The snowflakes groped me today,

Audaciously bypassed my sloppily knotted scarf,

Slipped beneath my neckline,

A glacial caress.

I was immediately violated,

Despoiled by precipitation

Dribbling obscenely down my chest.

Although analogies aren’t in vogue,

The gusty grip of the weather was

Very much unlike your eyes,

A mystifying melody of a color,

Warm as cinnamon rolls and

Bright as a newborn crocus.

The wintry whisper was

Altogether contrary to your left arm,

Whose pulse I can feel like

The rattle of an old radiator,

Stalwart, welcoming.

The frosty infringement was

The direct antithesis to your

Plain befuddlement,

That gently glowing chuckle

When I said,

“You smell like pasta spices,”

And your buttery delight when you made me

Sheepishly repeat it.

So often I wish I were a painter,

A photographer,

Employing anything,

Anything but this clumsy language,

These spatters of uncaring consonants,

Anything to open wide and just

Receive

The sanctity of snowflakes under the

Lamp-post’s luminous sigh,

The ebb and flow of your breathing

Beneath my stethoscope shoulder.

A vast morning,
Dim white sky.
Starry spirits supplicate themselves to silence.
A misty chill has settled round the steeple cross,
    seeping through the tower's teeth,
    wrapping up the windows and walls
    like a cool cotton wreath
       created of the condensed sighs of ancient stones.
Beneath the cracked foundations,
    dusty dragons with clouded eyes
    wind their way through invisible tunnels.
Soon the spirit of youth will waken,
Spreading into flames of life,
Drinking up the dewy veil,
Crashing through the glassine silence.
Heat of knowledge and rebellion,
Pulse of easy emotion.
All is in anticipation;
Twin staircases blink at each other,
Wooden doors recline on their hinges,
Hallways meditate in prayer.
All is peace.
All is waiting.
All except for me,
Awake and reveling in the
    blank-sky music of morning,
Awake and dreaming in the heavy folds of
    solitude.

    sequestered in stained-glass starglow

    a pink-clothed woman sways and swirls

Beat, fermata

Exhale, quiver

Champagne cello and dark-chocolate drum

A chortling guitar flicks the flames of

   candles on the floor

Rivers of watercolor rapture

    rush overhead

I reach up my fingertips to brush the

    tail of a trail of stars

Heads left and right nod loosely in the

    inscence-liquor languor

        peace palpable

        softly shocking

    the scent of wind over water

Sandals tap to the thunder-velvet beat

    of an oil-painting stallion

       flowing fast behind

  his home is wonderment

Color like VanGogh's tears surrounds me

    texture of falling through storm clouds

        taste of lavender spice and ice cream

Inhale, shudder

On the smooth wooden floor a child

    lies sleeping

        drifting and dancing in dusky-lit dreams

Despite all the demons which cling to my ankles

    (it seems one is born every birthday)

    I hold out my palm, into which

       falls a feather-light blessing

In the pastel rivers above

    the soul of a silent girl twirls and swirls

    clothed in sunset with slippers of pearl

She flickers, waxing periwinkle and

    tangerine

Leaping, melting, born each moment in her

    wild-winged ballet

I meet her eyes gazing down, blazing down

My soul recognizes myself.

Once upon a time

I spoke of the edge of the universe

With longing and

Infantile conviction.

Well now,

Now...

Feverish skies breathing emerald and tar

Watch over this broken dragon,

This crippled wildcat.

And certainly your arms wrap around me,

Dusky voice in a lemonade-magma whisper,

Dribbling through my ears and

Sliding down the back of my neck.

Indeed ten fingers melt together,

An awkward fit, sore, but seamless,

Watching eternity crumble.

Yet now I understand;

This snug embrace is terror-born and

Locked like climber's knot,

Lying on cheap cotton sheets

In the bedroom of the girl I was,

Watching the alarm clock and

Desperately clinging,

Clutching to one another

While tremors convulse through

Our just-each-other world.

For two red-rimmed inner eyes

Foretell the future fall.

Now you taste the scorpion's burden,

This jagged-razor yoke

Bound and biting on my heart.

The first day you laughed with me

I shouldered it lovingly.

Finally it starts to drag me under,

After six-months tainted love songs.

I see despite my clouded eyes

You're stronger than I thought,

And I, I am scared and feeble.

In the end the inner eyes will

Watch me fall,

And on that day I'll die,

I promise.

I'll plunge, I'll plummet,

I'll pray.

For descending the calypso which

I siren-sang you to,

I'll know your heart's decaying

Because of me.

I shall wish you a

Life without lifeline,

And pray you a

Love without deadline.

I shall yearn and

Bleed internally,

And softly slip away.

If you would wrap your arms around me,

Tell me that you love me,

And never let me go,

I'd leave my mind and

Live in love forever.

