“Rust”
I left that house with its boards still nailed to my legs.
It was an act of defiance, of regaining autonomy.
I went outside and resolved to make some markings.
Mostly meaningless chicken-scratch, but it felt good to will something into existence; to be a person once again.
I can feel earth’s cogs rumbling beneath my feet. There’s a certain ecstasy to taking action after so long in captivity. Like a rusty gear that squeals with joy as it’s turned for the first time in centuries.
Its past flakes off in big brown chunks,
revealing that there’s still something useful beneath.
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"Rediscovering Self"
Long day
words have built up like plaque against my teeth.
So as any creature of the wild would do
I go to the sea
and let the ripples erode
my shell.
Sometimes I get carried away
and end up
on a distant shore
coughing water out of my lungs.
I grope around for some sense of identity
but there isn’t one
I’m no one anymore.
But I’ll have to be
when the world’s great cogs resume their turning
and the guttural roar of the city streets
jerks my posture up right
back into shape: a form I recognize
but one I no longer call home.
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"Onslaught"
Wet your feet in us
we will remember your taste.
Seek our calm
look closer
you’ll see the rage.
By night we inch forward
stone by stone
devouring our own leash.
We remember your taste
wet your feet in us.
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"Hunger"
Jagged teeth are stunted rain
hungry for the ground
the maw salivates
drip, drip, drip.
Every free’d prisoner
weasels its way into the soil
racing towards
the salty metropolis.
Each drop
is a grain in the hourglass.
The mouth is slowly filling with saliva
The ice is hungry
and it receives intel from the birds
about our whereabouts.
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"Revolution"
Seedlings writhe under the asphalt
earth begs to become
we can feel the fight beneath our feet
each step is a sin
and it resonates
deeply
with the earth inside of us
encrusted in smog
growing thicker with each modern breath.
You can see the evidence in every crack
Mother Earth stretching her great green arms out.
You can see the evidence in every crack
our brief stints we have with truth
when our lives crumble
and the illusion ebbs.
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"Beneath Our Names is a Great Magic"
The pond mutters to itself by night
a choir of creaks and groans
as I eavesdrop
I’ll pretend that I don’t know it’s the frogs
and in my ignorance, the world becomes so much more enchanting.
what is that sound?
the one rising off the dew like mist
coming from deep down in the soil’s throat…
It seems almost to be a klaxon, alerting us to the arrival of spring.
Whatever it is
I hope it remains a mystery
so that it may continue to beckon the folklore out from within us
so that we may continue to frighten our children with campfire stories about the great unknown
so that our wide-eyed bodies may continue to bask in the magic
that rises from the depths
of a person who remains simple.
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"Song, in Flux"
Someone else’s words
dance on the strings
that stretch out immeasurable distances
from the stereo on my porch.
These strings lunge out into the trees
hanging like power lines
that all connect
to a central hub: the life force, the womb.
As their song envelopes the earth
each raindrop, bird call, and snapping twig is written into the music
there’s no hiccup, no resistance
nothing is out of place
it’s all a welcome addition.
The same song can never be played twice
and I’m in awe of the novelty of it.
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"A Third Eye Opening"
I beat the sun
the window is a sleepy void
the shapes out there rest
somewhere between existing and not.
At this hour
each noise has time to sit down for tea - the symphony hasn’t started yet.
A motor calls from behind the trees
it crashes into my empty room
I swallow it
it bursts from my chest
it soars back through the trees and over the hills
it takes me with it
my mind clings to the world like paint.
Back in my room
I wake for a second time
but from a different kind of sleep.
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"Creature of the Storm"
The things you have me do…
I feel so
beautifully ignorant
as you throw
bundles of stardust
whizzing at me
like gulls to a closed shell.
Even as I’m
grabbed by the collar
and pulled deep into the Baltic
to meet my fate
in the cold, dark places
I’d never dare go
without you
even then, I’ll be bewildered
up until the moment
I come home
soaked and stronger
and take a moment to reflect
on all the reasons I needed to stray.
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"Honey"
You were spat out of the swarm
where we all crawl like bugs
all covered in the oil and smog
that excretes from the pores
of a working hive.
How were you
so clean?
Glimmering amongst the bugs
like honey to the bees.
We passed
as I was crawling back to the colony
you smiled
as one would to a butterfly
and suddenly I became
a little more human.
_____________________________________
"Similar World"
I’m in the woods
it’s bright for midnight
the world is pale and monochrome
a few vagabond photons have escaped from the sun
and bounce off the moon
to steal a few extra moments with us
like kisses from a half asleep lover
that hang in the air
and hold me.
Under the moonlight, I can see the impossible
places usually shrouded in darkness.
I see what the forest secretly gets up to
under the guise of nightfall.
This is a place full of faint, grey notions
the trees are shapes - could be anything
perhaps the power of
the entirety of human life
asleep and dreaming up strange realities
is distorting what is.
And with everyone asleep
I can be
anything.
