The Half Finished Heaven

Sans Jupe

2010-02-05T12:05:00.000-08:00

Hello Surfers! Welcome to my poetry blog. Please enjoy a few of my verses if it pleases you.

I've been working on something new, a blog about my work as an alternative and erotic model. It's very NSFW and not for everyone, but if you're interested in seeing what I'm up to lately, you should mosey on over and take a look.

There's even talk of publication at the end of the year, so please bookmark it, don't read it at work (unless you have an awesome job!) and enjoy!

Sans Jupe

The Singular Binary Strand

2006-09-01T15:38:00.000-07:00

The Singular Binary Strand

We must have looked like quite a pair
to the satellites that map the city through the stratosphere,
hovering like dragonflies
in empty space, measuring the slope of rooftops, fog densities,
and the volume of our bodies,

converting the topography
of the earth into an invisible stream of data.
I wonder if their antennae
twitched briefly as they tuned to the frequency of my naked
body, standing plainly under

the street light in front of your house,
watching you float smoke rings out across the dark from your porch,
while the rest of the city slept,
I look for the complexity of you and me stirring
our coffee in time behind the morning

paper; in the pixelated
terrain broadcast across the city during the evening news,
the singular strand of binary
code extrapolated from the high relief of our bodies
as we dream on the same pillow

Maid's Lament

2006-07-18T17:01:00.000-07:00

A Maid's Lament

It's strange the things you learn about people
from the things they choose to throw away,

a silk shirt crumpled up in the wastebasket,
without a trace of the evening left behind,
as I examine it in the daylight,
trying to determine what it is they thought

I couldn't save with my brushes and soaps.

I am an apothecary, mixing magic potions
to lift out pigments and proteins;

blood, vomit, sweat and more I've scraped out
of the crotches of panties, the cuffs of Sunday suits,
even the hem of a wedding gown.
I've bleached away first periods,

and recently, a woman's last.

I'm hired to help people disappear from their homes,
wiping away the fingerprints of family and secret strangers

from banisters and doorjambs, dissolving footprints
from the polished floors of front rooms, where a casual acquaintance
might stumble across these clues, put two and two together,
turn around and leave.

But what's more peculiar, I think,

is how thoroughly they want me to clean their most private spaces,
how offensive they find their own refuse,

how quick they are to discard themselves.
That is why maids are necessary, to face the waste
of day to day existence, to focus on the depth of scratches,
the spread of spills, the loosening of screws,

the stubbornness of stains.

Otherwise, every displaced, dirty, or broken thing,
becomes a mirror.

People have become to me,
a list of items to be mended and sorted.
They become this to maids, so that to each other
they can remain human, whole and lovable.

It's hard work.

Vespers

2006-07-12T18:48:00.000-07:00

Vespers

I can not remember the sound of our mother's voice,
or even how she looked, the memory of her slipped
from my mind long ago, like a theif
disappearing into the night,
pilfered heirlooms tucked neatly in his pockets.

When I was a boy I would pretend to sleep, listening
to your whispered prayers, unraveling tone, pitch, timbre,
from the chord of your voice, searching
for strands of her sound
I could weave into a memory that would never leave.

Is it so strange then, that every angel that perched
along the branches of Bible verses taking root in my mind
shared your silhouette? That each
haloed head bowed to reveal
the sweet lunette of your neck? That my mind would turn

the feathery turnings of wings into the feathery turnings
of your hair over my face as you leaned down to kiss
me goodnight? That when I woke from a nightmare
once and you were standing
at the side of my bed, the moonlight made a nimbus around you?

