I lie awake pulling energy from your skin

While the mug threatens to spill tea all over the sheets

And the further we drop into our illusions

The harder the night feels to your tired mind,

Into the absence of thought about the hundreds

Who won't have the energy channeled,

Don't even risk spilling their tea,

Have never seen outside the box of another cycle complete,

And the box in the back of the drawer tempts their itching wrists,

The bottle behind the mirror wets their bile-sour throats.

I can't sleep, but it isn't your fault.

In another year I'll feel the same,

Twisted up in caffeine oil-rag wringing

And prosecco I didn't want anyway,

But it's bad luck to cheers with an empty glass,

And you wanted more enthusiasm when you asked

If I'd kiss you at midnight.

Maybe that's just me,

Imagining my ghosts reflected in your mirrors,

Remembering the years I've landed in that

Back-of-the-drawer seduction,

And it was my own hand that drew the energy from my flesh.

Could you tell my old lovers to stay home this year?

Could you tell them I can't come into the city

When a stranger calls me from their phone at 2am

And tells me all they could say was my name?

I'm away in the mountains, too far to reach the club

Before the shadows of the rising sun

creep their way over their unsteady legs.

I don't want to come anyway.

I've got other lovers to sit beside,

Faces that exist three inches from my own

When I turn to them in the half-light,

And some that stay far away

Even in the light of day.

I love them too, you know.

And you, though five and three and two mornings

Steeped in illusion, tea-spilling, and wrist-itching

Stretch between us like avalanche probes left out in the snow.

In the morning (same one, same one) my water is hot

And my desire cooled by the icy tub,

To a steam and a breath on the glass

That tells me I'm only a body

And a collection of words tied together by their gaps.

You must not fault a net for having holes.

Let's go once more around the Sun,

Pretend once more that it's happening

Different than last time--

The same as last time--

And decide whether we want to follow the tracks

Through the fence to where the sheep graze,

Or backwards until they vanish on the hillside

Leaving us staring at each other in confusion and wonder.

Blessed we bless each other

With love-bites and movement,

And conversations that make my starving mind begin to swoon,

And distance like a fraying blanket

Over all the land between us

Which is nothing at all,

Because we're here too,

And the blanket never uncovers my body

No matter how much you pull during the night.

You hold the tea in your lap and fall into me,

Thank you, thank you.

What would I do if you weren't here?

It's hard to use the whole body.

I'm always here.

Always...always...

Under your skin,

In your stare you can't explain,

In your love and love-doubt,

In your shame,

In your name.

Meet me again

Without hearing my name, my voice, before I speak,

Without knowing my face and the shapes it makes

When I'm happy, or upset, or afraid,

Without the histories you carry into its encounter.

Meet me in that familiar way

We tend to find so easily with strangers,

When the words and the images are only for show

And only new energy is in play,

Deciding for us whether we want to keep looking,

Before we ever have their stories and patterns

To satisfy the needs of our conscious minds.

I am only archeology,

Patterns of houses and temples and toilets

Vaguely familiar to you,

As distant and malleable as monochrome dust,

As intimate and terrifying as every mirror you've ever looked in.

But it's only bones---are they white when they're still inside?

Or covered in stains and blood and fluids you can't quite pronounce?---

I've watched the skins change many times;

It's uncomfortable and confusing,

Feathers everywhere,

Blood I thought was someone else's,

Newborn for the thousandth time.

I know it's confusing.

It's hardly comprehensible to me,

Pronouns like stray clouds chased out by a storm,

Emotions and motions arising and falling

With the consistency of Midwest snowfall,

Yet I---I mean the real "I"; not me, not this shape, not this memory---do not change.

You've met this body, this tongue, these eyes,

And at times you may have glimpsed me beneath all my clothes

When I've taken them off 'til there's only muscle and bone exposed,

And then the gore is a trauma,

And the deeper you get, the farther you stray

Because you've gone right through what you wanted to find

Arrived at the scary faces on the borders

Of those parts most densely shadowed from who I am.

Meet me again,

Where my body is just a moment

And the plants and dirt and fluids and cells

That went into making me are so much matter,

Floating endlessly in either direction.

