I will rip
you
the **** out of me,
go through my chest
right to the back of my rib cage,
rip that ******* string out
like God yanking the lights out on the world,
I'll ******* make you dark
and hateful,
I swear
I'll just rip all that love
just to get to the naked
emaciated soul.
Rip whatever shreds
that thing's clinging too
with bony, skin-loose
fingers.

Make it all wretched,
ripping the string of you
out of me,
like the ****-string
of a shrimp,
for the world to see
I'll rip you out of me.

It's not going to be pretty
or romantic
or tragic,
it's going to be the ugliest ******* thing you've ever seen.

Iamstillheartbroken
overyou.
Possiblyi'mnot,
possiblytherearethin­gsambivalentandjumbledandstucktogetherinsideofme
maybeyouareoneof­thestucktogetherthingsinsideofme
comingoutofmebecauseofacoreintur­moil
avolcanotappingfromagiantmagmachamberof
love.

l cradle my palm
at the basic
knot
of her skull.

A tiny mound
forcing against the flesh.

So I give it a little pressure,
just to get her to go deeper.

Just a stem
of movement.

she looks up at me
with petal-green eyes,
"grab the back of my head again,
see what happens."

She murmurs it,
because her white teeth
hover
over my
red-headed ****
like a guillotine.

I keep having
these war dreams.

A soldier
stalks my yard
cradling
an
M4.

The bullets ring in golden hiccups
at my head.

So,
I die.

Their was a  bartendress
in a costume
of superlatively
curly
black hair
and a tight body
snugged into
a tight blue dress
that shows off her upper thighs
and exposed
musclely
short legs.

Rests her hand
with splayed fingers
on the wet table.

She asked,
with a long tattoo
of the ****** of Guadalupe
snaking
down her wrist,

"Are you all right,
do you want any more?"

"No."

I tell her.

No,
I don't want anymore.

This
is how you tell a story.

From the beginning
to
the end.

When you told her that you
liked her and wanted to hold
her soft lips.

To the moment
she smacks
the **** out of you,
and your face burns
with your heart.

Shaking hot fingers.
Shaking hot stomach.
Shaking hot lungs.
Shaking hot
veins
bubbling
with the beer
running through them
as the soft bed
lightens
under a new
lonely weight..

My fear is
of looking over and being
alone and drunk.

High as ****.

E&J; swishing in hot particles
inside of my belly.

My soul


is possibly at the bottom
or top
of
me.

Death will come,
Death always comes.

When I was a ****** up kid,
I used to draw skulls
in the margins of the bible.

I used to laugh
and pick
at squashed squirrels;
while the girls
stood at a distance
crying.

I don't know
who they were crying
for.

I'd take an eraser
to the wrists
and
rub my own tombstone into my skin
until it burned.

Death will come,
Death always comes.

Last night
I had a dream
that
a kid pulled a Mossberg
out of his black
Jansport.

Pulled it
out by its ears
and flashed
its shining
black pelt in my direction.

He let loose
two
thumping shots.

No pain,
no nothing.

Just a dull, pushing thump in my chest.

Death will come to me one day, and it will be like magic.

I will exist,
and then stop existing.

I woke up this morning crying,
because in the evaporation of a dream
I came out of it
sweating, shaking, hot,
and
knowing death was close.

***
was so
cold,
silent
and hard
by then.

When I pushed into her,
I could feel
the weight
of repetition.

And by then
the weight
was normal
and safe.

A high, almost silent
ring;

like echoes of steel,

swung through my head
like a pendulum
and when I came
the ringing
stopped
mid-swing.

It shook
my head
with
its
high
gong.

Something,
so unexpected
and
unnecessary,
becomes a gift.

Remmel's
pocket smelled
like armpit,
and his switchblade
felt good
and heavy
near his thigh.

The air was humid with
passing rain
and asphalt
and he pulled out a Marlboro
and stuck it
to chapped lips.

A flood of water
hammered the gutters.

And the grass he stood on
was an island.

A flash of light rolled around the corner.
Two glimmering beacons
riding up on him.

Rolling slow.

The windows were all blacked out
and sheened in a perfect
reflection of orangeish streetlights.

Remmel put his hands in his jeans,
his white boxers
pin-striped in orange
bars.

He'd come out the house without a shirt, and
his black *******
got hard as lead in the new wind.

He licked his lips.
As the car rolled up,
a murmur of bass
making the windows buzz.

He put his hands on the hood
feeling the buzz go through him
warm and tickling
as he leaned into the car.

He checked up and down the street,
and finally squared on his reflection
in the black glass
seeing nothing but
the shaking
green God of himself
about to create.

John and Eric
had gone to New Orleans
to get drunk,
so when they saw the girl
hanging over the railing
of the balcony
pulling her shirt
up and down
up and down,
they hurled beads at her
aiming for the top of her head
so that they'd
circle the drain of her neck
in a circling, shimmering starlet
down
her shoulders.

"Come down here," John yelled.

The girl pulled down her halter-top
one more time,
exposing two
globes of bouncing flesh.

Thinking he had said,
"Pull them down."

