Sometimes we feel a bit of pain
over things missing from our lives:

gifts,
childhood
toys,
that old silverware,
memories...

But there is a special kind of pain,
a person feels over people missing from their lives.

There is a trick;
it is not this simple,
see.

The trick is this:
Often, it is only when that person begins to come back
into our lives,
that we realize just how great,
acute,
that pain was,
and is,
and this mutes the happiness one would fully feel
at the reconnect.

I am the caustic clarity in a thought
I am the clearest day covered in storm

I am the brittle bit of bone
that Old Men toss onto the dirt floor
in deep emerald Congo

I am the Winter

I am the glass tube sliding in
the steel cold to the plastic.

I was once something that meant something,
but you see,
I am that lovers' kiss,
that first cross-room-glance,
that needing-you-like-the-desert-needs-the-rain,
that poetic ******* cliche'

And like them,
I,
too,
have become meaningless.

Hey, Starchild…

Can you feel me lean  into you?

The weight of the moon -
immeasurable tons,
yet somehow making you lighter?

(An astronaut on the surface
gaining more height than you expect
with each leap-step.)

In the end, it may in reality be that
the Sun
is illuminated
by the moon.

Of all that stood by,
he alone
ran into the water, fully-clothed
on that cold February day,
to pull her (flailing wet-noodle limbs) from the water.

He alone
recognized she was not waving,
but drowning.
Coincidence they had recently
discovered that poem?

He’d heard once that Bob Dylan said something like,
“When someone is close to suicide, they don’t ask for help,
by sending family a letter in the mail.”

He’d heard,
many times before,
How dangerous it was to attempt such a thing,
but love muted those mnemonic memories,
replaced them with muscle memories
(the heart is a muscle)
and he flew, wind-like,
into the ocean.

Neither ever felt the earth under
their feet
again.

He always just assumed she was joking,
when he'd say he loved her more,
and she agreed.

The sting was in realizing that he could hardly love her at all,
and it would still be true.

He’s staring into the grains, wondering how what she felt
for him could  have become even smaller than those little marks and flecks on the wood.

She’s staring at the screen, her face awash in the glow she now values more
than what he offers her.

And he’s pushing and squeezing on as hard as he knows…

But she sees him as the enemy, her Nemesis, the antithesis
of what she wants at this moment,
those moments,
moments to come,

Her happiness doesn’t come from him any longer.
His smiles, and words, and care, and love,
holding less real estate in her pretty little head
than dried sauce on a plate
or ***** socks
on the floor
by the door
he now stands behind staring at, wishing her face, aglow,
would be smiling on the other side.

Sometimes
I feel spread so thin,
like a man who desperately searches for his home,
and suddenly realizes
he is a vagabond,
and has none...

I spread gravel once
flat across a lawn...
wishing it was me.

I made a trash bag-wreath once
white-pure strips of plastic...
wishing it was me.

I looked up at the delicate sky
held in place forever
crying to be fleeting
trapped in existence: eternity.

I heard family ghost stories once
stained branches on family tree...
wishing it was me.

You found the truck
attractive enough to her
to keep her standing up after each time you ran her down
Each time she saw you coming
She smiled in hope
And ran to the street, stood mid-lane, waving until that moment when
Your metal smashed her smile
Your rubber broke her fingers
and you had won.

Knowledge: My meager roadside curio is more to her than the fastest automobile hatred can build

And now, you do not drive this way very often, and nothing much makes me happier

But we both know the saying, "If I can't have her..."

And you managed that:
braces she has to wear now
slipped disks
scars all over her body
and heart...

She is a different person, and in that,
you have won,
as you couldn't have her,
and now neither do I.

But there is something else:
You forgot that my love is nearly unconditional.
Unconditional love does not exist.
My love is honest, pure,
Not the hardly-unconditional love most advertises as unconditional.
Not the kind that is plastic, and
flashing on a sign on the side of your vehicle
The one I read through tears
Each time
Her hand slipped from mine
as she ran to meet you.

I love her,
no matter what damage you have caused
no matter how long it takes to heal
no matter if it never heals
and in that,
you will never win.

