Once the levers are pulled down
squealing and removing themselves from silence,
once we become noisy
and our baritones are barges
across rivers that separate us,
once you become the Rock of Gibraltar
and I can point my nose at you in the fog
to gauge not only distance,
but time as well,
then I think
it will resume.

But as the night holds your tongue
on its own tongue, moving you around
inside its mouth in a *** of dense
violet clouds, as so many cities burn in the sky,
I will never hear a thing.

I will only see
your eyes running the gauntlet
of a dense violet night and its violence
of lighthouses revolving quicker than pulsars,
increasing the walls of space.

They scream in the void
for some empty barge and its horn
of compassion.

The wheels trample over hope,
they ground human minds
until they crack, until they exude
diaspora, and become sidewalks again.

The feeling
of freezepops icing the tongue
has been relinquished
because of the engine's lion moan,
suitable
for flesh and vitality.

We rumble over a bridge, the brakes reveal
their mouths and the hurt inside of them.

We lumber to a stop beside a park,
beside a bridge,
beside a river,
beside oily waters and
fire slapping the beach.

You and I,
are across the river.

There is a fountain filled with marble men
grabbing the thighs of marble women
with eyebrows wrinkled
towards their pelvis'.

If our souls could be soft again,
malleable,
we could wrinkle them in our laps
at pitstops.

I look across the aisle,
at a girl in a black pea-coat.

She knots her hands in her laps
and scratches her knuckles
with white nails.

I am
looking for the soft ore of hope
still nimble in the water fountain
of her lap,
your lap.

The engine,
this bus filled with bobbing eggs,
can break yolks.

This engine
can grind love down to a talcum,
a dust able to resign itself
to knotted hands and the jewelry boxes
of flesh.

This engine
works child's tongues in its wheels,
churning out adults,
churning out civilization,
churning out nothing.

Our cries for hope and peace and stability were usually the signposts for an innate and cultivated bitterness. From birth we had planted ourselves in the middle of a struggle for both hope and a good hold on realism. We chose pessimism as the avenue to realism. Once we began to hope and hope only, we couldn’t look at ourselves fully in the mirror. We’d start smiling and thinking that goodness was as easy as smiling at the other person, whoever that was, who was on the other side of the mirror, bus, or classroom. But as we got older, we saw this hope as stupid. It contaminated our bodies. Hope is a wound that festers. Hope not only festers, but it grows even in the worst conditions. This is why we grasped for realism and pessimism. Because hope could so easily grow and wrap around us and make us stupid with its poison.  We had been hurt too many times by this stupidity. No, our philosophical doctrine was to **** or be killed, to feel hurt constantly so that we could despise the poison of hope more acutely. We still cry for hope and peace and stability, but we hate ourselves for doing it.

She says I have a ness
about me,
a sadness,
an angriness,
a hatefulness,
a loch ness.

I haven't washed my hoodie
in a week, the toothpaste splatter
on my shoulder
looks like come,
maybe it's laziness.

I'd like to be
Bukowski today,
I'd like
to get a good **** in
before
dusk,
and a good drink in
at some point,
I've wanted some Wild Turkey
more than anything.

A good ****
when done right
without
the spring-loaded
traps of love,
just *******
until your body swells,
can make you come
for days,
and a good drink
is good for washing out
sadness as it pukes dramamine
in your stomach,
and Bukowski for a day
would be a lemon.

This is pretentious
as ****. I am a
pretentious ****.

Do you like flying?

I like flying.

I like the angle
of wings,
how they shiver
on the runway
as an artery of redemption.

The murmur of the engines
and the wheels
hopping like babies,
that is freedom.

The sifting through clouds
by the wings,
like dragging a stick
through a puddle of oil,
that is like love.

The belly of the plane
skimming over the clouds,
basking naked in the sun,
that is like life.

Descending through the fog
bumping in your seat,
watching the porthole
for the brown grasses of geese
and jewelry of the sun on other jets
that is like the birth
of the world.

Taxiing to a stop
and unconsciously
taking the sweet, lovely woman's hand,
in whichever way she is beautiful,
the one who snored through the descent
and it sounded like the piano play
of rain and concrete,
that is like grace
in innumerable measures.

You and your gold doorknockers,
those two rings
of golden milk
in your ears,
I love you for the things
that go into your ears,
for the Odysseys
and Onegins
and all the love letters
of Abelard and Heloise
that make all that milk
into a cream.

Your hoops
hang high and tight
until you forget to take them out,
I like when you forget to take them out,
and in the mornings
I wake up
to your low-tolling jingle
in gallons
and the liveliness of your jaw
saying things
that wake me up
with a natural cheeser on my face
and questions galore
in my dry mouth
and lungs.