Only this time, remember

That my ghost is out here,

Dancing in the space between us,

Haunting my own vessel

Like wildfire smoke creeping slowly up the valley,

Like October fog caressing the lines of the mountains,

Like the space between the rain jumping from place to place,

Like the blankets of snow that conspire to shape all this physical realm

Under their impossible perfection, falling like feathers from the sky.

I should be waxing my boots.

I should be mending the tear in the leather,

Needle in, needle out, then back through the other way,

Considering the cold and the pain of the trail-junkie

In the coming days,

In the winter days,

When the world turns into devil country.

I'm soaking the skin around my ankles

In rain that's hardly touching me

But for the water clinging to the plants at my feet

And the specks that hit my face when I peek out from the trees,

Moving toward the hoot, the screech,

And the unknown call somewhere to the west.

I moved backwards all day

And said it was good

And felt so still so still

While I watched my least favorite mirror

Breathe on the other side of my eyelids.

I should be writing letters.

I should be telling my friends I love them,

And how the leaves have turned to gold

And the snow that dusted the peaks is coming again Thursday

(or so they say)

And that I wish they were here and drinking my wine and tea

And telling me their loves their fears,

And telling me they love me.

I'm burying the mouse I found in the trap

In the laundry room outside my door,

And sitting atop the old forge behind my house

Watching the fog move over the face of the deer-mountain.

I wrote about falling through the ice

And it wasn't bad

Sinking down, in the blue in the white

Where the wound's bitter pain

Is the tiniest flame in the woodstove.

I should follow the music.

I should ask to sit beside unknown singers,

Whose voices bring me joy under darkening sky.

I walk past instead, and when I think to turn

I realize they have seen me go

And fear to cause confusion.

I go back home,

Spin in circles,

Play my songs

And sit beside the boots I have not mended,

Think about the letters I have not written,

Sigh that my voice is kept locked away

And my fingers can't find the right keys.

I consider the heavy bones

That keep me from my shape-shifting,

And they're alright too.

Anchor me to the riverbed

Beneath the earth, tie me to a tree

Until my roots have grown back into me.

It rained tonight for the first time in a while,

And the Moon broke through the clouds,

Summoned witnesses to remember the mountain sky

In all their great dramas here below,

Where hellos and goodbyes take up so much of our headspace

And so little of our time.

Only dreams, only memories,

Only little moments of breaking my heart open

Like frozen fingers too quickly warmed by the fire

Shattering me in her layered lingering

And their naked splashing in the darkness,

And I shiver half-clothed,

Watching a moment I'm (not) truly a part of,

And (yet) have created.

I am so young in my flesh,

So old in my ways.

Do the trees think me curious?

Head shaking out the window

And a child in a thrice-too-large coat

And tears behind so many eyes

And somehow it feels like Winter,

And Fall hasn't even arrived yet.

Could you embrace me again,

Skin to skin and our minds reeling

In a spiraling mass moving up and down

In tandem with the rhythm of distant hearts,

And I feel like crying out: Wait!

Because I'm not ready,

Because you're gone now

And Lichen next

And everyone, everyone eventually,

And I've hardly even caught your eye

To tell you silently that I love you.

Could you wait another day?

Take another month?

Stay another year?

But we would never keep you,

Though the piano doesn't greet me when I seek it out in the night,

And the stairs don't sing when they creak under unfamiliar footsteps,

And my terrified pace won't be slowed by the patient nightwalker

When the houses get too crowded and the paths too thin.

Where you wander now is yours,

And I'm proud of that choice,

And whether you appear in a month or a year

Or never again in our little wild lives,

I'll go on dancing to strange music,

Taking up space and squeezing into tea cups,

Laughing because people are so beautiful

And because being loved is so lovely.

I want to write music like a true poet. Not just words, drifting black and white across a blank canvas, never to see colour or cadence without a musical mind to untangle it. I want to paint obsessively. Not just kiddish attempts at watercolor and sketches I give up on halfway through, the image lost with my thoughts flying far too fast for my hand to keep up. But I can't keep up with you, true artists in this vibrant world. I can't bring life to my words like you inspire your brush, your strings, your whittling knife, or your voice. I create vessels for abstract ghosts, patterns of coded sounds in further coded shapes that only work to move information from here to there if the reader knows intimately the same magick signs. It's a gated art form, this inkcraft, and though beautiful in its way---filled with the fragrance of aging leaves, saturating in the context of its library or bookstore, musical when recited by those with greater skill, recreated by each amateur, ever evolving in every iteration---it will never quite match the passion of the colored and shadowed oils on the canvas drying on Rabbit's wall, never dance through the air to the keen vibrations of Grandfather's strings. There's too much mystery here, too much concealed, and what a name means to you is different from what it means to me.

