The world hung dead over my head

My throat was choked

By the rope that it weaved

I went through the ceiling

Reaching toward heaven

The earth tied knots

And anchored my feet

The ground swelled with song

I ascended the stairs

I sang of life's dreams

Of its crosses to bare

They approached me so gracefully

And offered their crowns

The alligator, the crocodile

The bison, the cow

I knelt down to greet them

My hair swept the ground

They'd known me through lifetimes

They'd watched from the clouds

A soul must be lost

Before it is found

So I made my peace

And rejoined with the ground.

He came from the highlands

With eyes in his hands

He followed his visions

To faraway lands

He waded through the lowlands

And across burning sands

Where the earthworm's eye

Meets the devil's hand

He asked for a word

A way through the world

An escape rope to heaven

An axe or a sword

He cut through the jungle

A land overtaken

Where vines made of words

Choke the throats of generations

The vines bled their poison

It clung to his skin

They robbed him of vision

If he let it seep in

He was the last of the men

With the eyes in his hands

Where words meet their death

Where vision expands

Where the faraway light

Is the key to the prison

Where the dead still speak

Where words are dull weapons.

I met with God

On the bathroom floor

I prayed to the toilet

As oft times before

I sat with God

At the foot of my bed

We argued for ages

I forgot what he said

I swam with God

In the tumbling sea

When I asked, what is grace

He tried drowning me

I knelt with God

Where the shadows grow tall

Where the word, it is written

By the light of the stars

Searching for freedom

In the earth, I dug deeper

But the entrance to heaven

Was the eye of a needle

I abandoned all hope

And surrendered to faith

While down the dirt road

The devil did the same.

I found my footsteps

At the edge of the desert

The landscape of fire

Was foreign to me

It burned through the dry earth

And heated my armor

The sky filled with white smoke

And blackened the leaves

I walked on the embers

Of the red blooming desert

The only thing with me

Was the sorrow I weaved

I let it catch fire

And as the flames, they grew higher

I bathed in the ashes

Of the world that I weaved

I slept on the edges

In the arms of the desert

My footsteps vanished

As they came to be

The earth, it screamed

While I lay and dreamed

I walked between worlds

As the gods wove my dreams.

The watchers stood and gathered

Weaving crimson rings of flowers

The circles kept the hours

And held her soul complete

They fastened chains of gold

To hold her to this world

They cursed the drowning god

And threw roses to the sea

There are devils on each side of her

And angels, by them, stand

She drinks the sacred poison

And drifts to foreign lands

She reaches through the glass

Collecting yellow flowers

She weaves them into chains of gold

As the sun collects the hours

She ties the chains to heaven

To hold her soul complete

She offers perfect circles

To the golden god of peace.

I’ve got stigmata enough

To bleed an ox

The blood in my eyes

It keeps dripping

I light frankincense

And carry a cross

So tell me, God

What am I missing

There are patron saints

And grand applause

There are halls of angels

Still singing

There are descending stairways

And the devil's claws

So come drown me, God

In your wisdom

I've had revelations

That light the dark

I hear the holy dove

When she's singing

I don't sleep at night

‘Cause I get lost

So come find me, God

If you're looking

I light my candles in the dark

I kiss the feet of your pilgrims

I've done what I could, God

And I've paid the cost

The price we pay

To be living.

Her world

She built

By constellation

Her head

Was rooted

In the stars

She wore a crown

That she built

From the grief

That she hid from

It was a crown of thorns

A crown of light

She lived

In an era

When time had froze over

When the winter first started

She could not recall

The cracks in the ceiling

Became constellations

Her world

She rebuilt

From the bedrock

In her skull

The storm was set upon her

It had intent to end her

But through her window

The stars spoke to her in light

Reborn from destruction

Under an earth long frozen

She reached deep

Into the bedrock

Through the thorns

Through the light

She dug through the cold

Deep into her skull

Under the weight

Of the generations

Her story was foretold

In the deepest of winters

True devotion is needed

With hands bleeding

She unearthed the gold.

The year of the water buffalo

The year of the blue moon

The year of old dreams dead

The year of new dreams born

My mother was born

In the year of the water buffalo

I dreamed that a blue ox

Was born from the moon

Vietnam floods back to my father

A water buffalo shot by the river

Fertility and abundance

In the heart of darkness

Sacrificial blood in the summer rain

In the year of my reclamation

The red buffalo lay its weight on me

It roamed the fractured landscape

Across the burning desert

The world fell to dust beneath its feet

Fertility and abundance

In a drought, fade away

The red buffalo looks to the sky

Waiting for the summer rain

The year of the water buffalo

The year of the blue moon

The year of old dreams dead

The year of new dreams born.

