Who Am I?

Well,
I must be
that ******,
the one
in the black hoodie
***** sweatpants
and an uncombed eye,
that's always wooly
scratchy,
bloodshot
with searching for
my stash spot,
that ******
in your peripherals
that you keep your eye on
because he's
not
in a polo
looking nice,
talking
"well-spoken"
and
not
a threat
to your beautiful
lily-white daughter.


Because I grew up
fixing myself
ramen noodles
and
lifting the welcome mat
after school,
I must also be
that ******
whose father wasn't
in the same house
until he was age 13,
and when I tell you that,
you weren't expecting it
because "you're not a racist."
but
you weren't surprised.


You see,
I must be
that ******,
a stand-in
for all other *******.
I must be that ******
who represents
all *******,
not because you are racist,
but because I'm the only
******
you've met
who doesn't talk like
dis, y'know whatmsayin,
and i talk like
this, do you know what I'm saying?
I must be that ******.

In order for you
to feel okay
being around me
I must be that ******
who goes to college
does the right
thing
the white thing
and gets a job
a nice little house,
a nice black wife
with a nice
new england
clear
dialect,
(what I was
trying to get at
earlier
is that ****** dialects,
by their mere intonation,
denote stupidity,
right?)
and doesn't say a word
when his white friends
make ****** jokes
or talk in a ****** dialect
mocking some Aunt Jemima
they heard at Walmart.

But,
I also must be that ******
who doesn't step out of line
and say
"WHY IS IT
THAT IN EVERY SINGLE
ENGLISH CLASS
WE READ
ONLY
TWO
BLACK AUTHORS
A SEMESTER,
AND THAT'S
ENOUGH,
JUST ENOUGH
TO KEEP THE
****** PARENTS
HAPPY."

And If I happen to be a ******,
I,
by all means,
must not be that ******
who had a white girlfriend,
and
this girlfriend
after dating
a ******,
tried to date a white guy
she liked,
and when she told him
that she had dated,
loved,
and yes,
******
a ******,
he had said back:
"I can't believe
you ****** a ******."

Then again,
I must be that ******
with the big swinging ****
able to destroy
a white girl's ******
with its pulverizing
power.

And,
please,
If I am going to be a ******
don't be the one
who writes a poem
about
having to be
that ******,
because those
kinds of *******
are being
over-sensitive,
those dashiki-wearing-*******
who think
"Da white man dis."
and "Da white man dat."

Because
I am not one of those *******
descended from the first people on earth,
your brother,

not in the ****** way,

but the familial,
species way.

Why am I even writing
this, ****** isn't a main operative
word anymore.

Search and find "******"
and
replace with
"Black Guy." That way it becomes
a joke.

Hometown girls
are real with you.
If they don't like you,
they'll even make their *****
look ugly;
pulling them in all the way
to the tops of their thighs
through their buttholes
and you can smell the stench
in your brain.

But when they let you in,
when they let you sit on their ears,
it's like warp-drive.

They smoke virginia slims,
because that's what their mom's smoke,
and the bags under their eyes
are filled with nicotine,
but they're pretty bags,
purses of flesh
full with the kinetic beauty of coal.

Hometown girls are mostly black,
mostly white,
fifty-fity,
but nobody's checking
and when they whisper something nice in your ear
it's colored with a microbrew
or a wheel of Jim Beam.

Sometimes they'll take you by the wrist
into the bathrooms;
sometimes they'll take your drink
when you're not looking
and smile when you catch them
with it on their lips.

But that smile is good even,
on par with a supernova
in its ability to crush
and make beautiful.


But most of the time,
they stand around
outside Casbah
and Motorco
--if they're bougie
it'll be West End--
in the middle of the night
under the porch of the sky
looking out with amber
slitted eyes
like cats,
their legs twitching thoughtfully
as they wait for cabs
and pick at the night.

Hometown girls
are ****/beautiful
because they'll watch your every move
from the gallery
out of empathy,
knowing they've been that ***** before,
knowing they've been that lonely,
knowing they just want to get drunk
and want to be around randoms
that aren't so random.

Bob and weave,
keep your tongue
out your teeth,
keep two fists up at all times,
don't let your hands drop
below your hipline,
that's how you get cleaned,
that's how you wind up
with a head full of bees,
move your feet,
off the heels
jump on the combs,
keep your toes wide,
and once you feel that
supreme blow
to the temple
give yourself a lil tap
wasps come to **** the bees
when the queen
is incapacitated.

I think about my death.

The seed of life
is so
profuse,
and that
is
my demise.

I might live,
but I will die.

When I dream,
I dream
of Judy Greer.

She's been there
talking
about
love and *******
and death
and hurting.

So what can I say now,
when bulletholes
of lightning
people my dreams.

When a couple
shots of whiskey
have put me on the edge
of missing you
over memories.

I moan
and dream,
because dreaming
is a moan
for hope.

And being in for a bid,
is the same
as your lips
to
my
lips.

So I evade promises
and dribble
into traps
of
depression.

I've had this problem
for so long,
it seems inconsequential
that I might
wring my neck
by an electrical cord,
or by the chords
of your heart..

Because i miss you
and that
type
of
thing
never lets go
to much.

I stare at humans with an anchor in my hands.

I don't know if I should break
their noses,
or
tell them how it got there.

Don't hate me,
just be grateful;
that I told you I'm so sad
and worn out.

"Have you talked to dad,
since you've been at school?"

"Nope."

"Are you coming home
for thanksgiving?"

"I don't know."

Josephina
breathes in a crackle
over the phone.

