you’re too late I’ve no idea how high is too high for heat that slickens my poison come to me floating your scarf falls away I see your throat like an angel paused in the work of daring me to travel thighs of I am here I am flesh I am that which waves in tidal pools trying to attract you do I have your attention not yet I am the raft in the wine-stream running down to be cleansed what better way to die perhaps trapped in legend the breeze I dream of pines and ripples but you put me under again how is it possible so far from shore softly do you hear me twist and swirl as you write stories about wolves and hunger you seem to think them new but no tale can be invented that hasn’t already been told by the sea it’s like how we’re all afraid of not finding the words but the more we say the harder it gets because language is like heroin you think you’re using it but it’s really the other way and you realize too late but by then you don’t care you’re spellbound and isn’t it wonderful tapping away on the glass of what could have been all the great loves blow away with each word at least you have the one about the little girl and the boy and the girl and the boy and on it goes but it doesn’t matter now all this freezing for future who will listen when the star by whose light you splash page after page with ink will explode but that’s not true it will fizzle and wink out like a torch held by the hunter seeking that which guards his soul but he’s too deep in the maze and all that’s left is flickering and a string of futures he’ll never see if only he hadn’t listened to the bards and their drunken lies though not ill intentioned he just didn’t know how much salt to take with each serving being a simple child and warm like the one he remembers so dimly but yes she kept him warm at night as his mind sought the wind but it’s not a thing you see that is what we know here at the bottom it can’t be found because are you ready I mean really ready alright don’t say I didn’t warn you it’s because mind isn’t a thing but a capacity to reveal that is why you’ll never find it no matter how many mountains you climb you won’t find it’s shape though your head is round and your heart a vague pear that is the real fruit of the garden oh you thought it was an apple yes it’s a common mistake made by those swinging through space but there’s nothing I can do about it and I don’t really want to because you refuse to look and I’ve gotten used to it and have come to like it in fact as things are much quieter now here in the dark

Remember when I painted you In notes? Recreated everything about you In four four time? Of course you don’t You weren’t there But you were All over the place In rhythms and fingertips And syncopated missteps Remember the time My face got red You called it a blush And it made you smile But red is the color of lust Of want Of fire It’s the melody of me pretending I have Any sort of barriers To loving you completely and breathlessly Kissing your neck with harmonies The real kind Not this music I make These clumsy tunes These dying prayers Of a forgotten animal The kick and the snare that fade When there’s nothing left inside me No, your song is a real one With lyrics And a bridge Chord progressions that make sense And it makes me wonder if you remember The time I painted you with notes But you’re too far to hear me now Forever on the other side of the Mobius

The dopamine crashes On the cortical shore Of my homeland where reason clashes With need, logic fights With desire Pulling like a rabid dog bound by chains I know I shouldn’t love you Shouldn’t see you smell you taste you Feel you In the crevices of every breath But I do so help me God I do What poison are you? What absolute and utter ecstasy, this high Of feeling like the world was created just for me, like The universe exploded Emanating from a single point, one Dimension with the singular purpose of writing Out my name in stars Nebular clouds of ink spilling forth As it exploded into planets and asteroids and, yes, Leaving black holes as a portent To remind us that it can’t all be stars But I didn’t listen I didn’t listen and now The secrets of everything are scrawled across my skin like scars From scalding water, reminders of melted flesh Tattoos that fade into each other and I can’t read them anymore What is ink and what is stardust, can you tell me the difference? No, you can’t Because you’re the ghostwriter, busy weaving The tall tale into my bones The one that ends with me being happy and complete Wanted Understood But it’s just fiction, and fiction is The cry from the empty mouth That blasphemy once kissed Take your needle and ink of honey And sell your dopamine fix in the next town, run Your fingers along Someone else’s spine Tell anyone but me That they’re worthwhile to love and dance with Them among the stars to the waltz of lo-fi cosmic background And gravitational waves That translate my tachycardic pleas Into real words that anyone can hear But most of all, no matter what Never forget what Orion said as he hung his belt By the door, when he knew That hunting was wrong after all Don’t you remember? He told us of the satyr who caught an arrow to the heart And lay bleating and bleeding, spilling Secrets of God all over Orion’s shrinking hands And the hunter just sat and cried, he Said he couldn’t tell what was blood and what was truth, he Told us never, but never to kill each other again But here’s the real secret behind those words Killing is the same as loving, he whispered at last And none of us will make it out alive But it’s just poetry, you said It’s not as though it’s the truth And I told you that there’s nothing more True ever thought or written than the blood of bards And that satyr was right No death could be sweeter than love And now I know everything All the subtext and the context written in the contrails So please, stop allowing me to breathe you in Because as soon as you sink behind the rings of Saturn I’m just a satyr myself, hunted Until my two halves are ripped apart into fur and flesh But that dopamine teases like raw steak And the hound in me pulls at that chain for more

