the reflection of a tidepool's mirror

Proxima Centauri

My face used to be blue and dark, while I had long black hair.  I worked as a scientist on a small mining outfit orbiting the Goldilocks zone of Alpha Centauri, near Proxima.  The corridors were long and white, my stateroom dark and adorned with a few paintings along with collected swords from wars that had long gone under and into peace.  My research centered around the human periodic table of elements, as an alien to Earth, finding out which elements were conducive to peaceful living and abundant wealth in terms of materials.  I had a few volumetric flasks and vapor shields, some copper ore, mingled with the fundaments of orbiting asteroids.  What struck me about the community then and now was its dark shadows mingled with contrast of moody colors, white hallways for official business like recieving transcripts from radio waves that traveled through interstellar dust, broadcasts for new assignments.  My name was Lisa there, which is a human woman's name, but applied to me then as a male.

Some of the ore resided outside the fundamental underpinnings of human science.  A human scientist would call them exotic matters, or for that matter, it might be an analogy to something out of a video game.  Each one appeared mysteriously beautiful, dodging the underpinnings of a nineteenth century Russian's elaboration on a chemical system in the periodic table of elements.  I was really not interested in investigating, but would stare at the samples, filled with wonder, shocked that they were more beautiful than my eyes when I looked in the mirror.  Earth seemed lacking, but I recieved word after writing off human chemistry as gibberish that I was to be stationed there in the future for further research.

The mining colony was running out of water, needing constant supplies of it to keep drill bits from overheating as it would bore into the Proxima asteroid, imploring for more ore.  Plans were arranged to capture a small comet, but the heat generators of the colony proved far too inadaquete to melt the comet ice into water, so mining operations were suspended and the old plant was blown up.  I felt sad to see it go, it had been my old home, but what lingered in the back of my mind concerned those white hallways, all the light, the contrast between the official corridors and the colorful aspects of the mining station and it's town, which ended up abandoned due to drought.

Stationed on Earth, I determined a massive problem with the human periodic scale.  The perspectives of analysis brought from that table created warfare in violent reactions, which had been hinted at in Proxima but which had gone undiscovered due to our low oxygen environment.  As soon as I stationed myself on Earth, my alien face that had been dark and blue turned a whitish pink from all that sun, poisoned by nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide.  I realized after I landed that most of my studies had lain in ignorance of change, that science could shift from observer to observer, from race to race.  The irony of the situation lay in the fact that Earth had an abundant water supply, whereas the Proxima asteroid had none, leaving me to quietly ruminate my thoughts about the inherent misplaced value of industry, yet however, the natives of Earth placed a primacy on the values of warfare, which had been forebidden as the blackest sin in that research module.

Self Portrait at 26, from the Viewpoint of an External Observer

through darkness fallen in autumn's veldt of carpeted leaves
in nightfall's expanse of moonless shadow
is where we met our friend,
that half jack drunk on moonbeams and whiskey,
wearing a tattered general's coat and raven feathers
dancing a jig out in the field of starless dark
weathered by the silouhettes of white birches
stuck like picket fences
in a forlorn town.

time travel, jeez
and obsessions with the occult by campfire.
i would have had a glass of wine to share
but it seemed disingenuous
for he was already half mad and unkempt
staring at old designs of poison arrows
while I kept an old blunderbuss on my mantle,
wondering about it's gilt
as the old fool danced next door
shouting at the police
while patrolling the property for onlookers.

there was a sweet smile in his dark eyes though
set to some damage that had escaped his past
as though he had seen worlds in outer space
that had blossomed through his breast
like explosions
and I thought, well, if I were a lady
I would call to have him taken away
over vast hills of rolling green in Spring
where the notations of his philosphoies would break
admist all that foreign beauty,
gentle there like lakes
and not the crashings of asteroids
or the old worn musk of Civil Wars.

Instead I invited him over for tea
and he sat there in a chair
with kind eyes, he gave up a knife
and a leather strap
before I told that young fellow
that he was headed off to perdition
on the back of a stagecoach.

They came to take him away
the next day
though white corridors of hospitals
where he kicked some man in the face
but to me he seemed fine and sane
because I knew he never gambled,
but always chose the shortest paths
by my house,
wandering in circles around an old elm
that bursted with shade and sun
as though it were our emblem of Life's pratfall
and growth, roots burgeoning in gnarls of rivers
and let me tell you
that later I told the police
that he was not insane.

angel

through reeds as white as shaded embers
in the moonlight where the reeds called in the delta
were these verbs that spoke with rushing water
"it is the end of the Earth"
and how complacent I was
sitting there on the banks
like a damsel garbed in white gown
just listening to the echo of love
as it left like a rifle shot
moving into something larger
like the rings of Saturn
lingering in her earring.

i thought i would fashion a carving
with some sharp ugly knife
up there in the forest,
maybe in the silouhette of a rabbit
or something beyond quiet
like a lizard
that moves and darts in those flits
of stillness and motion
that work like water
only not in similie.

we once were kings, you and I
and our kingdom fell with hearts aflame
those old goblets of honey mead
and lavish dinners where we sat in revelry
and I stripped off my silver armors
wondering, calling.

but now that Old Earth is calling
so you know
it always ended but then begun
from those old Renaissance cartographies
into empires that moved and fell and grew
changing from Europe to Asia to North America
and within the motions of those latitudes of politics
I knew that somehow
we had found something that could never fall
in the depths of old wells filled with silver rain water
as the world turned
we figured it would die
but it outlasted even the day of Sun
as those old curses fell back into odd books lined with gold
and those odd looks were only indicative of excitement and life,
the jewelry of your eyes
worth more than a diamond
just looking
and seeing
and that was worth more than wrought iron
or the existence of some long distance love affair
when you fought you placed your name inside of your chest
and sang with the robins
even though the future looked dark and dismal,
we found a blessed ship
and got off this dying planet
watching the land from the sky
our future was to swim in nebulas the color of velvet
and to drink wine,
to always drink wine.

yours.