Love & Echolocation

Summer 2008, January 2010

Sometimes I write poems where the protagonist is, arguably, a bat experiencing relationship problems.

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All distance disguised as desire,
all travel disguised as salvation,
when silence passes for separation
and your own voice hums like a distant station —
love, or echolocation?

I have sucked all the nectar from this angular night, I
have caught the quiet moth on the wing —
in blindness descended from blindness unshaken, in
a silhouette dreaming of a destination, in
love or desperation —

When the color was drained from your monochrome film
and you laid it out bare on the table,
trading shapes for shadows, trading shadow for sable,
calling gray-on-gray an exaggeration
was this love or an incantation?

I shout and I witness the edges of things
come boiling back from their old locations,
after one long moment of hesitation —

In the humid air of this alien night,
before we discovered the myth of flight,
your silver shape, in fine gradation,
in a room of lines of demarcation,
was this desire, or isolation?

Camera Obscura

Fall 2007?

Pandora, please, open your windows,
For only you know they are already open.
I have been painting them silver,
I have been passing magnets over them,
Watching red turn green turn black

Pandora, please, open your door.
If I am washed away by the midnight
That leaks out from the aperture,
Then I am already drowned in it,
Decibels turning over on a white axis

Pandora, shutter everything, shudder,
Three steps the whirlwind unfolds in the dry grass;
Hand me your brushes, your lance and shield.

Pandora, blessed with panther’s feet,
Pass over the patterned streets
That I covered in sawgrass,
Fearing to step too lightly.

Pandora, my brush, my lance and shield,
I will paint you in fiery ink
Pressed from fountains of the sun.

Yr Lv Sngs

November 2007

You might say abbreviation is a theme here. These are all standalone poems as they were originally written, but I think they work as a sequence fairly well. They’re all under 30 words and 7 lines, though at the time I was pretty much just aiming for “short.”

-To Mercy (by many names)

• Yr red gypsy jangle
  Yr radio signal
  Yr moonlit face
  Yr hair-flown breeze –
  
  Casual and senseless,
  Sensual and careless,
  As the rhythms of the sea.


• Yr easy style
  Yr frantic grace
  Yr civilized smile
  Yr feral waist
  
  Yr face like home
  But out of place


• Yr high country angles
  Yr frivolous fire
  Yr name in smoke
  Yr shape in wire:
  You know all echoes
  Are laced with desire.


• Yr radical rose
  Yr seldom shows
  Yr crystal voice
  Above the snows
  Burnin’ up the walls of Troy


• As far away as you are,
  As far away am I –
  Meet me in the western sky.

Snow Leopards

February 2008

I’ve been romanticizing armaments for a while. Part of me has constructed an ideal of love based on Spaghetti Westerns – not on the romances, but the standoffs.

My love is an elaborate ritual, stylized –
Not a love that I have had, but one
I inscribe, a love which circumscribes
All others.

My love is the love of two figures standing ten paces apart,
In a clearing, in a snowy wood. It is still snowing. There is nothing else for miles.
They are dressed for the weather. Their tracks, rapidly filling, lead in opposite directions.
The wind blows fiercely, from the far-off high country,
Towards a more distant ocean, and this is desire.
The whole world is desire. There is nothing
Before or after this moment.

Perhaps someday we will meet outside on a snowy evening,
Stop and recognize each other for the first time.

Then again, perhaps there is more.
Perhaps they step across the ley lines (We all carry ley lines).
Perhaps there is a transmutation, and they become snow leopards.
Or perhaps they cross, and they disappear, and the wind
Is still, and there is no sign that in some months the snow will melt.
Or perhaps they do not cross over, and the wind blows
That comes down out of the high country, that is named desire.

My love is the love of treacherous things, a love of loss
And of lost travelers. My love is an armistice, my love is two vipers
Intertwined. My love sings to me at the ramparts, and behind locked doors.

