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Photograph: a flat lay of writing supplies, handwritten poetry drafts, the songwriting book, desk rocks, candles, pinecones, and glass jars full of rattleweed pods.

Lyrics & Poetry

Iris

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Everyone knows

That the light in your windows

Is only a form of 

Ephemeral repose

From a darkness so bottomless,

Velvety wide,

It could eat you alive,

And each night that it don’t,

What a miracle!

 

Then the dawn’s paintbox blush

Brushes glorious things!

Is it any surprise

How the light-mongers cling 

To the bright cream of life,

Simulacra of winning,

And sweet Soma pretense

What happens come dusk

Is not happening?

 

All we spy open-eyed

On this side of our dreams

Gets reversed on the retina—

Not not what it seems.

Double negatives dance

Through the optics of mind.

In the cloth of perception,

Weave warp and weft true,

But the twist’s a lie.

 

Ooo the way you reverse 

Through my eyes, then my mind—

You’re the kind of light-liar

That I like to like.

Might I twist the illusion of you

For a spell?

Might I make like the light,

Take a dive down the well

Of those seraphinite irises?

 

-2020 

What Happens Come Dusk EP

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Four Bottles, Out to Sea

 

We are not a river bed.

Droplike & stretched, we shed porcelain,

Pleasing as the mirrors who would lay on the sea,

Fealty pre-sworn to the softness of anarchy—

 

Ancient thing, ambivalent at gunpoint

And blackening to birds.

If we’re here to fall apart,

Let’s fall apart exquisitely,

Regardless of enkindled, delusive degree,

 

And the muck & a gleam

Devour one another and waste.

Never let’s spill us like jelly to waves!

 

My heart was mollusks, transparent like they

Were poppets I parted, all staggering true,

But human & scorpion vain. 

 

(Black bottle, blue bottle,

Green bottle, gold bottle.)

I would turn my face 

Inside out for my love—

Tooth and nerve bared

For who knows who

Would find them enough.

(But I would turn my face

Inside out if enough.

Run, void-milk blood,

Void milk run!)

 

I would shake these bones out

To better know my love—

Know the nature of my love.

(Pretty charcoal traces

On the vellum of a drum.)

 

Bind this bone raft

Float us out to the sea—

Ribs over ribs under ribs

‘Neath the bowing gate of baleen.

 

(Black bottle, blue bottle,

Green bottle, gold bottle.)

 

You be the egret-bitten 

River of the estuary.

I’ll be the bell(e) in the whale

On the wine-darkened sea.

 

-2020 

What Happens Come Dusk EP

Photograph: Handwritten excerpt from Iris, framed by a silver paper fox mask with a grotesque eyeball figurine set in one socket, a strand of eye and window beads, blue light refracting through a watery paint jar, and labradorite stones.
Photograph: a messy art desk covered in paintbrush and pen cups, and glassware full of incense ashes and paper scraps of cut-up words.
Photograph: dusty, antique and vintage botttles on wooden shelves in an antique shop.
Photograph: word soup cut-up poetry forming the melody part of Four Bottles, Out To Sea.
Photograph: the sliced, spiral interior of a large nautilus shell.
Photograph: two pale and frail, leopard-print crab shells on a wooden plank at a beach.

Auguries

 

I’ve seen your art.

Mine flows the same.

It courses through these crooked veins.

Make blue my skin,

Make warm extremities.

 

What can we make

Of vague malaise

In strained, untempered, threatened days?

We saw those engines built on steam

And raised them ages

Fueled by blunt fatigue.

 

Fire on the heart-line

Cracks along the life-line

Hunger in the bloodline

Echoes through the hive mind

 

What have you done

To last the day?

What wicked prices did you pay?

What breadcrumb fragments of yourself

Got dropped along the way?

 

I’ve done as much

If not the same—

No dignity to grace my name.

Nobody makes it out alive

Or as the self-same self 

From whence they came.

 

Lightning on the power line

Fractals in the design

Secrets in the sub-mind

Reverb on the timeline

 

Lightning on the power line

Cracks along the life-line

Fire on the heart-line

Reverb on the timeline 

 

One last chance

To fall to bottom please—

Spare us of these rotten auguries!

Let the Void devour back the disease.

 

-2018 

What Happens Come Dusk EP

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An Unquiet Grave (2020 Edition)

after traditional

 

Cold blows the wind where Hope has flown

And gently falls the rain

To cleanse pale sheets and coax moss grown

Where tears would fall to stain,

 

Where I count the horrors of the hours

As a waking person may,

Bound to weep and furrow deep my brow

'Til all sorrow fades away.

 

When the bell tolls last every hour has passed,

Fallen Hope floats up to speak,

“Why consign me down to the frostbit ground

Then refuse to let me sleep?”