New York,
a cacophony
in the background.

A background of cold,
and
people talking
while walking
while hailing a yellowcab with a left
and slow-rolling heads locked
onto the phones in their right.

These people enter taxis,
not knowing if they're ever
going to reach home,
or the airport,
or union square,
just going
on the promise
that they won't become
road-****.

I can't feel it in my yellow apartment.

If anything,
my yellowcab
idles.

Through the receiver

A squad car
rings nervously,
then
after a lungful
of garbage-smelling air,
it becomes a full blare.

A pause
of
noise
always ensues,
just for a second,
the entire corner
becomes a silent silo
of human beings.

"How's new york?"

"you know,
dad called me
and asked about
how to get on a diet,
can you believe that?"

Yes,
I can
dad is a fat ****,
a pink, white belly
of a man. And a few
sandbags for chins.

"That's good."

"So I'm not going to see you?"

"Probably not."

"Well, you should call dad,
talk to him,
he loves
you."

Some conversations,
acheive nothing.

The same
tired, dead things
get run over.

Road-****.

Josephina believes she is the spatula
that will bring back
pancake squirrels
and
pancake relationships.

As much as you don't know
about me and dad's relationship,
I can give you a kodak moment.

A snapshot,

of a hovering man,
pointing at his son's neck,
searching for the misplaced vertebrae,
the lack
of fear for the world
--"the right kind of fear,
the fear a man
should have
of himself"--
and a son,
hunched,
small hands in fists,
a heavy haul of muscles
pulled into a dark brow
right over black eyes.

This picture
will suffice.

There is some genie
in our house, curdling poisonously.

I stay in the house
with a freckled old lady;
we're roommates,
unlucky enough to meet each other as life abated.

He does not live in the attic,
like a ***** ghoul; or in some
rubbing bottle like an amnesiac.

But we call the spirit lady, because the genie is vicious.

She comes to the house and says we need to move
things
around.

Her eyes are circled by some creamy mascara
into these black, skin-tight, **** rings,
like absurdist ****** targets.

Things are moved,
the genie stays, gets more vicious.

The mongerer is blamed
for bad things:
broken pots, fights over rent,
**** on the toilet seat,
lost keys.

We call the spirit lady,
this time her fingers jingle with golden rings,
her wrists sing with wrought-iron rainbows,
and says rain will send that sucker running.

So, we build little smoke pits in our house,
and take the most important things:
bills, and alumni letters from my school,
and birthday cards for her,
and burn them until it rains.

The genie calls us falsifiers.

The spirit lady comes back,
a necklace of grimacing clams around her neck,
and knocks around dancing, dancing,
a frenzy, a wildness, a knee-knocking,
throat-throtlling, dismantingly,
limb-ecstasy,
until she poops out and,
breathing heavy,
saying finally:
"there is nothing I can do for you,
I don't think I ever could,
some things are just bad luck."

She turns,
walks away,
and one of her clams drops from her necklace,
it says made in America on the inner lip.

The genie left a few weeks later.

Ever felt like you had the one
for you, and
you just let her duck out?

See, I got this girl.

See, I had this girl.

See, this girl really ****** me,
see?

This girl was an island girl.

This girl ****** in torrents.
Argued in cannonball barrages.
And hugged like a linebacker.

Those island girls are thick:
all thighs,
all ***,
all fire
like the volcanoes we all come from
and forget to remember.

But they remember.

And they live it.

See, this island girl, was a bigger, thicker one,
and I could throw her around any way I wanted.

And she liked it,
and I liked it,
and,
I'm telling you,
this island girl could take an ***-canning whooping
like nobody.

I mean, I'd make sure her ****** became
a bruised rose
and she felt it.

But,to talk about love,
the *** was a good thing,
but she could argue,
and I think I like that
more than I'm beginning to realize.  

Just like a short poem on a ***** day.

I'm paying for the ****,
leave me alone
and let me sleep.

"You're not just here for yourself,
Mr. Willis,
you're here for your classmates,"
Mr. **** said.

"I'm here to get a degree."

"Well, I'm sorry"

Yea, "Well",
now get your *** out my face
and let me sleep...

Today
go outside
after you've had
all the turkey,
stuffing,
cranberry sauce.

After you fill
your belly
with
a cornucopia
of food.

Go out there
and thank god
that those
Indians
died off so quickly.

Thank god
for giving us this land,
because we own it,
we can own
it.

It is ours
because God
said it should be ours,
not because
we took part
in one of the greatest
genocides
in history.

Breathe in
all that good air,
and thank god
that you don't have to be
on a reservation.

A refugee
on the motherland.

Our bad.

I TOLD THAT ******* TO SWING ON ME,
TAKE A CHANCE
MOTHEFUCKER,
TAKE A CHANCE,
I WANNA GET MY *** KICKED,
LET ME
CHILL HERE ON THE EARTH
WHILE YOU STAND OVER ME,
SPITTING
AND
DISSING.

BUT WHEN I GET UP
IMMA  BE MAD
ENOUGH
TO SCREAM
AND ****,
IMMA BE
A MANIAC
ON YOUR DOORSTEP,
IMMA BE
A ******
WITH NO CHANCES
WHEN I'VE GOT THREE.

SO WHEN YOU SWING ON ME *******,
SWING ON ME
AS YOU TRY AN CALL ME A *****,
JUST KNOW THAT IMMA COME AT
YOU
WITH A THOUSAND GRENADES
IN MY FINGERTIPS,
AND WHEN YOU DON'T SWING,
AND DON'T DO ****,
I'LL KNOW HOW YOU'RE MADE,
IMMA KNOW THAT ALL THAT **** YOU TALK
IS JUST A MISNOMER.

