only later do I remember that he is also a painter

he asks about colors
green with purple and blue flowers

how I am sitting
leaning back with my legs over the arm

wants more
there is a small snake laced through my fingers

he writes in the air between us

I cannot help but wonder
if he knows what he is doing

beaten down

tired
without
a safe place
to rest

I have been dreaming

blasphemous dreams
about sleeping
with a god

Pleasant Hill

I spent the afternoon
sitting in the sun
on the edge of a small human
made lake thinking and reading,
my cold white shoulders
warming to the bone-
storing this heat for winter

I was jolted to life
by a rivulet of sweat
rolling down my spine

thanks Morgan, for this

"In wildness is the preservation of the world."
-Thoreau

my evening was spent in 'Bloody Poetry'

(a play by Howard Brenton about Byron and the Shelleys)

it whispered to me from memory's recesses,
out of a black box in Columbus
but this journey started with Charlotte's Rochester

that libertine bedded me,
handed me over to Byron
who bound me in his stanzas

led me to the shores of Lake Geneva
into Mary's arms where I
was carried off to Italy

boarded Don Juan's recklessness,
drowned and was burned alive while
stepping from the mind into nature

reading

Before the reading I was supposed to write down something odd about myself but I wanted to listen to the first few people and the moderator took the clipboard away from me before I put pen to paper. After the reading my friend said that I should have mentioned that I have gone buzzard hunting. (Took a nap on a sunny afternoon in a field and was awakened by a buzzard circling a few feet above me.)

with a strange light in his eye he says

Don't hope...
trust.

on top of Fort Ancient earthworks

can take no blade to them

it is the privacy of armpits
that soft sensitive spot

epiphany

I am building a wave to ride out my life.

two friends had friends die unexpectedly last weekend

vague thoughts

I am unsettled this evening
a misplaced manuscript,
words sent to me,
motorcycles, heart attacks

my misplacement has only stolen
a brief satisfaction

that motorcycle stole Bonnie’s life

he writes...

“i imagine heat escaping from your skin,
firecrackers in an adjacent field,
dust yielding to dew”

fire tower bottom and top

from 'The Plague'

"...they forgot to be modest, that was all, and thought that everything still was possible for them...."

from the west bank