1. |
Sigh
02:18
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2. |
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that dawn the clouds were gothic,
curved and clawed cathedrals of the heavens.
they bloomed slow
from the blue womb so close.
we refused to know
the hand of that angriest of gods,
refused to let its print
(the land of sodom),
make of us solomon's
solemn and forgotten,
refused to be judged
by a thing such as sin.
with fearful eyes,
a brow hand knit
newborn blanket,
you clenched my hand,
demanded that i not squeeze back.
everything hurt so much
that you begged them to pierce your spine.
when this began,
you told me
that you were facing the consequences of our actions.
i told you
the only baptism that matters
is the one that clogs the drain.
this one.
so much you've overcome.
we have become
a purple grey:
a certain shade
of joy,
a perfectly draped
and coiled
curtain of grace
and noise,
verdant not faded
or spoiled
by hurt or shame,
her voice
first escaped
it bore
your burden your rape
your war.
determined made
them void,
girded you tamed
your sores:
the circles the gapes the source
of the curious pains
of being exploited.
the girl we created
when we joined,
emerged and negated
my boyhood.
she was a
splendid apocalypse
suspended inside of you,
descended upon us,
and we breathed it in,
choked on the light.
there were cakes of ash
we ate to see
each other's souls
as wedding veils
full length.
laid and then lifted
made in the image
of an essence
that when held,
falls to ribbons:
a waterfall gently melting into air
(the shroud of a virgin,
eternity shimmering).
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3. |
Lioness
04:25
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she is my lioness
who breaks my self
in her jaws:
how she knows the very lack
that i am,
the man
that i can't be,
the way i hurt those for whom i care most
(i use other's faults as salve on my conscience).
why she lets her claws grow long:
so when she's
sprawled on her back
underneath a linen sheet,
she can draw down my back
ten grenadine trees.
the way she reminds me of what we share most.
why she lets here claws grow so so sharply:
so that she can mark me
with barbs,
speckle me between
my freckles and my weakness,
a portrait
of my character
in scarlet,
a warning
to my lovers of
the harm i commit.
then her nails,
a desert sunset:
scimitar
descended.
sever my flesh:
the alabaster sand.
she makes of my savannah
a scrap heap,
scraping a shattered sky.
she is my lioness
the queen from whom
i beg greatness and shine.
i am her nighttime mirror:
pale moon to her glow.
without her
i would not know,
wouldn't ever learn
the folds and the turns
of our sleep,
wouldn't ever see
the color of her maw:
the sick, lavender tan
of our sheets,
when my self
is broken in her
jaws.
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4. |
The Thirsty Nighttime
05:32
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my interest
entered in her rest,
it rested in her breath,
caressed her inner breast.
when we were growing up
and the nighttime was thirsty,
my palms
were the turning of the aspens,
the branches
the cracks on a pond
so fragile
that it's gasping.
and she's grasping me.
grappling,
the season comes.
her eyes collapse closed,
half-flutter,
tap stutter,
and tango.
the leaves fell
silent,
leaving the ground
tissue paper vibrant.
so we that were walking on
stained glass windows.
and in those
winters before men wrote,
our legs
roots,
our limbs
spoke
of nights
hued the dye
of blueberry bruised thighs:
watercolor violet
blossom as an iris,
black so bright
that it promises to blind us.
and the moonlight was a curtain.
your fingers on my legs
was the spring shore
reclaiming what it lost.
lake of air in east alabama
for the rest of our lives
was the last sphere of
god.
the negative space
between our bodies
and the blankets
was its
ghost.
(it cannot last.
that is why
we why we love eachother.
that is why
we do this when we can.)
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5. |
/
03:54
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my heart
is an electric chair
where everything
you are to me
(the trembling in your arteries
their harmonies and artistry),
burns,
glows,
smolders as a coal field cloaked by the cold
the unfolded snow.
the smoke from you will write itself
as cursive in the air.
the verses form a perfect square
of graphite
called sky.
and i wait,
always beneath the torrent
of its breaking,
myself naked,
shaking.
acrid,
it blacksmiths my body,
painfully embraces me,
erasing the trace
of any grace in me:
your name and face,
a vacancy
the place that you were sacred
and awake in me.
(it anoints every inch of me:
a permanent ash wednesday.)
this is all a testament
to the sentiments of your distance.
an infinite between,
the cruelest of all tyrants
i'm trying
not to speak with words
that are your silence.
(why i can't be anything but your absence.)