MY FINGERS GRIP MY HEART
AS MUCH
AS THEY GRIP FISTS.

KNOW THAT IMMA CATCH YOU
WITH A RIGHT HOOK
FULL OF VEINS
AND A MAGAZINE
WITH YOUR NAME ON IT.

CHECK ME,
IMMA HIT UP SOMETHIN TONIGHT,
IMMA BRING MY FISTS
LIKE BURNERS,
MAKE YOU FEEL THE FIRE OF HELL,
CAUSE I'M ON THE EDGE,
AND THIS GIRL ****** UP MY HEART,
MY GRAMMA IS AT THE END OF HER ROPE,
MY MAMA IS STILL POOR,
MY SISTER STILL DOESN'T KNOW HERSELF,
AND MY HOMIES
ARE FAR AWAY,
FARTHER THAN YOU CAN SEE,
SO IMMA CHILL ON THIS PULSATING LEVEE.

Some girls just like something very traditional. does that make them any less of a woman. can a woman be a traditionalist and still be a feminist? I think so. I think that what we shared in that time was exactly what we wanted, to fall back into structured and secure roles, because we'd been through the centrifuge lately. And that may not have been who the both of us were at heart, but it worked to heal us, to make us both better for the future, and most importantly, less cynical. I think that what is most feminist about any relationship is the ability to choose. I've been in relationships where I'm the dominant one, and others where I'm not. It takes the ability to check your own self and being a pragmatist, because if you love someone you will change for them. You won't change your personality, but you'll change the way you approach a relationship if you care about them enough. I think that's what feminism boils down to. Allowing both partners to choose their roles in the relationship instead of having them chosen for them. So, **** it, my girl wants to be Susie Homemaker; that's her choice and I lay my head on that.

Free concerts
are full of potheads,
they get all in your ear
and start talking about
the land of milk and honey,
DENVER ******* COLORADO.

The beers cost
15 bucks
for pisswater
and barely a pint.

The girls
all wear pink spaghetti straps
sagging acid-wash jeans,
and a smell like
old milk.

The old people
dance.

the old people dance;
there wrinkly
pterodactyl arms
flapping as they swirl the air
with bad knuckles.

The air smells,
like sweat.

Sweat smells like
toilet water.

Free concerts are usually outside,
so hope to ******* Gaia that it doesn't rain,
because you're stuck there,
drunk and yelling
dancing and laughing
******* and falling.

Matt, Dang and Me.

We spent our summer going to free concerts,

because the girls that go to free concerts
think tattoos and finger-******* and toilet humor
is more ****
than money.

The old people dance with you
performing some type of necromancy
in the air
that brings dead things inside of you
back to life.

And the bud,
it's so ******* sticky,
and it causes a hacking
paroxysm of coughing
to the point that you can
taste the blood in your mouth,

because those people from
DENVER ******* COLORADO,
really know their ****.

I miss the drunks. The y3lling.
The inhalation of beer and cigarettes
Chased down by ego and godlessness.

How many times
hqve I written to this song,
and never heard beauty once?

Like the sweet pinch of a grapefruit,
before the sunset of sweat,
the same sunset that hailed warfare for boys.

I loved you so much once,
I still do, but you are like mist,
and  I am blind.

I miss backstabbers, creeps, catfish,
vampires, crows,
an angel.

When I was young I would screech down the hill
in my toy truck,
plastic chassis a powerhouse,
canary and howling,
I'd crash into the same cherry tree a million times.

Call me Avalanche.

Call me Indisputable.

Call me the Powerhouse.

Call me,
I missed you.

Isela
takes it in
the mouth.

She'd get on her knees,
positioning herself
half-in,
half-out
of focus.

Just enough for Joe,
behind the Cannon,
to capture
the whole thing.

Eric,
the producer,
was on his hands and knees
beside Joe.

'Come on Izzy
work it,
work the ****.'

'That's right,
stroke it,
make him sing.'

'I love it,
Izzy.'

Izzy wanted to bite
down.

She hated each and every ****,
she ever saw,
but she had a few things to do.

Her **** had to be new
and renewed
on the daily,
her ***** had to get wet
on command,
and her stroke had to be
so fast
they'd burn the dude
as her mouth
cooled.

After her mouth
was littered,
and her face was a mess
of spinal glitter -- You could make a man
come out of his
brain, Eric would say.

Izzy would get in her car,
wiping her arm
where'd she'd gone
to the clinic
to get pricked
and tested,
and pull a long haul of Virginia Slims
down her throat.
'
It was always the first sweet thing
she tasted.

Izzy would pull into the Terrace View apartments,
all that long black hair,
and wipe all that make-up off,
three napkins-worth,
so she could kiss her baby.

Because Rocco was in for a bid,
and not coming home anytime in
the forseeable future.

Her microbiology degree was somewhere
in her closet underneath those pink stillettos and
more fishnets than fish.

And Izzy knew
that with those double d's;
*** like a backseat,
mouth that could grease
a ****,
and her hands
Eric liked to call his own,
that she could pay the light bill
and maybe
put Romeo
into a daycare center
that wasn't full of roaches
and
angry *******.

"Someday I'll get out,
but it's illogical
to say
with all the money I'm making,
and it's just a job
when you get down to it,
I've ****** a lot of *****
and never gotten
paid."

Rocco Jr.'s cheeks were always the second
sweet thing
she tasted.

