Handmade Book, Edition of 2











Birds-Inside-The-Sun/Leslie-Like-A-Fool
2019
Handmake Book in Edition of 2
Acrylic, ink, oil pen and printer ink on recycled blank comic cover, printer paper with printed images and text, picture wire, and nylon thread.

O Black Sun

Oh, so lay down in this morning hour,
Darkness darkest there must soon be dawn. 
O Soleil Noir, dors maintenant.
Let the Sun of day rise upon this room,
These trees, grace these walls not
With ever-present greyscale winter,
Waiting to fade loveless as love leaves
Us. Fade from my eyes Black Sun, fade. 
Leave me to fall in winter, old, broken, in tears. 
Leave me to why. Let ley lines upon my mind
Be just imagination, meanings this mortal 
Machine made, cover them in mud and moss 
But not this frost, be just driftwood
And I a fool on a beach, leave Leslie
To my memory eye, become driftwood forgetting.
In driftwood forgetting again, I go back
Into quiet, a lesser life lived if living
Is clarity and solitude. In my art I captured 
That day, the day Sun burned my mind, 
I lacquered flowers and grass that breathed
Their last in the fading hours fresh
In my impressions of love and confusion. 
I see them here, black squares of tone 
And time captured, slowly illuminated
By the morning. Their definition comes
To be as night fades unrequited. 

the history of water

Slow lumbering beast
Lurking heart 
Hidden beneath winter buffalo grass
Spring beneath the ice
Forming life

For the physical sky
there is a sacred sky
For the physical earth
there is a sacred earth
For the physical love
there is a sacred love
For the physical body
there is clay mixed with water
and you're coated in a second skin
that dries in the sun, a deep red
turns light brown, cracks
and peels, and your naked
and covered in dust, wind
bristles, wearing myth
in eternal return.

With your forefinger of your left hand
you touch your tongue and draw
an eye on your forehead
as the sun rises
and my deep voice, wordless
before your illumination,
is wordless before
your illumination.

I make sad distributions

I make sad distributions
Of property
To feed
Such things
As pieces

I make a hand of musings
For inspiration
She is distant
And it's still
Still the only thing
I can draw paint from
And so I draw
Nothing

That's the evidence
Of something

ghost dancer giving thanks

Ghost dancer giving thanks walks across
Fish Lake pray past the old Pine
That marks the passage to the place 
Where the peacemakers went when they were 
Irrelevant 
That time in the years, the years right after,
After the famine came, after we began
Giving into reservations. 
They gathered in the spirit, the spirit called
Madness, the one that cried for food 
As much as freedom, that wondered
Where the buffalo went, what god did
Not let them return, shady skies and 
Bodies in a bloodless Earth. 
The Starvation of 1884.

a history in short wherein love lies

A history in short wherein love lies:
What was true lays in down, and defeated
I suppose, it was good to be needed.
But then kneaded and falsely given rise,
I left myself often open what for
Appeared as kindness but was just a door.
She exists, a constant performance in
Consistent adornment of consciences 
Created to elude her lack of sin, 
A future held back by present fences. 
I suppose it was good to be needed, 
Yet learn asking same to be defeated, 
Microcosms of her alcohol rise,
History in short of a love less lies.

The Muses

Terpsichore

The Men-Think
the debris
she left was gathered,
given implication, and
a faction.
A war
on memory,
this war.

Shrapnel,
a word floats
a parade
inside
a bandaged head.

Calliope

The fear is coming back
into particles of light.

Erato

In December light
Simple little glue, blue flies,
eight days to get
straight, I'm
waiting on Tuesday.

We muse upon
their liberty, a ruse
of sovereignty, careless
in our salvation dispenser.

Clio

The noisemakers wandering up
a Persian landscape.

Six thousand one years
back to Zoroaster,
twenty six point four degrees
twisted
against the sun.
Six thousand Year Ones
back to Zoroaster,
and there she stands
by the color TV.

Urania

What half would I have been?
The sphere is coming
back into particles of light.

Polyhymnia

The Mother nurse, she is standing
by the color TV. From
where I am looking,
air is nowhere,

but there is
air in everything.

Euterpe

The head
is a receptacle, the mind
is a wire, listen
and you will figure out
why: There
is where I am from,
and then There is Me,
and then There is Everything.
I heard the egg screaming
the secret name of God.

Melpomene

I am listening
to the desert sea.
The sound is pieces
of conflict sculpted
on transportable
insurance beds.
Half-lives of radiation TV.

I wonder which half I would have been?

