Alien Haiku

How is it that you
can't see yourself in others
who's the alien

Listening To

Listening

To the air produced by trees
Sounds, eaten green
The wax of leaves clogging lungs

To the thoughts
of dark men
insecure and sweaty, frenzied

To conversations pureed
I don’t understand living in tiny boxes
without life, Separate

To ghosts eating coins
while we try to keep promises
and straight spines

To all the breaths
borrowed from some other being
Shallow and sincere

To solidarity
fossilized by past efforts
in the hopes of being heard

Space Travel Haiku

Sweat mixed with iced tea
Perched on a sphere, on a sphere
In space and topless

Paper Flower

Waxed paper flowers
Skimmed over lines
Dutiful tokens of an economy
of care
Saved from the floods
for reanimation

The desert tells no jokes now
We all pray to outlast the sun
If we stare at one another
our blood can reroute
Flowing in the same direction

Overlook memory
Past the rains that became salt
Past those accidents
Trunks of waxed paper flowers
Washed up and hidden
Wax melting phosphorescent

Paper flowers laugh forever
Just bleed a bit more
than you think you can

Collected by Blood

Dreams are forgotten
in early morning syrup
distracting and sloppy,
Collected by blood
rearranged over eons
Travelling silently
first heated once by the Sun

Each lost mirage
Some gentle opportunity
in the dew
trying to push past fragile veins
as the certainty of fading
into shadow
taunts each cell

Don't wake them up

Considering fate,
I'll be washing the dishes
when those nukes wake up

Say that one thing

It isn’t nightmare that mocks
but its faint memory
Chalk in summer on salty concrete
pale and dull,
A strange headache of the soul

Say that one thing again
Send me to that blinding cave
where I stay lost
I’ve never slept quite the same
since then

Insincere barter
All I’ve been offered
are shadowpuppets
of someone else’s one last chance
at integrity

Repeat words, actions
I keep hearing them in my dreams
and it will always feel
as though I never woke up

Conversations

Why does it always
end in death; why do we try
to outlive ourselves

Can We Admit

Glass is meant to be the same
every time it's seen
Illusion of protection

Can we still write those poems,
lovesick
between breaths,
Inches separating histories

Can we still write the poems
about not knowing
why we ever loved them

What do we do
when all of us are lost
at the same time

Can I just admit
I don't know
if there is honor
in remorse

And that I don't want you
to keep paying me
just to charge me when I die

Hearth

Kitchen table hearth
bright yolk-stained confessional
surrounded by time

Invent

Have we ever not
been living on the brink of
annihilation

Why do they tell lies
we could not ever forgive
Wilted future tense

We invent our own
origins while the bombs drop
Prayer has never ceased

Wet Shoes

Life, sometimes a miracle,
Sometimes just wet shoes
ungracefully leaping over
muddled puddles of time

Guilt, leftover from spent seasons,
Not knowing how to
listen to tragedies without
vomiting

Most of this orbit’s gifts
lying in such toxic pools
are never hung out to dry,
unable to breathe, disregarded

Entire histories obliterated
with a bang, coupled
with some faint apology,
leave voices muddy and silent

Next to puddles
filled with expired energy,
burdens are left to air out
haphazard attempts to repent

April Showers

Collision's tart scent
Green comfort given by fate
Planets in frenzy

Dreamin'

Useless indignance
We all beg for honesty
Even our dreams lie

Praying Mantis

Pious cannibal
Something a lover might say
Sinning for hours

Blasphemy Haiku

Sex and blasphemy
may be all I will ever
bother to pray for

Who Will Kill Haiku

We're all going to die
fighting over who will kill
almost everything

Ribbons

My anger runs away
in listless braids, ribboned
to a dark room and
I am abandoned to the rest of myself

We haunt ourselves by speaking
and every time I hear myself
I can see into the past

I thought I’d know how by now
But the sins we create for each other
are endless and the jars to catch them
are all broken
or put away somewhere

My sins are only useful to myself
My anger bolts
back to a stained past
Perfect glass ribbons

by shorthand for strangers

To address exquisiteness
or offer bittersweet affirmations
regarding our such delicate conditions, while
fervidly vomiting up loveleeches in milk
by shorthand for strangers,
because I don't feel like we're a family anymore,
and weave our breaths into harmonious chants
that fill up temples on golden hills
seems cheap and
somehow perfumed with sour grapes

All the things we do
we keep doing forever
allowing the past to keep haunting

Strange Shadows

It is true
I am more docile now
Not wild like before
Like you knew me before
I am not like the wildflowers
you keep pressed in secret
hoping to give to your beloved

Clipped ruby wings
Plump, taciturn
protect against strange shadows
melting silently
during the sunny part of the day

Leftover relics
built along broken tracks
dividing pasts being avoided
I am not wild but
I am wild and you can’t see me anymore
nor the secrets melting quietly away
wilting from old scorn

Oasis

I have become from somewhere
No longer completely irrelevant
Alone, still, not lonely
Warding off that Second Death
there is nothing to do than eat
the grief of not having been oneself
for too long

How much further would I have gone walking
through a desert, convinced of oasis
Fabled, pearly ghost
I was always from nowhere at all
and now
And now I am pure again
I am encouraged not to flee so fast

I let myself stare
at your warm, bright eyes
seized by hypnotic vulnerability
Here it doesn’t matter who I am
There is no such thing as grief
in this light
where I see such unexpected roots