(so i beg of you,
envelop me.
make my lack yours
and yours mine,
so that together,
we will be all.
otherwise,
we are only a breath
a word
away
from falling apart.)
i can never love you
in the way that i want to
is the meaning
of the space
that separates my skin
and yours.
still,
it will fill my speech with sand
and call every one of my words a lie.
i agreed from the beginning.
my tears were my reply:
why the sand turned to mud:
an expanse without fathom:
midnight of the forest floor,
pit that is a crow's eye,
the moment before
the birth of my child.
(all of this balloons inside of us.
we are years pregnant with a void.)
i will never say a word.
instead,
i close my lips and you call it
our love.
i will be your husband.
i am a father.
and you call it
our love.
when you die,
having never felt pain,
having never shed a tear
because of me,
i will have loved in the way that wanted.
i will call it
my love.
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6. |
Deceit
05:42
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deceit is a seed
sown so deep
in the middle left
of my chest,
a little blessure
that i bade
to be pitiful and beige,
quiet in that
goat hide grey:
death of a drum,
death of a drum,
death of a drum.
deceit is a seed
sown so deep
in the middle left
of my chest,
a little blessure
that i bade
to be pitiful and beige,
quiet in that
goat hide grey.
death of a drum,
floor of a lake
dried in my great depression
of a devastated landscape,
craterous space where i sleep,
right in between
where your fingers and your hands
meet.
crosshatched deep:
a pregnancy at nineteen.
forms that i call
the softest scourge:
your work.
i am the cause of your
hurt.
sketched on your eyelids,
that's a type of violence,
one mark for
everyday that i miss.
why my kiss are another's
why my wish is
(to love you).
to my daughter:
[i heard you've been asking about me.
i was away finishing growing up,
trying on excuses,
trying not to look in the mirror,
trying to fill the hollow of my stomach
used to cast the plaster busts
of my hunger and longing.
i was hiding my face, using her body double.
i couldn't keep together
my frame:
a discarded dresser,
drawers disheveled
pouring from their broken home
my ribs.
so i beg
of you both
repose.]
the novel that i wrote between
your naval and your womb,
the thesis that i typed between
your thighs,
doesn't even know me.
you told me
she hates me:
the rose called betrayal in me
blooms as the letter that i
penned her.
my "a" of a failure,
a fool to consider everything i write as apology,
amends for the night
i needed you so much
that i settled for a double.
i know that your face
is the goal of every faith.
i know that your face
is the goal of every faith,
and so i am afraid
if you knew who
lives in my dreams,
knew my act,
you would never
touch me
trust me
love me
or let me see my daughter again.
man of thorns
how were you so unfaithful?
to let her toil while you lived as you did?
you should know
that your regret will never be so profound
as to alone persuade her forgiveness.
the truth will scar you both,
but your actions
then and now
are the coldest blade.
i know that your face
is the goal of every faith,
and so i was afraid
after hearing your name for me
(the way in which you say it
the peaks of the pines:
the sound that belongs only to your lips)
slip from her's,
that if i looked again
i would see you.
what then?
my god.
what then?
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7. |
Forgiving Me
03:05
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i can sense
the resentment
in your voice
when you tell me "i love you."
(please,
tell me "i love you.")
stretching the "so" in "so so much"
so long
that it doesn't mean a thing
(any longer).
how could it mean a thing
that we lost---
the second i
admitted
that i cannot
forgive you
for giving me
the gift of my life:
my little girl.
and you can't
forgive me
for giving you
the chance.
but i did it what it took to keep you
and if i could
have had you have
our lives any other way
i would have.
and because of that,
i'm the wrecking ball to you
/
you're the wrecking ball to me.
how did we become this?
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8. |
Longing Longing Longing
06:03
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there are points,
pinprickwells,
where tears swell,
then are leaden clovers
slowly exploding in my throat.
their center is without echo
and their feeling tremors on my tongue
(thinly and chilled)
as the winter tide does the shore:
an ultraviolet glow only rose deep.
her soul,
made raven-hair,
mops it up always
and without end:
a longing
longing
longing.
we made love
and after it
a pause
a knot
fraught with false responses
and the knowledge
we would be apart tomorrow.
she hid
her despondence
in a pillow
of cotton,
not thinking
i caught a
glimpse
or heard
a whisper
or a whimper
or a word.
so our talks
were a dog with a limp
then a shot pulled taut to a pop
through the matchstick woods,
a song, a lament:
how she sobbed
and shuddered,
how i stopped
and stuttered,
distraught,
sought to comfort her under covers
and wipe away
those ink blots of us
spread humbly beneath her eyes,
they seeped from two spots at once
as she slumbered seemed to sigh.
but i could still see the
glimmer from her pupils,
the bleak ponds where wolves
dead from hunger might lie.