"I know a lot of girls
that got defeated by this game."

I am a lovesick puppy.

Wanting so badly,
to let my nose rest on someone's ***,
and stick my tongue
in their stinker.

Aren't we all lovesick puppies?
don't all our fingers
smell like the unloading dock
where we were first castrated?

There is a man
who writes signs
for the homeless,
puts different lives
on display,
spends his time
night and day
over squares of cardboard
or triangles of vinyl,
he turns them into
war vets
or leukemia survivors,
he slaves away
so that they'll get
people to listen,
he wants people
to hear the heart
of the world murmuring
as it cries,
because we have left
them,
their lack of a place
to reside,
is our society's dark side,
so he is not a man
of the people
he is a man for the people,
he wants that spare
nickel,
dime,
or dollar
as much for them
as his words
are for himself
and his own sense
of redemption,
because this world
has gone cold on the surface
but it's heart
still burns,
still makes you uncomfortable,
when you see his signs
in the hands
of men and women
in the grassy medians.

Whenever I'm around my family,
I get this low kind of feeling.

My family is full
with the kind of people
that become vps,
investment bankers,
nurses,
lawyers.

me:
little ****-head
that smokes ****,
calls himself
"a writer",
and doesn't like to have
long conversations
about his future.


I am not one of them,
I am not a black sheep, or a black pharmacist,
or a black lawyer.

I am something
that wants to become
something,
when I am unsure
of what that something
is.

A continual
rebirth of somethings
likening myself
to God
with so much
internal creation.

This is malignant
to my family's ideals
of self-assuredness
and placement,
brutal placement
in America.

A fortified wall is nothing against a surfing barracuda
during a bad dream full of bad intentions:

Wave-action makes you look drunk,
stumbling in the water, lazy as a jellyfish carcass on shore I stare at you.

I am with that girl
the one in the silvery bikini
and wet hair,
fanning on her clumsy shoulders in thin strands.

I'll be with her till the end. I'll make this stand. This stand against the wave coming in.

Turning around in the barrel of a wave,
you wave me in with you;
smiling up to your incisors. How cleanly
you are able to bite off chunks of meat.

The wave womps the **** out of you.

Thunder is under there, thunder
of waves, lightning of jellyfish,
brutalized clams,
hard-pressed sand,
all confused in the barrel of betrayal that is the wave,
while the wave yawns and grins.

Nothing can stand the wave,
I hope you ******* drown in there;
I hope that others just like you,
eat you,
that you become seafood.

You don't feel the same
chemistry
with me
as you do
with him?

I asked.

And she just fell into my arms
like
a building.

She was a building.

And I held her,
the biggest girl
I'd ever known,
as she cried,
in my tiny shoulders
and cut out canyons
with her tears.

I had tried that night
so hard,
I wanted that river
of hair,
a river of coal,
to be white with stars
again,
to be so full of a cosmos
with it's millions of chances.

But it didn't work,
and I held that girl,
so close,
because I wanted to hold
that big girl
and let her know
it was okay
to feel small
from time to time.

"I don't really like sports."

I feel like
you've been mis-advertising
yourself.

On your profile
your likes are:
Soccer.
Basketball.
Football.
And
Rugby.

"That's cool."

I'll say anything to get
a girl
to let me stick my hands
in her pants;
even if it means
sacrificing
morals
and
sports.

I've seen cops
way too many times,
too many times
to go through my ****
ripping apart pillows
with switches
and against my better judgment
I did nothing
as I heard the glass of
my grandmother's picture
being tossed around
in the back.

Too many times
asking me questions
about this
and that?
Him or her?
If you help us out,
we'll help you out,
understand?
in their rooms
where no love is grown
and no help is on the way,
their eyes were filled with the fire,
they were finally
gonna get this ******,
make him pay
for crimes he didn't commit.

Too many times
when i was asleep
in some old sewer,
and rolling up
asking me if i was on drugs
or drunk,
and if i didn't leave
they were gonna shove
a nightstick up my ***;
get me used to it.

Too many times have they slowed down
at a light
and turned slowly,
keeping their eyes on me
like I was a wolf,
when they had blood in their eyes
and teeth
in their holsters.

"Where you going tonight?"
as they surrounded me,
another inmate
inside the bounded
bars of an external prison.

Cops never helped me,
never asked
how I was doing,
or why I was doing it,
or why I felt trapped
inside my own body;
all they saw
was another ******
making problems
for the civilized people.

God will remember them,
just as I can't forget.

And most of the time,
it was other black men,
some fruit bred strong in them,
to hate them bottom-rung *******
because they had escaped
and remade themselves,
apparently.

In truth,
I have killed many of them
in my sleep,
but when I step back,
I see that they are a product
of the same system
that says the guns, drugs, and violence
are part of the ****** condition,
that only shows a ****** on tv
when he's *****, or killed somebody,
another mugshot for you to put in your
scrapbook of fear.


So, no I don't hate them,
I hate seeing people that look like me
getting killed
before they come to fruition.

I hate that
:"black"
is used as a term
meant to engender
fear.

I hate that I walk down the street,
and a white girl
walks ahead
turning around
to
check for me.

I hate that when me
and some of the homies
walk down the street,
our hoodies pulled over our heads,
people look behind us
for the grim reaper.

There is hope,
but without
it being fostered,
The fruits
die on the vine,
noosed up
in a new way
as they drop.

*******,
hoes,
crazy,
*****.

Catch me on a friday night,
and I might
say them all.

But what I say
and what I feel
is a different
thing.

