Hills Like Hot Air Balloons From the hills Looking down over The coastal plain Hot air balloons Chase the sun Upward, One hell of a show For the motorists Who for a second Stopped caking On make-up And didn't think About Starbucks and Simply remembered something, Sequestered, From youth. Perhaps life has Much more substance Than a morning commute. But A cell phone rings. The sun wins the race. And the gears of capitalism Turn in marked rhythm, Punching in the time clocks Until the health insurance Won't cover the costs. Perhaps life has Much more substance. I long to know.

Blenders Are For Puréeing

Blenders Are For Puréeing(conceptualized and co-authored by Samuel Stavinoha)

All the people go spinning around
furiously around, and again they go around
with the heirloom tomatoes and the hatch green
chiles and the purple onion,
but most of them never realize that if 
you just press your whole body against
the clear glass that you can stay out 
of the salsa churning in the blades
down below us all, at the foot of the world. 
It's ridiculous to think that we are 
so poorly adapted as apes that we can't
even swim fast enough to get 
out of the wake most of the time
and the ones that do just cling 
in terror, watching everything raging into
salsa below them. They hold on 
screaming for god to shut the blender 
off, but the sound is too great and 
everyone's just screaming at the air. 
I heard a story once of a man who thought 
he was safe from the salsa, but he accidentally
let go when he answered his blackberry. 
I heard Christopher Columbus made it out 
with only a few stained clothes to go on
and catastrophically discover the new world. 
How evil the world must have been then,
before we stopped answering questions about the universe
with wars instead of math. Or was it art that we use?
I can never remember. This blender is so loud
it is so very hard to remember.
I also heard that owning Apple products
statistically increases your chances of
getting up the glass, but then again,
so does being Batman. 
There are days I feel like I'm a glass-climber
and days that I feel like minced garlic.
In the end, I guess it's a matter of opinion. 

The more I think about things between us, past and present, I am beginning to see the ways in which our lives are becoming one life and the more we fight its movement, the more acute the awareness becomes; the terrifying and sometimes so overcoming realization of our now and here, and this, comes on so strongly that we forget that two rivers running along side one another most always converge. Their colors meld and their salts and soils turn into one shade of the murkiest brown. We forget that the water is perpetually rolling over itself toward the sea, where we set out to a place where the sky once was, now only separated by the slightest of color. Rolling on into darkness.
Fighting is so much harder on us, but we do it because we are scared to drown. Drowning is suffocating with water and the experts say it is more painful than burning alive, so why shouldn't we be scared? Why shouldn't we fight to get to the banks instead of being sucked down into the moving silt and mud to suffocate in a place we cannot see or understand? We are not catfish, but people. Two incredibly scared people on the verge of drowning at the hands of a merciless movement toward a sea of unknowing and endlessness. Darkness.

Today I have a very different thought about it though.

I want to drown.
I want to let go and tumble underwater at the hands of two rivers converged, feeling the momentum gather strength as they entangle waters, tearing at the land beside, cutting through the earth like the knife that carved creation out of a single block. I want to open my mouth and let the water go down into my lungs where it will fill up every inch of space, every breath of air exhaled into the muddy water. I want them to explode.
Because then I can finally sleep without worrying so much that I'd drown. I will have already done it.
And the best part, the moving part of it, is that I know I won't be alone.
You are just as much a part as the river as me and there is nothing more comforting than the thought of drowning in your water, entangled in it, the mud composed of soil from the entirety of our lives separate - now thrown together into one. Just drowned and quiet, flowing toward the sea, letting the river take us where we need to go before we get there. Really breathing in the water deep into our lungs.

I cannot wait to drown with you.
I can see our rivers converging just ahead.
The thought is so pleasing that nobody would mistake my emotion to be anything less than peacefully content. Alive with the thought of dying at an old age with you.

I love you in ways you cannot know because they are so much apart of me that I cannot tell them from one another, nor explain them for that very reason.

Drown with me.

26

The tower howls
and sings a
requiem
to the springs
it looms over-
when I see it
I crawl into myself
and realize,
at the cost of great
aversion and pain,
that death is
counting our ribs
every day.
I will miss you
Mr. Fox.
I will miss you
a great deal.

They Call The Wind Mariah

On a night
in Amarillo
if you are
quiet enough,
you will hear
the wind whistle
through the hole
where god is
supposed to go,
dust settling through
the cracks of a window;
and when you
hear it you
will whisper
to yourself
"is this really
it?"
and sisyphus will
look at you
from the chair
across the room
and say "quit
your moping,
flip the record,
and get us another
beer."

(a.) Stream Of Consciousness Exercise (b.) Possibly The Beginning of a Short Story Or (c.) Simply A Character Development

She was humming while the shower curtain threw open and she reached for the blue towel hanging on the wall mounted rack from Target, immediately wrapping it under her arms, the point of contact between wet skin and dry cotton just shy of immaculate, elbows tucked down to hold it in place. As she reached out for the pink towel, smaller, to wrap around her head she noticed that her arms were puffed out next to her breasts from the elbow tucking and this sent displeasure through her, though she knew it was petty and probably a useless thing to feel. No less, it was her useless thing to feel.