There's an igloo
glowing auburn-yellow from the inside
miles of empty snow and ice around
lead-blue sky bears down:
an endless weight squashing reality.

I'm trying to remember which muscles are required to make me stand.
I'm braiding the coarse-twine letters of your name into a gallows rope,
tie it around our necks,
place the knot correctly so the vertebrate split,
separate fragile cord that brings all life to the body,
same as the delicate thread that held us together.

Did it ever,
really?

I drip away from you
charred
marshmallow held over the flame
too long.
This ceremonial rattle shakes
full of seeds within dried husk
the sound tickles your eardrums
as you **** on the snow and ice
covered with its coat of
honey,
nectar,
black gall.

I am watching black and white films of ****** surgery nightmares,
the heads concealed behind bandages, contents unknown.

You are toothpaste: once I squeeze you out it is impossible to
put you back, as you occupy my life with your carnival apathy

Research has shown
that lithium
is the only drug
that guarantees a decrease
in suicide.

So slow the trajectory in which you came to me,
not simply difficult to see,
but difficult to identify:

felt the same as walking through a door and looking back to see a man approaching,
try to judge if he is close enough to hold it, not hold it, or give it the push
just enough for him to take advantage.

Awkward as a traffic light,
yellow,
too close to stop,
too far to go through.

Some people in my life are felt marker streaks,
they start so saturated
but fade to nothing as they advance.

You are the opposite:
slowly building from nothing,
continuing to get brighter,
containing more
color,
until the end.

Skin the color of fleshy burnt sienna
as if someone took the areola's border,
sewed it on the armpits

can't close eyes tight enough to cleanse the memory of
your face from my thoughts
regurgitating in endless loops of hula hoop champions.

I can't stop the dream –
(woman who looks eighteen, lips colored same as the pastel cheeks)
watching hot pink
bob bobbing.

Stupid ****:
if I'm raising armies to invade you with,
I clearly want you still.

I haven't cried in three days. The napkin-white petals,
an Alyssum White blanket of snow,
piebalded by Slipper Orchids,
flows beneath my skin
as if it were the thinnest layer of water
under oil.

The feeling is the consistency of pungent Valerian,
the active ingredient the smell
of well-matured cheese,
cuts the tops off  mountains
as it fills the bottoms of canyons
with asphalt.

It's given a brain back to this anencephaly.
Where there were stitched lips,
now only paper-heart kisses.

We've shared secrets no one else would ever want to know,
but now your brothel hair has become a nest for dead birds.

Where once you were a wet marsh,
perfumed in tangy musk,
you have now become a dry
steppe covered in rotting fish.

I'm writing acrostics of your name,
remembering you like discarded tire husks
on Arizona's August freeways.

And I'm still trying to figure out how to say that without feeling like a liar
Making up a screenplay in my head: dead
lead from the real way I wish to express, again
Exiting into your u-turn I always ******* dread: descend
Melodies I learned to hum when young
To someone now no one, flashes of red

You hummed them to me; child-like: off to bed
Implanting this seed in me 
I don't recall a single syllable you said
But still memories are melting me like butter on burnt bread
Talking to a ghost
Pointless...end.

They said your footprints
were still on the windowsill
when the authorities showed up

I wonder how long my hand prints will remain

as I lean out and see the last thing you ever saw
speed towards you
like that camera trick they use where the background speeds forward
but the person stands still

I feel you in my nose here
all that remains of you is
a scent of yellowed dime-store novel pages
and I can't help but agree
when scientists say that
our sense of smell is the one most closely tied
to our memories.

They always said you had an old soul

but I know better

You lived with the clarity of a newborn's eyes.

I'm reading the Codex Gigas,
one hundred and sixty pounds of flesh,
black hairy tongue,
penitent Battenti sponges staining the robe with blood,
stalking through Campania.

Crushed insect nests,
a shiver up the jaw from food not had in too long.
Squashing caterpillars,
the insides squirt from their ketchup-packet bodies
in a spray of slime-neon green.

Pheromone cream drips from your *****, I gag it down,
curdled milk-paste.
When pulling the dress down, one never knows
whether you will get a paper cut,
or a gaping jaw of hairy
life.

