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.

If This Were A Map:

1.

If this were a map 

it would wind bafflingly around my estuary.

I have an unsettled oasis,

now, 

something is churning toward future, 

future which is not a reliable resource- 

rather, steam, rather, coal, rather

rather. 

Desire, wants, needs, beginnings, uncertainty, nakedness, fibers, silence, communication, action, inaction, power, (what is it?), things that wield power: scales, steamrollers, guns, ovens, water boarding, captivity, isolation, isolation with a person, the room of the mind. 

Nonverbal communication, being in a room with someone in your mind. Letting someone into the room of your mind. Occupying a room with someone- a room that is not physical, a room of space, a theoretical room, 

room is more than metaphor: 

room is where we are with each other 

How much can language conjure the incomprehensible body?

It can be a face between the knees. 

2.

How much ground can we gain through this groping, this groping for light? I told my friend in the car: there aren't enough hands in the world to cut off, to make it right. 

We have to reckon with the hand, hand as weapon and symbol. 

And I crawl now toward the symbol of a trap-door. (Symbol is not a dirty word.) Symbol is as sacred as dirt, arm, stomach, hand against stomach, 

3.

I appreciate symbol, but am ravenous and brief. Give me rock above map, 

moment above illustration, 

your spleen on a plate, I'll lap it up,

I'm an animal.  

4.

Dear beloved,

I'm an animal.

You are too.

Resistance is

(anecdotally, totally,)

futile 

More Anatta For Will

How it happens without you

if you aren't careful-

every moment is yes very deep

like beyond the wave-breaking point,

every moment is yes very

saturated with gravity,

every moment every moment

every moment

I was twelve years old and the world tasted of chamomile.

Devoured and shaped by the soft gray fog, so long ago and

long before

the tilting scale questions:

Windmill or fracking drill?

Is that a windmill

or a fracking drill?

Balanced on the beam of a branch, and once I was a child,

hello there, and once you were a child, the past is death

it is the truth of death, it is as if it never was,

every moment, every moment.

And do we all know, you and me and

the swelling human sea, do we know the

healing purity of the struggle?

The churning disparity between windmill and

fracking drill?

I almost can be as brave

and as stupid

as myself

yesterday.

But I am learning to make love

out of anatta.

And I will write a letter 

and let myself be golden for a moment more,

a moment, every moment  

Yet haste, haste on

Yet haste, haste on

Where do you all go to, small miseries? Fleeing 

like tumbling lemmings spurred by anthrax. 

Holding space for more 

small miseries

more brief reprieve long 

recovery,

more conversations with the landscape:

                                      Oh night sky, can't you hear my tree fall? 

Where am I going when I follow

the tunnel of time? 

Curled beneath

                         the curling gale, 

the brackish wind,

the thickest socks, 

                        the dreams of fog,

                         all underwater