Michael K. Gause hosts the Disheveled Salon, a monthly happy hour gathering of local writers in the Twin Cities. His first self-published chapbook, The Tequila Chronicles, received honorable mention in The Carbon Based Mistake’s 2004 Art Exchange Program Contest. His second, I Want To Look Like Henry Bataille, was published in 2006 by Little Poem Press and to his knowledge hasn’t won anything. His website is www.thedayonfire.com.

 

 

 

Lake Superior , Midnight

Dark beneath a bluer wave

tricks us into moving closer,

while the reason makes what we see

unknown.

 

Together they're a magnet that cannot resist me,

because I was born a stiller place.

 

So at dusk I approach.

I spend a night with this tireless nocturne –

the fluid attraction between two living things –

engulfed in the reason some never leave.

Lull

At this window

Above the voices

Against the rocks

 

He says Now I’m the one

Who knows nothing

 

More than the love he wakes for

Less than the dream that follows

 

Save the way

To bury all dead things

On Writing

How putting all of this down is easy

compared to the silence that follows.

 

Each time we stop

we are sacrificed to the quiet that watches us.

 

How all of writing wracks the virgin state,

violating our nature without conscience.

 

Raped by the opening of doors, we wake to find ourselves

water tossed from the broken window.

Youth’s Last Stand

I know you hear it.

In the breaking air of dawn,

the future is coming for you.

 

It is the ocean encroaching on your feet,

And you are wrong to have stayed this long.

But you are not afraid.

 

For like a hundred times before,

waving your flag with fingers crossed,

you will approach me and

pretend to give yourself up.