Man I hate when a girl gets in your head,
because she stays there,
just squats
on your hypothalamus.

But even more than that
she takes over the left side of your brain;
sleep
takes
awhile.

Sleep is no longer
inevitable.

When I start feeling a girl,
I feel her hard,
and I feel her jumping
on my brain for fun,
even though she doesn't know it hurts.

**** my heart,
she'll make her way down there
soon enough.

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.

Truthfully,
being alone in bed
*****;
I hate waking up
to myself
and nothing like you.

Nothing like your hair.
Your sweet and sour smell of ripe peaches;
Morning breath of cigarettes.

I think about
living in Alaska a lot more
now
than I did then.

I think about trailers with furniture
made by stacking old mattresses
and oil-burning lamps
and suns that die forever
and live forever.

The guy just kept swinging his lunchbox
and it kept hitting Shakira
in the stomach.

I had to say something.

So I did, I told him to watch where he swung
that ******* cooler.

And his boys got into it.
And they wanted to fight to.
And we were near the beach.
And the clouds were edgeless.
And the sun was pastel.

And I just wanted to **** all of them.

Shakira held me back.
My girl held me back.

And then I felt something sinking
cold, deep down in me.

I sat on the beach
and almost cried;
depression hit like peppermints.

And I'd never felt so afraid in my life.
On the beach, all those people laughing
and their fat ******* kids running into the surf,
I just wanted to **** myself right there,
I was so afraid and scared.

I'd never been scared.
Or afraid.
I'd gotten my nose broken
my jaw bruised a few times,
and I knew to put vaseline on
cuts over the eye,
but I was scared
and I can't explain the kind of fear
that's made me weak.

I've gotten into fights since then,
but I feel fear growing
everytime.

My fingers go crazy with twitching
and after it's over,
the ball gets bigger inside of me.

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.

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?

This is how you squeeze
a dollar
outta fifteen cents.

Cut the bottom of the tube
of a toothpaste
and lick the mint jelly
onto a toothbrush.