Growing Pains

It's the manic way I hug pillows to my chest when I
Can't stop laughing.
The dense ache in my legs.
I can't sleep.
No one sleeps.
I close my eyes and let them ache

The Sandman

Left brain right brain bridge of your nose

Here comes the sandman
Left brain right brain you make me insane.

Here comes the sandman

Just past the bridge of your nose there are
Clouded faces swimming in your memories

Walking so softly

Into your spinal cavities pulsating womblike thinking
Not of nothing, floating tree rings static tv screen
Fractured shards of the house plant you dropped, cutting
Your hand on the pieces of the universes you glimpsed in the
Deadlands before sleep.
Sunspots and blurs, your groggy and throbbing thunder, the
Music of your eyes.

I am an egg I am a curled up shark waiting for life in
Its hard and twisted purse
I sense nothing. Only this.

only you when you blacked out and imagined
Birds in a sandstorm.

Creeping along in the tips of his toes

And he sprinkles his sand

With his own little hand

In the eyes of sleeping children

Go to sleep my little one

Go to sleep my dear

Promises

Somehow the edge of land seems more like the edge when you're 100
Feet up on a cliff
Somehow promises seem more breakable
The idea of them fragile and thin. Watching
Elephant seals move on land makes me think of
Teenagers, even their amphibian names
Even their noses as they rear up
Crash into each other and in the moment
Before the collision the way their necks twine is
Religious but they crash and fall into the ocean
And in the splash I can almost feel
The energy it takes to rear up again but they will
Not like a choice but like a chemical flight controller
The one adults never acknowledge when they ask awkward
Unanswerable questions like
But what were you thinking?

The Elephants leave the sea and the seals crawl onto land.
They rest. They molt.
When they rise from the deep they bring it with them in sound
Like the fresh on summer nights with the windows down
A deep and ripping rumble.
In the sea they swim alone but on land they need the solid weight
Of others to dream that they are underwater once again
Hunting for life.
They wake each other but it's only to check that the
social order is unchanged
Only to compare nose lengths
To stretch mouths red open slowing gloamy teeth and make that sound again.
Promises are impossible. This
Is the real edge and all others appear edgy but go on for secret ages.
I promise to be stupid forever.
I promise to never move till fall and only wake you up to yawn
Fearsomely.
I promise to never change the fact that I am changing all the time.

Poem 2

We drank this city down on foot.
Chasing bridges with colder drinks
Brown bread single-file marionetting
Past every window on Lombard St
And if the Palace of Fine Arts has survived the fires
The earthquakes
The tourists
Then maybe it would have fallen if we hadn't
Loped in throats open eyes up everywhere every filigreed surface
Our substitute for redwoods
These things lift us up.
We talk big here words that burst speech bubbles
Generalizations about this our generation
Madcap comedians, scientists, mourners we become in
Five days, each a line on the staff paper, the Richter register
Where the notes fall into patterns
Trace out routes we wear into sidewalks
(page turn)
Treble clef for sunny days. Minor keys for mist.
We'll hear this music in days months years
After it is sung felt eaten lived chewed because
We're light on our feet and
Not even sound catches up
And now we are fighting with river rocks now we
Read serious things and smile for the understanding
Smelling of gasoline, mesquite sweet and skunky.