Archimedes' Principle

I tilt you towards me

and you breathe heavily against my face

your smooth, white porcelain skin

smelling of warm cocoa

after a night of restless, shallow swimming

My neck is a bottle waiting to be shattered

against a ship's maiden voyage

and I lose myself even before 

french-kissing the salty sea air

a slippery swooning swan song 

You run through me 

like fingertip-toeing, piano-playing

stone-skidding on water surfaces and I half-shut my eyes

to sensitize your tactile intrusion

into my soundless morning

The fishing poles have all the baits

but reeling them in might be a little

more trivial than lifting the anchor

out of its watery grave

The dock groans another tired warning

wood on wood on nail and wood and sea

My eyes cloaked on sails, knots being

untied and so the tilting and swishing

and chopping begins 

the dance of drowning.

10:15 AM

December 20, 2013

AIR DRIED

Inkwells dry up when stand fans

decide not to glance over their shoulders

they stare long enough to gather dust

on corners and every small thing

that bears no weight fall off the gray

grand desk

receipts, business cards, old letters

sometimes pens that roll on their bellies

headless without their caps

skydiving ceremoniously on the floor

some soft bound books may attempt

to breathe a few pages

against the force of the stare

but like dead fish, they just murmur uneloquently

still, no words come to wet parched papers

somehow the nearby wall will soon

give in, out of self-consciousness

and mounted images will shift uncomfortably

until there is nothing left but

the constant movement of air filling

your breath, no empty space to fill 

unflinching, purposive, 

these blades watch, without looking.

7.41 PM | December 12, 2013 | Thursday

When Wet

Rain water is running between pavement cracks

pooling on gutters and trailing along windshields

on raincoat folds, blurring words on newspapers

and staining dust into mud

caught in the wind and drawn by the urge to

thin out in gravitational abandonment 

The map lines they leave are just obvious trails

of liquidations, all those evaporated heat

condensed and precipitated solitude 

we know too well where drops fall down from

darkly cradled far too long

only to race back to anything close to 

the same cloudy embrace

so they come down filling up palms, tin cans, 

dried up fish ponds and abandoned fountains

seeking space to occupy like all matter long to be

wherever they can slither in their

mercurial form into shapes and surfaces

to define them with a purpose

of more than just being slippery when wet.

9.42 PM

Nov. 7 2013

In-betweens

you know how it is

the in-betweens

the interims

the learning curvature

of wanting and needing

and unwanting some more

of missing something 

you've never known

the breaths held

the fingers crossed

the coin-tossed wishes

the wisps of thin candlestick smoke

blown out from birthday cakes

of things we thought we can't live without

and still we breathe a little better now

the sleeps, between wakes

the pause between breaks

the split second sighs

of resignation or relief

that follows the tragic comedy

of knowing the unknown

or waking to the familiar truth you've known all along

Aug 29, 2013

Short cat

she licks her wound in

small, round, clockwise

concentric circles

the scabs have dried into

cold volcanic surfaces

rugged, rusty,  ribbed and rough

a river hardening

in summer, burnt frozen

in place where lakes turn into mud

earnestly, she traces every nook

crevice, flesh on hardened flesh

wet moist tongue flicking on air-dried crust 

as if making out a letter

or tracing out a line or a quote

to make sense from all this french kissing

3:35 PM

Ants

ants have been frantic

gnawing on wet shirt sleeves

you can hardly see these scented lines

they follow, an invisible trace

they disappear on earth tone paisley sheets

silently defying gravity on tumbleweed walls

second-storey floors are no feat

when flood water drowns the moist ground

the heat fishes them out in a frenzy

of finding moisture, almost reaching the sky

one or two wards off the path in missionary search

for sugar maybe, and a congo line builds after

lying in bed, once or twice, you feel the distinctive sting

on the soft folds of your arm, scratching off the itch

only to be reddened in blistered annoyance

for something so small to cause this much sensory commotion

Sept. 08, 2013

3:09 PM

Not a Touch Typist

we move our fingers when we creep in shadows

without realizing we hit key strokes

sometimes we sit comfortably on space bars

and long pauses are born in exponential succession

without us meaning to

before the next syllable slicks its way sidewards

finger tiptoe-ing even when the caps lock is on

all this careful crawling becomes a silent scandal

of symbols above the number line

appearing with the simple press of the shift key

words are magnified by ampersands and pound signs

and asterisks, compounded by exclamation points

that bleed carbon fingerprints for every

single misstep or touch

the dark hardly hides anything from what we know

of where we've been skimming

and the things we say even without opening our mouths

we click our tongues to hide the sound of our backspacing

4:49 PM

Aug. 5, 2013