Loose Cannons

November 22, 2007

I wrote this in the car on the way to Thanksgiving dinner. Doesn't have much to do with that, but travel does that sometimes. "Fault Lines" (The Mountain Goats) was stuck in my head pretty fiercely, and that's where the melody mostly originates. Based (loosely) on a true story.

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I thought, "Here's a love that fate should smile on."
That was the day when the whole thing went wrong
"You're not as smooth as you'd like", you said,
Turned out the light, and went up to bed.

We were two loose cannons in an open field,
Two reckless machines, with all terrain wheels.
We should've stood proud in the face
of all challenge and chaos.

But I was a wreck, and you were a mess
Neither one of us knew how to confess
That the tethers that held us together
would never obey us.

I thought, "Here's a love that fate should smile on."
But the love of sweet fools never lasted too long.
You didn't know me, I didn't know you,
And wanting your love still won't make it come true.

We can harden our hearts but not mount a defense
I try not to confuse it, with current events
And each knot that I tried to retie,
You quickly unraveled.

With armaments armed to break down every gate
Sometimes there's no time from too soon to too late,
And the wind blows wild on a highway
That's never been traveled.

For Survival

August 31, 2007

Work of an evening. I went out to the Point, and did some longing.

I’ll sit in the space the waves should fill in
And stare out to the edge of the sky,
Such a straight line it hurts your eyes.
I’m sure I could see it in your eyes
If you’d just open them.

But Mercy, I’ve never been easy to see
Even in neon and silver and song
I could turn into gold and escape into dawn.
I never will see you by dawn,
And you’ll never believe me.

I’ve been filling myself with the shades of the sea:
Blue-gray and carbon and aquamarine,
Bleeding breakwalls and barnacles into my dreams.
You always have haunted my dreams,
Even when uninvited.

I sing sad sweet songs for survival.

Letters from Colorado

May 2007

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One day I’m going to open up
The window wider than the summer sky
And a bottle of whiskey, the horizon and I
Are going to meet up at the top of Pike’s Peak,
Sort things out between God and Man
And the postmaster-general of Eastern Cheyenne.
He’s been troubled by visions
Of the dead letter office
Consumed in fire, and the letters are coffins,
But he doesn't understand what he came here for,
And he doesn't understand what it means.
He doesn't understand what he came here for,
But the mountain burns red in his dreams.

One day I’m going to send you
A letter written entirely in Arabic,
Asking for mercy, and the sweetly acerbic
Way that you used to hold your head
When you didn’t know better
Than to laugh when the world exploded.
When the pipes in the walls all suddenly corroded
We were left drinking nothing
But red, red wine, dark as the water,
And I called you the Devil’s adopted daughter,
And you said
You had nothing to fear from the offer.

But you’re not really going to read that,
I’m not really going to send it,
But you’ll hear through three lanes of full-throttle roar
Or I’ll carve it in big block letters on the door
With a highway flare.

One day I’m going to wake up
In a cold sweat with a knife in my pocket
And I’ll jam it straight into an electrical socket
And wait for the tide to come in
To a studio apartment on the 31st floor,
Open the window and let it all pour
Out in a column of sweet, glittering light.

Forgiveness of Sins

May 2007

I did a lot of experimenting with scene-setting this quarter.

I approach with tourniquets of phrase.
This is the last angle of autumn
when the setting sun will cast its
full red light on the cathedral floor
through the stained-glass cape of St. Martin.

I have not been in a church
with even one other
for many years.

Red as a rosary, reading,
in this place that belongs to neither of us,
the air currents, you rise
and prepare to take wing.

In the rafters there is a nest of owls.
Night will bring them down
on the church mice.

This vault is a dry gulf.
Fragile I want starves in the aisle
I love pools around columns
I dreamt of clings to a caesura,
shocked to be spoken, hanging in space.

I believe the architect designed
the wide south doors,
which you fling open, facing the sea
with only this moment in mind:

Flight.

Come back when the moon is bright and the past is deaf,
when autumn’s light is singed into the stone.
Come banging on oak, calling
“Sanctuary! Sanctuary!”