Do you believe in in fairy tales?

I don't.

This morning with it's apple-juice eye,

When I clung by my toenails to a cracked-stone wall,

Threw my arms out behind my hair,

            medusa hair,

Smiled into the hurricane and

            whispered

            Hawthorne whispered razorblade whispered

                        soothingly whispered

                                    “Take me...”

Now it is twilight,

            heavy-breath twilight,

And the silence has woken which has slept since the

            second

                        God-kiss second

                                    the universe was born.

The edges of leaves and the tips of the grass slip

            in and out of definition,

The wind is the only real thing in this

            moment,

                        sweet-delerium moment.

I am a girl in this

            moment

                        who never was alive before and

                                    never shall be again.

There's a boy back home,

A falcon-feather boy,

Whose ocean-bottom aura is streaked with

            dragonfire.

I see his spirit dancing,

Phoenix-eyes laughing,

And down inside he's asleep in his passion.

He brushes dark waters with a

            razorblade whisper,

                        “Take me...”

Lifts up his heart on his fingertips,

Thrusts it down into his phoenix-fire soul,

Turns,

            Burns,

                        And smiles.

And within this secret-delirium moment,

His flaming-soul smile is whisked on the wind,

            On the only real thing,

                        To set my spirit aflame.

The rest of humanity,

            solid humanity,

                        logical humanity,

                                    Falls comatose in consistancy,

While this poet-plague rushes, it flows to us all,

            All we who dwell in this moment of not,

                        Dream-fed delirium,

                                    Death-fed delirium,

Whispering into the crackling,

            straining with everything,

                        bursting-with-emptiness souls,

                                    “Take me...”

Then, as the universe crashes in over us,

            Collapses in over us,

                        Silent-sweet apocalypse,

Nobody notices.

Beauty lies encrusted

In the eye of every storm,

Sequestered and entrusted

To each heart that watches o’er.

Storms rage captivated

In the soul of every being,

Unemancipated

Till our birth-wet wings might soar.

Summer storms are raging

In my soul this weighted night.

Through volumes here I’m paging

For the truth I thought I knew.

I’ll uproot the crystal beauty,

Unsung, yet all alight,

Alight with piercing mystery,

My soul-storms, silver blue.

Thank you, Wyoming.
Thank you, cheddar-tone deserts studded with dusty-kiss sagebrush.
Thank you, mountain panorama like sleeping dragon silhouettes.
And thank you hearts of Riverton:

The leather-skinned, deep-river pioneer gentlemen toting cheerfully the weight of family's lives.
The velvet-voiced, apricot-and-oregano aura women rising and caring as mother mountain lions.
The softly-shimmering with young-love-summer-star girls, treading on pixie heels and toes to leave bright Venus-dust in the eyes of those behind.
And, of course, the chocolate-soy-milk, lupine chorus, ruby-ocean-sunspot breathing hippie boys whose penetrating gazes brought to life the mustardseed between my eyes.

Thank you for August sunsets, all raspberry-mango sorbet drizzled with merlot and whipped-cream-sea skies.
Thank you for the welcome weight of love-stroked quilts with background sizzle of scrambled eggs and salsa-chicken breakfasts, the squabble of discontented geese at night.
Thank you for the regenerating soul-crush of a silent prayer, the death-surpassing Dorothy-in-the-core-of-her-tornado adrenaline whirl tempered by the bleeding-thumbs solidity of granite and the tentative symbiotic mastership of mountain North Faces.
Thank you for the anasthetically seductive curls of dusky-blue incense butterfly kissing my irises while beat poets trippingly float their words, belly laughs and bright eyes.
Thank you for the ballet-race of light on a river chortling with white-garnished waves, the cathartic ice-hug of the Big Kahuna and the crispy twang of endorphine-pheremone sushi.
Thank you for the harmonic caress from a stranger's guitar, the honey-cherry snare-gleam and the soaring of two heat-encircled sticks, a kangaroo boxer bounce and a bassline like a pulse of tangerine smoothie through the xylem-phloem veins of the earth.
Thank you for the beauty of life and vibration which realigned the rainbow bridges of my being, for the tinted-tenor tones that seemed to halo all around the edges of the spaces in cells.
Thank you simply for the reminder of fun,
for carpe diem,
for dhyana, canta, cho-ha,
And for God is love.
I will carry you like whispers in my pocket, every one, to lend that lighted river so vital to love and life.
You're in me, where I keep you.
Welcome to Minnesota.

Who are you, my pariah friend?
You've nudged me to this doubting end.
Is the tiny seed of who you are
Crumpled in this vortex star?

Do the specters come at night,
Sprinkling your eyes with frozen light?
Do the rain clouds do your bidding,
Embracing your mind, the blackness ridding?

