The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.

Oscar Wilde

march

titanium shoulder
gristles in a loose socket.
i keep rolling it
to hear the noise
& feel the grind
unique to this shoulder
and me.

fresh ground sound
foreign objects
rub, catch on
tendons or cartilage
stop, skip, hit, pop

interesting sensation
skeletal reverberation

lately nights
i think i'd take back
the old shoulder
which was all me
it could move,
it just hurt to.

can't get comfy
in my sleep
my left arm keeps
going numb or just
aching. it feels so much
older & younger than me.

monday night
i'd get more done
if i was marooned
or at least moved
& onmyowning.

march you twist
time & weather &
i get caught
in the knots of you.
wrangle some
daytangles
different from the
usual strands.

you're unnecessary
& sink me.
kite line tight
breaks & i sit
in the sway
of dead grass, undoing.

shipwreck

sleep deprivation

winds me up in

other ways, 

slants my thought

processes

just so; just so

i see everything

from a slight tilt,

& sense abandons

current plateaus

for easy flow

to a lower plane.

today,

my body is a boat

half-sunk in 11 o'clock.

my head a last

escape of breath

in amorphous

ascent over

wreckage below.

but is it retreat

or just runaway?

a climb for the sake

of climbing.

silt clouds skirt

lower edges,

& then still,

remains creak

from pressure

& slow settling

in deep dark.

tidepulls

today the old familiar urge to fly away is tugging at the backs of my shoulderblades with gusto, with necessity. i am poised on the edge of sprouting wings just to escape, start over again, or start somewhere new, where no one knows my name. the inner ocean is listless, lapping at the edges, tidepulling.

always the ocean. i crave to be beside it like a long-distance love. to curl up in a cradle of sand and lie there while the sound and fury of waves lull me to sleep. to have the wet, salt air and the living, briny scent it carries, purge the dry mountain dirt from my shallow lungs so i can breathe deep again and feel like i'm living and not just subsisting in some perpetual slide with no inertia, a movement state of solely residual energy and the lack of opposing forces.

i want grey sky and grey water and the tempest dance of them together on the horizon, in front of god and everyone, but mostly me. instead of hidden behind the fortress walls of these mountains. this giant bowl of earth and people and smog and all the wrong colours of gray. that yellow brown blah gray that leaves nothing in your soul but a sour, brittle note. reverberating and repeated until you wish you could go deaf. until you feel like double or nothing-ing the van gogh challenge, not for a lost love but for a lost will. or maybe a lost longing for love, which might be worse.

vivisect

after a while
you take a blade
to cut into
old wounds
and see if they
had healed yet;

just the way
you turn back
to welcome
old vices
and test the limits
of your resistance.