(and this was every other weekend,
i lost count of how many times it happened:
the day together, impossible to enjoy
because of the weight of the weeks apart.)
during our days away from one another
we spoke on the phone
with broken tones
as though
condolences console
and we
didn't still feel the vast alone
after goodbye,
in cold beds,
or homes the wrong size.
yet i called her my reader
because these talks were the salve
the bandages for callouses and scabs.
and she called me her source of relief,
her leave from grief,
though she kneaded
her forehead into three creases.
the glyphs
i knew to mean:
my body,
her body,
and the longing between.
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9. |
Wandering Joy
02:31
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10. |
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oh
how she made the ocean leap,
the day
that she revealed to me
the bow in her belly to be.
oh
how i had to crawl beneath it,
that all of it
could fall through me.
to be baptized into a father,
i learned
the face of each wave,
to be draped underwater
in the dress of light,
my holy see
cannot house death or life
(only give itself for another).
how do i float
in an oil spill lake?
how do i
know the silt
painted greygreenblue
frozen currents of her veins,
covered in a layer
so thick so bleak
that i struggle to speak?
it sticks
when i tell her i believe in her.
only after weeks,
did i realize this as this.
only then,
did i resist the woe,
beginning to swim
without strokes,
beginning to hope.
(i fit a flood
into the splinter
that i slipped
into the river
spilling from your center,
so never tell me there is no room for hope
never say it isn't so.)
to hope
that we could
fashion from the fathoms
a masterpiece,
at last a peace:
the best of our sentiments,
invested with the innocence
of lovers in arms in arm
against
the constant onslaught,
the onrush,
the starless obsidian abyss
all around that is
the sea of grief,
the grief of being.
so under covers
rumpled in the squall
we tossed away the armor of regard,
stumbled,
tumbled, and discovered
how to drown
how it would be to breathe for one another
now.
how we had sighed
and that that was a sign
that the heart had resigned
the divide of itself and its lining.
the gentle edge
i swept deftly through her legs,
it left a cleft.
she bled a bit of witness
to the tempest,
let the middle of the mist
hit and miss us,
make of her of a mrs.,
double braid a seam
in the midst of us,
cut us with a double bladed
dream.
later in our lives
we moved from the shore
to the mountains.
the clouds would sit
cross legged around us,
and we would play the day
breaking them:
a blanket upon awaking.
this place became the safest haven
for raising our baby.
and with a daughter
called the carpenter of grace,
the sawyer of providence,
we can surely say:
the marble in that azur
murmuring past us
is a whitewhite mist,
the gift
of a life
the color
of going blind.
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11. |
Inez
04:15
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your mane
is an ink brush
held by an ancient saint
who stains a scroll
with a five foot character for "brave."
each of your hairs
form the decorated margins
of the page.
inez,
your acne
are the pearls
that adorn the words
"holy bible"
on the worn, torn leather cover
of a fourteenth century
illuminated manuscript.
patiently,
you stripped the field
of its crop.
the harvest is your color
and your feel
so soft.
the ridges in the husk
are the grimace
of the run in your hose.
every single thread
is the beginning of a myth so old,
wistful and brave.
and your lips
are their braille,
tell that tale
where your kiss
is a cave,
home of our ancestors
huddled around the flame
that became
a thousand tallow candles
in the frame
of a cavernous palace
that the
hands from nazareth raised.
where the roof of your mouth
is the pattern
of an amaranth
in amethyst and jade.
the floor
is your tongue,
is the same,
is the prayer mat
where prophets
and their practices
are made.
every word i have ever told you
is dumb.
every poem i have ever written you,
unlettered.
every painting i have ever made you,
unskilled.
every feeling i have ever shown you
is cold.
how could they compare
to the prayer
of your breath?
how could they compare
to the subtle script of your palms?
in the prose of their aging,
they tremble.
when they touch mine,
it's a psalm.
how could they compare
to the arabic of your silhouette?
the shade,
shape,
sculpture of your sleep,
your lashes that are minarets.
how dare
i compare them?
how dare
i compare them
to your bearing
and raising
my little girl?
inez,
all that i can give you
is the promise
that i will lick the dust,
gnaw the paint
from your fatal car wreck.
so i never
forget.
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