Blinks behind stripes of gold.
My mind has been broken, and yet,
Peace has its restitutions.
II.
Twelve-thousand sparks-
Golden skyflowers sprouting out of her awakening,
Dissolving the lonely mountaintop, drowning out our broken edges.
I look for her at sunrise. I see two. I count one.
Slipstream dove: from you, I learned her iambic heartbeat.
Poetry has no words. I think she knows that.
Infinite sparks, in her music, her waves, her sunscape.
She has known, perhaps always. Forgetting is colorless.
(How quickly we disappear)
(Sunrises and sunsets have always looked the same to me.
Dear Misperception, our shadows grow long.)
III.
My confrontation with a man named Why:
He and I meet to deal cards from time to time, it feels, though I believe we’ve never stopped. Draining me of my prayers, he asks his question, and I retrieve my breath. There is silence when he speaks, something cryptic about his simplicity. I tell him: Pain is the pill I keep under my tongue, for later, if Love I can still keep lodged in my throat. While placing his four-of-a-kind between his wine and my acrimony, he smokes four words: “She will be gone.” I bite my lip, but find air to tell him that if a moment in the sun is all I seek, a life of night is welcome into my fate. Before laying down my Jack of Hearts, I sculpt my poem, tattoo it in his back:
Not.
(His four words still hang in the air, gray and complacent, waiting for someone to speak, then drift westward)
IV.
I’ve found religion to be the art of believing (and in you, I’ve found belief),
For poetry thou art, and unto poetry thou shalt return.
The skies are paved with petals of your silver soul-
(These roads trip atop you)-
Still, you have made me wince at the sunset.
Behind your back, I have hidden- between blank lines of poetry
That speak of a lily, in tongues that speak only of you-
I have pretended to discover the sky, to your smiling belief.
Eight faces with one mind; the progression of love is not my abstract.
I'm hoping you haven't read me unreversed.
Your house is built on this art. I am a nomad.
V.
You extend to me- myself- lost in a glass box with triangle insides.
You were amused by the eight-sided cage of echoes, like a glass island in your palm.
(Right angles could never tell me right from wrong)
Because the ocean is a sky untouched by waves,
We cast my mind into the sea (you said it looked like a sphere in its airborne nativity).
These waves bleed ink, black and white, yet I drowned in gold twisted in brown.
Mindlessness, synthesis, and transparent love in the ocean sunrise that I never saw coming.
Eight sparks- a glass box, broken from within.
(Love in the Sedona Sunrise)
(I drowned in the sea, in the tears of the moon in the earth’s cupped hands.
With you here, they will not drip through.
Without you, I will follow them.)
VI.
She’s unraveling incense and pretense, barricades and serenades, calmly exhaling the sublime.
I'm prodding patterns in an oppressed rhyme, praying they're conveying my decaying in time.
She's wading in mindpools that always seem spilled.
I'm digging through February graves that were never really filled.
She’s got me living in unreality, inside walls of dreamstone.
I'm learning that love is something hearts never hone.
She's got the gaze to make the fibers of the sun unfurl.
I've got scars between stars, they spell my life:
(About a Girl)
VII.
I've been through the desert, with no line of sight,
Chained to an origami shadow- I thought I knew why it stays beneath me.
Broken glass images drift along the yellow stillness-
I lift my eyes for this new shade of silence.
Out of a window, gliding through the air like dust, reaches your golden hand.
Your grasp liberates, addicts, blooms me.
Oasis. Sanctum. Nirvana. Sedona.
You left, but left behind rain (the sweetest reign).
VIII.
There is a girl,
Who stepped out of the sunrise, into me, today.
There are eight colors in her eyes (and we all shine gold).
There is perfection in peace, and peace in her.
There is a way to fly, if this love stays in the air.
There is a radiant, sanctified, fiery, magnetic, blinding, rising, ultraviolet, golden-striped Girl
The one that I adore
Like no other before
Who is what none will ever be.