Because *******,
hoes,
womps,
don't have vocabularies
like boulders.

They can't destroy.

And with a new mindset,
I can say
a few things.

A ***** is a girl
without hope.

A ***
is a girl
that likes ****
and doesn't
like
love.

A crazy one
is a girl that gets by.

A ****
is a girl
that doesn't know the difference
between the three
and operates
on a thin line;
because *******
have treated her like ****
and no new ******
can make her think
any different.

But a girl,
alas
a
girl.

A girl
is full of love
and platitudes.

A girl
has her hands
on your heart
all the time.

She has a vocabulary
and says **** a Webster's
because she's got a new dictionary
that didn't even exist
before she let it out her mouth.

A girl
makes you re-define
the word
love,
with all its
futile resentment
and
disenchantment,
because she'll keep you coming
back
for more,
even as she says
"no,
you're talking crazy,
you gotta
go."

So trust me when I say this,
I could **** with a girl's head before,
but this girl
she's maneuvered me into thinking
about how ****** up
I
really
am.

And that's as smart
as
I've
ever
been.

I used to know a girl named Calypso,
she had beautiful shorthand
and we used to fall asleep
in her mom's house
until that was gone,
until the storm came
and she was an island
I had drawn with ink.

Thai China
buzzes
because
we
buzz.

It quiets
because
we
quiet.

I'm at the end of my stamina,
me and you,
we've had a few beers;
got to talking;
and BAM!!!:

WE"RE MOROSE.


The business crowd
goes crazy
for some Thai China.

The tempers
calm
over hot bowls of white rice
(costing $5)
that steam up into
hooked noses.

Our lips,
juicy by now,
are so numb
that
we gave up talking a minute a go.

And got into a *****, male mood.

We just stare at the girls,
the waitresses,
wanting to **** them
in our nasty dreams.

Wanting to stick
our *****
in EVERY HOLE,
but we just get drunker
and drunker
and stir over
our bowls of rice.

The business
of business
commences;
our suppressed urges
and office angers
dull
by the mouthful.

The way I memorialize
a woman's heart
against my own,
is by pointing
to the scars she has left
on my heart
in my moments of solitude.

Like the wounds
on sharks during
mating,
I hold close
those moments
when I sank my teeth in
and when she sank
into me.

So
when
they
ask
me:

"Would you have done
anything differently,
now that you see how it
turned out?"

And I say:
"No."

I cherished those moments
when your placed your mouth
on my heart
and squeezed with
perfect teeth.

When you boil it down,
really get down to the flesh,
bone;
marrow;
mitochondria;
I am nothing but a fizzled
thing
pushing
third-rate
pulses
out of a fourth-rate heart;
that's why when I ***** you to me
in an impermanent cowgirl;
chest
to
chest;
a good, running thump
is answered
by a
descending blip.

the older generation
thinks we're all ****-heads,
ritalin-riddled serial killers,
serious ingesters
of buckets-of-blood thrillers,
they look at me funny
when I sag my pants
look at me funny
when I've got my girl in my arms
and her hands on my zipper
moving slowly
to the biggest dipper, too loud,
they say,
too loud,
too much cursing,
too much blood and gore,
too many games about getting money
and running over grannies to get more;
Ren and Stimpy,
and
Bert and Ernie,
two homos
that need to burn
for their sin,
the world is going
to hell in a handbasket.

Come to me,
come to me
with paper and pencil
and too much coffee.

Come to me
like the Sahara.

Come to me
like skyscrapers
and bandaged
clouds.

Come to me
in a whirl of flesh
vivid as oil
under a streetlight,
I will make a rainbow.

Come to me with optimism
or pessimism,
hope and death.

Come to me
like I came to you in the night,
when you were suicidal
and I had to hold you
away from your stash
of oxy's
like a knot
and uncoil myself
in the morning.

Come to me
when the fish run,
and the whales
scream
and the jellyfish
wash ashore
like glass hearts
solid and fracturing.

Making love
is the city of ruin.

The worst kind of fog
captures it,
a fog where the streetlights
are not pushing out
light
into the right places.

Light falls only on the glossy mercedes
and it's rims
full of hope and wealth.

The skyscrapers
reach the sky
and finger the underbelly
of an afterlife,
as if there is something to look
forward
to.

The buses
transport
souls
and
promise,
or seem too.

But this is all a lie,
the lights only create light,
darkness grows,
the skyscrapers touch the sky,
yes,
but they don't know a thing
about goodness,
and the buses are full
of
hopelessness.

But when we make love,
it is like
we are only looking for the good things
in the city
as we get robbed blind.

When I touch your belly button,
I can feel your heart in your stomach,
so low and so unwanting
that it dropped
to a place of digestion,
of eating what we had
and ******* it out.

It is ok to realize
this untruth
late in the game,
it is wrong to continue
when we know of the untruth,
and that is what we are doing,
that's why I hate
you
and still *******.

I love the city,
in its ruinous returns
I keep fooling myself
into thinking
this is the best thing that's ever happened
to me.

Your ***** must be the greatest,
because I'll never leave
even when we call making love
a city of hope
when we ****
and it's a dystopia
of
destruction.

when me an Gnat split
we kept our eyes open,
cause we could close them,
behind blindness,
and I could take her soul
for nothing,
and I could keep it forever,
so now what we do,
is set fire to those
in the same situation,
we put their hearts
on our grills,
and tell them to wait
until they have regained
the fire,
so then,
society wasn't ready
for the realest ****** alive,
becuase by then
society
had told them
that ******,
emos,
true-*** emos,
them *******
could just drop
everything
to keep you on the low-low,
and they were the realest
I ever knew.

