The deer bow and the sky bends and I am
smiling, lanterns red at sunset, pavilions gold
at noon and I wish I could curl up in Buddha’s
lap and watch the world turn. Lotuses are opening
in my lungs and the train tracks blur past my eyes
and I spend the night dreaming of fawn dawns and
antlers balanced on my shoulders, bowing to a
white-cloaked beauty with promises of more,
promises of Nara.

I have spent thirty days and thirty nights breathing
poetry, inhaling images and exhaling similes. And
now my bones are tired, hands raw, this pen empty
of all ink and I will spend storms waiting for the next
inspiration to rise above the horizon and capture my
captivated mind, will wait patiently for the next poem
to flutter in my lungs rather than searching through the
overgrown foliage of forgotten memories for scraps of
somethings I can string together free-verse and
scattered like migrating birds. I will wait, I will wait
for the April showers to pass and for the May sun to
call its siren song over waves of sleep and awaken my
inner author once more.

trace my veins with your fingernail
dig a canal of blood through my skin
dethrone rapid platelets
and leave me to bleed.
it takes one needle prick
to send me sprawling
sapping my own life essence
and your frigid breath could numb me
into bliss, but you are too far away —
standing just close enough
to toss salt on my wounds.
walk away as I sew myself back together
totter, stumbling, after you
and fall to pieces at your feet.

in my noontime garden
I cultivate garish shades of orange
and clash them against the milk carton blue above
opposing forces colliding in a shower of sunlight
I paint myself an astrodome
and burrow deep into the sky
until my spade strikes starlight
and I melt into red velvet —
small wonders winking in sporadic dance
until I wane into sleep
head lolling on bare arms
wisp of a grin still twisting my face
I wake bathed in blue —
(not the Royal Blue of yesterday) —
deep sorrowful Cerulean
stealing back into my heart
another dream turned excessive
poured back into the carton
washed out by another’s tide
to clash with another’s colors

Below the ground
we think we stand on,
the steps are mapped out
by pasts and presents
and presets
and the presence
of all manner of rules –
well, guidelines.
I don't dance,
as a matter of principle,
graceless and careless,
always a beat
out of time,
coordination not quite
enough to handle
the quick steps
and tempo changes,
but most people are happy
as long as I move.

silenced and moonlighting;
pretending was something
i was always so talented at.
but an actor, i am not.
when i faded away,
real lies and real isles
of my soul
were still attached
to hazel irises
that clutched 
them; cardinal sight.
it was so real.
my lies were so real.
my lies were so real
that i swallowed them
like water in hopes
of nourishing the part of me
that i left behind;
to create a new persona
in the shed skin
of old.
healing around the hole 
of your presence,
perspective eluded me
until i fell
back into your view.
little miss allusion,
you are the lens
of my own cardinal view
in your jade-colored hue,
nature has kissed me.
my wind has returned
and the earth shifts
back underneath my feet
where restlessness
and confusion sat once before.
healing around the crater
of my missing constellation,
here we are again.
here we are again,
prepared to explore space
as we arrive to our satellite--
we still have a mission to complete.
perspectives.

it's easiest to displace
and display, to misuse,
uncork, disregard
and mute with hands.
we used them
to end a war
we didn't know
was waged.
but in the wrinkles of my palms,
i spread the ant feet
of your words into the mountain
of my hands until they are but wisps
at the tips
of my fingers.
your hands
were your greatest quality.
and they still are.
i'd much rather
end the story on that note,
for it is a proper burial
to know the soil
kisses your weary knuckles.