 

Though my wanting tangles into knots

Far beyond my skill to name,

Would you kiss my eyes so that I might Sight

When all good revives again?

 

“How my husk has hardened as the clay

And my breath is earthly strong

Any kiss from my translucent lips

And your eyes won’t light up long.”

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“Wander backward to that dappled grove

That enclosed our carefree walks.

Find the ghost flower sprung where the summer’s blooms

Have withered all to stalks.”

  

“Fetch a milky rose from a desert dry,

Juice the blood out from a stone,

Win a promise quicker than dead things die

From the flickering Unknown.”

 

“Go dig a grave both deep and wide

On the wave-line of the sea

That I might dissolve there to ride the tides

If you would not let me sleep.”

 

When will we meet again, sweet Hope?

When will we again?

“When the autumn leaves that fall from trees

Are green and spring up again.”

 

-2020

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Photograph: four disembodied cabbage-white butterfly wings in a green, vintage desert glass with candle wax rings at the bottom.
Photograph: a crow skull in the grass and clover, surrounded by sticky, black feathers.
Photograph: blooming, pink tea roses covered in snow.
Photograph: a dried, rotted apple on a just-thawed branch of a very old tree, pink and wrinkled, and looking like a rose.
Photograph: closeup on gooey and frothing, pink sap gushing from a natural crack in an evergreen's bark.
Photograph: a handwritten scrap from An Unquiet Grave, over an open wooden trinket box full of dried leaves, roses, and paper wasp's nests. To the left, a specimen of pyrite in slate, a black and orange marble beach stone, and a hand holding a rust-red rock with a fresh water stain.

Illusion, With Birds

 

One sheet of glass makes possible 

Two overlapping fogs:

One county-deep, one membrane-thin,

As pixels on the pane.

 

One mirror tipped at angle shows

This blossoming of birds

Implausible—from crow-less gray,

Five crows burst close by face.

 

-2020

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Fables and Warnings

 

The spruce trees beneath whom we lie

Stretch as high as the moon floats low,

And sleeping bats rise in time

To the Northern Lights' unfurling descent.

We drink fables and warnings for nightcaps:

Don't carve yourself guides out of trickstery clay.

Don't listen to glow-worms who’d cut at your cords,

'Til you wander you marrow-less, thirsty, and blind

While they wind their way after your gold.

 

-circa 2015 

Stars & Dirt Zine Vol.1 (out of print)

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Dawning

 

Let’s strap one another to the Wheel 

of Forgiveness and Unforgiveness,

that we might turn and in our turning see

how to summarize and judge.

 

We’ll examine ourselves from all angles

but inside out.

 

We tried once to seek 

the inside of man

on the inside of man.

 

In the hollow-grave night of the Renaissance,

we rifled and searched for the soul,

peeling back strata of flesh from the bone,

but always the spirit eluded us.

We thought perhaps there wasn’t one at all.

 

It was the dawn of the Age of Reason.

 

-circa 2015

Stars & Dirt Zine Vol.1 (out of print)

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Past Normal

 

Any fool knows

any theatre worth

price of admission is 

haunted

and this one’s haunted

way past normal and

by whom?

 

Every time we think

we’ve solved it the

suspect turns up

alive

and ghosts are awfully

tough to book for

interviews.

 

-circa 2013

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Ballad To The Backs of Your Eyelids

 

Maybe some rose-colored yesterday

Our sorrows will rise

From their own ashes

To make us marionettes of our fears.

See them clack and gleam

Through their snakeskin smiles! 

Someone left precious oils on their cheeks for tears. 

They’ve got lacquer for sweat.

Each pearl of a tooth names its price.

 

They say, 

“Listen to us well:

You can’t tell if we are laughing or crying– 

We did that on purpose.

This is a lesson in ambiguity,

And if you have to ask us what that means,

Then the answer is ‘no.’”

They say,

“Listen to us well:

This is an historical reenactment.

It is accurate.

It is brief.”

 

-2011-2013

Photograph: looking up into the tangled boughs of bare, winter trees drowing in bittersweet vines, receding into fog.
Photograph: a small tuxedo cat sits on the songwriting book in a studio corner, surrounded by musical instruments, vanitas kitsch, and art books.
Photograph: an orange moon rises through haze behind a field of tall, late-summer grasses illuminated by hallogen lamplight.
Photograph: a lone, dried maple leaf caught in a rusted chain-link fence, choked and woven through with a riot of bare, vining twigs.
Photograph: lyrics for Ballad to the Backs of Your Eyelids, scrawled over a faded photo of a stained, lace curtain.

The images here include favorites from my painting reference catalog, taken on walks over the years. Painters and illustrators should always be taking pictures! The nautilus shell is on display in the natural history wing of the Science Museum in Boston. Alas, it is not my nautilus. The wild things stayed where found and aren't mine either. The cat is a genuine roommate, though!

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