Give me two more weeks. If I survive, I will see you at the end. If not, you were all wonderful.

Oh children, would you wait for me?

Oh children, I don't feel like hurtling through the frail fingers of these failing trees to find you. These cottonwoods are dead enough without my wails to illuminate their pale defeat. The mountains are sunken like the wan white fires of smouldering galleons into fog thick as copper.

Oh children, I love to wade in the irrigation ditches by the blindly patched leg of asphalt between the fields, swans to my right and crows to my left. When I surrender and bury me in muddied silver, they rise in a roiling cacophony of ivory and jet and shudder past the frigid light like brilliant crackling frames, old cinema.

Oh children, a passion that does not leave you heaving near death
is no passion.

* * *

I must not leave on a note like that. Tomorrow holds too many demands to retire depressed and exhausted.

Folk keep asking what I want for my birthday. I hate listing things like that. So I am going to drop subtle hints that will hopefully lead to eventual inspiration.

I have been reminded multiple times in the last couple of weeks in my musical forays that I still do not possess the second Thursday album, "Full Collapse." That bastard I call my friend (i.e. Matt White) wouldn't sell it to me last I asked. So, I'm stuck with the first and third. That's like having "New Hope" and "Return of the Jedi" without "Empire Stikes Back."

I was looking at my list of books that I'd like to turn into movies, and it dawned on me that "I Had Seen Castles" by Jane Yolen and "Where You Once Belonged" by Kent Haruf aren't in my collection. Strange.

I discovered an Irish playwright by the name of Martin McDonagh recently; read three of his plays. Fantastic stuff. It's peculiar that I don't own any of them. Yet.

"Topdog/Underdog" by Suzan-Lori Parks was the best play I've ever seen. Interesting that I can't seem to find any copies in stores.

Band shirts rock. Does Matt know any of my favorite bands? Gee golly whillakers.

I am tired of being a cheesy bastard. I shall commence growing a ponytail and becoming sensitive. I hope the blatant hints above did not offend anyone. They offended me.

This Friday, ladies and gentlemen: Dane Cook.

Matt and I went on Sunday to the Dead Poetic concert at the Pound. I got all band members, excluding the singer, to sign my insert. We walked out deaf and happy. They played all my favorite songs, including the first song of theirs that I ever heard.

The My Chemical Romance concert is for twenty-one years and older, so Matt and I will need to conjure up some fake IDs. Yes. Right.

I am directing so much right now that I could spit. If it were all one big project, at least everything would be homogenous. Unfortunately, it's a short film, a teaser for a series, a scene for my Directing for Stage final, and a one-act play for next semester's Student Repertory Theatre. I spent six straight hours typing up and cutting down that damn script yesterday.

"Three Musketeers" went out with a bang, and we had a gloriously smooth closing night. I went to bed at six the next morning, after spending most of the previous hours caring for Drew, who had imbibed a wee bit much.

I'll see everyone on Friday. Until then, please get more sleep than I have been receiving, throw a couple Molotovs in your neighbor's backyard, and keep oul' Erin's Isle in your hearts.

Be gentle with me.

Piano in the dark, trees

Be oh so tender.

I care not how it goes, how you rage and swell, your blushing anger silhouetted like crimson lace against the window corded with fog, your grey room veined in rain.

Be merciful, be sweet.

Your fingertips on my eyelids and tears on my throat, evening or morning I don't know.

Hollow, augured, I have no say none at all so
be quiet don't tell me that you're standing
in your skirt that smells of mute chamomile and cinnamon
that draws its lips back above your knees
in the peeling doorway with only balmy shadows slicking the walls behind you.
I want nothing of your handkerchiefs choked up with lavender
or of that bruised rouge cracking like old gargoyles on your eyelids.

Be silent, take and leave.

Corpses of lilacs, blue urn shuttered in dust pleading emptily,
vanquished.

Be harsh, suck in your lip turn
parade oh tragedy through the licking downpour,
gray satin leeching the scent from my
bent porch planks
I'll see you off but only from behind
the clouded muslin of the window good night
as evening plucks blue mutters
from the urn.

THE STRONGEST BONES

sallow orange membranes of autumnal clouds
mumble across the vestiges of twilight drifting
in the willows of your eyes
I
hear the slumber of your lips
chilling against my quiet jawbone,
the sully bedsheet ghosts of your brushfire moons
crackling like the dry throats of crows,
a sweetened blackness in my ears.

I
bear no tattered evenings on my moist shoulderblades,
I
clatter about in clay vessels ashy and whisperish
straining against bedsheet ghosts who seem to know me
I don’t know them
and they mouth off and thumb their stubby noses at
I
heard the ragged paper shriek of doves’ wings
muttering in the foyer on blue terra cotta tiles
beaded with morning and stirring hoarsely in the fog,
green whispers, green orchestras
stringing furtively for unseen concertos,
rustling:
This is me, This is you.

see that, girl?
lines on my hands and ink in my eyes,
a bristling potent rebellion
of bones, bones.
no proof, no flesh,
bones and dust,
the triumph of bones and dust
lording and laughing drily like
sallow gilt fermenting on the brushfire
edges of moons and twilight clouds.

what happens under the winter sun's flame--

The barges of the dead dragging foamy trenches
through the rilly pallor, blue as sickly lips, frail
and needy, lovely

--is between you and me--

Gravelly spatters of cold gold across
the rear window, shuddering through trees
with dead leaves covering their eyes, I
haven't scrubbed this thing for weeks
and the children who smeared their stubby fingers
in the rain-streaked dirt have staggered
off into the hard evening as the sinking light
stretched out the wrinkles at their temples and beneath
their eyes and I
heard the pavement's cracked hoary breath
as they laid down to
pass quietly into death
to the hollow song of no crickets (hell it's winter you know),
white spiders dropping down from the churning bellies
of hot cars burning by
to spin brass pennies across their eyes

--and nobody else, but between you and me--

I fell black in desire, hearing hounds
fringing night in crystalline howls, their breath
uncurling in shivery plumes,
that womanly silver slip of a bay writhing in the eventide,
cupping the clammy loamy flesh of earth,
tasting the cinnamon rot of winter
and your bluesy eyes snatching umber moments

--are only the crystalline howls of passion
uncurling unvoiced and tensely poised,
the silent want.

My grandparents are here right now.