this girl came wanderin' in the shop
with slim hips and these summery
blue eyes, real nice, probably 23.

I've always wondered about that
study taken on by the University
of Copenhagen wherein they found
that blue-eyed people might very
well share the same ancestor--

how in the presence of this feathery girl
who looked like she might be hiding wings
beneath that brown leather jacket, I feel
like even the last man on earth would
rather dive into an inch-deep lake than five
feet of muck, only some people find pleasure
in wet earth

but lately i've felt as if even the men who
call me beautiful would much faster take
off for the sky if only just to leave the ground.

my favorite ****
color is the unwashed
indigo blue of your truck
with a muddy license plate

Parked off to the side
Beside the pines

Ah, Dakota,
did you know I see the
mountains when I say
your name? That when
you touched me I saw
no sparks but the entire
flame?

you gave me a list of everyone
you'd kissed, not arbitrarily--
I'd asked. The way you ask
where the bathroom is or
for a glass of water, but
you sent me a full directory
of names, a rolling file of
women I didn't know but
would rake through the
similarities and try to define
your tastes, blonde, blonde...
blonde

When I asked you how many
people you had slept with, I was
lying on the floor picking at the red
threads in my carpet while you rolled
your heavy palms into my shoulders.
you stilled for a moment, sliding down
to the base of my hips

I dunno...five? Or ten...
I laughed and you loosened.
Well, I mean...define sleeping with.


to me there are not many definitions for
one thing, there are synonyms for *** but
none of them you really need

Just four, then.

What happened to the other six? Were they only
kind-of-sort-of's? if you didn't really feel them, did they ever exist?
if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around hear it, did you really sleep with her?

Later on you would casually mention that you were worried that's how I really kissed as if a peck could dictate a whole eight years of
kissing--and I was kind of offended. But then there's that list, the list of
all the trees in the forest that fell and the six that went missing and i think about how I can count the number of people i've slept with on
my pointer finger and how perhaps that doesn't even apply, do you pump gas for twenty seconds before the girls at the counter start crying?

suddenly there are experiences that you
have stamped into your belt and none where i've pretended to be
full of lusts and talents and shortcomings
really I'm just a baby, a wisp of cotton
yellow, so yellow
and you're a full bag of burlap and wire

we are encouraged to be light
but I beseech you to be heavy--
with your skin and hair and every
bone, with your gossamery soul--
a soul that could sink ships,

be heavy, you are much.

do your hair up all pretty like
for those of us that are sure the world
can see our fly-aways, just fly away
our cuticles aren't healed enough
from nights spent jamming our
hands in between the rough *****
and city junctions, telephone wires
hooked to our skin because we're
just fish to greater demons

but

when you hear your old selves
discuss their polarities and crack
the mirror with spiritual hits it's
best to talk them off the ledge
that faint precipice in the distance
where they linger and stare too
long at the other sides, the other wheres
otherwhys and othertheres
see the green grass in other hells
but you tell them that
there's no place like
the here and
now

the here
and now.