Her brain

She kept

In a golden bird cage

Her demons roamed freely

In and out

Her wings were backlit

A moth in the static

In the day, she faded

She clung to the night

She sat

And she faded

With the other ghosts

She waited

Her soul

Liquid gold

On the waiting room floor

If she were the moth

Her end would be clearer

Trapped by the sap

Or caught by the spider

She reached out her hand

For something to guide her

Day turned to night

Night turned to fever

Hey doctor

No need for muscle

I'll dig my own grave

Eternity is shallow

Time is all I have

And for you

Time is gold

Your precious ore

On the waiting room floor

I'll pass you the gold

Just hand me the shovel

A creature once alive

Never fully fades

She prayed for hurricanes

For tidal waves

For something big

To wash it away

To loosen the earth's mud

To unbind its clay

The nights grow long

Her wings are frayed

Time grows slippery

Behind the golden bird cage

She chokes down her words

They're hollow anyway

Just like tomorrow

Just like yesterday.

My dearest, darkest friend

I've come to your shores

To speak with you again

It's been so long

Since you last knew me

I’ve gone to the mountains

Far away from the sea

It was you that I came from

It was by you, that I grew

From the window

Of the old white house

I said goodbye to you

I heard you at night

Your pulse hitting the shore

You had pull in the darkness

Your mood was more raw

You waited for me

Beyond the flickering street

In the pale neon glow

In the warm buzzing heat

You held my fear

I felt your pull

I knew you in the day

But at night, not at all

In the moonlight

You scattered

And a living creature

Needs time alone

I thought of you waiting

How you could swallow me whole

I held power

In the arms of your water

I bled my heart out

Into the sea

Land lacked your rhythm

Your chaotic freedom

The tension was invisible

Impossible to see

It moved in all directions

Heavy and disconnected

Anchored by words

No universal currency

You matched my resistence

My reckless persistence

Your tides gave me vision

A way I could see

I dreamt you pulled me under

My ears roared with thunder

I reached for the surface

But you wouldn't let go

I descended into darkness

Absorbed by the stillness

There was no time to grieve

You had swallowed me whole

I was still and peaceful

In your darkness, so beautiful

Under the weight of the water

I began to breath

I felt the fear leave me

It could no longer keep me

The weight of life dropped

To the bottom of the sea

Maybe now I'll remember

When I next hear the thunder

That life is the glow

Of a flickering street

We come here to suffer

To find love, and surrender

We come to swim

In the ocean at night

We brave the white water

We come up from under

We move through the darkness

And collect bits of light

When the ocean speaks, I listen

In the mountains, I still dream of it

Its vastness

Its openness

Its pulse on the shore

Rivers here run away

But you always ran toward me

In a world full of red

You were a cold, blue song

You delivered me to shore

Like countless times before

It is you who I come from

And to you, I'll return.

Upon the burning desert

Where nothing ever grew

A star fell from the midnight sky

And a consciousness, there grew

Before the age of pyramids

Before the first great flood

A song swept through the swirling sky

And bloomed out from the skull

Opening at night, the unfolding mind

Before fragmentation

It sat coiled around the spine

Before amnesiac descension

Before the heaviness of time

The snake coiled 'round the apple tree

A world of symbols and of signs

Our language lived in the sky

And the song, we understood

Perfect circles descended

And carved the future into wormwood

They filled up the sky

Like they fill up my dreams

The blue lotus opening

The coiled snake, released

We are rooted in the earth

But we're made of the sky

Each time we touch down

We start keeping time

We keep falling

We keep forgetting

We are as desperate

As we are divine

Every night when we sleep

A divinity creeps

We dream of darkness

We dream of light

It rains from the sky

Into the third eye

The cactus blooming

In the desert at night

We are the perfect circles

On an earth of sharp angles

We are the fallen angels

The wards of time.

Where consciousness grows

On an overgrown path

The white lotus blooms

From the wounds of the past

I stand between worlds

I've never committed

When my feet touch the ground

It's the sky that I speak of

I've gathered conviction

Where the gospels were written

But when my wings touch the sky

It's the ground that I speak of

The heavens cry out

To an earth lost in mourning

The shadows they cast

Stand here before me

In the flames of the future

It is love that is written

On an overgrown path

The light grows before me.

It washed over my skin

The storm you were carrying

It dripped from my fingertips

As I gathered the sky

Though I felt my heart breaking

I let the storm take me

The cracks that it made

Let in the light

We are seeds that lay dormant

On an earth full of storm

We weave with fine silk

New worlds to come

The earth, it bowed down

Where the sun met the sky

It melted to gold

It poured from my eyes

I met with the light

From which you were born

I let my heart break

For love is a storm.