Arms Race

February 2007

Right, so there are pentasyllabic slant rhymes in here, and that makes me unjustifiably happy. Other than that, I think it’s pretty good.

I still think it was Cupid
With a cannon that left nowhere to run.
It flew across the hotel lobby
On black wings and a bitter tornado.
It was red hot, and instantly fatal.
It was love at first sight, it was
A lot like staring at the sun.

Most of the survivors believe
It was swamp gas lit by a solar flare.
That exploded in the hotel lobby—
A freak event with no explanation,
A detour and a slow detonation.
It was love at first sight, but I
Don’t think they’re in the mood to care.

I’m pretty sure he winged you
When the heat-seeking shuriken flew
In a cloud across the hotel lobby
While you danced there with reckless abandon
In the hail of an electric commandment.
It was love at first sight, but his
Aim never claimed to be true.

When the wreckage was cleared
They found nothing but shattered glass,
Broken timber, the ruins
Of a continental breakfast,
And the scattered remains
Of a bouquet of roses,
Which exploded.

Sumatra

November 2006

So many teensy revisions had to be made to this one. The muse, she is a stubborn wench sometimes.

Two hands that held the sky caught fire,
The moon by string and the sun by wire.
And no one else was watching

But me a lost astronomer,
A hollow tube, the broken earth
And you a crashing dove.

May we all fall in love like the avalanche.
May we all carve our sorrows in the sea.
May we all forget.

Two stars that struck the sea came down,
The molten shards of moonlight drowned,
Like a shattered lily in an open wound,
In exploding sheet-glass water.

You were a blade of snow.
You were a harp of white fire.
You were gone.

It was Better When Romeo Said It

July 2006

Another song about Romeo, sort of. But hey, I feel literary lately. I’m proud of this one. I was able to break out of my normal patterns a lot. Credit goes to the Mountain Goats, as the lyric pattern feels a lot like some of their/his songs, and John Darnielle provide the mental vocals originally. I’ve tightened the rhyme scheme slightly and adjusted things to my voice, but the stress at the line endings, the free-flowing structure, I’m still very happy to have borrowed. anyway, I like it. It’s a love song with a tangent about witches.

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I told you, you were like the sun
But it was better when Romeo said it
He said it with conviction, like a fool
People were foolish in those days
When time was short and the hours were long
If you had nothing to go by
So they believed strange things
That the world was flat
And mice grew from old cheese
And witches always had black cats
Or white ones depending on who you believe

And Romeo he believed in Juliet
And Juliet she believed when Romeo said
She was bright and warm and beautiful
And kept the world from growing dark and cold
But of course they didn’t know
The whole world turned around her

People were foolish in those days
They saw meaning in every flock of birds
That circled in the sky
And every star that fell, fell for someone
And I only see meaning in subtle curves
And the circles in your eyes
And every time I fell, I fell for someone
Someone shining as the sun

But people are foolish in these days

Catch Me!

December 2005

You know, I’m going to run out of fresh things to say about these if I don’t find a new theme. But hell, it’s bouncy and kind of Belle & Sebastian-y. And it does touch a somewhat different tone than other things I’ve written: full of enthusiasm, but not quite ready to jump.

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Catch me! I’m not falling but I’ll fall for you
Catch me! I’m not falling but I’m trying to
Don’t be scared, honey! I’m a fool but this is true
If you catch me I’ll be there to carry you.

Wake me! I’m not sleeping but I dream of you
Wake me! I’ve been out for near a month or two
Don’t be scared, honey! I’m a fool but so are you
And together there’s no telling what we’ll do

Save me! I’m not dying but that’s all I do
Save me! I’m an inch away from breaking through
Don’t be scared, honey! We’ve got everything to lose
But that’s only if it’s what we want to do

Don’t be scared, honey! I’m a fool I know it’s true
Don’t be scared, honey! I’m a fool but so are you
Don’t be scared, honey! I don’t have to fall for you
But I’m telling you there’s more that we can do

Oh, catch me! I’m not falling but I’ll fall for you
Catch me! I’m not falling but I’m trying to
Don’t be scared, honey! I’m a fool but this is true
If you catch me I’ll be there to carry you.