Sestina

2006-04-11T19:22:00.000-07:00

Elegy of Dirt

I remember the day I found a girl embedded in the dirt
underneath the oleander shrub where I used to bury
the pewter and ivory trinkets I found
in the attics and basements of abandoned houses, the sadness
of her bones alone with me in the dark
chrysalis of branches, bright points
of metatarsal light gleaming under the starry blooms like the points
of a compass rose on the sad map of dirt.
all summer long they searched for her in the dark
designs of the earth, countless family pets reburied
along with pits of garbage and the caked bulbs of flowers, sadness
seemed to hang on everything they found,
dirt weighed down every green thing sprouting in the fields, but they only found
the private plots of one another, the rusted points
of nails, misshapen pieces of wood, the forgotten sadnesses
of unknown families and children grown up and gone, preserved by the dirt
and its depressions. I wondered how many other girls the dirt had buried
in the outposts of the big cities, the hardpan of deserts, in the dark
clefts of mountains, the white shards of bones in the dark
fossil record of the earth forming a constellation of endless bodies waiting to be found.
I thought of every living thing I had buried,
the clammy body of an animal I found along the canal,
its tender domed head a tiny pointed
skull, its pink nose a cavity packed with seeds and dirt,
the clean gleam of the spade packed my sadness
into its tomb of dirt, and the crumbling dirt under my hand leveled the sadness
with the earth. Alone in the dark
at night some times I would dream of girls crawling out of the dirt
walking the plots, ghostly white, where they were found
the ball and socket joints of their skeletons glowing points
floating and bobbing along an infinite train of girls waiting to be buried
the mystery of what the dirt has buried
lighting up the earth like the synchronicity of lights at dusk in the city, the sadness
of the solitary vista banished with each point
of light switching on along the grid in the dark
valley below, when the familiar pattern of your own home is found
and you get back in your car and leave behind the cold certainty of the dirt
this morning I found a tender green bud pushing out of the dark
plot where I buried that animal over twenty years ago, like a tiny pointed finger.
Sometimes the rich sadness of dirt overwhelms me.

I Die

2006-04-02T16:30:00.000-07:00

I'm murdered from time to time in my dreams,
by a stranger in an all night laundromat,
I'm folding clothes in the flickering light
when I notice him casually walking in
through the only door out. There is something
between us, a familiarity in
the way he stares as I feed the machines
quarters and clothes, that makes me afraid when I
realize there are no windows in this room,
and we are stuck like that for a long time, both
knowing what we intend to do, but not
yet moving.

Some Things Bear Repeating

2006-03-13T16:27:00.000-08:00

My Masterpiece

You were going to be my masterpiece,
every spare moment I spent training
my psyche like a bonsai tree
trimming away any stray branches
of anger or jealousy,
I was meticulous in my reasoning
pruning back any complexities
I caught budding from my thoughts,
shaping my love into perfect simplicity....

I get so tired sometimes,
of my memories.

Kharma Dodgers

2006-03-11T06:34:00.000-08:00

The highway walls cut the noise of the city
away from the clean blue of the sky as I
head toward San Francisco. Years ago, young
and drunk, we came speeding out of the curving
on ramp, veering across the empty freeway,
laughing, until we came out of the sloping
spiral of the interchange, and saw policemen
loading a body bag into the back
of a darkened ambulance. No blood or sirens,
just the debris of something catastrophic
glittering up from the grooved road behind us
as we continued our forward trajectory.

Kharma is always a casual belief until
I allow myself to tabulate the exact
number of miseries required to justify
the current state of things. In ten years of driving
you've never had an accident. How
many times did a car windshield split your face down
the middle, sliding the flesh off your skull like a glove,
the way a highway patrolman once explained
to me, or a steering wheel break the hinge
of your ribs, for you to get off scott-free this time
around? Life must be awkward in the aftermath
of something like that.

I analyze the symmetry of my own features
sometimes, trying to determine exactly how many
accidents and circumstances are averaged into my face.

Two years after you moved I rolled my car end over end
four times on my way to see you, and crawled out
of the crushed steel covered in glass dust, untouched. I couldn't
drive for years after that, for fear of what fate might still have
in store for me, of how many more lives I might have to live
with skewed limbs, or wrecked ambitions.

Sitting in the park, baking in the sun, our legs tanned and hard
in front of us as we lean back on our arms watching the shimmering
surface of the sea, a kind of melancholy comes over me, like a shadow
seeping out from behind the pristine dimensions of our bodies,
wondering if all that suffering was worth what we've become.