Wrapping up her hair in the same turban style her mother had taught her when she was young, a memory came and the displeasure was gone. Rowan didn't believe in an afterlife, but the thought of her mother sleeping peacefully made her feel something new. It would be six years next month and Rowan was finally a little okay with it. Displeasure replaced with nostalgia and a faint scent of daughterly gratitude. She managed to smile as she dried her shoulders, but then she thought of how much time had passed since those shoulders had been touched and this brought back the events that took place just prior at the Saxon Pub.

She was supposed to have met a guy who she'd contacted on FirstDate.com, but assumed that he had either died in his apartment from dorito strangulation, or a strange heart condition, or he just saw her face, feeling either too aggravated and nervous to deal with a next to blind date, or disgusted with the goods, the commodity which the internet had turned her into - a profile to be examined and evaluated - and walked back out the door. She imagined him hailing a cab as she drank her third vodka-tonic, skimming over how he could have made such a terrible mistake, overlooking all the possible negatives of her profile and following his dick's advice. Whatever the reason, he had not come and Rowan was, in different and terribly melancholy ways, crushed by this.

And as she lifted a leg to the edge of the tub, bending over to dry it, her stomach bunched into the faintest little pudge whereupon water trickled out of her belly button and ran down to her thigh. It felt for the briefest of moments like a man gently blowing against her skin and when she became aroused at the thought, the displeasure came back in full stride and she began crying, the tears indistinguishable from the hard tap water still running down her face from the drenched turban of hair above.
She felt just like everybody else in the world, nothing special about her. Breathing in sharply between light sobs, this was Friday night for Rowan and it was filled with ups and downs, nostalgia and the great displeasure.
Probably petty and useless things to feel, but these was hers to feel as she unfolded onto the bathroom floor, a puddle forming at her feet.
Hers alone.

1.11.11

We will spend our nights
eating vestiges of dumplings
as cold sweeps into
our window panes,
rushing through
empty spaces
between the wood
exhaling into the house
and fighting the heater
tooth and nail.
Blood for blood
and cold for hot,
we only live about
eighty years each,
spend a third of them
asleep and even more
in silence or in chaos.
Death counts
our ribs while we snore
toss and turn,
we might be better
off trying to love
each other.
Of course we won't
ever know what
that means.
But as absurd as it
seems, in those
quiet moments:
Tick Tock tick tock

goes the big 

wooden clock

and the wind 

whistles in again.

Still

I have again
confused the Shell
station sign for
a brighter and fuller
moon than the one
that actually hung
in its place above
the town that
rests quietly,
winter's slow.
It is the season
to know
that when you
have bent down
the branches all
and pulled away
the fruit, the tree
only looks like a skeleton,
it's skin fallen to
the ground,
rotting in piles
raked together,
never carried to
the garbage.
Be still I say.
We are so
lucky
and so foolish,
sometimes one
cannot be distinguished
from the other.

I want to pay for the drink and help him to understand that the warmth of the whiskey is the warmest he'll get from me or from her.

I am your bespoken;
perhaps.
Your estivated cabin
where a quiet sun shines
through breeze
touched curtains
into the room.
The twang of strings
crying out
to the sun
brings clouds and
gray winters in the West.
The pogonip settling
into the seams of
your mountain-scape
where imagination
runs limitlessly
to all matter of
places.
Your mind's divagation
from the trouble
and right back to it.
Resarciation is our
finest art
and we have not yet
painted the masterpiece.

Bore Into A Man Unshorn

As our history
is increasingly
disinterred,
the dirt piled
and the bodies
laid out and
catalogued,
we learn that
the bandages
were only
wrapped so
thin, to keep
moisture out,
but all they have
done in time
is soaked
everything up
and kept it off
the skin of our
deceased language,
dangling by a tissue
the meaning we
ascribe to each
inflection, each
word we carelessly
toss at each other.
It is so dried up
and brittle.

When those bandages
finally meet the air
again, we tremble,
we drown
and we beg for
the mercy of a
god we've never
seen. We beg
because god
makes sense in
situations like that
and because we
have such little
dignity,
such a putrid
sense of
propriety.

Put me back
in the ground.
Burn me up.
Send me away
for a fucking life
sentence.

You cannot
understand what
I'm talking to you
because my lungs
do not breathe air
like yours do.
My eyes do not
see color.
All I have is a
walking stick
to tick and tick
and poke around with
so I don't run
into anything else,
so I can swing
at the bastards who
come along trying
to steal the only food I've got.

Only prophets
walk these roads anymore.
Men who haven't
a clue why they
can't see anymore.
Men waiting for
the end.
I will dig you
another grave, if you'll
put me in it too.