We all live like pigs, but need to clean up to appear to live
like everyone else appears to live when we visit them.

You rob me of myself; a teacher
walks into a food bank ashamed and finds his student working there.

My life experiences pile up like broken infant bones,
fragile phalanges of famine,
until all I add up to are decades of
Holodormo,
the Killing Hunger.

You hide in the sea,
I lick your left palm.

She sits across from you at the group-work table in all her flesh
a coat of giant cold chicken skin
she can't figure how to take off.

A cow chewing cud
would be less offensive than the way she grinds
that gum with mouth, a hole slapping
against itself in fleshy clicks.

She is heavy, whipping cream-
colored thighs each time she slaps a hand down in laughter.

The chest is pouring out in all of it's hypnotic paleness;
the dark colored shirt is giving its all, but failing against the strain.

Your adrenaline courses in nausea
as she moves her legs apart,
veins radiation-blue,
mashed potato inner thighs,
and suddenly
you've peaked behind the curtain
the poison fish you see
makes you *****.

I'm having fists of laughter, daisy-cutter dreams in formaldehyde,
creating the worlds most loved sport by kicking the heads of Danes.

Mutually assured corruption I can feel
creeping down the inside of my nostril,
across my tiny hairs,
but I am still, let it come;
it runs out and onto my lips. I **** its mercurial
clearness down.

I was born without fingernails or teeth,
forever stuck gumming the soft pink nail beds.

I keep everyone out of my life;
it is the only way to justify never seeing you.
Desiccant children pour from their mothers' laps
as if they were clear beads from that little paper shoe box packet.

You are an apricot full of sand;
I am a Mongol stealing maidenheads.

A peach is a rose -
deep inside
drips cyanide.

She stands in the truth,
a puddle of lysergic acid
that seeps into her bare soles,
as a tuning peg twists her gut.

The single page, crisp,
bends, hangs limp
where index and thumb tips
barely touch left and right edges.

Her blue eyes quickly sweep left and right, work
their way slowly from top to bottom, absorb his self-eulogy,
drain their color out and onto the page.

As each drop hits, ink blots change from explanation and apologies
to a Rorschach Test to which she will never have an answer.

Moisture leaves her body faster than she feels it will be replaced,
she is mummifying herself alive in Sokushinbutsu,
attempting to join the Xerces Blue letter-author
who flew away into extinction.

The walls around her now close, tight, stone;
her only contact with the outside world the string of her memory
attached to the bell of loss.  

The weight of the page
she holds destroys her.

I can bore you with talk
of women and children,
but it is simple enough to say
human beings.

Human beings
run in gathering storms
of concrete dust;
run from misting
of meat.

Explosions are sudden fatal therapy
for human beings
suffering dissonance,
and there's nothing quite
the same as losing words.

All of these
human beings,
cut-off
quick
in Tourette syndrome
(****!)
Pu.nc-tu-a.tion.

Caught in the concrete cloud
darker than Krubera Cave,
lost out on a betrayed Silk Road,
as bloated blue bodies
wash up on Indonesian shores.

This city of centuries
built by human beings,
has now become
almost-five thousand corpses
who dangle their toes
out of shrapnel windows.

Pieces of me sweat
away in an instant of swaying black burqas,
rocking on knees at a cemetery.

I’m standing in Beirut -
nineteen-eighty two.
I watch towers fall.
There has to be
a way to make the world relate,
even if it takes
nineteen years.

Those words are now meaningless
compared to what you mean to me.
Where I thought that there was no way to feel deeper,
you prove me wrong.

I am ice
and you were the cool breeze
that keeps me from melting and evaporating away.

No four letter-word could ever measure against you.

I was eating cigarettes for breakfast;
now I subsist only on the health of you.

I was dreaming of the day
I was born,
strangling on an umbilical noose;
you have slid your pink life-giving cord into my navel.

I was writing my suicide note,
but you came and lit it aflame,
blew away the embers,
wrote a story with a happy ending.