Are you trapped in golden song,
Wherein lies no right or wrong?
Do you weep blood for all unreal,
No charity, or comfort feel?

Do the mirrors shriek your name,
Upon your face to place the blame?
Have I known you, have I seen
Enough of you, some hope to glean?

Do you breathe beauty, swirling white
Clouds upon your heart so bright?
Does the earth beneath you tremble,
Your weak grasp to disassemble?

Are the faces all a blur,
Shadows in the mist, to slur the
Images of solid mind,
Nevermore your steps to find?

I've never swam the breeze you drink,
Can't comprehend the way you think.
For once a world is locked to me,
Unable now to set you free.

I miss you, though I never knew
The layer of your soul that's true.
I have been crushed, nothing to give,
Beneath the echo that you live.

So friend, if you decide to leave
Consumed in all that you conceive,
Forsaking all reality,
I ask you this: remember me.

Images emblazoned on a ticking-time-bomb mind.

Thoughts are only passersby- the poking, prodding kind.

(4.48 Psychosis, when desperation visits, and God, it's only 12:08)

Cranberry juice from concentrate, the syrup looks like blood.

It crawls beneath my fingernails to mix with flesh and mud.

(Don't worry, don't worry, I only take a moment to shed this insanity, less if you'll mock me.)

Back when names had power, people knew where they were flawed,

So what can I do with "Lasting" and the fatal "Judged By God?"

(I miss the tangerine glow of a night-light.  Watch me... watch me... vanish.)

All I do is play with words, in style soaked with rum.

It's all my inner worry about who I may become.

(4:48, when desperation visits.  I shall hang myself to the sound of my lover's breathing.  Body and soul can never be married.)

There is no need for anything to end,
Although everything must die.
Suppose one day I lift my face,
Onyx and obsidian,
To find I cannot brush your cheeks
With stardust fire,
To find I cannot stop the world
Inside those iced-mercury eyes,
To find I cannot, dare not say it,
Press my tongue into a cliché
And bring it back laden in
Fermented fruit?
You belong to my smiles and whispers,
I shall not abuse you.
And if one day I lose the
Corridors and dragon dens
Between your heartstrings,
Then let me, darling, let me
Fade away.

I must be young, to find shades of green such as this.
Naiads and birch shadows, silken white, rushing in,
To laughingly bat at my aura.
My hearty companion and I, flowing,
Have suddenly cast off the shackles.

I've fallen into the breathing of the trees,
That gentle murmur rocking sideways all the clouds.
Dead wood offers no warmth, but that's okay,
It's all inside me, carried on spring inhalations,
Matching the pulse of the universe.

Two pairs of eyes with straw-golden threads,
You sense tonight we have touched our realities.
I'm not looking for perfection any longer.
A duchess and her jester, their court at my feet,
Silly little fur-phantoms, just out of reach.

I know now that alone is my choosing.
Icy air splashing past my eyes,
The indifference of life, unbound, still-grounded.
Nature has beckoned me back, lures me to sleep,
Tells tales of gray-blue skies brushed with silhouette.

A jester, still a gentleman,
My tiny escort out of this world.
Comical orange glider, my white rabbit, I suppose.
He sees me to the door,
To waiting light of a different breed.

Somehow I have found what I wanted.

Show me realization, show me distant stars.
Give me inspiration, tell me who you are.
Mystery, creation, time on wings of glass;
Lives across a nation soon will come to pass.

Empty, hazy faces, strains of harmony,
Echoing through spaces held so dear to me.
Searching for the traces of silent, lifelong songs,
Heroes and disgraces, contained in right and wrong.

Loving glances, strange romances,
Fateful days and foreign ways.

One sunbeam in the ocean, one smile in this world
One blade of grass, the motion of a life, now full unfurled.
Shadows of devotion, immune to conservation.
Gathering a notion of true unity, elation.

Show me awkward smiles, tell me newborn tales,
Pure truth that swift beguiles, pure truth that never fails.
Tell me of the miles of Niles and of skies,
Stop and stay awhile, and please don't ask me why.

Free and living, soon forgiving,
Natural highs and gentle sighs.

Whisper abstract musings, sing to me your life.
The cold and warm abusings of real happiness and strife.
This broken rhyme I'm using is the rhythm of my mind,
I'm winning and I'm losing all the threads of humankind.

Cloaks and masks and shielding, refuge in the silence.
Frightened souls all wielding the beloved shield of violence.
Unsowed gardens yielding shining fruits while death storms blow,
We'd be better, it'd be better, if we let each other know!

Pass me in the hallway, brush by me in the street.
I'm watching, waiting all day for two melodies to meet.
This message, can you hear it? These words are for the world.
I am the frightened spirit of every boy and girl.

Can't you see a clichéd plea
For love and peace and harmony?