There is no home to go to;
there are cigarettes still burning
in the ashtray we made
out of a Folger's can,
and you have forgotten
to put them out.

Forgive me,
I'm bitter now,
and I think it'll be hard for me
to love again,
because you are my teacher.

Do you believe in heaven?

I still think about five years ago,
and I know you do to.

I still think about
being horrific
and you getting red in the face
and crying
over the past.

I remember pregnant anger,
and you hitting me,
and me
hitting you,
because I said I hated you.

I think there are good things that last.

Sometimes I mow lawns
and try to make the straightest lines possible;
I am afraid you will see them
and be angry with me.

Sometimes I have nightmares
about not being able to fix things.

I have kissed you tenderly on the cheek,
but because I'm not young anymore,
it seems stupid
and
wrong.

But there's a bigger question:
Do you even like me?
Do I
even like you?

And we manufacture love,
because you are always sad and hurt
and
I am shy
and scared;
afraid
that you will say something
that will make me leave
and be scared
for a lifetime.

Tonight,
the drive took longer
than expected.

I was just going to the store
for four dollar whiskey.

We have argued for some time now,
and hold our breaths
when we crunch our food
in the morning.

We work: 9-5; and come home to laze
away from each other,
or to roar
about unkept promises
in the shared den;

We work: 9-5; and come home to laze;
to glisten in the beedled glow
of TVs
in separate rooms,
on separate couches,
on separate floors.

I have faltered,
and you have quoted.

I needed to get out of the house
because we have worked too hard
to shake it;
and screaming is a discomfort
we can bare
and that's no good
I've realized lately.

And the highway,
with its litany of bruises
and the brutality of a billion
dandelion reflectors
seemed like a blackening pavilion
for catharsis.

There  was no one beside me;
the roadway pummeled
beneath.

It was a terrible silence.

I screamed in the ***** odor of night,
and whistled
in the hushing door;

paid for my little bottle of godliness
and took hard swigs
in a ****-laundered parking lot
of an abandoned Food Lion.

Crabgress crept up through the concrete--
breaking and burdening--
and drifted in suffocating meadows.

The empty grocery store has an opaque facade
and a shimmering tiny lion;
I am home.

Amelia
with the
tender
Tom Hardy lips
picks
at things.

Scabs.

The peeling leather
on her
steering wheel.

The frayed edges of the hole in her denims
that's as gaping
as a zipper mouth,
and looks
just
as
vicious.

Boys she likes
and likes
not at all.
(Men that call her "sweetie.")

Amelia's delicate fingers
and the ballet of her fingernails
warp bruises
into rose vaginas.

And make hurt
smell
good,
and decay
taste like
the wet of your first girlfriend
and the sweet odor of fear
she let off
when your tongue searched
and she lay there--
legs cocked on your shoulders--
quiet,
never sighing.

Amelia hasn't found anything
that scares her good and healthy yet.

When she does
she'll know love,
and I'll stop thinking about her.

Not seen or heard from
you
in awhile.

I sat on the bus today,
with the strength of vinyl,
and a girl slinked by me
in a flower-print sundress.

Her plastic bra-straps stradled her shoulders,
akimbo
and slippery wet.

And the man in the front seat
almost lost his head,
when the bus rolled.

Not seen
or heard from
by some other woman.

Took a drive this morning,
ate my cigarettes,
inhaled gasoline,
put my feet on the curb
leaned on my hood,
and not seen or heard from
I waited for the movie to start.

The bobcat yowl of an NSX
pronounced the night
as quick,
and your serrated memory
cuts
like it should.

Not seen or heard from
you
in awhile.


I bet you smoke
with the other waitresses
and waiters,
busboys,
hosts,
hostesses,
managers,
line cooks,
and
chefs.

I bet you have a good time
in that tiny cafe,
where you run
from table to table
with that wild hair,
and can abandon yourself
to short-term memory
and long-term

loss.

Not seen or heard from you.

a tiny woman
has hips
with a thousand mouths to feed.

her little feet
are
acetylane-based
and her philosophy
is
a
by-product
of a lack of faith.

"It's going to be a good night, for a little while,
but let's not spoil a night
by thinking about it,"
her hips
say
to your fingers.

The thousand tongues
lap at your fingerprints.

Her tongues
make rollers
of passion,
and bury love
deep beneath the ruined sand
of a nimbus-warped beach
blackened by pain,
x-rayed by fingernails of lightning.

She makes you think
of such a beach.

The tiny woman
wraps her long, lean
arms
around your tiny
hairless neck.

Her breath singes
your uncovered Adam's apple.

Little man,
she calls you,
this old cougar
with rat teeth
and **** eyes.

"Little man,"
she says,
"I know how men
get down these days,"

Her body is verve,
electric skin
and loose, vibrating fabric.

Her legs are muscle
only,
as tight as a horse's quad,
you can see all the veins
and their tributaries
in her thighs,
and how they wiggle
against olive muscle.

"Little man,"
she says,
beer like a Titan
on her breath,
"I'm hungry."

And you are too,
and she will lead you,
holding your arm
by the drunken,
half-holding,
half-forgotten
vice
of her fingers
and you and her
will eat at Waffle House.

At 2 a.m.

She will dry out,
and become salty.

You will dry out and finally be hungry.

Eat,
Little Man,
she thinks,
because you're walking home
tonight.

I come back
for promise.

The tea leaves
told me it would be
all it should be.

My bags were packed
the same way a child packs a bag,
everything vital
was left
on
the
bed.

I took satisfying trinkets
because pollution
dulls.

Oh,
I
am
at
your doorstep
once
more.

The lady in the techni-colored
shawl
with eyes like a rainbow,
brought the water to a boil,
dropped in the leaves,
told me
my future
would be ready
in a second,

I'd know everything in due time,

and it was.

The tea leaves told me
in a raspy, Pall Mall
voice
that everything was going
to be
all it should be.

So,
here I am,
at your doorstep,
and everything vital
hums through woven lips
on your bed.

I have come for a teddy bear
that I have hugged
too long.

Lovers trapped
in flourescent corners.

Skin shimmers underneath
loose tees,
beige with the kind of sweat
that blackens
Levi's in the crotches.

Her fingers *****
at his mice-sized ears
which hunger
for the acrylic traps
she lays with her fingernails.

If lips had tongues
his lips would say:
"I've had plastic flesh
and mercury is in my veins
cooling me
until I'm frozen
in the arms
of death."

And his lips never touch
hers:
neck,
breastbone,
cleft-chin,
chapped ear lobe,
crackling scalp,
fracturing spine,
splitting abdomen,
scarred heart.

his are never touched by
hers:
lips.

They finger the hills
of each other's skin:
velvetine,
innumerable,
wet.

Starships beep in the night.

Beep through receivers
from a place against the earth,
but not touching it.

THeir voices are intimate
and not there.

Cries are heard from space
and cradled as breathing
treasure.

Intimate,
but not there.

Their fingers touch each other,
infinitely
and not at all.

He feels her
as the earth feels
remote beeps
in remote intimacy.