Outside it's snowing.
friday afternoon, construction
site more silent with every
worker welcoming weekend.

there's beauty in this.

gloved pats on dusty shoulders,
flakes of white like god's
dandruff on everything
else.

there's beauty in all of this.

I think of my woman's warm
lips against my cold cheek as I
enter. I will turn down beers
with the boys to feel them sooner,

and there is so much beauty in all
of this.

god is a zen buddhist with an
art degree.
I enter my office and wrestle off
my hi-vis coat, shake the drops from

my hard hat and hang it up.
kick my boots off against the wall
like an eight-year-old coming
home from school.

I could explain a workman's week
ending more poetically, but
life and weekends are both too short,
and there's so much ******* beauty

in all of this, and outside
it's snowing. outside it's
snowing like
hell.

I am cutting all of my shirts this summer
to change each seam into a headband,
one that matches my stretchmarks –
twenty-two, in fact,
that are in perfect style for anyone to see.

I kissed a man and he called me a *****
the name floated like a swan upon glass waves
but I tucked it into my nightgown,
I saved it away. Then one morning he said
it again and I wore it just like pearl feathers –
oh, such a shine that brightened my face!
I am a *****, I told him, but at least I get laid.

Miss mother nature, goddess of earth
your grass masturbates my feet
and the clouds cushion my bedhead –

I am alive
as the plants breathe, I
can watch myself as they watch me.

I am mundane, plain, a concrete building
brutalist and manmade
but their real existence, live vines climb
and make me seem attractive…

Even as I want to be dead,
they kiss me as a husband would his
sleeping wife –

even loving when unaware, forgetting
acknowledgement
being beautiful all alone.

Miss mother nature, goddess of earth
I am alive
no longer manmade in your home.

There is some decadent rise
limp during afternoon highs and
pulsing at moonlight, the morning
knows something I do not know –

glowing, too, at the clarity
the cut of one’s sum, you and I

we are constructed of limbs and
dumb ligaments, bolted joints
and pivots: but most of all,

tissues that bleed when separated,
is that the value our love holds?
Do our nerves have common
apexes, the sapphire ends?

How we glisten and shine,
but do not feel when torn apart –

I sometimes feel like a classic
piano you are playing, one white
key tortured by the skin that does
not match any other’s but yours,
my player’s, retching for noise.

And I will give louder than
midnight howls of a single man,
his fingers fell from his hand –

he knows the morning such as I,
waking up just to decay,

while muscles keep their color,
the sun, or absence of, gives clues:
like footprints, a duet in sand,
I should not wake up without you.

Men grow on my fingers
and I assault them when I write
until each becomes impotent,
I will never let anyone hurt me.

Their pulses stutter and echo
as if I keep them in a barn
but they’re hard under my skin,
their erections like callouses.

Some get restless and none cry
because they know I watch:
I am not here to be present, I
am not here to let people inside.

I am beginning
to believe that breast milk is
made of shooting stars.