Dramatic Exercise #1

Close your eyes.

Imagine your are yourself, only very young, and you have gone too far into the woods alone.  The air smells like cinnamon and peat and something black, like death.  Imagine the cold licking at your skin, causing it to rise up pebbly and chill beneath your clothes.  Breathe.  Imagine a root hooked above the earth like a gnarled finger.  You trip and tear your sleeve.  The place you have hurt yourself glows red and there is a bright stream weaving down your arm.  Feel the pulse rushing through your body.  Breathe.  Taste iron heavy on your tongue.  Now you are crying.  Now you are truly alone.  Wind whistles through the branches.  You begin to hear footsteps behind you.  Breathe.  Again.  How small can you make yourself?  Will you fit into a monster's mouth?

Fully Pressurized, Stability Rated

I am in love with myself

filled with blood, tight

as a tick with it, as though

any passing tack will

tear a hole in me with its

tiny tooth, and everything,

the beauty and the poison,

would yield to that

one moment of malice,

would burst out of me

all at once and I would be

a skin of my former self.

I am in love with myself
rotten to the quick, the bones
click-clacking endlessly,
grinding their grudges
into each other, one day
I am in love with the idea
that this scaffolding will
fall like rain, and there
will be only foundations
from which to infer
how to begin again.

The Separation

It could be that nothing is sacred to me,
or it could be that I have seen enough of altars and alder groves.

A thyrsus is only a cock, after all
and a holy virgin only a girl who won't call.

Let's go ragged as old coats tattered by a wind
whose playfulness makes love to the idea of apocalypse.

Carry on, carry on, I feel it in the popping gears of my heart
that rattletrap old box of bones.

Some comeuppance it was, howled loud as a rabbit's hop
and half as deadly, some great vindication--

all your books lost at sea but the painting I had given her
for her birthday still hanging around.

She had wanted it.  Love will leave you it said without prelude,
how macabre, and she wanted it.

Wolf Dreams

In the night I was
devouring your heart raw
the thick slippery flesh and
ropes of gristle

a savage banquet, the

flowers of your blood blooming
hot and rich on my tongue.
In the morning my teeth

dropped on the pillow in

vengeful splinters and what

I had dreamed was your heart
was my tongue, ribboned now

and useless, and my rage, which was

so hungry I was eating myself alive,
the animal part refusing to be cowed,
my sleeping jaws grinding at the

softest part of you, where you

are most vulnerable, in the morning
there is blood, and blood, and
I am heartless, without words.

+1

It's entirely possible that
I need to unfriend
all social media
since it has become
a tool of my own oppression,
or some other thing I learned in college,
but I can’t live
without knowing if you like
everything I say.
O brave new world
that has such metrics in it,
what feedback percentage
will be enough? Will I ever be
optimized to the point of
pure celebrity, will the sound of
a thousand strangers
clicking their approval
drown out the analog whispers
that still rattle around inside
my head, you are made of paper
and flesh, which means
despite your digital lovers
you will burn when the fires come,
you will still burn,
and all the statuses left
un-commented on
will be less significant even
than ash
and smoke.

Clarence and Helen

People said she was in it for the money,
the tall blond farmer with big hands
and rolling fields. What better way to escape

than uprooting from high school halls
and replanting on the sweeping hills
high above the river, where roots

can run deep. What better than a place
where everything grows; fat yellow kernels
and fat brown chickens. Eight babies grown,

uprooted, replanted, but the long reach
of time and blood and love collects them all
back again, the long reach of love

spanning decades, measured by harvests,
by baseball seasons, by each new birth,
each new set of roots made possible

by the first planting. She was in it
for the money, they said. The gold turned out
to be measured by the bushel and bale,

the wealth of love so much more, without price.

Dramatic Exercise #7

Close your eyes.

Imagine you are standing on the deck of a ship. Feel the cool salt air on your face. Breathe. Taste the breeze like tears on your tongue. From high above in the crow's nest a small man is playing a faint tune on his pipe. Breathe. Again. The waves push at the sides of the boat and you feel yourself sliding toward the edge of the deck. Imagine each note of the small man’s melody hanging in the air, a delicate crystal sphere. Suddenly a wave has swelled like a great black beast and pushed you over the edge. Breathe. Again. Feel the water rushing into your lungs, your chest swelling with tears. Your hand finds the cold slick links of the anchor chain, but you cannot grip it tightly and you slip down, down, down, languid as a dream. Breathe. Again. The small crystal spheres that come out of your mouth and spin lazily toward the surface are filled with music. Imagine you can compose the melody of your oceansong. Is it a song of love? Does it resolve?