Thalia

Where were my welds
and my mounds, my wounds
of Vietnam? Why did Americans
not bring home a poetry
of the mountains
and quiet rivers? Why was it
only the wreckage and Eagles?
It flies under me,

a war
on memory,
This war.
A war on memory,
this war

too will end. The fatherless
will look to the land,
not for a connection
but a conviction, a plea
bargain. They will be
dog bodies of the August moon,
a yield of the American sundown.
Game mercenaries lying crosswise
In the vast stage of history, epitaphs
for opinionated pandering.
Under the empires
their youth will be providence
but limbless, a viral video
easily forgotten
against the lineage of oil sacks
and moneyrooms.
Will they see their own mind, in a prison,
eyes lidless under a forgetting sky?
We are born turning revolutions.
The mirrors give us the illusion
of time as moving forward.
The interruptions in the lineal
system betray the circles we spin
until darkness becomes light,
everywhere, mirrors,
everywhere, the face of God.
And when we become blind,
we live, with our fear,
in the past, or we live
with our fear in the past.

Moving-On-To-Nothing

Everybody falls in love it's just something
Everybody does
Something everybody knows

Everyone feels alone it's just something
Everybody knows
Something everybody does

Everyone goes home inside themselves
Everybody is a body that doesn't show
Nothing ever comes of joy
Love leaves you to die alone
Love leaves
Through all the seasons
Falling from a tree made of everything
Everything that came before

You feed the stardust alone
The years go by, there's nobody home
We end in memories of yesterday
Before moving on to nothing

I Only Know My Love By Few Moments

I only know my love by few moments 
Five and ten feet deep. Only memories 
In my eyes at night in sleepless arrest,
Replayed as a film, moments of a force 
Acting at a distance, flickering scenes
Before me, as my eyes fade and age in
Darkness, the light ever towards night, her eyes.
Few minutes they were, fewer the count yet
When measured in hours, a book of few pages. 
Yet read them I do, every breath and word, 
Every moment of her, each slow gesture. 
Relive then I do, pain in an ever 
Increasing distance. Of this loveless day 
I can only hope it ends, or I can
Hope. 

Life At First Sight Is A Broken Heart

It is
It's broken
The first time I looked across a room
And saw you, the way you moved
And your eyes, and your smile 
The things poets have to write about
I saw my future
Falling apart
An edge
A broken heart
When you touched my elbow
I was shocked to life
And I found I dove
In feather pieces
Into the future until it became passed
A broken heart at first sight

Everything bypassed 
Like a nine month wormhole

You devastate me 
A memory like a book of poetry unread
How did I learn your smile?

How did I learn to quit?
When food that begins
How did that become me?
How do you sit alone
In a crowded room 
Unlit in despair?
Those lonely souls who have lingering
Lumbering days, space
What is love? 

I always fall in love, with every beautiful
Thing and then another too, it's a flaw
I know to look for, that if there's love 
There must be one more, converging
And coming through the stinging door. 

Whenever there is stillness 
Thoughts run back to you, 
If I say I know how to move on
It was out of fear. I don't even
Know what it means. I've learned. 
Love is sometimes a stone mountain, 
It may be a thousand different things
At a thousand different times, 
But someday you may notice, every
Little once in awhile you may notice, 
Beneath that season's grass or the collapsing
Tourist, it's a stone mountain. 

To The Moon

I love you. To the Moon in the window,
Reflective of the grey horizon, in
The 27th house, in the corner. In
The violet sky, to the moon shine hidden,
Visible in backlit night, I love you.
I love you too, I'll never learn to fly.

Artificial Light

Under the sweet desert
the anniversary impulse
is bred into
the soldiers heart...
in time nine beats
for eleven measures
and self dissappears
into the Arabian rhythm.

In rhythms and beats the orange
sun rises and violent
its violet edges
say good night
and good morning
to insurgents and surges
of soldiers playing and plying
the dead for mediated
affirmations of each other's
causation.

Under yellow sodium
artificial light
death came.
To each with ecstasy, sadness,
passion and numbness;
To each with pain,
forgiveness,
and hatred.

Two televisions sit facing
each other, transmitting
in different languages, filling
the air with sounds
mixing together,
playing to an ever
deafening crowd.

Sidewalk Infirmary Forgetting Its Own War

What slugs fall apart
On our sidewalks?
Their eyeless
Destruction and left
Path of glue
On the cement progress,
The veins of Our Earth.
I think its clay red skin,
And gasoline eyes
In a limbless five-year old.

What Heaven will account
Such slaughter as righteous?
What would we do
To someone who did
That to a child
Who lived on the next block?
And nevertheless its satisfactory in War.

