Hope

we might yet show them all;

those who doubt true belief

who break when they land,

those who don't hold hands,

who don't climb trees.

we might yet stand on a corner embracing 

like two teenagers.

like lovers outside of time

stones shaped by the waterfall

or the wind in your hair

like better weather.

we might yet pick up the flame

move it further than anyone believed

and the sound that makes sounds like a voice

but manifests as a beam of light

we haven't failed, the sound says

we've only nearly started.

#internalsummer

the sky today
above chicago [hands reaching up]
breaks beauty in half &
tears down everything
but the truth;

[deeply azure &
self-assured,
the grand vista of 
dominance & judgement;]

reaching down to us the clouds
caress the tops of 
our steel-&-stone
[hands reaching up] as a 
proud but patronizing parent;

our children are less than children,
[hands reaching up]
when the sky stretches farther
than your poor, wide eyes
can see all at once;

our needs are so small,
your love is so small,
& each of us thinks everything
is happening to them
[hands reaching up];

who is doing this to you?
[hands reaching up] voices,
reaching up,
all of us [as well as I]
blame the sky.

Infinite Obsolescence

As the fine-grained sand under Robert Paulson's G-Boots began to shift & swirl, he raised his head in what would be his last desperate view of the ship. Great yawning holes were beginning to appear everywhere in the narrow field of vision allowed by his ENV helmet, marking out a hellish obstacle-course on the unfamiliar ground of this alien world. Blinded by optimism & panic, Rob began to run across the disappearing verdant sandscape, leaping awkwardly, never taking his eyes off the ship. He barely felt the ENV suit automatically assess his rising biostress & add electromagnetic pulses to the joint components, allowing for faster reaction time & lift. Only dimly aware of the mechanical assist, a growing lead weight deep inside his stomach told him he would never make it to the airlock before this odd jade-coloured sand swallowed him. With every step his speed increased just a bit, just a little bit, but his mind saw the ship receding from him, incrementally; inversely proportionate to the hot zinc taste of fear rising up the back of his throat. Unknown to Rob, the standard-issue ENV suit became aware of his situation, monitoring both Rob & the environment. The artificial intelligence of the suit began the calculations that would ease Rob's transition to oblivion just minutes before its own unplanned, and infinite, obsolescence began. Bit by bit, as the suit began to increase the ratio of oxygen to nitrogen in Rob's breath recycler, Rob began to lose track of his panic. He was still facing the ship, but what had been ground beneath his feet was now empty space as the final fragments of the first supermassive asteroid discovered by humans disintegrated under him. His legs pumped empty space, as parts of his evolutionary biology not used in a hundred thousand years tried to swim through the blackness, to no avail. He began to slowly twist in the gravity-less vacuum, and was lost already; his ship, his wife, and the few others of the crew would be taken by autopilot back to Sol-3, according to mission protocols, and this no longer frightened or saddened him, now deeply sucking at a 100% oxygen mix like a calf at his mothers' udder. In his final, Boddhisatva moments of calm, his brain, spurred by the penultimate cocktail of adrenaline & endorphins, sparked a memory of the last thing his wife said as he prepared to enter the airlock: "We live in the future, honey. It will be alright; we've thought of everything." 

5 Haiku para Espana

1

tonight Chicago

sees the same beautiful

moon you saw last night

2

unless you did not

if you did not see the moon

that haiku is moot

3

there is a man here

thinking of the moon in Spain

you might be the moon

4

if you were the moon

he would like to be the sea

lying beneath you

5

if you were the sea

he would live on the shoreline

just to talk to you

For The New Year

Lonely as I am

I think of giving my love to women that are likewise lonely.

Love's absence is only occasionally without cause;

humans can be ugly, we 

can be petty & terrible, or vain as death. We can be cold, 

careless,

callous, or crazy;

but like attracts like, 

mine would be lean [or small], adorable,

undoubtably crazy.

So I look for solitary women around me,

who talk to themselves,

or drink too deeply from the wells of adornment,

those who have much much more love for pets than people,

who fear the accidental eye contact & seek to remove the risk

burying their gaze in fiction

they who have all but turned their back on our 

collective modern madness.

I want to love them. 

All of them. 

All of you.

[One at a time.]

