It is not pleasant to be torn between two worlds you love.

I know what it feels like.

Herring fish gather in the shallow stream behind the lake and through the trees.

Propped up on my elbows, on the stiff gym floor. 

Planks: a climax in the battle to stay healthy.

Hands that once felt too small to lift burdens

are now clenched into fists

The stories they tell me spill out a feeling that the spider web defines perfectly.

From the sky I saw endless gray rivers,

older than the cliché of arteries

We think it was a lit cigarette

flicked off the wrist of a driver, racing past

Once under the light of dawn

there sat a singing lark.

You think this poem will preserve the breeze,

preserve the dark and oaky trees

Pollen stuck to his thighs, the man feels 

something unnamable growing in his chest 

"Bye," she says. "Love you!" 

I freeze, almost tripping down the steps. 

My dad and I have come to the mutual realisation that he can't force me to help him out in the garden. 

Ingrain yourself in a wild honey: flail a standing ovation with petaled hands

moonlight kisses the clouds. It rings, the moonlight, like church bells striking.

It began at the beginning in the middle of things; at the center of a galaxy 

You cringe as the door opens with a loud beep, but no one comes running. 

Today, nature is fit in an open, square bus window with Mama obstructing the moving, alfresco greenery. 

It begins with patter, like the impatient tap

of painted nails, the rain thrums on the roof

"Quark querk arck erk,"  

That's what the tui said.

Below

the cherry blossom clouds

I drink the elderflower air, 

poured by the 4am sky

for two cents, the man 

answering will reach into the ocean

Water waits and wastes away in wilted states. It waxes and wanes in winter weather and slips away in the spring fever. 

Of all the swimmer summer and the dust, sun, rain, you are what sticks out. 

I do not see the stars from where I stand

but I know they are there. 

He scuttled furiously from beneath the undergrowth, pausing every few seconds to catch his breath. 

They say 7 billion people stayed home today

2.2 billion children stayed out of school

As we turn into ghost towns and ghost stories,

I memorize the steps, the corners, the edges.

125 miles.

I never imagined they could be so close. 

And the sea has many teeth, far more than I. But if we are one 

then I have all the same teeth as the sea, then it has the same teeth as I. 

Sometimes I like to collapse infinity

into a single point in time I label "now."

In the thousand faceless poems I've read

the moon has never been named a "him."

The grass stings my thighs and whispers at me to move my legs so that it may look upon the stars 

I try to think of death as an ocean; uncharted and unknown, but vast.

i have come back

to the village i swore i would never see again

Late afternoon. I never knew a whisper, soft and sweet, could sing

There is a certain inscrutability in the mercurial ebb and flow of life in the woods, an unassuming cadence that settles just beyond my naive circumspection. The dry sweep of the wind’s touch is fond and insidious in turns . . .

On a frosty October morning, I walk to a field

And lie flat on my back in the dewy grass.

A poem is when a scattering of swallows suddenly form a perfect v.

A poem is the angle which makes dew on a rose petal look like diamonds.