S.T.A.Y.

snow pack

snow salt

dawn breaking the grey

will you tell me?

following my own footprints

the fossils of yesterday

a temporary installment in time

ice cracking

will you tell me?

in a field of severed trees

these cabins are hazy in the grey

like a memory already gone

a memory I'm walking through

mountains

will you tell me?

and now I see where bon iver gets it

and i know where i get these thoughts

they're yours, dammit

that mountains are the sutures for the human heart

when they're really rabid teeth hungry for daylight

i wear my hair french every day

just because you hate it

but it's not really enough

and you call me to come

I'll always be coming, Lord

are you speaking to me in my dreams?

are you speaking to me in these films?

will you tell me?

how are you going to heal me?

MAGNOLIA MATTRESS

remind

mind, again

shocked through the spiral spines of this mattress

an experiment

you’re with me

i declare that you’re with me

though i’m searching valleys to find you

over the hills and through the meadows

i dreamed i circled a crowd on the sunset shore with my camera

MOOD PROCESSOR

hey honey, how's she doing?

i don't get nervous driving home at night.

nervous

the fire on the highway doesn't make me nervous

eating someone cradled shrunken alive

the silver demons crawling don't make me nervous

slipping under my tires

as i pour boiled water into the bathtub

i miss my baby

and he misses me back.

bleeding out of me

how's she doing?

her hair's growing out, now,

over her sun-tanned shoulders.

she wanders around dallas on fridays.

it's where she learned to jaywalk.

i know, i know, that hair's getting long,

a golden tide down her spine.

let's keep boiling water.

this writing might as well be prophecy -

electric now, illuminating future me.

can't help it bleeding,

don't you know, dallas child?

with a museum pass for one.

we've seen her around.

and i'll talk to me later,

when the credits roll with his name.

i wonder what she'll think now.

i wonder what she'll think then.

my baby knows all about time travel,

an hour lost somewhere in the sky -

lavender, lemongrass, lime.

teach me to travel through time.

i'm sick in the mind.

it's an infection of the heart.

he's been asking, i feel it,

coming off the waves of the west coast,

catching onto my split ends.

how's she doing?

in your split-lipped apologies through my brother.

he's heard the whispers,

everyone left as she held on longer than the rest.

and when you left for denver,

what did you know that I did not?

nothing.

you knew it all.

TIME

sun skin sun skin

please don’t snow again

the outlines of my body glowing warm

a holy time with you

it’s a holy time with you

breaking up roots for new soil

speak to me, Yahweh, i’m listening.

LONG-ING

cracking

like my skin that somehow bleeds

as the diamond runs freeze over

and fleets of snow dust the streets

in a town that's quietly waking up

i'm waking up.

day after day

i choose it

i reach for your hand to lift me down out of bed

up from dreams and slamming into my frame

i'm awake.

i step through the day.

and then you,

you find me under lamplight

holding me tightly in a hushed parking lot

this cappuccino boy

has become the eyes that hold mine in silence

the hands that work blood into my feet

pressing veins i didn't know existed

bringing tears i didn't know existed

if we can make wordless rivers of each other's eyes

then where have we been for all of our lives

sparking in my toes, i can write again

melting ice cream from plants between my knees

you press hope into me, and it hurts

as memories unlock from within my body

they lift, and where should they go?

maybe you should restrain my hands before they break a window -

as this surgery drags on for months;

that's why they call it long-ing.