“Done Haunting Houses”

Death is the devil’s work

Love is a cheap card trick

Truth is a poor man’s dream

Thought is a quick-sand pit.

And all my years spent cursing up the stairs,

“Good morning, God.

Get up.

Forget those bad dreams.”

We’ve been awake

and waiting far too long,

And thinking up our deaths.

Sleep is a sick, sad joke.

“Spill”

She was in the back yard,

Digging out a trench

Praying for her father’s gun again.

All the holy weight they’d laid across your back

And the hundred years you’ll waste

just thanking them for that.

And you can’t blame anyone for what you’ve done

Oh my God you can’t blame anyone

Before the bridges are built, you’ll burn them down.

You had built a new face,

empty but awake

And painted it the one shade you could never fake.

Love had kicked your crutches

out from underneath.

I was still the sandstone cutting up your feet.

God was in our back yard, tearing down the fence,

Calling out our father’s name again.

So we fixed him to the floor, covered up his ears

And spent another lifetime

Shaking off our fears.

Oh but I could be something else entirely

And spill out of my burning head

And underneath your door.

No, I do not see what you see

in your old eyes.

And I will be cutting up your feet

for eternity.

“Cardinals”

Reach in for it

Your rusted, iron-covered cross

Pour out your breath

into the furnace again.

I think I found a better way to live

And I think I’ve found a better way to die.

And I’ve been fitting myself into that small space

That you set our for the screaming of the wind.

That is all I’ve ever been.

And sorting through it,

I never saw something so clear

As your hands bound up in prayer

Behind a closed door.

I thought I’d walked a better road, alone

Until I felt my feet turn into stone,

And that’s when I turned back.

“For His Old Branches”

There is a wheel

That spins to keep the river flowing.

It runs a course between your eyelids and your aching jaws.

There was a bird 

Who took your voice and turned it backwards.

He and the past were aiming arrows at your heaving chest.

You took a train into the mouth of all you hated,

Spent half an hour watching hope pass through a window

You’ve got that singing crown of thorns

around your thick head

You and the kid that you once were

are fighting over it.

(Then we ran down the river Van

To the mouth of old Fenrir

And he swallowed us up)

I collected rocks, filled up my pockets

and tried to swim across the stream.

I was told I’d be kept afloat

By the ghosts of the hills that I’d flattened to get here.

Trusted a fiend and lost my hand.

My blood flowed white and filled the canyon,

And I saw faces in the leaves

And they were preaching to me.

There is a tree you cannot cut.

He knows your name and all your fears.

You dare not lay an axe to his old branches.

They dug a coal mine by your house.

His yelling kept you up all night.

All of your friends got caught between his black teeth.

We left our shoes under the ground,

tied yellow feathers to our arms,

and learned the language of the aching mountain.

Then I went out west 

and tried to build a better version of myself.

My iron tools got swallowed up by spirits.

And I knew my head was inside out,

so I sold my soul to taste the clouds,

ate from the tree and started digging up the ground.

There is a thought you cannot shake

Of her asleep under the lake.

The ice is eating up the surface and you are the fish

Sleeping peacefully.

 ”The Clouds”

I’ve been waiting on a response for days.

There’s been a complication

It seems your heart needed a break

From pumping the blood through your veins,

and keeping the oxygen okay.

I still see your face in the day.

And I see your eyes in the bottle that was way too tall

I finished it just to see if we could talk.

Now I’m speaking with your ghost again

It’s telling me that I don’t listen.

Can we be friends,

In another lifetime

I might pretend that we are right now.

I summoned demons from a dying tree

I took a long walk off a short levee

I drank the poison from a black moon seed,

and then I saw you.

I felt your kiss in a dream I had

I felt your skin in a monument

Then I went home to live a brand new life without you

I buried all our things

Beneath the giant shadows of the clouds.

And they will stay there underground,

but no matter what I do I never will stop talking to you.

I never did get the last word in,

And you said I always did.

“A Weather Vane”

All that time that you killed,

Pulling smoke to your lungs

In a parking lot covered in green glass 

And shimmering

The light on your face starts to darken and dissipate

The ghost was inside your mouth

Placing bets with your teeth.

Forcing your voice out,

Pushing your tongue up from underneath

And out past the fields we were racing the sun.

You slipped away past the fog and the firelight

I saw the footsteps cut out of the ash.

We traded names just to see if the colors would change

And they did.

I got sick of the pull

You just sputtered and sank

You were nothing

A curtain of sawdust

A weather vane.

And don’t try to skip past the part where you realize.

But I lied my way out of this one

And you lied your way to a ditch

And I fought myself just to stay up 

Out of your street-walking, tongue-talking sleep.

How it consumed you

and eventually me

“Through Windows”

I am not the devil under the water

Pulling you down by your old wooden ankles.

Splitting and shriveling,

seeping out of me.

God, I’m afraid of the songs you’ve been singing me

God I cannot hear your voice quite so clearly.

And I am the walls crumbling down.

We are clearly the saints

No, we are not afraid

Our names cannot be engraved in the sand.

I am just a sinner, pulling my splinters out

Chipping away at a crackling flame.

Well I felt my shoulders begin to get lighter

When I realized that it all would get harder than this.

But I don’t believe in the surface.

We can’t see through the sheets

No, we are not asleep

And I will not be the leaves on your tree.

I am the tides

I’m the beggar left for dead on the side

And I am the walls crumbling down

They’re watching me fall through the windows of saints

They’re making me something I am not.

Your brother got killed in the snow while you slept

But you never grew out of the secrets you kept

To keep all his light-headed hoping alive

Carried for miles inside of your mind.

Now I’m writing down all of my saintly complaints

And pulling the strings they’ve attached to my face

But I’m done haunting houses 

And cursing at God

And filling up spaces with black and white fog.

I saw my whole life in the glass on the floor

Well what did you think all of that shaking was for?

Now I’m floating downstream 

Chasing after my bones.

Well I guess I grew old 

But I never went home.