I want to dance my stories into life---no fear here, no fear here---like a restless graveyard filled with morbid boredom, inspirit old bones with movement they've long forgotten, passing strength from my growing muscles to their atrophied and consumed limbs. No more envying the dead! I want to tell stories like an old man with a captive audience, not caring that my voice is shaky and so are my hands, or that I have to breathe twice as long as my younger counterparts, intent instead on illustrating in the softly drifting air before me invisible patterns of smoke for my listeners to inhale, seeing visions of bygone days and uphill-both-ways roads and loves so sharp and beautiful and gone, gone away, gone far away, that they begin to travel through time like I do, forgetting their wyes and woes, no choices to make, no terror in the results, standing like tall trees through contradicting air currents. I want to love like a child, playful and free, to say 'hello' and 'do you want to be my friend?' and 'goodbye' when it's time for lunch, to let it all in and let it all go and let it all be and not once think of my self as something needing or lacking or twisting up at every change in the cast of beautiful faces around me.

And though my words contain worlds that I cannot share any other way---why am I wearing clothes?---they spin so far out from the Sun that I fear they grow cold, lose their atmosphere, forget their water and their heat, and life abandons them---or they abandon life---as soon as they are set into motion, whiling away their unending shorter-than-earth days like so many dead things floating in a mountain lake, brilliant in a confused and fearful way, waiting to be eaten up by fish that will never swim there, content instead to be bounced around by spiraling children passing from life to death to life again in a game of who can swim the fastest?

I don't think I'm finished though---oh, how simple!---I don't think the lack of senses means a lack of colour or sound or feel or smell or taste; even the blueberries burst all the more sweet at night, and the stars shine more boldly in their gentle way, fall through a too-broad-for-the-eyes canvas with more invisible colour than any painting can contain without turning to mud, captured only in our silly little magick-eye contraptions we call cameras. We walk through worlds each day that cannot be traveled to again only through snapshots; we need many and never enough.

I'm creating now alongside Rabbit and Grandfather---the wind is my friend---the one painting and writing and laughing, the other touching keys and strings and singing out, and I draw faces in leaves and flowers blooming behind closed eyes and write, a volunteer insomniac in the minutes between the hours, sketching out in digital glyphs impossible geometries that fill the sky and pattern onto our ceilings, collage the musings of other souls into a little container, which opens onto a little world being created above the waterfall, a bed of moss and a sun-soaked field in the wild mountain country hemmed in by wildfire.

And I ask myself now, seeing this world---Time unwinds its coil---can you walk upon that forgiving water? let your storm be roused and calmed in the same moment, the same rhythm, the same pattern? You won't drown, I promise. But you may very well fall, singing in tune and grinning through a thousand illnesses, into an impossible, ferocious love.

I meditated on the wind the other day, sitting half-lotus in a half-decayed concrete garage in the middle of a forest, where we used to have our fires last winter. I sat with a friend and waited for my brain to start trailblazing, taking me into the truth of the automaton that is me, entering a state of flow, becoming a muscle responding to an electric pulse originating somewhere outside of me; I am only one small part responding to a stimulus. The flutist inhales the spirit, breathes it into the instrument, acts as lungs for a body-less entity, and the voice of the wind emerges. This day, I allowed the trees to do so, and listened to memories of the wind from another artist repeating in a digital plane.

I sat with my friend and could not open my eyes without being overwhelmed. So I breathed, and I stayed still, and I listened to the wind and the music and I smelled the air and I wondered if my cloak would be warm enough, and found that it was so. I drifted into reverie and out of it, felt the push and pull of heart-clingers, loved it all, or hated it; there was strong energy, but no real judgment. I've listened to my heart time and again, and it always tells me something different. I've reasoned with it, abandoned reason for it, given it space, given it attention, swaddled and freed it, fed it with good and ill, and never once has it been consistent. There is a wound somewhere I cannot find. A healing I cannot achieve. What guidance can such a thing be that beats as consistently as the wind blows?