I dangled, atrophied, off of an edge,
my chalk-outline superimposed over the gaping black.
Your hair, strands of raven steel,
snaked their way through my fingers,
held me long enough for you
to pull me back.

You held my hand,
guided the crayon it held.
Where I saw only a blank
page, you showed
where the lines were and created
a piece of art beyond
anything the world has ever seen.

You are my life-support system,

Holly,

and without you,
I wouldn't be writing this.

There were little ways, once, when things could sparkle and spread the light
just like I spread your legs
then.

Away I could turn,
and feel your eyes on me,
the breath for breathing in always fresh and free between us,
the staleness now punctuating every sentence, drooling from my lips
and off away somewhere…

nowhere.

The infant
me lying next to the mother
of you in the creeping sun

running away over the edge of the world
like Magellan.

I could chase it,
I would,
I swear I will,
if you would ask it,
and I would tumble over that dark cusp
and off into a six-year terror of death and disease,
just to return,
spinning the Earth under my feet,
pushing it with my hands like paddles,
kicking it back with toes,
sweating bleeding shaking
and collapsing
back into
you.

There are times when I feel like I am dying,
and I never wish it were true more than when I realize it isn't.

My imagination runs wild like wind through wheat,
catching on the trailing edges of her summer dress as she runs by,
and away.

My fingers just cannot hold on.

I can see through her dress when the sun hits it right,
and I can feel the waves her hip bones made
those times when we came together in that field,

but she is a mystery now,
no more familiar than the feeling of the bottom of the sea.

I close my eyes, dream of her, and fade into the soil.

I've only got so much left
and no ones listens to me not screaming for what I want,
my mouth full of feathers and blood,
weakened to the state of living past the point of dying,
to the point of numbness
where I can cut this skin like construction paper,
stretch it over love you never had
and find something that can carry me forward
into somewhere I can finally rest.

I'm in the passenger seat
next to you
and you don't say a ******* word
and I don't say a ******* word
and we watch the world speed by
eyes ahead
in silence.

I am content.

There are three dresses,
drinking the rain
and the sky is doing somersaults
in your bones.

My burning hands caress your body's baby hair, *****.

I am drowning in you,
and I am suffocating in nicotine stains,
falling from balconies of acrimony that you pushed me off of.

My clipped wing feathers burn in bursts
of red, cyan, and lemon.

I crash down into you one last time
where my seething nails dig into your skin,
searing you right out of my ******* memory.

If only it were justice to ****
a mocking bird.

The fauna that derides one,
stares one down
and dominates
with the entirety of Nature behind it.

I'm stuck, my blood dripping
fresh from its feathers.

It leaves me empty with its cries;
lonely and one dies.
Absorbed, engorged,
elapsed, and relapsed.

Nothing works,
and nothing's clean;
everything's a nightmare,
and it used to be a dream.

Crawls like a ******* with insect legs,
wet cool tongue tickles like a slug
up the inner thighs to the inside of the crotch.

I'm indebted to the doctor who saved me
from nature's attempt to abort me with an umbilical cord -
I owe him a bullet in the brain.

My mother's love
was only there
in her tries to cover the guilt
for strangling me in the womb.

Pull your teeth out,
threading your lips together with twine.

Reach into your bellybutton with a finger,
hook-shaped,
and remove your intestines,
like a serpent.

Run a hook into your nose,
removing your brain
as if mummifying you.

Carve a smile with a razor,
under each breast,
******* out the fat
and replacing it with silicone.

Pull your nails off,
leaving ****** beds,
krazy-gluing plastic
over the tips of the fingers.

Fingers into ****,
pulling out the ******.

Spoon the eyeballs out,
sew the sockets shut.

My doll, broken and battered,
now fixed in perfection.
A soft suicide relapse into plasticine porcelain -
you tremble when we ****.

A girl with soft teeth
grinding cavities

*******
in confession
with five weeks of absence

wrapped up
in confusion
with five hours of evidence

she's got a new kick
tomorrow, she says

tore up
in weeping
with five minutes of dissonance

It feels like Winter’s fingers
and they’re pulling me under
by the ankles
once again.

I struggle but it is
never enough,

I thaw out from my freeze but it is
never enough.