Keep on Dreaming

November 2005

It’s got that enthusiastically uncertain vibe that I do so well. And I also seem to have drifted into a bit of a… roots rock? … mode lately, which is why I come up a bit clichéd on the choruses. But it’s been fun to sing, and it’s one of my more inspired songs lately. Think Johnny Cash.

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There’s a song you hear in the dead of night when your thoughts have all gone dry
And you keep on thinking till your head goes numb and you keep on wondering why
And you keep on falling down
And you keep on trying to fly
And there’s a song you hear in the dead of night when your thoughts have all gone dry

But you keep on moving
You keep on trying way too hard
And you keep on losing
But you keep on going back to the start
But you keep on dreaming
You keep on keep on keeping on
You keep on saying, babe, don’t make me sing this song

And there’s a face you see when you close your eyes that you don’t even try to explain
And you keep on talking till you’ve figured it out and your friends all think you’re insane
And you keep on looking up
And you keep on down the drain
But there’s a face you see when you close your eyes that you don’t even try to explain

But you keep on moving…

And there’s a voice you hear when you wake up cold and you color your days with your dreams
And you keep on believing till you’re scared to death that it’s nearly as hard as it seems
And you keep on breaking down
And you keep on gaining steam
But there’s a voice you hear when you wake up cold and you color your days with your dreams

But you keep on moving…

And there’s a song you hear in the dead of night that’s burning a hole in your mind
And you keep on trying to disguise yourself like you know what tomorrow will find
And you keep on looking for daylight
And you keep on flying blind
And there’s a song you hear in the dead of night that’s burning a hole in your mind

But you keep on moving…

So don’t you kill me, honey
Don’t you walk me down the line
Don’t you kill me, honey
You know you’re a friend of mine
And don’t you worry, baby
It’s all right now I’ll be fine
Don’t you worry, baby
You’ll be on my mind

Chicago Rain My Blues Away

November 2005

Somehow, these things are always really good when you finish them at 4 in the morning. Even if I just can’t seem to avoid the weather imagery. This one was fun. It started out sort of Bell & Sebastian inspired, although I think the tempo changed along the way and there a bit of melody I may have stolen from the Allman Brothers. Do I even have to say it’s about a girl at this point?

---

I’ve been talking in the station of the crow’s unsteady flight
I‘ve been waking in the morning to a grey and shaky light
I could stake my reputation on my never being right
Oh Chicago, won’t you rain my blues away?

Cause it’s been so long without sunshine
I can’t stand it when the skies are clear
And I’ve been so long chasing shadows
That I don’t know what to do when one gets near

And it takes more than a smile to move me… sometimes
And it takes more than the wind to move me anywhere at all
But I’m hiding from the blue sky with my back against the wall
So Chicago, won’t you rain my blues away?

And it gets so cold in the sunshine
That I don’t even try to warm my nights
And it gets so dim in the daytime
That I don’t even think to turn the lights

But if everything I try to do is something
And if nothing that I know is nevermore,
Still it seems that I get burned whenever I walk out the door
So Chicago, won’t you rain my blues away?

Cause it takes so much to be sensible
I’d rather have a complicated twist
And a clear autumn day seems so simple
When I’m fixed upon an unexpected tryst

So I’m sorry that my thoughts are always cloudy
And I’m sorry that I’m caught up in the breeze and just a kiss
And I fear we may get snowed in before we get out of this
So Chicago, won’t you rain my blues away?
Oh Chicago, can’t you rain my blues away?
Cause I’m really not so worried when the world’s in shades of gray.
Oh Chicago, won’t you rain my blues away?

To You (Like a River)

July 2005

A “remix”, if you will, of my earlier poem. And yeah, I know the theme has been done. But I came up with the last two stanzas and felt they fit onto “To You”. Another one I actually have a way to sing. Obviously I could sing most of it before, but the new stanzas have a different, though partly similar, melody.

