Posts from Sleep Deprivation

So here's a secret: I deny

Myself this because of the sheer fucking rush of life

I get at four when I can't think of anything left to type

but "I'm a slave to rhythm" and feel the heartbeat

of the world.

This is the structure that I want to see,

The feeling of being here and now.

Alone in a sleeping town with myself,

And against the chill of tomorrow

I brace myself.

Crash

Two bodies may not occupy the same space at the same time but

sonofabitch

isn't it quite the thing

when

they

TRY?

The saints of mixed blend malt agree.

The silence isn't was it was.

Could you teach me what it is to read

Betweens the lines of speech?

I cannot not give what I am.

I've nothing left I cannot give.

The single speeds of dark and light

Begin to disagree.

The starling and the hawk concur

That what I want is far from here

And felt between my every breath

That brushes inward, cheek to mouth.

Proofing

She starts to gather speed

and strokes the growing length of clause

and then there is no comma stops and marks and picks again against the grain of thought

and feels the burring sense of misplaced word and pushes back against it hard and ticks beneath citation end and hits the point where teasing intro stops and sentence frag and here he's said too much and gone too far with no supporting facts and stops him yet again and teases his ideas as

the work collapses down

and

now at once

they know each other's point

with him across her mind her marks across

his red-lined

paper.

Aubade (Monk's Song)

"I am, you anxious one.

Don't you sense me, ready to break

into being at your touch?" (Rainier Maria Rilke, The Book of a Monastic Life I,19)

I created this empty song, this quest to know,

This space where I can feel the words.

I have been silent too long, and so by choice.

Now the words awakened like birds

Start from December-encrusted boughs.

Silence is startled, and so by choice.

I crumble into being at the touch of your eyes.

Are you God? Am I? Is this heresy why I do not know

The landscape of heaven or of hell?

The bell begins, and so by choice,

The bell itself is silence held between the layers

Of sounding air. Do not confuse remembrance for regret,

but the wonder of emerging and worship.

We come into being with the sound. We are lost with it.

We are still between the violent air, in this silence, God,

Pressed always to the limit,

There is no is but that which we can approach

in silence.

Notes on an Empty Apartment

Keening gives sway to desires.

I feel lusts like a bird on the wind.

My memory is large and uplifted,

Rage tonsures the silence within.

The smoothness of words can dissemble,

Each shadow's alone and light-limned.

Thoughts like erasure uprising

Or starts like a birdflight begin.

Structure, Pt. II

"And over alle the houses angles

Is ful of rouninges and of jangles

Of werres, of pees, of mariages,

Of reste, of labour, of viages,

Of abode, of deeth, of lyfe,

Of love, of hate, acorde, of stryfe."

Jesus how much I had to say and could not

once the structure choked my voice and

my tongue was already numb and how much I wanted

the clean crush of a body against mine in ways that were

cold and kept us pure.

Sex is always and only a second when

words fail and

wants fall trippingly

into the lowest level

of desire.

Words can't be unsaid, we can't take back

Our lowest points.

Our bodies are inscribed with the words of our desire.

II.

Let me build a structure with words I cannot say.

I've seen spirals of glistering light, and

Would remake my body with trees I've known.

I watched a deer once drink the dew

And compiled the landscapes in my mind:

Structures of stone, of sand, of dream,

Worlds of words, of intense fragility, of fragile beauty.

I watched the summer drip from trees, watched my youth fade

and loved the moments of all my loss.

What structures slipped between

emerged, a birth upon the cold clear grass of early autumn.