Her fingernails were square
and stretching for her cigarette;

Previously lost
next to papers, pens, magazines
and envelopes with short notes
she wrote herself
and never read.

She looked at Ro.
Her eyebrows pushed together
then pouted, sighed,
before lifting her fingers
pressed against
pearl pink lips
slipping Paul Mall in,
sipping it.

Between each clean breath
she’d say something idle to pass
the time it took to smoke.

Her thick grey hair peaked
from beneath yellow bleach
and she said something silly
about that too.
Her face was smooth and eyebrows thin
but she’d never mention it.

Burned down barely far
from her knuckles,
she pushed the ****
into an ashtray laying
on the arm of stained grey
loveseat.

Simultaneously as she was crossing
her feet she was sweeping
her focus on that chipped black tabled
looking for something…

Then got distracted.

My slip with it's sins
I can't unzip, wash nor twist
but learn to live as is.

Enter;
please yellow
seas who loved you
as you were young and
thirsty.

Sunrise
kissed white cap
tips but only left
my back warm.  Backwards
Mama.

Miss moon
she thinks we're
the silliest
I'd have to agree
you see,

fishes
probably
see water like
oiled asphalt on
sunrise.

The bonobo baked
more banana bread
in four stone ovens.

Made monkeys
unhungry but her brick
bungalow became
so smokey.

We did things like
throw stones,
watch them bounce
on themselves
until

We hit
two ducklings.

We thought Mother
would hate them
after being
touched.

We were
kidnappers.

I used to want tobacco to breed on my little purple lungs
but I’m just fading under the sun without
wanting much at all.

Touch my fingertips and turn to water on the sidewalk
Little puddle people fading under the sun not wanting much
but a little moon too.

Where were grey windows when
You came around?  I took your eyelashes
and gave them to the bees because we’re all dying anyway

So play, tip toe around the clock
I’ve got three keys and one lock and the honeys
all gone To sinkholes on Chinatown

Three times I’ve slowly licked the ash left on marble
well I regret telling you more than doing it.
But I don’t think about it too long.

Streetlights' orange glow
against smaller other-color lights
-- the buzzing background
of florescent light of a gym,

glowing bright blue tops
of emergency call buttons--
they overlap against my feet;
absurdly bare on sidewalk.

I wonder about sidewalk's
accidental mosaics
and compare them
to my instep pores.

I sit on the bush's bulwark
facing the few trees who've
gifted me ever-misplaced
and fallen honey locust,

fallen into the cracks, the split
of sidewalk of this one to the next;
I dig fingernails against their cement
to pull each yellow leaf individually

placing temporal halos around my arches
and crowning the tips of my toes.

Every toe, like a daisy picked and planted,
their roots wrapped around my bones
and licked tips in translucent pink.  
I place each sole on slightly dusted
wood board floor before hearing
the window pane being beaten
by hail, my vanilla skin riddles itself
in jealousy.  I felt lonely
like only the rain wanted me
and not even the piano on the stereo
could save me.  Where was God now
but rendering herself on the slightly
more stable existence of window
panes of dark brick Chicago complexes?

I was supposed to ****
her a long time ago.  Not because
she never loved my toes but because
she did, and she loved them better than I did.  
I remember when I’d lose my fingertips
in God's chest bone and they'd disappear
like a song I loved  but was never the same every time
I heard it.  Kind of like classical music.  
I never remember the composer's name
but I knew that tune.

I pulled the green string holding
my dress together and let it fall. When I die,
don’t let them keep my clothes.  I was somewhere
between letting that dress dangle by the single nail
I forgot to pull from the window sill, hang myself there,
still living so much anyway or sailing my big toes across
the linings of the wood, spun on them, let my threads pull apart
against the wet sill; dripping half opened window.  
But then, to both these thoughts I stopped.  

I just stood there naked.  
Until the sun came over my neighbor’s roof.  
Until the window was dry.  
And there was nothing left to be jealous of.

Round wheels found
patterned, pebble pavement
opened Heaven
and white walls.

Who were washed, dropped
brown mud crowns broken
on soft breathing ground.
It's not loud.

Color from clay,
(my dearest sulfate)
I'll wash away three days
one glass with sparkling diamonds
drops I cannot catch.  Fingernails
orange and chipped, I sip

waste six more days
but saved my veins, still
dream of trains.
I think of engines, coal
and triumphant triangle
iron.  Trains have
become much more
than that.

CTA and there's no Racoon
roadkill.  White walls
around pink stink, black drops
of gum beneath me.

Maybe in daisies, I believe;
mosquitos and flies
I wear pants.  I've got
less eyes and more lies
than that.