Little birds Peck at the flesh Of a paper heart Strung out in a scarlet Banner For all to see The tiny pinpricks Bleeding across My dotted chest While their squawking Invites more To watch Nothing to see here Folks say while Ignoring the dying In favor of Cell phone Cameras

Dendritic we branch Fractal we climb We are time We talk, we walk, we This is what people do I’m unsure, still getting used to this Covering of skin and all the We smile we tell each other Stories of our pasts And there’s no future Without more pasts to tell And always tell (and always tell) The pull grows stronger, more Present with each day the need The urge to find you Through the trees, all the trees, You Always slipping by somehow Wround the corner In this urban jungle A thin, silver line Invisible to most But not to me Not to you I’m yours, the cells in me Ache to find you (this ache) Through all the needles littering the ground I’d find you And would it be strange if this time We didn’t walk or talk But instead I held your hand Along the softest part of my belly Without a word spoken There amidst the trees Just the pine air and your fingers on my ribs And like a piano teacher I’d guide those fingers under mine Tap on them one By one Through the trees that watch us Like nature’s voyeurs Hands intertwining and singing to one another In the thick arbor And my belly in your palm One warms the other, though it’s impossible to tell which way The heat flows And wouldn’t it be strange and wonderful If not a word was shared But instead the words that have no shape And yet every shape still If all these words found places to sit In the corners of our minds And we gently tucked them away Because we knew that words Could not do justice to this sweet thing I’d see you and your eyes would take me in Like the girls etched in oils, Dimensionless on a canvas Hung in galleries for all to see You’d be there in the trees with me And the earth would drip from everywhere Your tongue to hold the nectar of all these sweet moments And still so new and fresh I’d guide your hand Belly to hip Your fingers know me now It’s only been a moment but it’s unfolding like eternities always do And you know me now By touch by taste by smell Oh god the smell The way your essence pours into me My nose caressing tiny hairs on the side of your neck And I graze my teeth along For neither of us knows The thousands of ways we could die None of them as painful as this The awful beauty in the agony I feel again and again The time has come for all of us to say die Or else who knows what could happen My breath is no longer my own But ours to share here in the trees The trees that watch us And make love to us Our skin bare to dry leaves and sky I kiss your mouth And taste the words you’ve left inside Our fire threatens the forest So we run downstream to where the world was born I lie in half repose and otherwise taut with hunger The words and all the words spill out of me of you of us But silent and devoid of language Still So still on the bank of the stream I read you poetry Your head on my lap You fill yourself with all the sweetness Flowing from me Never knowing when my gasps Are from metaphor and meter Or your soft sweet tongue that dances Along the sun rays and my shadows We find each other anew in every branch of time beginning here My fingertips close your eyelids I walk them along your neck And here amongst the trees at the river’s edge I let you slip into my hands The parts of you that have no shape But still, to me, feel the most real I’ll hold them here against my chest So that the beat they feel might revive them The rhythm knocking against my ribs is yours It’s meant for you And you know this as your hand on the smallest of my back Guides me to the fallen leaves And props you up so we are nose to nose I feel all parts of you now At the borderlands of here and tomorrow And yesterday and always We are a constellation waiting to be born I want to satiate you time and again but you know what they say A single step must begin with a journey of a thousand miles And so I lead you and you lead me back My hair held tightly in your hands My nails grazing your midnight thoughts now come to life And here we are, amongst the trees, The only others who will know And later will remind me Of what it felt like to have you, even for that infinite moment The cosmos slip through the needle’s eye… The time when I let you inside When the words failed us and neither of us could tell When the darkest parts of me sat draped across your lips like candy And when you kissed every memory held between my shoulders When I tasted the seconds that trickled from you, fancying them minutes or even hours When you took me as your own and watched my fingers play before coming to me again to fill me with still more dreams Only the trees remind me And I’ll carry a piece of the dream along for colder nights When I’ll pretend your breath is on my back And on my belly Winding its way through all the words that weren’t there I’ll let my own eyes close As the memory serves me And I serve myself to it Just me Just the trees Just the shade of you on my hips