Written in Seattle, Washington.

Respect is a Requirement

Respect is a requirement
as is the conversation.
Amongst the ferns
there is no doubt.
But here I am flooded
with the grey skies
of renewal and renewing.

Outside the door they walk
and no one says a thing.
No one says a single thing.
In that film where all occurs
at once, we are reminded.
Sometimes reminders are needed.
Like the fabric rolling through toes
or the dreams colliding with comfort,
or a single, wet challenge.

The challenged. We are all.
We sit and move through
premeditations like bacteria,
coughing up into new forms,
our oasis the stopping point,
reflection at exquisite sizes.

The Rodent on the Log

Written things like
it all must matter
before I back down.

Coal the color of the gray
that was the rodent on the log,
nurse to the ravine, upper banks
of a single, roaring creek in spring.

Men hold their faces like I hold mine,
in the shadow of the lance of blood.
What leaves is exonerated.
What enters is accepted.

Smart roads paved with glitter
coax feelings of severance.
Remember the lake and the joy.
Remember the attempt to transgress.
Masculine permitting is one type.
Especially amidst the grid,
especially amidst the blood
continuing to find its flowering cycles.

A Return

I wish I could invert the experience
and flip it into place calmly.
The way you have is of convincing.
Boxes are needed for greater storage.
People are struggling with reconditioning.
I too find it as it finds me like light,
like the premeditation of the sun.
It comes across the scales of Cascades
where I’ve called myself home for lengths.
Breaths and breathing and oxygen and blood.
How long we wait for home to crumble,
or wait for the pressure for us to crumble home.
A fancy, privileged sum: incision and excision.
The spirit that creates motions for the cut.
The intact method of seeing newer spaces.
Images redacted to return transformed.
A return is always transformation.
As she once said she would wait for me to die,
so it feels like it has come true in this way.

My Sequences

Improperly
property
brooding steps.
The gulls.
I haven’t seen them
and hearing’s done.
Steeped tea
is what it’s like.
Or pits of garbage.
What’s down there?
My sequences.
All of ours
in collection.
The dreams
dirty and full.
The forbearance
a motion too.

Be forgotten.
Be dense.
Be too heavy.
Handling is up.
So is the way:
that we wake
without arms
without faces
without noons
in our minds.
The bedsheets
shallower
as we swallow
pass on movement.

It really is ennui

It really is ennui
in this yellowing blossom.
The gardens crumble
and the mountains shiver.
The cries of the road are slick.
Purposes stop and go in blinks.
The world rips apart cycles
and casts them next, fixedly.
It really is here, then, this ennui
a magnificent rotunda of purple,
where those who rise gravitate,
where those who sleep dream,
where those who die arrive
to organize their skeletal remains,
where those who have been born
imagine their future mistakes,
lovers singing in attempted harmony,
it’s all intentional among the many.
And then it’s gone, it’s done,
it’s happened, it’s a bluntness,
a lashing into place and a prop,
proposal of the stinging wounds,
reminder of the sighs we live by.