Cedar Sigo

I began as a stiff, narrative, storytelling poet and ended as a pool of gasoline and water catching sunlight.

I began as a student librarian and ended as a drunken lonely playground teacher.

I began as a formal sonnet and ended as a razor cut gown hanging in a public toilet.

I began as a watermelon-colored mountain and ended as a rainy granite quarry outside Seattle.

You think you can peel my poetry zines away from my hardback goldleaf editions?

I can allow for a cold rubbing of the fossil within. The Xerox light has been left on all night.

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It's misty in the dream.

grab my rented Parisian suit, stuff the tin-foil into my handbag leave no doomed note, no golden numbered address, get on the train that pulls out green and backward. I'm not sure that they will know my intention, rocks in my throbbing head, screws that hold my lungs together pop out with embarrassment. The sound along the floor that I will not be getting back. I expect to swim a random channel, fall in and out of pitfalls, romantic and financial tombs. Never hope, it all moves along the glass without the hand ever punching through.

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A black beetle runs across white stone. 

I drown in the bear grass beside it. The tick of the clock is an ants leg torn from its body repeatedly. The scotch broom chokes out the hillside and the fact that it flowers goes unacknowledged. The fire of the inner orange petal is left hacked to pieces, the clouds like trailing fog, it hides the side door to the glacial mountain. The waterfall of clumsy ice will not be allowed out tonight. The trees around it absorb the nervousness inherent in this light.

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The dead are working the universe, they're in its shifting walls.

They arrange the cobalt violets to break out like glass from behind the tundra. I can't see it. That is in fact the first sound, it forms a silver thread that we burned and let cool. The pieces left twisted to winds along the ground. The pull of collage is evident in it's not holding my hand ever. Are the lines of cinema too frozen and straight? Are we hounded toward our rearrangement? The dead are stuck reading scraps of our future, a soap opera convoluted and held up, outside of time. but each paragraph is shown into its strait jacket. I fit miraculously into an odd sample size.