Time began when we were young
We knew no better, knew no lie
Nor that mankind usurped the throne
of She who grants us daily life
She has been there, beneath our feet
the food we take, the air we breathe
since long before mankind was born
She will remain, when we're long gone
The beasts we kill, polluted seas
will be to Her our legacy
And time will end past mankind's reign
When ashes rain and oceans bleed
She will be all that shall remain
The shadow of an ancient greed

Oh is it fair, that the fare for happiness
is to seek the love, in spite of loneliness
Oh the fury and passion that boils
down and grind me as my body toils
I have lived alone for most of my life. I have grown
accustomed to my own company, the silence of the
other half of the bed, the bare side of the wardrobe.
I am told I should be in love by now, as if there is a
bus schedule outside my front door and a waiting list
for happiness. I don’t know what love is, but the movies
tell me it should be photoshopped bodies held close under
a designer sky, kissing in artificial rain, recording scenes
over and over until they are perfect, unmarred by honest
inflexions.
Is it not but fair that each soul has its mate
though I feel bitter if such is determined by fate
for where is such love without free will
Would you stay here, please, will you stay still
I have started to fall in love with a girl nothing like a screen siren.
in the mornings, her face is a mess of mascara stre

(you told me that a person’s favourite colour was a reflection of their character.)
When I was young I loved that bright
shade of purple that glows with an
undertone of warm creamy pinks. My
grandfather would buy me ornaments
of fairies dressed in yellow tulip dresses,
cyan wings pressed into their shoulders
and I wanted to live in a kaleidoscope.
Home was warm, my walls light blue and
my favourite colour purple. Purple like my
laugh, purple like my mother’s high heels,
purple like the post-sunset sky.
When I grew older, I was washed out like
mixing watercolour paints. The men came and
went, taking the brightest shades with them,
sweeping swathes of foul red ink across every
canvas. And my favourite colour was lilac, soft
delicate quivering. It was the wisterias that would
listen to my empty pages, the pale dawn sky that
asked me to write while I was erased and swan-
feathered and half-dreaming of drowning in endless
cream seas. Lilac like my mother’s tired eyes, lila

I think about you in boats, in bouts -
when the engine shudders and mutes my words
I imagine your hand in mine, two heartbeats and a
motor as our symphony, tongues dormant, eyes shut;
Love, I love love; Love, I love loving you
but you are not here and I content myself with mountains
and pine trees and postcard-perfect-picturesque-points-of-view;
but the roots of hanging trees carve into rocky precipices and I
wonder if you have done the same to me.
You have eroded my stone-hard resolutions and left them
crumbling under your soft touch, you have threaded inside my
cliff-side heart and fall suspended between my lungs, dappled
with the slats of morning light curving between my fluted ribs and
I think about you in bouts, in boats -
I think about how you share my father’s name but none
of his flaws, none of his tempered steel-sword tempers,
none of his emptiness, none of his jealousy, not a one.
I think about how we stand as karst stark hill and
slow indigo waters and I know which of

There is a girl four
thousand miles from me who says
her w’s as
v’s and has drunk beer
for far longer than I have
though we’re the same age.
She lives without lights
or a stove; meanwhile, I drive
a hundred minutes a
day for eight hours
of monotony, feeling
holed up and cut off
because it’s hard to
think beyond your day-to-day.
But I picture that
girl sometimes—next to
me under the stars, just as
bewildered by my
life as I am by
hers, and just as ill at ease.
We’ll talk and barely
understand what the
other is saying but then
she’ll look up and I’ll
look up and we’ll be
united as stargazers
and that will be our
communication.

starlet, you are more to me
than the moon with his softened edges
his surface rubbed raw with weary adages
and another poet’s words.
you are more than the maple tree
solidly anchored, and yes,
more even than the unwavering
evergreen. only you
could brush so softly
across my mind
with your non-corporeal glow,
a glimmer that fades if I meet your eyes directly
and divides dizzyingly in two
through my binoculars. only you
could deflect such verbose scrutiny
the way a stone parts wind.
starlet, you are more to me
than the sprawling spiral arm
that embraces you, speckled with luminescence,
before setting you drifting
like a wayward leaf.
and you are more too than the lighthouse’s roving glare
which must give light to all things
so may never spare a sigh for the silence of night.

there are pieces of me
scattered across
two thousand one hundred
thirty-nine kilometres
of forest
and lakes,
roads and urban land
covered in
divisions of class
and culture
and language –
i am not whole even
inside these walls,
identity fragmented
in experiences
cast across a wide world –
first words in wales,
first steps in canada,
first book in sweden,
first fall in wales again,
this circle starts
in the wrong place,
but i haven't found
its epicentre,
and there's still plenty
of me
to leave in caches
across a globe
that i know
i belong to
in my entirety.