You deserve love,

all of you.

that which cannot be understood 

by those minds who flock with fashion

[& mock passionate depth]

is the greatest resource of all. 

Your own unique ways

[when I am allowed to see them]

drive me to contemplate dancing,

right out on the street, 

dancing.

You have concerns.

You have worries,

bills, family problems, 

baggage from the last lover,

your boss is an oblivious ass,

you have student loans,

you have cystic fibrosis or lupus,

you don't want to end up ruining our long friendship,

there are a million reasons why it seems like a bad idea,

and you're probably right.

We are all mistakes to be made. 

Mistakes become stories.

Friends become stories. 

Stories become memories.

Our memories are our last friends. Even if we make this mistake 
together, we will still, 

once again,

be friends.

As To Beginning:

it anchors feet
to concrete and
tethers inspiration
to the wearer.

the colors are
myriad, mystifying,
carelessly colliding idolatry,
save for those
too poor to matter.

the voice I heard
spoke to me a litany of memories
of our rapidly-changing
neurochemical landscape.

it drives us via rhythm
drives us towards desire
and teases imaginary hands
toward unfeeling heaven.

it was the sound
of forty thousand insects
being crushed by the
tiny, gleeful fists of children.

the voice spoke as a
multitude, a host,
unverifiable in enormous, overwhelming,
blessed volume that
captured us bodily,
nailed us to this corpse,
& forces us to love.

[*Response: We will never be free.]

We are enslaved by survival; *

We are chained to each other; *

We are rooted in the dirt; *

if our work would lead to supposed Paradise; *

We will free ourselves when breathing the air of every being. *

6 Year Marker

on rare days
in any weather
moments least guarded
eyes barely register
mind drifting
pedaling
I see you on the street.

already  passed by
no looking back
pondering invisibility
adrenaline
did you notice?

long
years
don't
erase;
they
retaliate.

[1st found poem]

Virgin

like wilderness without

concrete caging.

In a sense, you feel it

like a flu

under your skin

FLAMING hot.

Even in winter 

it burns her path

thru the ice

and she is

so

nice.

Thru the golden

breakbeat sunset

between buildings

of december

I will find her

and rejoice

(together).

sunset & th train

I saw static waves of color explode from the setting sun,

bands of light flowing across the sky,

modular freqencies splash against shifting clouds

to move the light n' dark from where the trains go underground

to the weightless skyline,

pointing girded fingers towards the vast inverted ocean.

I am less than these colors,

I am awash in no glow

{tho my blue is deeper than the sky},

I extrovert a shade of brown

projected from my eyes n' hair.

I do not compare to this glorious wash of light.

Memory Well Met

She tucks her hair behind her ears,

and a ten-year body of softness

pulls at my every memory and muscle. Let this go.

She is timeless as the

line of buildings, as the lake

pounding rocks into pebbles,

a handful of sand thru my fingers,

the lingering sense of sangria

and cigarettes from long ago.

The sun pounds concrete & glass &

the people I pass on the street

seem black n' white,  or maybe

I stopped being sensitive to

hues of mood, substituting

reaction for compassion. Trying to

save it all up for her.

Everywhere I see women,

but none that I would treat better,

for a while, at least.

For the streets change fast like

Chicago seasons,

like weather or not you're

prepared,

the air shifts and is gone.

Long, shadowed halls of the

intangible enveloping waves of steam of days

& the way I wanted things to be.

Traces of transcended flaws

of personality and her afterimage

outlined on the lids of my eyes.

I think about sleep,

and decide to write.

A Day Made New

I feel the flush of desire

run red to my face

pupils relax & dilate, palms sweat.

Claustrophobic in my awkwardness

racing thoughts for conversation & 

banter, 

can't or won't join in with 

cheap shots & drunk excuses.

I'm in for risk-taking n' chances,

I know you've got a man but

I don't think he dances. 

See, here I am stuck waiting

for girls my age to grow up;

I just want somebody 

I can talk to

(afterwards)...

for certain words fail me,

here I am standing & reading,

miles away from the point

around which my city

still revolves,

for with nightfall I dissolve

& spread into the dark that

holds the lake under

it's palm. The mist in the morning

re-births me, and I walk to 

work reassembled.