Human art is sculpted
On the dusty surface
Of history's table.
Occasional chips
In the lacquer reflection
Reveal the dead tree
At the center of
The construction.
Plastic raincoat
To keep out the termites.

More eyeless feeders.

We think they are so blind,
With carbombs and cellphones
And messages from God.
What is it the blind
See? A child of American
Ingenuity, the crust of
Western civilization
Burned on a dead surface?

Maybe an overflowing
Bodybag buried inside
The gates of Abu Graib?

Maybe War Criminals
Asking for a piece
Or maybe just peace

When the money runs dry?
Maybe politicians
Planting coalitions
On carcasses, a sure
Measure of success?

the oregon trail has failed
you in your
faith healing death,
God’s odd way to welcome
you to Antelope country.

The Way of the Rain

What language was that
Drifting across
The grey fabric
Of your leg?

The uncovered spaces
Near my eye
Still ache
From the dull wind,
Someone left a pin
In there after my birth.

The entire sky
Is a cloud,
The earth a skin,
a coagulant
Corpse. It's twelve
Pieces of skin.

What we think of as dirt
Is covering
worm meat in
radiated chicken,
pink and isolated,
Its surface burned
From a boiling torture.
Some veins sicken the air.
We make feathers
Into hemlock tea,
And all the questions are
dusted for wax works.

If I were to weigh the rain,
and lay down in your sleep,
all the decay would be lifted
From this infirmary.

Our Close Distance

When will I come home
And see that lamp in
Your flickering room?

What will you do, home
From the war? Sunlight
And summer ore, or
Bus stop and creeping
Mourning through the night before?

What will you do,
Bandaged in your skin?

I will drink lampwax
And leave terracotta dust,
My faith and wonder withering in
Shadows on couches and grass arenas.
Until a semblance of my substance
Emerges, resembling enough,
Just enough encaustic dust,
So you may trust your memory,
Unlock the door, and let me in
from this close distance.

Mothers Go To War

Mothers go to war
their hearts extended
in the sky

as their only Icarus
goes too far
in the song of some
black eyed sunflower lie

wax wings melting in the dust

and mothers go to war
in their windows
and streets

hearts beating loud
the drums of broken wings

I Hate My Oxygen

I don't know why the colors
Run that way, the way they fi fo dum
Maybe they like being thick
And hard to clean up
Could be I hate my body
Like the way love runs away
When I give it your name
I don't know how the colors
Change that easy, I've heard fee fi fo
It's from the oxygen
Maybe they're thick like me, never
Learning simple lessons
In quiet and not sharing, save me
Some cleaning, I hate my body.

I doubt and don't believe in God if
God looks like me, in a mirror silver 
Covered in steak steam settling on broken
Glass darkly within my fever
Like the way love runs away
When I give it your name
A face in fractions looking back
I wipe my finger on the image to see
Clearly my black hair but its colorless 
Water beading building and running
Maybe its thin line is thin like me, never
Learning to keep the feelings in, save me
From running down my skin, save me
Some cleaning, I hate my oxygen.

I steal a quiet Western ending
As a bid on a fair adieu.
My works remember if you do
As beautiful, for one love that is true. 

Birds-Inside-The-Sun 1.a

Equal to the great things
are the little
Gestures from which
come the big bangs

Small at
First, a slight touch even
Half of that or more

      around, even your name,
     around you, any thought,
    and I'm derailed
  lost in that drifting mind of mine
every moment of your presence a gift

to be in love again, feel that
madness of ink, words such as these
I can not say Leslie-I-Love-You
Or your face twists in anger so
Instead I'll label them 

things from inside become 
             Thinks-About-Your-Heart
things made for becoming overwhelmed 
By the light in your eyes 
And the warmth of your smile become
             Birds-Inside-The-Sun

I did not think it would be again
the land of words dripping
off my breathing tongue

Its my imagination with little threads of you
slivers of beauty
a gift that comes from
trying to reimagine your touch
And I know the roads my words and mind
Travel are not to be roads with you
But I know I don't turn here
Without you having been there...
all these words
from the source of my imagining
electricity
whatever it was, illuminating...
It was you Birds-Inside-The-Sun,
Your eyes upon me, you are:
     leave and nothing knows-
your eyes upon me, you were:
     learn anything new.
Learning your breath upon my life.
I thank you
For this awakening.
The sky above my head, the dirt on my feet,
The poetry on my tongue,
The place I'm in, the space
I'm breathing in, this elevated imagination,
I only got here because of you.