When things were going great
we'd eat transcendental dinners,
we'd take livers
in rainbow saucers
and ladle them
in tartar sauce
until our mouths
were full of salt,
sometimes we'd go to Thai China
and make interstellar fighters
out of the wise guts
of
cream-colored Starships.

But the nights when we went
to Burger King were the greatest,
we'd have simple dinners:
99 cent burgers
and fries like elephant ears,
we'd sit in our booth
in the corner,
you farting ketchup
out of like
twenty packets
into a red **** pile,
and I farted
like
twenty farts
out of my ***,
but I like
simple things;
they are natural
even if they don't sound
that way.

I swear,
I love
a girl
with
biggg-***
lips.

The kind of lips
that could pull a ****** into
a sanatarium.

I'd go crazy
willingly.

Put me in the strait-jacket
of your mouth.

I'll kiss every crevice because
you've got two anacondas of muscle covering
perfect teeth.

I'll grip the shoulders of your jaw,
as you squeeze me with those
biggg-*** lips
so hard
that my backbones
break.

In the middle of weekends
of drunkenness
I cry
over what I see.

I cry
over the man
I gave a marlboro
too,
as he bumbled
and shook
to get it too his mouth,
I leaned in
and gave him a cover
for his light.

I cry
over the deaths
and vigils
in the projects,
cry
over the fact
that there are men
who have been
killed
over menial ****.

I cry
over my mother
and grandmother,
because my love
tools away
in the darkness
of my soul
and I am not useful.

I cry
because I have not
seen my best friend
in years,
and I will perhaps
never see him again,
even when
we kept neighborhood ******
away,
back to back
swinging at the world
just to keep our
heads clean.

I cry
over love.

I cry
because there
is something warm
inside me,
as warm
as this gin.

So keep me in your prayers
I am a man crying,
because it roils
inside of me,
because I can't keep my emotions
in check, and don't want to.

I was raised around
a strong woman
with even
stronger emotions
that could be felt like
velvet
and pebbles,
and she taught me
how to be a man
and not lose my heart.

Just because they have disappeared
does not mean that
i'm clutter-free.

It's a cluster-free, a clusterfuck of ******* insanity.

My uncle left right after
my Grampa's funeral,
split like a chicken's *****,
"he's in the airforce
or some other human-processing factory,"
Ma would say to me.

My aunt mable,
dipped out
dripped out two kids
then split
like a pillsbury biscuit.

My aunt pat's mom,
left Aunt pat on Aunt FLo's doorstep,
in the sole of her instep,
stepped out on a kid
and a husband
with a left shoe,
the right one
was left behind.

My pops
was forced out,
I saw him drag Ma
through the halls,
saw him whip her face in
with the brass-end
of a leather belt,
everybody's face was leathery
when the cops came in.

There is a litany of disappearing faces
in my family picture, a litany
of the disappeared
who reappear
over thanksgiving and christmas dinners,
when we wax nostalgiac
or hurt
over turkey,
gravy,
and biscuits.

Over love
and how many are missing.

When he was seventeen years old,
your protagonist
asked his father
a question about heartbreak, his own perhaps.

The father
answered:
"Why would she love you?
I can see why?
You're acting like a *****?"

Each line a question,
demanding an answer.

Answers your protagonist
did not have.

So your protagonist
ventured out into the
world,
and became a rambler.

Rambling off nonsense
with the rapidity
of lemming chatter.

He became
the great Rambler,
mumbling about
love,
until even his dreams
became ****** up streams
of language.

He caromed off cliffs of reality
bumping against those barriers
of his fatherland
until he was hurtling
into the rambling ocean
to drown
unconsciously.

When I'm not back home
in the city
where the bulls cry
in fumes,
**** goes awry.

The girl
that
I loved
once,
calls
twice.

And then a third time,
I pick up,
and it's war
from the first
breath.

D-Day on a tuesday night,
the troops storming the shore,
the bombs blazing
in the infrerno of night,
my ex calling me
talking about
compassion.

So what did I do?
really?

I just tried
to be
civil.

I tried to tell her that my heart
was in another place,
that it was bending
and finally
broken.

Compassion doesn't live here anymore,
because so many questions
about cheating with white girls,
the same kind that her irish-italian blood
resembled,
boiled down
to
self-hate.

I tried to tell her
that I was in love,
that I was over her,
that these arguments
were the mute points
of her politicism.

She couldn't sway me
with a thousand dollars
or a million.

I was in love
and it hurt to argue,
because I wasn't talking
to the one,
I wanted to.

I was ******* with heathers,
when I wanted to know more
about  flying eagles
and the depth of feminism.

I wanted to know how deep it reached
her heart,
and how.

So now,
I'm angry
that you called,
because it wasn't the number I wanted,
not the voice
so clear
and liquid
as
truth.

The way
we used to handle it,
was through bars,
we'd rap
and I'd start
throwing fists,
I catch a ******
in the hip
quick,
catch him in the hallway
or
anywhere else
he chose to spit.

I swear, my face was bloodied
so much that I couldn't see,
a ****** six-foot three,
tried to put me in a headlock,
said i was a *****,
so i started going in,
i got my face
messed up,
my cheekbones are high
because they were punched
up there,
but when i was a kid
i'd never do ****,
i wonder what my legacy will be,
will i be remembered for the love
that i was afraid to show,
or the hate
i was too ready
to make plausible.

It's so sloppy
down
there
like runny eggs.