Untitled #4

I can see green thru

windows, from where I sit. 

My Chicago is a fickle femme,

ready to go out, then

changing her mind. Left, then,

with what I can find of the

sidewalks, I am

trapped between rivers.

I follow them home & rest.

Birds follow me, dogs accompany me,

lightening precedes me & my

footsteps are thunder.

One lonely three-millionth of the City.

Heat Death

her
sizzle 
is stealthy.


she 
smoulders.


across the room,
I can feel it.


the 
menacing energy
of truth,
forthright
in your face


it is the 
breathing
light she


establishes
silhouette
defining by outline.


designed to  
occupy 
my mind & 
how I spend 
my time. 


her heat is 
the kind that destroys
burns holes in you


every time

Ancient Herstory

Thru blood sunsets laid

on their backs, legs spread wide,

to the snapping sparks of the el train;

it speaks to me with her voice.

In the parade and phony pagentry of

Michigan Avenue, along the lakefront

in the public places;

it speaks with her voice.

The white-capped lake, wind whipped

trees & the endless debate of birds

& highschoolkids in the heat;

speak to me with her voice.

On this, the first bright day

this year, I am free

enough

to agree that she adulted me.

We, as two, cocooned; & then a

longlovely metamorphosis,

into a mercifully gentle,

almost imperceptible decline.

It was long, it

lasted forever.

We, as two, emerged into winter anew;

changed & uncomfortable,

unrecognizable & alien, grew into

new skins,

new abilities.

Today
I would not know her if I saw her.

The Chicago of Me

Flame-built n' cured

still smoking from celestial

atomic alignment;

poured thru layers of atmosphere

to here;

dragged clouds down with me

for my clothes, stained now

black with soot to match

my hair n' eyes. Earthly body

made manifest this way

skin kilned ceramic white

by the rubbing burn of air.

Pages n' pages left in my book

there is only friction n' gravity

to tug at clouds

while I pull n' work n' flame n' drift

all with equal purpose

n' justified ends.

That quiet voice that speaks to me

of the backs of buildings

tells me the stories

of the ones who leave running.

I stare at their backs, unconvinced.

I am not of the type to flee.

I am of the roots of the trees here

the bricks of houses are a trillion

metamorphed molecules of me.

I have no home,

but I contain multitudes.

Th' Fools Who Deconstruct

one real moment in time
passes every moment that
passes is handed to the that
that was, relieving the now
that is of the strain of being
for another moment.

if, in the moments after this,
there is only what we imagine
there to be, we will have lost.

the accumulation of meaning
like a wave, context building
structures that resemble faith.

an ornate cathedral in the
minds of us who build for tomorrow
so we won't be as lonely as today:

the one true religion.

I imagine no more epic

Uncurable pagentry.

I have seen eyes like crystal.

I see only strings of nows

Occuring in mad succession.

I still feel soft pillow-lips.

There is no time, but Future.

There is no we, but Us.

Our life moves across treetops

Like the wind.

Not a Recent Poem

written words are obsolete

before the pen hits the page

before the ink dries on the page,

like spoken words are lies

before the sound dies in the air.

a new white sheet of paper

with no ideas, recites to me all the words

that say nothing about my body

or my city, just forever shielding

lists of words describing trains.

empty metaphors are my motionless lips

and all these terms of

language are merely a motionless pen

poised to write, the choice of passing

the faulty abstraction for the apt.

some call this communication.

Strength

today I evaded rain.
riding underneath the running
clouds,
I imagined myself
on the prarie,
away from you fools
forever.

riding underneath the running
clouds,
I imbibed the wind.
feeling drunk from
the endless pushing momentum,
I swore at the city,
and laughed at my survival.

every minute i spend riding,
pulling weight against gravity,
powering against the elements,
missing her smell,
i become stronger.
i digest this life and shit memory.

Thax Douglas Longevity

there was a swift bladed touch of childmind bifurcated calm
there was an El Che sweatshirt hairstyle dirty from spilled coffee n' tired iron
you watched him take keys from his pocket and twirl them absently
you watched them talk for long minutes tho you couldn't hear you could imagine
there was a soft eternity eon before the light impression left your eyelids
and then it was hard to remember exactly what after all.