Three Poems from 2009 and 2010

Watching

We burned in
The war of Falls,
All around us,
Angels dropping
like flies;

I love what is still
All night, falling
In a walk through
All the
broken
years of us
In polar distances of
The quiet
Lunch sounds
we make out of
difficult conversations,
talking a round desire.

Lessons drift into your soft muscle,
Eyes lost on the wooden beach,
Curvature and bubble shapes, mucus turning
you from pink to brown.

The war of Falls,
These broken wingless
Words, bridges
Left decaying in brown rust
slowly straying over old green paint
as the new constructions rise.
Only the curious will wonder
Why we were, and they will become
something few and rare.
Armless, dark eyes, brittle
flowers reduced to pigment
and videography.

I remember you even as I see you,
room, and moment,
alone, illuminated
runes, and evening shadows
covered in a yellow sodium
of memory,
just an elbow
on a green
cabinet, your eyes
backlight,
we never touched.

We burned.

War Runs Across My Life

This digital world
lingers
and does not bring
us closer together.

I only see
my self with the help
of telescopes.
Every love song
reminds me of sadness,
every sad song
reminds me of a plastic
radion. When will this end?

We are torn apart,
slightly separated
by the presence
of conflict, bombs,
some scholar might say
the sweep
of world events;
yet it is back
to the feelings
of distance, the desolation

that you are
not here and may not
be, that causes
an unspoken anguish
I can share with no one.

And they say this digital world
brings us closer together,
"they", hmmm, who? who?
And yet when we talk,
I at night
and you
in the morning,
message by message,
it is only the distance
that is illuminated,
a trembling, quail distance.

I see these threads
unwinding finally,
back to a river in Vietnam,
a bear, a mountain,
drinking cold
too close to the mouth.
Sunlight breaks the horizon
water desert, brown
sand coming out of
your brown hair.

Our Close Distance

When will I come home
And see that lamp in
Your flickering room?

What will you do, home
From the war? Sunlight
And summer ore, or
Bus stop and creeping
Mourning through the night before?
What will you do,
Bandaged in your skin?

I will drink lampwax
And leave terracotta dust,
My faith and wonder withering in
Shadows on couches and grass arenas;
Until a semblance of my substance
Emerges, resembling enough,
Just enough encaustic dust,
So you may trust your memory,
Unlock the door, and let me in
from this close distance.

Sonnet #1

I dissolved in this minstrelsy: your blood
Beautiful smell falls within thoughts of us;
Tea’s pass in winds of opportunity.
These inklings of orphan lines before your
Clay skin drapery, adorned with snakes
Where no earth is passing beneath me, just
Unrequited looks over lunch and hair.
If I could only speak the eye musing
Heard in your voice: warm light filters my gaze
Into you: river grey eyes, drowning stars!
How many of these tea ceremonies
Have ended with your head coming down on
Nothing but your own shoulder! My dear friend:
Is love bound to ending silence? Harm? Care?