Just trust the jeweled beetle bug.

Are you aware
of the music you make, Cricket?
Can the grass be ticklish to your toes?
Tickled like trapped foes.

Toads and toad bumps.
Frogs salted on salted Slugs.
Creamer for the chocolate night,
Are you alive?

Sentimental over fingerprints,
my wings wandered
three centuries ago.
Where they went nobody knows.

Three lights captured in my eye:
one is the bedroom
one is the trumpet
one is the theatre

Hip bones have red suns.
Flowers crawl on skyscrapers.
Barns and bugs with spotted bellies.

Cracked a mirror on my foot,
wish it stayed the evening
and for supper.

Could have gone home
but instead, harvested Winter
in Mexico.

Yellow spotted
orchid-smelling
pebble, why aren't
you blue?

Black frogs
with neon
stripes cuddle
my thick, dry
tongue.

Where has the fruit bird gone?

Red hands
from picked cherries;
Womanhood loves me.

Digest zebra leaves
from fern trees if
no pink salt is found
in green or grey eyes
of spider monkeys.

I want sand toes
standing hair
and finger spheres
spinning on touch.

Keep your triangles
but give me your dressless
dog and two teeth
from the back
of your gum.

What I mean
is like furniture
but I have no home.
My house has a home.

I am home
and also a couch.

I was born
of the swamp.
I felt foreign toes
come alive
as I stepped out
from salty marsh,
gasping between
the stretched mud
strings pulling
then breaking
on my lips
dripping onto
my thirsty tongue.
Grasping at cow-tails,
I've got a handful
of dragonfly wings
instead. And I returned
sacs of humus
from my elbows
plopped into the water.
I was so thirsty.
Thirsty like the gnats
who met their genocide
at golden-silk orbs--
oh, false sun.
I wander. I pray.
Slamming my knuckles
against the clay
of crocodile's teeth
then I return
to humility.

into the elbows
of bamboo shoots,
slithering up them. I reach
fourteen purple spotted, green orchids
-- one reached her pink purse to me
and kissed me.  I peeled at her specs
like gumdrops on my tongue and tasted
like laughing amythesyst.  Laughing like toddlers
do.  "And how do toddlers laugh?"
like they know they are dying.
"I didn't know rocks could laugh,"
she said.  Well they do.  And praise them.
They are dying longer than us.
The orchid gasped, her golden tongue,
pink tipped dipped into the slippery mud
below us: loose cement.  She buried her tongue
and dropped, from her nest, two pearl seeds
embedded into the soil imprinted with my feet --
are my feet *****?  "I think I might die too."
What a shame -- She outstretched her petals
they dried, brown, odorless, deceased
whispering this and sweet nothings to me.
She cradled and cuddled me
to her dust.  What a shame
she only thought
and never knew.

I've got three lizards
living without any names.
While it's hot and dry.

You've got thirty days;
You live in Alaska, friend.
Where do I begin?

See, I have got three
tiny green men following
my shadow all day.

When it's dark and damp
well, they won't tell me their names
they just crawl away.

Living in the snow
well, it doesn't make any sense.
Where do lizards go?

I wanna fall in love with someone who plays
the blues like floss between his toes
baked under the sun, steps away from a lake
we called a sea anyway.  We sat

their four days, the sand packed under
our breathing vertebrate
the sun never set; only dripped, dipped
its golden fingertips into pleased, green ripples.

He'd watch with me, his rolled up jeans,
pressed pink cheeks blowing against
that harmonica, fingers white, pressed.
I rest on my hands on wet sand, tiny grains

of sunny diamonds.  I sang out
to the redheaded halcyon --
to his slender beak:
*pierce my gentle heart!

People are no longer like swatted fruit flies
begging for apple seeds, and remind me
more of leaves riddling the lake
casting shadows on fish faces.

“You are too young to be afraid of death”
but I have already felt the wrinkle.

I never felt wrong but maybe
I had stepped in-between
the crossfire of oil and water
like daytime moon
who always shows
her face too soon.

Don’t let them keep my clothes.

I was going South, walking on beige lake-wall
immensely focused on each pattern and grain
of every single rock at Belmont harbor.  My body
wanted to scream out of it's skin how deeply
I fell in love with their lives, endlessly content
with being beaten by Lake Michigan.  I counted
each wave, each blow as they slammed against
the boulders screaming Remember Me! before
returning back into themselves.