She lived in the old country

Of yellow beaches

Of frozen time

And shallow reaches

Golden antiquities

Washed ashore

It was commonplace there

She could catch them

Better than anyone

She had no past

But the ocean

She knew

She had one possession

Passed down

Through the generations

By a distant ancestor

From the sea

It was pulled

It was older than the others

It had more value

It was a looking glass

A thing of vision

Its golden filaments

Pulsed under her skin

It wove through her body

And lit up her brain

It glowed in her eyes

And spoke in her dreams

It was her golden will

And it carried her

Across worlds

Across time

They could almost see it

And it kept them distant

They watched her closely

They bided their time

If they could possess her

They could take

What had made her

The golden object

Was her worldly value

With their golden trinkets

They could never match it

Heaved into piles

From the farthest reaches

Their heavy nets

Sank in the deep blue

Hers was harder to catch

It had the vision they lacked

Her whole world

She built

From an empty room

When she looked through it

She could see a great distance

There were other worlds

Other suns

Other moons

It gave her power

In that world

And it wasn’t safe

From the others there

From the tall man

Who sat at the helm

He squinted his eyes

In the absence of light

His shadow drew closer

And choked out her light

Her vision was ancient

Eternal

Older than the hills

His power was slippery

No match for her will

In this world of beaches

Of broken tongues

And shallow reaches

Fog clung to the horizon

And clouded her head

The day came

When she fled away

His greed shook the sky

And turned the world

From blue to red

She had never burned brighter

Her and her golden will

Together

Through the looking glass

She watched

As the world disappeared

She left it behind

The world of frozen time

Where the future grows rust

In the shallows of the mind

She broke through the uncertain

She felt it burst wide open

A new world of freedom

A new world of flaw

It had deep oceans

Pain and love

Could be spoken

Through the looking glass

The generations smiled down.

I dig up the sorrow

That grows in the deep

I pull at the stitches

That time slowly weaves

I dance the old dance

I dream the old dreams

I open the wounds

I let it all bleed

I mine the black gold

From the bellies of beasts

Where fire grows tall

I let the flames breath

I pull down the sky

I rise from the deep

I cross the great river

In the water, I weep

It pours from my eyes

Through my lungs, it sings

Through my ears, it answers

Through my mind, it dreams.

The horizon divides

A world, painted blue

They're playing Tom Waits

"Drunk On The Moon"

Day bleeds to night

Under a grapefruit moon

The ocean is black

Beyond the pale dune

The streetlights flicker

In the late summer heat

The gulls have flown west

The world is asleep

It's just me and the moon

And the sorrowful sea

The tide has come in

And brought up the deep

The ocean holds memories

And I hold the sea

So deep and so dark

So dark, I can dream

I breath in the freedom

Of the wide open night

They're playing Tom Waits

"Midnight Lullaby".

It's in the air that we breath

It's carved in the tomb

To sing only of love

When the flowers are in bloom

But what of the storm

And the swallowing fog

The cold, tumbling seas

Where all souls become lost

What of the horror

When all light is gone

What of the hauntings

That turn men to stone

They ring in the ears

And cloud out the light

They move like dark shadows

In the corner of the eye

In the heart of darkness

There lives a love song

It sings of the flower

Bloomed and now gone

It's the first and last breath

The war field at dawn

In a world of such weeping

We possess golden lungs

Our songs fill the sky

And rain to the ground

To earth's battle cry

Our souls, they are bound

To monsters and men

To darkness and light

To the sun and the moon

We are fated to bind.

I place my lantern

On the book of days

I keep my hands folded

When I enter the cave

My heart, it flickers

In the empty space

With no anchor of light

My mind moves away

I let my mind wander

Through the long, snaking caverns

I feel them upon me

The eyes that are watching

I withdraw from the light

With the spiders and vermin

They are old like the stone

That arose from earth's hatching

From icy winds, and violent seas

They retreated beneath

They bided their time

In an uneasy peace

To the cave, I go

For my mind to unfold

Its grants me its vision

In its chambers of gold

The earthly treasures

Are protected by dragons

From deep in their sleep

They can read mens' intentions

They guard ancient knowledge

That cannot be stolen

With fire, they baptize

The fools who would rob them

To the cave, I go

When my vision grows cloudy

On the wind, are the words

"As above, so below me"

It opens my eyes

Each time I lose sight

In my eyes, the flame flickers

In my heart, it resides.