Fixtures

My fixations haven’t been healthy
Living by restlessness or anxiousness
You’ve been a poor keeper
Of my emotions

Because you didn’t call, or write at all
Three days busy brewing new lies
Honey, it’s all right I wasn’t gonna sleep tonight anyway.

The morning I woke up
From that second sleepless night
I sent the letter that said,
Honey, let’s stop the lies.

Among other things, it rambled
But as I recall it forgave us both
Our failures and weakness through all these trials

We can take it back, like with bandanas and steel eyes
Like Rosie the Riveter or Bonnie and Clyde
Say hey mister bring her boy home
Give this man back to the woman that loves him most

And save our ship, it’s the same old shit
Tales of lies, loss, destruction,
Sabotage and dysfunction
Loose lips sink ships, and they have

Because you didn’t call, or write at all
Three days busy brewing new lies
“Honey it’s all right, I wasn’t gonna sleep this week anyway.”

We can take it back, like with bandanas and steel eyes
Like Rosie the Riveter or Bonnie and Clyde
Say hey mister bring her boy home
Give this man back to the woman that loves him most

There’s love in me for both of us
But if we want love, or at least trust
Let’s stop fucking around

Ulcers

Do they have sports bars where you are?
Like Jackson's, like the first date
When she answered, your classmate, for you

Do they have payphones where you are?
There's one in your purse, and I hope it's not far
From your hands . . . is he near them?

While I swim in this doubt
And I think I would drown
But even water won't stay down

While you float through your town
My flowers all around you

Making

I wish it all would change
Between fickle hearts and ball and chains
It's all just chasing windmills
Meanwhile treading on the tulips
Like how I never bought you flowers
I planted them in you, they just never grew

Until today, the softest of suns on your face
You and me, behind a tree off the highway to Crater Lake
Making, mmmhmm

I wish you could have it
The tenderness I've torn and split
To hold it in your hands
And fastened to your sleeve, you could
Pretend that you'd thought of me
In Seattle, or otherwise

Hold in your eyes, the countenance culled from surprise
It's strange as such, a stranger's touch alight in a plane through the sky
Making, mmhmm

I knew where you were last time
But only the loneliness moves you
To measures beyond, beyond . . .

Thinking of the other side of this

Cervantes, like that painting I made when she was away

Each of us has windmills

And I my De La Mancha

To take her fill and slip me a pill

And taunt my little Panza

Just one of her sighs or sleepless nights

Would fill me overflowing

‘Ere these faults of mine or even the wine

Turned up the seeds for sowing

So fetch me my steed

And hand me my lance

For lifetimes hide in chance yet

A Dispatch from Oregon

Dropping like a fly
In a prop plane, into the valley
Where you live and work
And struggle without me

Skipping like a stone
Between the waves of grain
I reel in the forgiveness
Numb from the pain

Bending the sun
Like a cracked windshield
In light of all I've sung
That can never be undone

_______________

The moments we can't have back are no worse
Than those I dreamed up and rehearsed
That never have come

That sigh was a softer than I could have imagined
To hear you lungs cast off what your hands did
Saying he never came

I know 400 miles isn't a thousand, to one of our doors
But don't make the miles we've crossed together more
Than those to come