Beautiful polished mirror
You endured so much
horror, no wonder
you shattered in time
You tried to recover
with fingers bloody
shards sour, sands
upon the latest hour
dripping away
your distress
to see what a mess
you became
due to strain
Pain
and silence
and dark resilience
For each shard was granted a spark
of your life gone astray
some beautiful, some mad
they relayed
what you couldn't say
And though glued back together,
this mirror
retains its fragile interior
shades of flame
at its core

The note was a mistake. I didn't
mean to write it, but I did.
Feeling no pain, nothing at all.
Sleep-walking with eyes open
and thoughts on hold, typing
bloodied fingerprints on the keys.
I hadn't planned to have you find the
black and white of my lost faith lying
stillborn in the paper tray.

“Drunk and shameless,” she slurs
slamming her empty shot glass
on the countertop. Her eyes
are glossed over, her face
flushed. It’s 2 in the morning
and she needs to go to bed
but there she sits, next to me,
shot glasses between us,
hands next to the shot glasses,
not sure whether or not
to go for another round.
Then she’s gripping the vodka
and says, tipping it sideways,
“The truth is
I don’t know how to cope
with the world.”
I open my mouth to reply—
to say “that’s alright,
no one does” or something
to that effect—but don’t get
the chance.
“And the truth is
I’m 24 years old and have
never amounted to anything.”
She raises her now-filled glass
to her lips as she says this
then, after tossing it back,
adds, “And the truth is
I’m afraid of failure.”
Shot glass down, clinking
with the table’s surface—
“And the truth is
I’m afraid of success.”
Her

when it rains
I twirl across the front lawn
with my face upturned
or kneel in the swelling grasses
to watch thin waves pour
in an endless conga line
down the driveway.
perhaps I’ll skip
to the true river, spread myself
on a narrow ledge
and let the steady roar
wash over me
all fear of falling
whisked away downstream;
and I’ll pretend not to feel the eyes
of passerby, I’ll pretend that
there are no eyes, no ears,
no day or night, only blinding gray;
and I am on a ledge waiting, waiting
for the rain to dissolve me
or for the river to wash me away.

one.
an unraveled blanket
is to disengage genesis,
instant and adamant,
the nocturne departure was
actually wonderful.
and the venom
is a souvenir
of fern acid spit
that is your voice
with an acetone accent;
but it never bothered me anyway.
two.
this book fantasy suburbia
was no longer
a fireproof machine
and your soul
is nothing more than
a cheap faux-champagne
smear campaign 
camping pain
in the ache of your lungs.
your becoming--
nothing more than
dying evergreens and
sclera crimson-colored
anger-drunken stupor,
driven stupid,
yet too smart for a tutor.
but too dumb to recognize
the holes in your pocket,
too numb to reckon
your reckoning
in the broken
whole whale of your sadness,
you're your own
home-wrecked mess
wallowing in shallow,
harrowing madness.
you've been dead.
three.
immortals fall out,
boy meets world;
it's full of hopeless optimists
and shrinking cynics.
scene and seen,
listening and keen;
you chastise 
yet seek the call now

¿Cuál es tu mejor cualidad?
Is that best as in
optimum,
where I outshine
and upstage
with quickness to learn
and readiness
to know?
Or best as in
the most morally upright,
commitment
and dedication
to logically established
principles?
After all,
those logical principles
aren't always
in line
with traditional values,
and that intelligence
can be a cause
of vemod, unease,
and deep green jealousy.
The quality
of our qualities
is relative,
but it's all in the mind,
anyway.

falling falling;
everything is
in its right place.
and i feel
like me again.
tracing the mark
of your stars
on the inside of my
eyelids:
you are the constellation
that filled my empty spaces.
the flash
in a jaded jet sky.