I lay under the trees and the air rushed into my lungs, seeped out of them slowly, or quickly if it so desired. And I listened for the wisdom of the vaporous sea, wondered at the patterns that emerged within my mind from its variance: air rushing down claw-marks in the aspens, spinning through channels in the grain of the interior of the flute, filling a space and leaving it, dancing along the surface of the water, wisping into nothingness in the atmosphere high above, turning on itself at a moment's notice. The wind is treacherous, like my heart. What wisdom is there? What wisdom is there to be gained?

There are patterns, but not to be thoroughly obeyed. There are names, but not to be confused with realities. The wind is a fickle deity, a mischievous spirit full of tricks and power and voice. And it calls to me deeply, deeply. I cannot stay in my flesh when the wind catches me right, cannot remember my own name when the flute begins to sound. I am sent far, far away, and forget that I have not wings.

Memory doesn't matter here. It blows away like a slender candle flame in a sudden gale, whispers half its secrets and vanishes into nothing, and the secret is scattered like the stars about a new planet, which becomes a seed, which becomes a child wrapped in a cloak, which becomes a galaxy and an astral body, which stretches apart like light entering a black hole, which condenses in a moment into a nest on a once-halcyon sea now swelling to a moon-drunk wave in a silver and blue ocean somewhere deep in the eye of the mystic.

My friend writes poetry and I turn over a half-shaped haiku, forgetting that the wind cares not for structure, knocking over the pines, pushing the smoke out and pulling it back in. And I watch my jealous mind from my laughing mind, and it isn't unkind, and I drift on his words and twist about them, imagining a fire before us and I the smoke dancing in celebration that the ban has been lifted, and I am in the future then, and time is taken by the wind and left in pieces out of order, like the chess pieces buried by the squirrels in the village.

Down from the sky I am inhaled, a molecule in the lungs of God, traveling through the heart, to the brain, and I am torn apart into my bed, and open my eyes like a child with a thousand, thousand lifetimes behind me. The silk scarf has only worn away about a few inches of the mountain.

There is a dry canyon

Deeply carved with ivory scars

And in a dark house abandoned many (not so many) years ago

There's a girl -- her feet don't touch the ground -- fingers flexing in the darkness

A growl in her throat and ink-black tendrils crawling up her arms

Have you forgotten me yet?

All my lovers were there with me

And the Moon doesn't answer my questions

And the bus is far away

And the boat waits at the dock for days... days...

Somewhere I'm a jester lost in a slaughterhouse

And you're holding a knife buried in my stomach

And I'm finally back home! where my skin is buzzing

With the ecstasy of that satyrical freedom

Behind a fence in the woods

Behind the static cardboard cut-out

And buried where the lights don't reach

But the drums still echo

I've left something living in a graffiti-ed grave

And heavy lie beneath a mantel of stars

Wish upon a devouring

Splayed in the mud, stomach down,

Forgive every cowardly thing that I've done

Dirt in my sun-wounded ear

And tears on my cheeks

Never! never! because it's a bad signal-- bad sign--

Still my cowardly heart

Empty for its binding-tension

Because taming is scary

But I always take the rope

And so you are unique to me

All of you

I cannot explain it

My arms are askew and braced against the pillows

While I rest exposed in a room of strangers

And wonder where my fire has gone

Drowned behind the glass between the worlds

Only the child presses their nose against

Have you forgotten me?

I've been away you know

Blind and wandering

And twisting around other souls

With a hatred for all things human

And an insatiable hunger for all things human

Your phantom-craft is black velvet and sanguine

And I a hungry ghost with too many sharp objects

Perhaps the river yet runs through that canyon

Clear and true and unchanging

And I need a chisel and hammer to remove my sigil

Too tired to hold the blade at vigil

So the stars fall in virgin rain and without harm

C'est tellement mystérieux, le pays des larmes.

The path of the Sun is a windshield wiper across the face of the mountain,

And they aren't big enough to show the pattern,

So we say they drop into shadow,

Or that the shadow rises to cover them.

But light isn't more than a collection of bugs on a windshield,

And night a brand new plastic arm scattering and splattering them

That the drivers might see where they can't during the day.

Valleys are for dark things,

And peaks for the isolated socialites

To escape their sundry sorrows,

Dream of wingèd canopies.

Of feathery ceilings below their high gaze.