So smelly
like
hippo diarrhea.

So humid
like the inside
of your mouth,
in the same exact places.

How is it that this seems to happen
over night?

I'm not a grimy human being.

Hygiene
is the closest thing
I have to a religion.

It's time for a washing.

P.S.
I write a lot of poems about my *****.
They are very near and dear to me.
Don't hate,
appreciate,
ruminate,
metriculate
down there
and do a good washing
yourself.

"We need to maintain our nether regions
for the sake of posterity."

Barney Rubble
said that.

It's a cool place to meet.
25 cent wings.
Nice, tiny booths
Lit by tiny electric lamps
In the guise of candles,
That give everything a nice, golden glow.
It's a Corona light,
And Corona-colored light always makes me feel
at ease.

She pulls up in a silver acura.

Gets out of the car and I can
see her ***
from the front of her
as she syrups over.

She’s got on a Black tanktop;
black bra straps showing
against white-pink
puerto rican skin
all while holding up those veritable C's.

Her hips burst against
a
long, beige
d
r
e
s
s,                                                                                
and I'm wanting to slide my hands all the way up her shirt to that black bra, and snap it off.

We have conversations about feeling older than
eighteen
and twenty-one
respectively.

Our lips are saucy
and oily. Tiny chicken scraps
can be felt in our teeth.

"I just started reading Starship Troopers."

"Yea, I love that movie."

I've never seen the movie,
but it endears her to me

that she loves it.

"Do you have any plans?"

"Plans?"

"After college?"

I plan on finishing my wings
before you, then I'm hoping
you'll let me hold your ****.

"Not yet."

"You know I've read some of your poetry."

"What do you think?"

"I like it," She smirks,
uncomfortably.

She ladles a wing in a slick of sauce.

"Truthfully, it was too much for me,
you really shouldn't talk about things like that."

She brings the wing
to her lips
and smacks it down
with a loud ******* noise
of a working, pink tongue.

I’ve wanted to hold her **** ever since I met her.
Now I’m lost.
Because she’s got black eyes
and I’m not even thinking about her **** or her bra.


I start thinking about how white her teeth are,
and how much two people can never know about each other.

I actually tried that poetic
Rico suave **** with a girl.
We were both naked
Lying in bed, her messing with the hair
On my chest and me lying there
Trying to come up with an excuse
as to why she couldn't stay
or why I had to leave.

I like her enough,
but the way
she looks at me,
she's inviting something bad.
She's so lonely in her eyes.

She twirls one hair in a pink fingernail
and looks up at me.

She says to me:
"Give me some poetry."

I says to her:
"You've got green eyes like the Mediterranean, I think I could mine
something out of you, your eyes are just that full of something beautiful."

It sounded fake
and corny as **** coming out of my mouth.


I hated her for even asking me
To sell out like that.

But she smiled a hungry,
ravenous smile, because she hadn’t had love
or even flattery
In a while and she was
hungry for that kind of poetic
Hollywood *******.

I'm a sucker for
girls going weak for me,

and me going even weaker for them.

It's a form of humiliation
and a bad way to end something good
like we had.

Lisa Nelle
had two names
like a pornstar.

She'd put her makeup on and stick all this blackness on
under her eyes
like she was holding night
in bags.

We watched Hey Arnold! DVDs at five in the morning,
and smoked the whole place up.

Sometimes her and Alexis would go in the back room.

Alexis never liked me.

Lisa Nelle had this way of looking at you
where she'd take her eyes
and she'd work her way
down to your stomach.

She could find a star in my intestines,
a dwarf light could warble in my stomach
and she'd see it through my belly button.

She'd pull it out
wings and all
and tell me
that Khalil knew the answers.

Out of this two-ton purse she carried around,
she'd whip out a compilation of Khalil Gibran.

One time she told me how her father
used to pull her hair
and thighs.

She didn't say anything about it again.

When we tripped shrooms,
she took my hands and put them on her neck
and asked me to feel for the nebulas
underneath her skin.

When I read
some of the stuff you send me,
the emails,
texts
or poems,
I can't help but wonder how many words
I now know as a result of you
that I wouldn't know
if I hadn't been looking
around for bud
and someone I knew
that
knew you.

I'm sorry Lisa Nelle,
that things didn't work out with you and Alexis
when they did
with you
and
Sabrosa.

Sometimes I hate myself too.

Elise
and
Romeo
got on the bus.

Elise carried a cake
with a thousand red
ribbons
dripping like
loose ***** lips,
or so they appeared to Romeo.

Romeo came on with
a hard-on
on his face,
or so it appeared to Elise.

"I don't want
any other man
over at my
house,
I don't care if he's your cousin,
you hear me?"

Elise let out a silver snarl.

"I'm not playing with you
woman."

Elise's whispers
wavered between razor-thin roses
and soft spikes.

"I love you
Romy,
but you're on some
other,
I ain't seen a man
in a while,"

The roses that break the skin,
the spikes
that blunt the pain.

"Oh that's how it is?"

"It has to be."

Elise
carried the cake off.

Romeo
got stuck with the cart
full of groceries,
and three wheels missing,
just dragging
the thing.

Elise strutted like fat *******
strut.

Romeo called after her
about other men,
other men,
other men
that had been in his house
without him knowing,
he hated and loved her,
dragging all the sustenance
in the world
behind him.

Elise loved him too,
loved him
even when she was with
other men,
and that's the thing
he couldn't figure
out.

Love is a hard thing
to deal with
for anybody.

