It's raining in Denton again

these stony blocks
raise muted hues
willingly to the
dingy wool jacket
of sky, but the trees
collide:
all verdant and crashing--

bright flash-
es of green-
ness against

the oyster lid,
wet and murky.

it's almost brazen
the way they
bare
those shivering ornaments.
veins swollen with water
pulse with electric
escarole souls.

and the cars are beeping,
screeching
tires shriek
homage to the
slick streets,
onyx sheets
of asphalt,
as they dodge
umbrella-huddled
hunchbacks that
hopscotch
a cr os s
puddled intersections.

pregnant sky,
mother sky,
meets infant earth
with wailing city mouth
that drinks and drinks
her nectar.

Hallelujah
hallelujah
hallelu
jah.

Austin, TX Revision

One might have seen us there, stepping in and out of the sunlight that sifted through the trees and the gaps of the Congress St. Bridge, sashaying down the cracked sidewalk like we were one of them and we might have been. We might have been
one of the leathery men playing Woody Guthrie for just enough money to buy a beer,

“I just blowed in, and I’ll blow back out again”
plucking rusty strings with fingernails that had collected so much dirt, so much dust, so much dirt. We could have had the ruddy cheeks of giggling girls, our legs like satin ribbons dipped into cowboy boots and licit lips that hold back cherry secrets. It's quite possible one might have spotted us in between the hipsters and their hand rolled cigarettes. We could have been reflecting the clouds off our sunglasses or making new ones with the tufts of white acridness, little wonderland caterpillars dressed in stovepipe jeans asking
A-
E-
I-
O-
Who-Are-You?

We were all of them when we ate our rice bowls by the river while bats peppered the sky. We were all of them when we sucked down SoCo on the roofs of squatty buildings nestled between skyscrapers and loft apartments. We were all of them when we made love in that shapeless hotel.

And then one night, the rain began. It spilled out over the oily streets, washing all that sin and soul into hopeless rain gutters. And somewhere to the west, the hills lifted and pitched while the rain kicked up dust over the rocks. Our bodies rocked gently with the pop and hiss of beer cans and high heels down on 6th Street, and I curled my coral toes into the disquietude of that city.

paper airplane

i hate paris
and your reverence for it,
though i've never been,
because you never forget a thing like
cafes in antiquarian dusk light
or the taste of a kiss beneath the arc de triomphe,
sweet like ripe melons and warm like heady
humid Spring,
and i despise having to fit inside
these echoes of yours,
shaped for smaller hips and
thicker accents.

jitterbug

i'll let that kiss hang in the air
for just
one
minute
more
before i forget about it,
just need to
forget
about
it.

forget about the paper lantern lips
with parchment light
because my breath is scattering
across the floor,
clacking against itself like glass beads
and i've got to collect
what i can.

i've got to claw at things like
"it'll be okay"
and minute hands
and coffee rings
and wait until your smile
and strong brow
stop making me feel like
i just
need
to
forget it.

gas station

It's August
and so all the cicadas are exhaling together.
The air is boiling above the gum-speckled asphalt,
shapeless blobs turned black from
tire-treads
and muddy boots.

It's August
and oily water leaks from grumbling trucks
muttering lazily in their torrid disgust,
forming rainbow toxic pools left to sizzle
under the globed fruit that burns
and burns in the blue.

The attendant plunks
on cash register keys with sinewy fingers,
the whorls of which are lined with
russet dirt and money soot.

These august pumps
his empire, these perspiry bodies,
his serfs.

if p, then q

what am i on the verge of here?

strange quantities of knowing and undoing the knowing,
stringy bits of information that once were the finite pieces of personality



but we are all so very limitless.




and you,
with your chasms of secrets i can only manage to catch flashes of,

one day i will figure you out and i will make sure that you know
i have every intention of drawing the hush-hush out of you
like a black and yellow humor.

the further i get,
the more apprehensive i become.

what is it, what is nestled in those umber eyes i always seem to see right through?
i can't make them give anything away,

and i'm not even sure i want them to.

L'fabuleaux destin d'moi

She was an immutable muttering,
a perpetual prattle tottering by
like a beetle on brittle stilts.

Her t-shirts and citrus-colored jumpers were
murals of quotidian stains,
stretched taut across a tawny tummy filled
with juice and Cherry Mash.

Odd and outre,
she was always glazed
in some sort of whimsy,
and she laughed during uncomfortable silences.

In a room that faced the street
where children's voices flitted by,
and the blur of their bodies
zipped by on bikes or bare feet,

the cantaloupe twilight splashes across her face.
Her eyes grew wide as she watched herself
glide in on slippered feet, her path illumed
in gossamer and violets.

Her cinnamon skin consented to
the gracious curves of her body,
fluid and fulgent as silk.
She was zaftig and rosy,
with a presence like her mother's old stills of Mae West.

Now the neighborhood grows silent
with the sleepy hush of dusk,
and the crickets twitter in the wake
of the children's fading footsteps.

Amber lamplight guides her hands
brushing through her tangled hair,
clammy fingers picking at the knots,

and she tries to count to infinity.