I still believe in love. The end.

the only god

Fill the mirror
lines break, feet filled with tendons fail.
The music splits off,
says, “I’ll catch up with you later.”
News reports ricochet like shrapnel
based in the back end of a battered brain pan
that still believes in love, buried.
But it’s not shattered.
Just smudge-faced, glassy-eyed
lost in reflections of screaming children
and hastily scrawled “I’m Sorry”s

These memories must learn to dance on broken legs.
No matter how I move, I am followed.
Shadow metaphors splinter when faced with the real –
these dance steps are inside of me,
this blood memory is every promise fulfilled.
Drunk on ether
my flesh
beckons like topsoil in early summer mornings,
dew-wet, begging to be seeded.

But tonight, the sky’s gunmetal with falling bombs.
Dark promises intrude on perfection.
One death is a global earthquake
and the temple where I house my peace of mind
falls around my ears.

Will my whispers be heard?
Smudge-faced, blind, these howls are
a pittance – all my body can hold –
an old cup lost in the ocean.

Does the sunset share my opinions on art?
It teases me with paintings that live and die in my iris
lost even to the rush of remembrance that
can be found in the body’s loud pleasures.
Torment is losing beauty.
Regret is the only eternity
when god is change.

It sounds strange to me too.
But I only believe in what I can cause.

For Judez
11/26/05

The Great American Pastime

“Find your way home,” the old man said
as I ran for first base.
The introduction
of doubt.
Diamonds, once carbon-based and predictable
now twisted into question marks.
A path once known becomes a shadowed wood
with just four words.
Where is this place of which you speak?
An end to motion, absolute zero.
The movement of eyes without subtext.
Was I promised nothing?
This sprint is now a dance.

11/23/05