I spend thirty days in a blast furnace but it is
never enough.

Oh save me, Spring,
that I might live,

as no matter my struggle,
or how strong I am,
or how well I swim
or tread this slushed and frozen lake,
chunks of ice
bump against my exposed flesh
splitting it as I am pulled,
choking,
down and under that frozen pond
where I am drowned.

How that camera captured the unseen rays of crystal sunlight,
it is almost 1990
but our young bodies
are stuttering in grainy silence,
spinning film on a machine that wasn't even made back when
it was almost 1980.

Look at you,
taller, stronger
sister
towering from that diving board...stronger, taller, older -
but I was always bolder.

Boldness.
Bravery.
A glamorous fearlessness towards the dangers of life.

You were always jealous of that,
weren't you?

Notice the toes.
Yours are so very close to the edge, aren't they?
But look at mine.
They curl down at the joints, peering over the edge,
ready to fall
pull my smaller body after them into a deep blue oblivion,
like the one you've abandoned
me to now.

The last time I saw my son
he was smiling
waving his little eight year-old hand
in front of his scarecrow-gold hair
shoulder-length

The last time I saw my son
he was joyous
at simply another day of school
mom taking him in her car as I stood by
unemployed

The last time I saw my son
he was blissfully unaware
of simply another day of sorrow for us
and the unatainability of life
missing

But I smiled back and the window between us
hid my welling tears
as I stood by the car that pulled away

The last time I saw my son
I knew he'd come looking for me
but I wouldn't be here any longer
just words written and songs made
photos and pictures and comments online
a ghost of electricity
a haunting blast of brain and regret
whose last thought was
the last time I saw my son.

You just keep on carving back my smiles,
elastic vowels you blanket me in,
drowning me, again, with smoke from your belly.
Gargle all the chunky bits
that remain in this blended relationship.
Strain them out through the cheesecloth
which splits apart,
like the split between your legs

The split of an insect’s back when it
bends, arches, reaches too far.
And I’m sick of that bird-****-yellow
oozing out from that crack there;
held in your scarecrow arms.

I don’t want to be your headache
in this migraine *******.

Scaffolding in place by those that value
a structure arranged and supporting,
housing community.
Community from its root of ‘commune,’
what exists from the efforts
of all those involved.
A building housing
opinions,
creativity,
debate,
and art.

What was once a poetry free-for-all,
now a pay to play disaster
crumbling down
at the swinging of a dollar-shaped
wrecking ball.

How easy my thoughts are lost
in you and simpler still my body pulled
into you held down by the weight
of the earth I’ve filled my pockets
with. I push my way into this welcoming
water’s body. I do not want to go,
but the ocean’s thundering applause
and its frigid love under my toes
sweeps me off my feet
as waking gulls
mourn the triumph of the sea.

There is sunshine in your voice
as your tight wet mouth
is on my neck
and the tongue
is in my ear.
You lick your palm,
there’s a bit of blood
on my copy of ******,
and I’m coming.

I am only three thrusts away
enjoying the girl,
oh her little bones,
sweet somber hair
as my pants
become tighter.

I watch you brushing teeth,
foam on your lips,
as my crippled spider
legs sway forward on
towards your tender little ***
hole like a cherry,
hidden within the cleft of a peach,
sweet, then a flash of violence
towards your haunches, hips, shanks.

Older women are sweet like saccharine,
but you are pure cane,
****** peppermint
cinnamon disks,
which drip
the same as crushed
maraschino cherries.

More than lust,
more than ***,
more than *******,
is the peace they bring.

More than pillows,
more than clouds,
more than rest,
is the calm they bring.

Warmth against the ear and cheek, Mother's breath
runs through the hairs on the back of his neck
as Lover's fingers trace through his hair.

Soft, such skin.

The man becomes an infant at the touch
on ear of delicate areola,
an inverted dimple,
which he turns to with the lips and tongue,
moist.

We aren't on speaking terms
but
we **** nightly
that way
we don't have to see one another.

All day long we are:

coarse hair fly legs under each other's skin,
black drops of ink in a jade bowl of milk,
genocidal gestures.

