Hekla

Nature mimics the fridge when old volcanoes stench just like when I forget to clear the egg drawer. Sulfurous and salty, pungent clouds until you reach forward, expecting a shell but the texture takes over. Bumps that ooze brown, taut slime shakes like a geriatrics’ dessert table except instead of tapioca bubbles we have unlimited possibilities for creation through hot molten core that comes down hot, slow, fast, think, smooth, rough, away and toward.

Thomas knew the screaming, how sound travels during an ice storm up and into ear canals at warm human temperatures.

Bill wrote it all down-published in his prime but Ishmael turned it around – the mariner became the next big thing, not bemoaning but joking about his hot headedness as the two portals down to Purgatory, ironic since residents swore that at night the voices yelled hot, spewing forth cries, hawking up their glowing phlegm as a warning. Humans may understand the why of these pressure cookers work now but the magic remains when eyes look deep from the precipice to a reposed underworld.

For Charlie

It is depressing to look up at the starlit sky, seeing not only the dying breaths of galaxies lightyears away but the pockets of nothingness that lay between them. In that nothingness, there has to be some body making light, doing something but it is too far to be seen by just us. At one point of another, we all wake up in the nothing space in someone elses night sky.

Gold

Our mellifluous present could stand no more
so it took my own pride before I could hide it,
whimpering in the corner of an empty train car
I came to understand just how these things work.

Experiments

I took a fresh breath of bathwater before I dry a martini
to lose at yet another game of Omaha hold 'em down before
they run away too because the world is too dangerous for
those girls who bleach their upper lips and cross their legs
at the ankle. So I'll just watch the window that holds the world
while I move forward and everything just goes by, hand in hand
with all the military men and women who protected things I
never wanted in the first place because it makes life so much more
complicated than it has to be, we could all be free of these
ties that bind and limit our lives but we stay sill as windows.

Realism

We all grow into the mistakes we made years ago, saying how we were meant for more, bigger, better things when really our own minds and problems keep holding us back, further away from where we would like to be.

So I watch out my window as the rottweiler takes his morning walk even though
the rain is hard, his owner wears a navy slicker that helps moisture stay out and his hands free to clean up while my window is dirty and my mind shrinks back when rotary phones ring because I am too lazy to modernize.

Past

The power of blank space
has truly been announced.

I doubt I will ever
look at the whites of eyes
the same way again.

One life can not tell a story.
It is chapters and words
that are wrought together
with emotions
and old love letters
that were never sent but
instead found
when moving out of one apartment
in place for an older one.

These overlooked and garbage thoughts
were criminal in their misadventures
and dreamings of unbelievable cramps.

I should have thrown it out long
ago. But it was here
waiting for one of us
and for some reason he chose me.

(untitled)

The candle was a gift.
The first time I burned the wick,
I left it lit too long and the wax
stained a table my grandmother owned.
Scrambled mess turned into a quick disaster
that I knew would always remind me of
that gift
and you
and how things never really ended,
they just stopped.

Vacation

I dreamt that both our windows were open
and while I watched you undress
you watched me, watching you.
A funny cycle of voyeurs who
had no idea how to stop
except for repeated cleaning of our
panes to keep watching.

When I told you about the dream,
you laughed saying,
that wasn't a dream.
We used to live across the street from
one another
in a past life.
After you said this, your chin shook.

You got another drink and left me
thinking about the dream
and past lives.
So you were a liar,
I know that much,
but I somehow still cared
about all your stories and tails.