I dream of wildfire,

Where one silvery head circles before,

Gazing into the water spared of the haze because the wind is kind,

And gently dodge the diving terror from above

That cannot see its sovereignty.

Not much left now; the bugs have scrambled back into the sky,

And soon I'll see them perched far away,

Making shapes in the black,

Waiting for the wiper to return its odd, swinging arc

That they might alight anew upon the mountainside,

Upon the meadows and rocks and trees,

Gather about the waters to eat us,

And we'll curse them, kill them,

Summon the winter darkness.

But for a time they'll stare at us unblinking,

And we'll call them ancient, memory,

And never invoke their insectile nature,

Nor confess our bifurcated tongues.

Looking out the screen door that never quite closes,

I realize that color does not stick in my mind.

I could not tell you whether the building to the South is green or brown or blue,

Nor the amount of snow on the mountains,

Nor the shape of the trees that line the path at the foot of our stairs—

Are there any?

This music is a cloud in my mind,

Except the few songs that rise above the storm,

Or dive below it, dodging raindrops and lightning.

I feel so empty here, and I shouldn’t.

I have love and trust and wilderness at my door,

A universe of wonders and mysteries to unravel,

Yet the spirits have gone a-wandering.

The ravens appear so infrequently now.

They are indifferent toward me, who lingers

A ghost forgotten in the summer Sun.

Even the Moon hides his face from me

Until his power wanes.

I suffer the heat, the light, the unending days,

Miss the cold, the dark, the long nights.

I don’t belong here, this taxing season,

Where my skin begins to darken in tandem with my heart,

And Memory becomes a memory instead of a god.

I can’t undo my confusion,

What I’ve created in this past winter spell.

She is beautiful, and I know this.

But my eyes glaze over and forget desire,

Incline themselves toward closure,

Seeking solitary incubation,

Slumber until the days grow short enough to endure.

I am static on a TV screen,

A jagged wave of energy in an inferno of sun beams,

Arrows, arrows spinning me about,

And I keep breaking them,

So the bathers in the grass are dismayed

By the scattered shadows.

Trap me in a jar and I’ll thank you;

Clip my wings and I’ll hate you;

Tell me to leave and I’ll spin in circles

Until my face splits in two

And there is no more difference

Between all my tears and all my laughter.

A breath on a tremulous flame

Dancing afraid on a thin lake of wax—

Cover the dark with a rag

And watch it melt onto the glass

Before its sparks can escape

Into the summer Sun.

Your happiness lives because you have walls.

And not solid walls, neither stone nor clay nor wood,

But something like glass, transparent,

Maybe cracking in a couple places,

Or slightly open in a room you’d forgotten existed

So a draught comes through and stirs up the air now and again,

Saturates the over-oxygenated environment of your waking reality

With a little arsenic that still hangs in the air

From the tailings across the water.

Silly scares in basement freezers,

And bypass difficult weather with clever zeugma,

Make me laugh at my unbidden rêverie

And watch my face grow still.

What is a summer camp to us?

Here, where the evergreens cloak themselves in white

While these temporary souls slumber in other worlds

And we drift like ghosts six feet above the ground?

What do we do when they play their music around their fires

And send their children chasing after the squirrels,

While the faun behind cabin seven cries out

To feed the bear, and its mother looks on?

But my friend can play into the joke,

Bring laughter to your seasonal clambering,

And know in some other less-maintained section of their mind

That it is a wound that hasn’t yet been made.

We trace our scars before their genesis,

Welcome them in with a smile and a nod to the wind at the edge of town,

And we ask for thunder to come rolling down the valley,

Because, God! it’s too hot, and the days too uniform.

I feel like a child,

Not trusting in the strength of the windows

While the storm rages just beyond.

Yet I know it is not without sense,

For the glass is not glass,

But a visage of Time,

And my body a vehicle that passes through.

This is not a room separate from the world,

But a single perspective, and all our walls

Are portals to worlds upon worlds

That have passed before or follow after—

Tell me, tell me to turn away,

And I’ll fall backwards over my shoelaces,

Into the—into the—into another room,

Surrounded by other walls,

And you’ll be on the other side of the glass.

But tomorrow is a making day--

Making art, making stories, making love.

And for now, our hands can still touch,

Our laughter can still be heard,

And the windows, though lined with cracks,

Remain intact, while the storms beyond rage and retire,

And rage again.