jayivan

Wind cools while sun warms
the bare chested river pier:
—surfaces glisten.

Settlers of the sexual frontier:
the warfires call you home

An ocean away,
Islands crumble, atoms crack:
Spring starts unaware.

Tight jeans and oxblood
boots stand cross legged
in the blue sun.

A haiku is not

a sentence broken by sounds:

it is a no thing.

A dark country road, (three lives lost,)

broken tree limbs,

the blood splattered snow.

Motion brings joy.
Try standing still—

See, agony.

Weimar giddiness
Via Cairo’s cobblestones
Burdened and unknown

Until stones were thrown,
Pent voices flew home into
Mouths wetted with tomes:

Curl tongue and purse lips
Shape the sound and let it slip:

On the corner of grand and Crosby,
A narrow strip sunlit:
I bask in it.

I fell into a room of chattering twins, hundreds, thousands maybe. Difficult to estimate. I couldn’t see the far corner over the heads of babbling mirrors, identical faces preening each others’ thought, plucking the stray thread, the uncouth expression.

The big big strums
kicks me in the heels
roll along boy

We crawl over gods tossed aside in the gravel lane: there
is work to do. The bleeding body beneath our boots waits in grace,
eyes up unblinking at the Open Mouth.

My kite broke free—

I stared at the sky
In awe of blue:
Not a reverent awe,
But an awe of old:
Immensity and Terror and The Big Big:
Blue.

such things—metaphors,
nothing more than verbal whores
jacking off the flaccid bores

These are lies in the guise of truths.
A cloak flung over the shapeless beast
that shakes and barks in the struggle
to throw off the ill-fitting sack,
you hack.

I knocked on my skin—
just the cat replied—
a hungry miao

the job, just robs

sweating in subway
cars full of sweating people

bloodshot eyes swaring
at their reflection’s swagger

the heat crept in—
dreamstealing
through windows sealed tight

Point makes a prison
Out of what could be freedom:
The fear is killing.

We crawled inside love,
as if (it wasn’t) a shelter.

I wrote this while holding you in bed, the air conditioner running too cold and your body running hot beneath the comforter. I wanted my arms to wrap around you and hold you from all harm. To protect you and make you feel safe. You sighed heavy and shifted closer to me. And for a moment we were safe. It was not illusion. Instinct more likely. Something inherent. Hereditary. Prehuman. To make us blind to the fact we are never safe. Even in each others arms. Our bodies are our sustenance yet they work against us. Others bodies: interactions and entanglements out of ours, anyone’s control. The earth, sustaining us yet trembling beneath us. And space, cold space, burning hot space: order and chaos into infinity.

So I held you, and felt your warm breath against me, and let my head spin free in thought. With you. Just then. Forever in a moment. Like a flame forgetting it is a flame, a sun forgetting it too is a thing with a lifetime.

The flowers have dropped
and spring rots in the bark mulch
with last month’s rain.

I am not dreamless
even if you can’t see them;
maybe it’s your eyes.

I sit in gardens
aflower on cloudy days
but it doesn’t help.

Dreams drowned out by noise:
a sine wave reverberates
neurons until collapse.

be the spring grass, soft,
supple, beneath the body
radiant with faith

be the spring grass, soft,
supple, beneath the body
radiant with faith

this week I grew sick
of bickering, just enough,
to call it a cold

Hollow Man
hollow me out

Adrift, not knowing
I’m still at sea, bobbing,
To defend against sharks let free.

I erode while I:
eyes too close to me
to see sandstorms approaching.

She wore a black fur coat and carried a book titled object lessons in psychoanalytic practice. She shook off her umbrella in the nearly empty train, by the sole man sitting quietly by himself, and sat next to him on the 2-seated plastic bench.

His eyes retreated, heavy, drawn into the moment’s hopelessness—but he lifted his head and those eyes drifted forward to tread the calm waters out-of-focus and distant.

leave us two alone
on our garden throne

Face forward
Let the world blur past in hues
Through you

a wet bootprint pressed
in a speckled floor fades to
vapour

All work and no play
makes Jack a dull boy. All work
and no play makes Jack.

I break these lines as
I break hearts, giving half,
Keeping whole.

Birch leaves above the canopy
Flutter in sunlight abluster–
Black, light and newly green, I
Warm dreams cold-stored in memory–
No, not I, not this thing called me:
It is the green, the light, the black,
It is the newly BE, no, no, not ME
That burns this dead world FREE!
The outside force, the godhead farce
Dance, dance, dance in wind and leaves and me
I’ll let you in
We can be one
Together
Undone.

Go to that dark place
And linger.

Thought carves my body
Into unknowable forms
Hemmed by skin and breath.

Treacherous night
Betrays the day with leering eyes
Unhidden by shade.

Dream-less nights and
dream-filled days fray the seams
which bind our way.

The line in the sand
Waits, uncrossed, pent-up and
Dangerous as thought.

The owl’s hoo-hoo flails
Into a continuous
Wail while night stays bright.

Generalities
Support my poems because
Concrete things lack weight.

A shy sun inches
Behind the church steeple like
A slow motion thief

Irradiating
Holiness while gathering
Souls for midnight snacks.

You smile while the streets
Riot hurling pavement toward
Glass cased highrises.

The ego frets and squirms
While the lungs of time breathe stars
out in dusty sighs.

Killed at noon to-day
I could not cry, or wring my
Hands, I should but watch.

Being born, and urged
Full of notions, this zest-filled
Insufficient breast.

We lay in the park
shade, shirtless, optimistic
and hungry in May.

We lay in the park
shade shirtless, eyes skyward,

We lay in the park
shade shirtless, fingers tucked loose
Into buttoned jeans.

We lay in the park
shade shirtless, plotting

devolutions

See for what a slight

Thing you are betrayed, this door

You might not open.

We wiped the headstone
Clean of green moss clung tight to
Granite cavities.

We wiped the headstone
Clean, my brother and me

When I touch your skin
The world becomes good again
And it is enough.

My dog died today
And I need to feel something
Better or much worse.

Something must die in
a story: but this story is
different: see.

I seek solace in spring
But April’s hungry for souls
Including my own.

Dance man, unaware
You are about to be snuffed
Out.

Celebrating no-
thing, I shiver in the a/c
Chilling a cold March.

Left alone to drink
My beer and write lines of three:
You call this free? Please.

I whispered into
The vacuum, forgetting that
You hear, even there.

Fern green delights
The eyes until amber spores
Scratch throats dry.

Does the fire grow dim,
Or is the daily stoking
Merely wearisome?

Two hours are too long
To spend alone when shadowed
By December sun.

I watch heads bobbing
And arms flailing to music
By unknown artists.

cherry trees’ browning

leaves brings comfortless promise

of coming pink springs

Stunted branch on the peeling birch,
Hidden summer long behind green screens
All fallen, now stands naked and unashamed.

Stick a stake in love’s
Heart, and it continues to
Writhe blood thirsting.