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Like a river to the ocean
Like a salmon to the stream
Like a dying man to water
Like a lobster to the steam

Like a freight train, slowly rolling
Slowly rolling down the line
I’ll come rolling to your doorstep
If you’ve ever got the time

And I’m running out of options
And I’m running out of time
I’ll come running straight to your arms
That is if you don’t mind.

Like an arrow to the target
Like a bolt from the blue
If you’ll answer one more question
I’ll come flying straight to you

I’ve got nothing left to give you
I’ve got nothing left to lose
If you give me one more answer
Then I’ll fall in love with you.

Like a coward out of danger
Like a prisoner going free
Like a hammer needs an anvil
Like a blind man needs to see.

Like a river, slowly flowing
Slowly rolling to the sea
If I ever get close to you
Won’t you please stay close to me?

Like a river, to the all-receiving ocean
Like a sailor, to the all-forgiving sea
Like the rain comes, in one ever-loving motion
Let my heart fly, to wherever you may be.

As the gulls cry, across the all-believing ocean
As the storms roll, up from the all-redeeming sea
Like a river, full of swift torrential motion
Let my love flow, to wherever you may be

Something in the Wind

February-April 2005

I… am not really sure what to say about this one. Very much a jumble of thoughts over a period. Originally, it owes something to “Suite – Judy Blue Eyes” but it didn’t stay songlike.

There is something in the wind
And in the January sky
That does not know me anymore
Than I know who I am today.

Yet I follow in my footsteps
Back where I have gone before
And find I’m wishing that the dawn was near at hand.

But I was born to be a gypsy
I was born to be a poet and a fool
And she was made to make me restless
Reckless wandering before the break of day.

Yet I follow in the green grass
Back where early morning sunshine
Will only make me turn my head away and wander on.

But I was born to hear the rhythm
Of the sunshine in the swaying trees
And though I know not who I am
I know more than I will ever find to say.

Yet I follow in the wilderness
Where her heartbeat moves the rivers
And the streams of time just might flow back to me.

There is something in the April rain
That tells me what I’ve left behind
And I wonder how it knows me
And if ever it will all come back my way.

Runaway Train Lost Woman Blues

April 2005

This was written for a girl just familiar enough to be fascinatingly incomprehensible. It wants to be a song, but I haven’t actually figured out how to sing it.

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She was dangerous for all the right reasons
I was doomed in all the right ways
I was falling in love like a runaway train
And she never knew what to say

Well, you’ll never get anything perfect from her
But she might be the perfect girl

Well it started ‘round four in the morning
And it ended at eleven PM
And if I had to get hit by a runaway train
Well, it might as well have been then.

No, you never will understand what she does
But you know she does it well.

It was then I started drifting backward
It was then I started drifting free
And though she couldn’t keep me from falling apart
She made me do it elegantly.

And you’ll never get what you expect from her
But she might give you what you need.

To You

April 2005

Clearly written with a girl in mind. Simple folk or blues type of melody here, probably stolen from something I can’t remember. Still, I think I can actually sing this one decently.

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Like a river to the ocean
Like a salmon to the stream
Like a dying man to water
Like a lobster to the steam

Like a freight train, slowly rolling
Slowly rolling down the line
I’ll come rolling to your doorstep
If you’ve ever got the time

And I’m running out of options
And I’m running out of time
I’ll come running straight to your arms
That is if you don’t mind.

Like an arrow to the target
Like a bolt from the blue
If you’ll answer one more question
I’ll come flying straight to you

I’ve got nothing left to give you
I’ve got nothing left to lose
If you give me one more answer
Then I’ll fall in love with you.

Like a coward out of danger
Like a prisoner going free
Like a hammer needs an anvil
Like a blind man needs to see.

Like a river, slowly flowing
Slowly rolling to the sea
If I ever get close to you
Won’t you please stay close to me?