I reach a clearing with a pond in the middle
I sit down and stare at my formless, moonlit reflection
I am no longer solid
I’m completely permeable
I stare so sharply
that my eyes break through the surface
I’m somewhere beyond myself now.
Beneath my reflection, there are others:
someone else’s eyes staring back at me
a gaze from a dozen years back
I didn’t even know I remembered.
The stare feels old
practiced
loving.
Who were you again?
She’s standing on everything I could have said
to reach me
as if these unspoken words
were a stairwell to some alternate dimension.
The sword of dawn cuts the whole thing in half
I look up from the water and squint
into the harsh, orange blade
the world around me is no longer a notion
it is simply what is
all the possibilities have been slayed
in one great thrust from the horizon
though, when I look around at the corpses
most have already turned to dirt
and I realize
they were killed off long ago
as each word I never spoke, and each step I never took
was another shovel-full onto the mound
burying them deeper and deeper
into the recesses of the night.
_____________________________________
"Wide-Open Space"
In wide-open spaces, I come undone
I become the threads of an unravelled knot
sprawling endlessly across the valley.
In wide-open spaces, my mind is unconfined
and gushes out like a river
filling everything.
In wide-open spaces, every whisper reaches the edge of the world
strangers listen in
to the soft thuds of my heart:
a language they’re not supposed to know.
_____________________________________
"Farewell"
They enter
and startle the dust
it jumps and whirls, scoping out the newcomer.
They stride past
and the floating particles are exiled.
Friend, you’ve brought the wind with you
and outcasted the grey film that covers creation.
They exit
and the dust crawls back out from the negative space
just to settle once again
in new places.
_____________________________________
"Seafarer"
What was said is lost to the sea.
Promises break over the rocks of a distant shore.
They hiss towards the depths.
It is low tide now
and the sand is crawling with beachcombers.
They make new words and skip them across the water like stones.
Their feet wake the crabs.
They scuttle out from the oily depths
covered in old water and older words.
They rush towards my hiding place
they pinch at my toes.
A gull pulls the blanket off from an ancient sky.
It is time.
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"Pilgrimage"
He plucks strings to the tune of stars falling out of the sky. His guitar’s gaping mouth speaks of a beautiful end. Language crumbles away. Everything crumbles away. There is no world; only a man and his craft, suspended in space. Even as the guitar strings wrap around and topple any last trace of identity - to the him, nothing has ever made more sense.
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"Breaking Free"
I feel it under my eyes
cool wind eroding the crust of sleep
there’s something here
buzzing about
invisibly
in the atmosphere.
It’s just out of reach
like that life-magic
that you feel but can’t touch
under the weight of those burdens
that followed you impossibly deep
into the woods.
It takes an incredible amount of attention
to see what is
beyond here
in a realm just a half step over from the physical
yet somehow is more real
than anything we can touch.
It tugs on the strings of gravity
I’m pulled
by love, by creation
these words and pictures
are just footsteps:
a means of which I use
to open the portal.
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"Dreamer Debris"
Moored sails sleep on the water
below them
the waves are couriers
and they come running from outer space, carrying the sun on their backs
they collapse into the shore and shrug off the daylight
it glimmers on the stones in circular patterns: hundreds of tiny suns.
Within that delivery, among the solar offspring that scuttles with the crabs, is the dreams of the sailors. The loose thoughts of their sleep break off in the morning swell, and the ripples carry them away. Nestled among the rocks is a wife and a daughter, two sons and a fireplace, a family dog and green fields. The hearts of these nomadic men try to escape every morning. They make for the shore and attempt to grow legs. They burrow into the ground and ask the clams for directions.
They want to go home.
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"Cairns"
Have you found the way out?
I pry my hands into the soil
I dig like a wolf
I’ve been here too long
and lost my humanity.
The trees are gigantic cairns
thousands of them
all saying "here."
Within the dirt under our nails, between the intervals of a heartbeat, hiding in the trucker’s horn, and underneath the stream:
It is here.
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"Lurch"
So many streets I’m used to walking on are black ice
I slip and fall into the mind
I forget myself.
The grey sky is a mirror
the storm clings to dead trees like a cobweb
something pulses beneath it
thuds of footsteps
from the surface! The real world!
My revery is split open, and I’m pulled through an oozing, red gash in the clouds.
On the other side, I know who I am
and everything is a poem.
My body hasn’t moved
the world is the same.
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"Gauze"
So much as holding
a pen and paper
can be an act of bravery.
Our fingers are full of deep cuts
and our imperfections can’t help
but bleed onto the page.
I suppose it’s our duty
to leave this trail of gauze behind us.
For yes, some will see it as a token of our weakness
but others will see it as permission to feel - a reminder that it is human to hurt.
It is them who I bleed on stage for.
_____________________________________
"Ancestor"
We smiled
at the beautiful end.
We stomped our calloused feet
on our forest’s neck
and watched it rot
into the soil.
We knew it would nourish
what was coming.
