Beauty State

As of today, my book Beauty State has achieved full funding in pre-orders, via it's Kickstarter.

Pre-ordering will continue until the last day of the campaign. More pre-orders = a larger first pressing!

Ghost Rush

1.

I tried to find myself less lonely,

and to reckon with the world's swelling
wound and all that violence

we slept and the dog slept

between our bent legs,

like a sword

I always go back to the place
where I first knew
and first lost
my faith

I always go back to the place

where my self can be erased

just to rejoin the chorus
of the ghosts

2.

and cold water, warm water,
mine shaft, looking glass

oil of citronella, bug bite
on the thigh

I thought I wanted:

always do that,

I know my mind so little

I forget the uselessness
of trying to try

Don't give up on me as human or symbol. Try to forgive me as animal, please

I thrash in the water like a drowning spider, I float and stare at the sky

like a body, I yield, retract, concave, sigh

3.

The part of me that wishes most to disappear
only wishes to go somewhere I can be seen
by trees

solitude, I say to you,
oh grapple,

grapple with that.

Eat the grapes from the raw green vine,

eat the blackberries that aren't yet ready,
rain falls on the sweetpeas,
I know I'm very greedy,
I know that love awaits me
from behind

Shooting from the Hip

"Why dost thou wildly rush and roar,
 Mad River, O Mad River?"

I.


Do you know what is funny?

What is funny in heaps
of quartz, or
heaps of pyrite,

I found it all so funny under the
noon sun, so funny beneath the pine heat,
the Sierra summer.

(Laughed hard, knew life. Life in gradiants,
we crumble and intuit)

(Do you know what is funny I say
it all is.)

II.


And I buckle under unwavering stares like
the river,

true arrows-
there is a difference between youth brave and
grown brave-

you have grown brave-
you there, have grown brave:

find the gentle body of bones, all
heaps of quartz and humble
stone, take it into your bed
of rock,

take it into your flannel dreams.

Dream of all of the ones that were here then,
there then. We are the ones that are here now.

And Ian could not sleep for all the thinking.
In the dark and heat, and beneath July,
he was many things.

III.


I will write a tiny book, and in it
I will say:

I have all the beauty of the lost den

I have all the ashes of the night sky,
I have the smudge of memory,

of eyes

Untitled

I don't know why I'm reading another book
about a murder.

(I have been listening to Satie because I am
so lost.)

I found the book on the shelf
in the parlor room
of a childhood house, all
polished up
to be sold

to the future.

And you
make me write a poem.

I could write
about how I fantasize
a dark hot armpit

(“I will Never Leave.”)

I could write about dried plums and figs
which spell murder. Could write about children
walking out into the night sand

then gone as
chaff in the breeze.

I could tell you about the way that
your physicality is not my physicality,
about how I do not touch a body
that is not mine,

about how much I value very small things,
pieces of chocolate,
strips of paper.

I could tell you that I am never pretending
when I say that I would leave abruptly, headed

just toward
the notion of a dream.

I am too brave for this world.