Integumentary

Two in form,
the moment is.
And perhaps not.
Suspended.
Breathe in
the shampoo
and sweat
from her hair.
Skin
covered in rain
and I drag the
blistered burn
on my hand
across,
a cigarette
sparking one thousand
pieces as
the lungs
draw its flue,
it goes
down
inside us.
It is searing.
Everything should
be
as this is.

Party Like It's 1999

We wander forward

just moving

away from

what's behind

us. All that's

behind us

so very

afraid

of sleeping

in the 

dark.

Hungry.

Vultures

we are,

whatever we can

find on the 

ground

in the dirt

bloated

and rotten,

full of a stench

the death

we did not

see

but taste 

so succulently,

and we'll 

laugh,

giggling at how

we used to only 

eat vegetables

and how we thought

we could save the 

world from this,

and that

looking around

at what isn't 

anymore,

everything

we knew,

a whole new place

full of so
few people
mostly those
who wouldn't

have a 

care 

about tasting

your flesh

while you watch

them do it;

and we will walk 

with blood on our 

faces

from impossible animals that

made it

until they didn't,

found by us,

cooked on our fire

and we will never 

guess what's across 

the sea

because we 

will not

have understood yet

that when it

comes down 

to it

you and me

are all we've got.

So to answer your 

question;

am I sorry?

You have no idea 

how sorry

I am.

Until the day I

can't hold

steady,

your stride by mine

when the ash

is falling and

we are breathing it

in like we need it,

like it doesn't matter

the sun behind 

eternal clouds

and we can't walk 

from 

the blisters,

when my

very breath

leaves,

trying to 

hold the shape

of a word

on my 

lips,

I am 

so

so sorry.

Come Find Me Louise.

Our weather shrunken hearts
are such thin pieces of meat
stretched out on rotisseries
over a fire, fueled by coals
forged from trouble
a year or more passed.
The sum of our parts.
We count.
And add up to the decimal point.

So I ask,
what is it that keeps us
going
in this landscape,
this ash,
this gray dawn and
early night,
this day and age.
the many images meaning
more and less than anything
before them.

I love to watch you
when you think I do
not see.
I do.

We enter the Christmas
season
and wish well for
our families,
respectively.
Trees and sights
and sounds,
ferris wheels and children,
the screams of
laughter cut the night
like the smile of a moon.

You say you see me
and you know my heart
when I think it is all
hidden up,
tucked away,
and that you see me,
you love me.

Are we good for
anything but warfare?

If you are here,
we must be.

The fire still roasts
our two hearts
on a spit,
turning ever slow,
the skin of them tightening
and drying out,
only a matter of time
before they decide
that we smell done,
pull us off,
and eat us both.

Dripping off their lips
into the dust.

We return.

I love watching you from here.

Strike of the Drum Against the Silence of Time

It's hard to say how time passes.
Marked by pain, by joy, by numbness. Or is it the silences between? I know not.
I suppose it could be measured out in songs and memories, the things we like best in life, at least that's desirable. But what do we keep? What is ours to keep? What is right to keep?
Coffee, I suppose. Or beer.
I have many questions and increasingly I find fewer and fewer answers, always living by the skin of my balls, hoping incessantly to be correct about something, to feel right in this life.

I feel most often like a plucked string; first the burst and sting followed by an expectant silence, waiting for the next note, though nobody can be sure there would ever be another. Yet we love music so dearly. As in life, we hold onto so many things, but I don't believe we keep any of it. Not a single thing.
And in a way it kills me. To think that we cannot keep the look in a lover's eye, or the taste of childhood candy, or the touch of a dog's fur. Call it sentimental; in fact call it whatever you want, because it floats away like cat hair on the wind along with even your criticism and your memory and your life's work. Bastard. I'm not the first to say that beauty is what it is because it disappears so quickly and the things we love in this life are no different. We are organic matter headed back in the direction from which we came, into a dark place where nothing else can hurt us.

In that way, losing it all is freeing. Nothing holds us back and what we do with it is completely ours and for all the terrible things that happen day in and day out we have the potential to put one foot in front of the other and move towards the place in front of us. There is no pattern. Rhymes are dead. Reasons are subjective.
Coffee, I suppose. Or beer.

We are the turns of the pendulum, the perpetual motion at its stopping point, just before it falls back toward the center - suspended there for as long as we can, the briefest of moments and gone. Terrified of falling the entire time.

What we come away with in the end is incredibly isolated inside the labyrinth within the mind. An old man never wants to look back and see all the impunity he barely managed. Though it was probably the most thrilling part of it all, he wants to remember his children and the smell of his wife's neck and his father's home and his favorite place to go to watch the sky.

Our lives are so much larger inside us, while outside we just want to eat.

So that is how time passes, one chew at a time, until we've got it all soft enough to swallow. The watch ticking as we stand on the bridge, looking down at the water and wondering where it all went.

Just keep chewing.