You and your gold doorknockers,
those two rings
of golden milk
in your ears,
I love you for the things
that go into your ears,
for the Odysseys
and Onegins
and all the love letters
of Abelard and Heloise
that make all that milk
into a cream.

Your hoops
hang high and tight
until you forget to take them out,
I like when you forget to take them out,
and in the mornings
I wake up
to your low-tolling jingle
in gallons
and the liveliness of your jaw
saying things
that wake me up
with a natural cheeser on my face
and questions galore
in my dry mouth
and lungs.

"I will eat your ******* **** off
in your sleep,
this is just disgusting"

We had been conversing proper cleaning methods concerning the latrine.

"Who does that?
Just ****** all over the toilet seat and doesn't clean it."

"Who leaves a ****** ****** in the toilet
and doesn't flush?"

We resolved the situation amicably like adults.

you look so good
like a goddess
where's the courage to tell you?

do
I know the right words?

An innocence of love like
a bird in the sky,
in its cerulean heaven,
all its purity
untainted.

all the painters in the world
using all their colors
like ravens and vultures,
and the advertisers
using maroon and crimson
like doves and love,
they just don't know.

How you look in a snapshot,
is better than a mural.

I hate that we can't talk any more,
seems decrepit, I'm so poor,
spoiled by the gift of your lost love,
like a pearl in my mouth,
every gulp of the sea
is a tearjerker.

All I want is love and affection
from the eden of your love,
the juice of your apple
a knowledge
only concerning to gods.

The seed of your body,
a peachtree paradise,
each pod dropping to the body of my death,
like the shroud of renewal.

Each new picture of you:
the destruction of your youth,
and the eruption of your wonderland,
is another nail,
another regretful wish
that I'd seen and understood
everything beautiful about you.

Even in the moontide hours,
when the dawn brawled
and your teeth crawled against the loose skin of my earlobes
as you gripped with pearly whites
my lying flesh,
and my lips touched every truth you'd never known.

Only god could ever know the pain of now.
Only I could ever wish I knew your heaven.

From the hole
in her acid-wash jeans,
she calls
her ***** a prophet,
from that hole a whole
new world
will be born.

She will push
out
****, ****,
but lastly
she will push out
a new world.

She will push out my fingers,
and my clawing
at her,
she will push out the concealed evil
and the suffocated good.

Slap that ***.
Slap that ***.

Make the evil and good scream,
give birth to a new black
humanity, a breathing wheezing
baby of equal parts good and bad,
king and beggar,
prophet and pessimist,
criminal and revolutionary.


From
her acid-wash jeans
and the hole
that I dug my fingers in
countless times
and made swirls
of mud against her burning
insides and wet flesh,
she will give birth
from a well-rounded hole,
to a well-rounded whole.

There is something about her
that's not good
for letting go,
so I say this here
on a muggy winter night
as she lays on crags
in the wind,
pulling me closer
to those lovely halcyon stars
but a valkyrie of gin.

so I must say goodbye,
to this war machine of love,
I must lay my heart
back in it's proper place
against those soft cheeks of hers
where my lips were boarders
and my heart became wily.

I hate this letting go,
it'd be easier for us to hug,
searching lips buzzing
for the growing rose of the tongue,
I would rather
have things be easy,
and never have to
not see you go,
but whatever we had,
let its skeleton of love
grow old in the murk,
let its bones be recast
into something of worth,
let my heart reside easily
in the oilyness
of iniquity,
someday soon I'll meet another
and start this war machine
with its grandiose sacrifices,
and subliminal pains,
all over again.

So maybe this was your plan all along,
the great general
pushing the arteries around
like so many toy soldiers,
until the whole thing
was gone,
and there was nothing
to remember,
I really don't think so,
but maybe I'm wrong.

I hope you meet him
somewhere nice,
where you are warm
and flakes of yourself fall into
him like glaciers,
I hope he can become
the beast of love to break you down
again
and make you love him insanely
with only the best kinds of sin;
the kind that make you burn warmly
and feel young and wily again.

There's a part of me,
that you have never seen,
it's large, burrowing, dysmorphic
and it tells
me that this is okay,
this is natural,
that the cold rush I feel
is the thermometer saying I'm cooling down
and that love that kept boomeranging
won't be able to reach me
because that part of me
is digging deep for the both of us.

And so,
stuck inside that soggy center
it burrows for fun and survival,
because it knows it can go as deep as it wants,
and no one will ever see it.

This is the beat
for the future.

Slow.

Continuous.

Quick in paces.
Slow in the right
places.

The bassline of the future
should be love.

Let's make it as slow and continuous as our ideals have said it would be.

In the last moments
of the world
let every man kiss every man
every woman kiss every woman
every love see love.

Fuhreal,
let's take love
to a whole new level.

Let's make it so beautiful
that we stop killing cockroaches
and poaching
the god's green broaches of branches
full of howler monkeys
howling for conservation against the parasitism
that man has become accustomed to.

Laugh all you want,
but when I was a kid
I didn't watch
Thriller after dark.

But I danced.
I danced my *** off in that lit living
room
with Joci.

All night long,
popping
and moonwalking.

Now that I'm old(er)
I know how to build spaceships
and I can put
the popcorn
in the microwave
myself.

I can take the popcorn out of the microwave
and watch Thriller all night long.

But
then
my little woodpecker
came.

When I was
Cynical
with power
now and then,
I became
Raw
and uncarved
again.

We dance over the graves all night long.
Our tombstones are smooth
and we make light
together
with our feet.

Little woodpecker
what are you beginning to etch
in me now?