As It Is

The man I love hates technology, hates
that he's forced to use it: telephones
and microfilm, air conditioning,
car radios and the occasional fax.
He wishes he lived in the old world,
sitting on a stump carving a clothespin
or a spoon. He wants to go back, slip
like lint into his great-great-grandfather's
pocket, reborn as a pilgrim, a peasant,
a dirt farmer hoeing his uneven rows.
He walks when he can, through the hills
behind his house, his dogs panting beside him
like small steam engines. He's delighted
by the sun's slow and simple
descent, the complicated machinery
of his own body. I would have loved him
in any era, in any dark age; I would take him
into the twilight and unwind him, slide
my fingers through his hair and pull him
to his knees. As it is, this afternoon, late
in the twentieth century, I sit on a chair
in the kitchen with my keys in my lap, pressing
the black buttons on the answering machine
over and over, listening to his message,
his voice strung along the wires outside my window
where the birds balance themselves
and stare off into the trees, thinking
even in the farthest future, in the most
distant universe, I would have recognized
this voice, refracted, as it would be, like light
from some small, uncharted star.

When no one's watching

Paris Bedroom

Give me your absence tonight

Song

You're wondering if I'm lonely:
OK then, yes, I'm lonely
as a plane rides lonely and level
on its radio beam, aiming
across the Rockies
for the blue-strung aisles
of an airfield on the ocean.

You want to ask, am I lonely?
Well, of course, lonely
as a woman driving across country
day after day, leaving behind
mile after mile
little towns she might have stopped
and lived and died in, lonely

If I'm lonely
it must be the loneliness
of waking first, of breathing
dawns' first cold breath on the city
of being the one awake
in a house wrapped in sleep

If I'm lonely
it's with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore
in the last red light of the year
that knows what it is, that knows it's neither
ice nor mud nor winter light
but wood, with a gift for burning

Kelly Lind

Azuras

Pocket poem

If this comes creased and creased again and soiled
as if I’d opened it a thousand times
to see if what I’d written here was right,
it’s all because I looked too long for you
to put in your pocket. Midnight says
the little gifts of loneliness come wrapped
by nervous fingers. What I wanted this
to say was that I want to be so close
that when you find it, it is warm from me.

Skate

Joshua Hoffine

Take it

God says yes to me

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her is it was okay to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even okay if I don't paragraph
my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I'm telling you is
Yes Yes Yes

Out to sea

Gospel

The new grass rising in the hills,
the cows loitering in the morning chill,
a dozen or more old browns hidden
in the shadows of the cottonwoods
beside the streambed. I go higher
to where the road gives up and there's
only a faint path strewn with lupine
between the mountain oaks. I don't
ask myself what I'm looking for.
I didn't come for answers
to a place like this, I came to walk
on the earth, still cold, still silent.
Still ungiving, I've said to myself,
although it greets me with last year's
dead thistles and this year's
hard spines, early blooming
wild onions, the curling remains
of spider's cloth. What did I bring
to the dance? In my back pocket
a crushed letter from a woman
I've never met bearing bad news
I can do nothing about. So I wander
these woods half sightless while
a west wind picks up in the trees
clustered above. The pines make
a music like no other, rising and
falling like a distant surf at night
that calms the darkness before
first light. "Soughing" we call it, from
Old English, no less. How weightless
words are when nothing will do.

Brooklyn Street Art

Firefly

Falling rocket

Coquette

Taste buds...

Love is a stolen passage

I don't remember you. Oh. Well I'm sorry I couldn't make my presence known more often. I was dead at the time. Will you teach me how to fight? Tell me to forget how to love. Keep me away from myself, and don't let me think too often about unhealthy things like the future. Plug the hole in my lung with your finger so I can take a decent enough breath to scream at you. I'm better off without sight. My teeth are chattering from an inability to equate myself to the values I eschew as necessary and tragically uncommon. I'll k i l l myself off before I worry like that again. Why does everyone need 120 days and who stops to count them?

The cow jumped over the moon

There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.

Like big stars in the back seat, like skeletons ever so pretty

She hit me (and it felt like a kiss)

In her first passion, a woman loves her lover, in all the others all she loves is love

In the beholder

Group

Discover

Eugenio

Anna

I looked for an answer to my question. But reason could not give me an answer - reason is incommensurable with the question. Life itself has given me the answer, in my knowledge of what is good and bad. And that knowledge I did not acquire in any way; it was given to me as to everybody, given because I could not take it from anywhere.

Organ

Fred Moore

Qian Qian

These hands

James Jean

The Red Room

Accuracy

Magnolia

The Maker

Little by little, the beautiful universe left him behind: a stubborn mist blurred the outline of his hand, the night was emptied of stars, and the ground grew uneven beneath his feet. Everything receded and ran together. When he realized he was going blind, he cried out; Stoic modesty had yet to be invented, and Hector could flee unperturbed. Never again will I see the sky full of mythological horror (he sensed), nor this face that the years will go on changing. Days and nights flew past the despair he experienced in his flesh, until one morning he woke up and looked at the indistinct objects around him (without surprise, now) and felt inexplicably —like someone recognizing a piece of music or voice— that it was over, that he had faced it all with apprehension but also with high spirits, hope, and curiosity. It was then that he dug deep into his memory, which struck him as bottomless, and managed to snatch from the whirlpool the lost recollection that shone like a coin bathed by rain— perhaps because he had never looked at it, except possibly in a dream.

Pasquali

Glow