There is a part of me that loves you
(despite all the harm we've conceived)
it slides in and out of you as I write this.

Your torso, stretched and squeezed by God's finger
and thumb, ever so gently
just between your hips and ribs.
Those long bow-shaped bones stretch against your near melanin-free skin.
Is that pink-tinge the blood vessels, just beneath,
or the marks of my touch?

I am heady;
you are ice on my tongue,
which slowly melts into warm
liquid as I mouth-
breathe.

You make me feel so *****-clean,
a pale patriarch that ***** his Sister.
I am so drunk
on your potency,
my memories flood in as absinthe, my inebriated
body replays that first night I tore you open.

Stretch your arms above your pretty poutish head,
I pull myself out from your bald lips -
coat you in white feathers.

Pink bodies glide by in an endless
sequence, one neck after another, opened
by the blade he grips. With a liquid-muted squeal,
and cacophonous struggle of the fore legs (the back two are bound
up), the swine pours its life out with just a little coaxing of the man's tool.

One, two, three...and more
drowning in the smell of ***** matter and gore.

White, brown, and black bodies
in an never-ending stream,
dangle by the hind legs, swinging
from the mass of them, roll by; the ankles
hold their weight. The man's knife is
never dull, it finds the sweet spot
where it slides between bone and tendon
and cartilage and into the vein,
thick and fleshy (a garden hose),
which pumps its contents onto the killing floor.

One, two, three...and more
near-boiling in the unrelenting heat of ******.

That knife, that blade, that tool
opening one faceless
animal after another.

Their names are blotted out in blood.
Their cries bubble out through red,
thick like mucous.

Knife in, knife out,
knife in, knife out

with dull repetition
and the precision
of a machine,
until they all look the same,
until he feels nothing for them,
until there is no difference between them and people,
until the sharp, stained instrument of steel
turns to the side
and into the man next to him.

There's a threaded zipper on your pants
made of little stitches of red
which grasp the zipper's brass teeth,
which match the enamel tools
which grow from my pink gums
which pull at that handle.

As it slides down, the teeth of brass
pull apart
(skin from a peach).

Little coquette,
I can see the smirk of giddy shame
as the denim drops
and you are bare.

There was a time when I was driving towards you,
highway lights passing by as if they were hyper-drive stars.

By blunders I somehow found your address on the scrap
of paper that I write this on now. It's still stamped with your lipstick,
scent of your armpits,
blood,
hair,
and the smell of your palms after they'd cradled my face
while I cried for you not to leave but just to make this daybreak
moment last an hour longer
to make that sun rise slower
drape your body over mine
one more time.

I swear I'll enter you if only you'd just give me one more chance.
I swear...

I was waving goodbye
but you never
saw. You never
even looked back.

There's a caterpillar in my right ear canal.
It's almost neon-green,
with poison-orange bulbs,
the color of grafted cactus.  

It's squeezed its way quite far in, stuffed
itself in as if it were an expanding foam earplug,
the spines stuck in my inner pink skin.

I lean my head to the right, knock
the left side with the flat of my palm.
Eggs, the same as desiccant beads,
the color of earwax, pitter-patter out and onto my table
as if they were plastic raindrops on a trampoline.

There will come a day when it cocoons itself, and that moth
flies free, but until that day, I will continue
to turn it towards you
every time you speak.

I've got oiled bearings of lead in my gut,
rolling through my intestines.
My mother's never cried quite enough;
I'll get some more tears out of her.

So cover my head in plastic,
pull that Velcro tight,
swallow down the pills
dissolving on the tongue,
dive off the building.

Corpse dangles from tree by snapped-twig neck,
innards spilled out from stomach like rotten raspberries,
nothing but stick-figure hang man.

Simon Iscariot's tears fall beside blood and water
that pours from your abdomen,
similar to the emulsion
from the spear-wound in Jesus. Christ
gave you the highest honor:

that of making all
ancient parchment
statements true.

They were then hidden away for centuries in dry clay pots
in musty caves of sheep-herders.

Father lowers you down
the greatest of care
to the arms of
Pieta' Mother.