I was walking North.  On the white smooth gravel
heading home.  I had a moment in my own head
about how crazy it might seem to Strangers
if I told them the rocks had introduced themselves
to me and given me their names.  A man walked
his bike on those same rocks, an affair I didn't mind.
"I was just seeing if I had the courage
to ride my bike up here" he said to me.  He must've
seen me smile, and with that thought, I bloomed;
"Oh please do."  How silly we both were
to feel ashamed of our love for boulders.

-- the unseen is perceived
through upside down black holes.
I hold gold around the rim
of black, but not blind, paths
hoping to grasp
some sort of hand

like man will hope for God
in heaven where coffins of light
wait to meet ours.

...and when they do
my eyes will gloss
like my future titanium tombstone
in Her garden.  In Her garden's soft grass
submitting to the arches of my bare feet --

this I will only know when my pulse
beats to the banging
of atom collision and belongs to
the unborn children.

He was unbothered
by conversation in the kitchen.
He sits tightly, legs up
on the lounge chair,
tossed to the side
facing away from words
between his mother and wife.

His spine sinking heavier beneath
the cross-patterned blanket
as he turns only his head sideways
at me.

His slouching, glassy eyes
spoke with his lips,
slowly separating,
“Please hold my hand”

I blinked.
Wedding band touched my skin--
those masculine diamonds embedded,
I glance.  His head drops;

One ear hugged by faux leather.
He ignores the trees seated
outside our bay window
or the seemingly distant
but not silent footsteps
of Julian piling up and pushing
those blocks.

His chest fires upward
and I listen to his exhale shake,
grasping his hand tighter.

“When I was a teenager
I used to think I could use memories
as a means to time travel…”
He’s shifting and sweating
but the house is cool.

Sweetly and softly, he sings,
“It was psychotic, really.”

I heard un-hallow crickets
play mandolin in
small city grass strips
far from rubber-asphalt
grips of cars passing
in distance.
Their moon-muscle
remembered
to move silence
somewhere else,
alone and terrifying,
twisting itself
in burning sun towers or
...something like that.
Screaming, scraping
wings of little
creakers; are they
also scared?
Does he beat his wings ******
until the stringy veins
of his back snap
and ******* under
the weight of Sun Towers?
Would blades of grass ******
his open wound, reduced to
whispering
woes into his wake
about his wonder?

My solitude requires nightlights
and their temporal choir.

her bare uncold body stood on red ice but not breaking
Europa's gentle surface; delicate patchwork of Angelite Rose.
She was covered in butterflies who crawled and kissed her,
******* gently on her paper skin dressing her; peach-fuzzed legs
tiptoed across, antennae exploring her belly and her neck as if
she was a blessing from Them -- Them, and the Moon Bugs,
and The Cosmos, and the stretched sunset wings on the veins
of Pieridae who tickled the behind her kneecaps, fluttered and boasted
to Their Moon, Thirsty Europa, about Her.  She was a house never sought
but found between the fragile glass mountains, who, spitefully, were unmoved
by Jupiter's glow in the horizon -- the sky was half red.  She laughed
at how silly it all seemed. "Do you hear me?" said Morpho swimming
to her eardrum moving from the gentle hairs of her collarbone
like scarce grass. Morpho's electric blue wings that made Lo jealous
and the red ice crave more of galaxy insects.  His slender, tender body
as slim as the legs he pressed into the curled hairs around her ear, "Or am I silly
like unmoved mountains or the air you used to be able to breathe?"

Yellow suits.  He wore yellow suits. To work, to mourn.  He wore yellow suits and his teeth were yellow too.  But only if you could see them.  Those silly dancing teeth poking through his tiny lips.  He licked him, curling his lip, and I watched the wrinkles come and go like passing waves on his yellow face.

He plucked five dandelions from the garden I found him in from their plastic root that sat next to a yellow balloon. I was on a sidewalk first.  Then stepped in.  I saw his yellow suit.  His yellow suits. Yellow suits.

I stepped in through the black ribcage that held this garden away from Irving Park rd.  Well it wasn’t much of a park.  The stones had names on them.  And years on them too.  The trees were big and I fell in love with a single ant.  I dipped my finger into the maple of the tree and brought it to that man.  And his yellow suit. He sat on a stone with the word “Emma Jennings --- 1953-1989”

Well this rock was young.  And really didn’t look like much of a rock at all.  Mr. Yellow Suits wasn’t looking at that or the dandelions he was stepping on now.  He was staring into the green grass.  I walked up to his shoulder and smelt his ear who had three stray brown hairs and placed that juicy ant on his shoulder.

“Yellow suits” he said, pushing the cuff up on his left arm.  I smiled and placed my fingernail at the bottom of his prickly grey chin. I pushed his face up, “of all the yellow things to love”