It was so loud and everyone was whistling
and there wasn't just a single color of light;
the aura from the club
was a nebula of parti-colored flashing.

later that night
she did come down.

She bumped in between John and Eric
as they navigated her through the crowd
trying their hardest to keep her
from falling over and puking,
while trying to do the same
for themselves.

She hung to them like they were long singular beams of steel.
When she rolled her head around at them
she remembered that they looked
hard and unknown.
And while holding her
in the crooks of their arms,
they maneuvered the flesh in their jeans
with their free hands,
trying to subdue the worlds
rising out of their pants
like volcanoes.

They got her back to the hotel.

A small room
with a tiny old bed, with flower-print
comforters and
an antique dresser with swirling
sculptured wood at its corners.

John slipped off his black leather jacket
and shook his mop of
curly black hair.

Eric plopped onto the bed,
pulling her with him.

She felt him pull,
she felt the gravity of him;
the warp as she bumped against
the bed.

"You guys should come back next year."

"Maybe," Eric said.

She didn't know if she was here or not.
If she'd been here the whole night
or if she was dreaming.

But she felt something physical
on her body.

Eric sat in the corner--
beside the humming a/c
as it vacuumed out the room--
watching with lifeless eyes.

It moved across her stomach.
Slow and continuous.
It moved down to her
pelvis,
slow and continuous.
It reached inside of her
slow and continuous,
and she felt the vacuum of space.

John and Eric
tag-teamed her.

Eric
taking her mouth
and working it around his *****,
saying
"Come on baby,
****."

John pushing against her
his glowing body
making a slapping noise
as he struggled
with his hands under her stomach
making hard dimples of flesh
on her mid-section
as he tried to hold up
her limp body.

"She's out cold,"
he said.

Daddy
woke up
one morning
to mommy puking.

The curly jet-black knots of hair
on his pink-white chest
shivered
under the slicing ceiling fan.

He scratched his *****, and cleared his throat in a metallic ****** of congealed beer and bile,
it sounded like he was cutting something in his mouth with his tongue.

Rolling over,
he fumbled for his golden Rolex
on the night table,
pushing off
mommy's bangles
and bracelets
jingling to the floor
in a golden mess
that seemed wet
with light.

Rolling over,
back again
to his back
he clicked on the Rolex.

He held up his wrist in
the sun,
and,
**** me,
the light
was coming off it so hard
and strong
that he had
to cover his eyes
just to keep from seeing
all that light
and talent.

"You all right in there?"

He asked,
slipping on his boxers,
working his ****
with his golden-wristed hand
into the fabric.

In the bathroom,
mommy heard daddy's wrist click,
she wiped her mouth
on an oversized shirt sleeve,
and held her stomach.

An accumulation
of cells
split
over and over again
floating and shaking
in mommy's ******,
and she didn't know
what beer and bile
could make.

She didn't know how hard it would be
to cut that thing out.

Your lips were
at the bottom
of the shot glass
in that dim
blue bar.

Disembodied.
Bluish pink,  
and swimming as I swished
around the last
of my drink.

Usually when I drink
I try not to think about girls,
because I get depressed
easily.

You rub my body
in moving beads
and your lips
and the bluelight
are usually the last thing I remember.

Maybe if I
take a girl in the bathroom
and ******* her
on the sink
as the oil in her hair
greases the mirror
and the flies watch,
maybe I'll be able
to blur myself out,
and not even go back
to you
as you stagnate
in a blue glass
full of
blue fluid.

I miss you
girl
with the hair that smells
like sweet beer
and
breath
like iron.

I am anemic
and brutal
without you.

From the hole
in her acid-wash jeans,
she calls
her ***** a prophet,
from that hole a whole
new world
will be born.

She will push
out
****, ****,
but lastly
she will push out
a new world.

She will push out my fingers,
and my clawing
at her,
she will push out the concealed evil
and the suffocated good.

Slap that ***.
Slap that ***.

Make the evil and good scream,
give birth to a new black
humanity, a breathing wheezing
baby of equal parts good and bad,
king and beggar,
prophet and pessimist,
criminal and revolutionary.


From
her acid-wash jeans
and the hole
that I dug my fingers in
countless times
and made swirls
of mud against her burning
insides and wet flesh,
she will give birth
from a well-rounded hole,
to a well-rounded whole.

I eat your face
with my tongue
because it tastes good,
and the rough
fang-like pores
take flakes of your
soft skin into my stomach;
flakes of you;
I have broken you;
I can break you;
I can take tiny pieces
of you
and digest them.

I can eat your face,
I can eat your ears,
your nose,
your mouth,
the cleft in your chin,
your *******
a whole ***,
a cheek of your ***,
a calf muscle,
your upper quadricep
your lower intestine
your right lung,
and finally
your heart.

I can **** you with my love, because I will become a monster with a belly for you.

That tiny
red brick townhouse
somewhere
away from London.

Bathed
in fogged sunlight.

Watery air.

rays
in penumbras.

At the window
she is
a conflagration
of
soft yellow lasers.

The ivy creeps up the windows
from a
bottomless
rug
seeping
out of the basement grates
in
green
scrambling
capillaries,

they want to be burned
in the sun.

What joy
a snake
like me
feels
in a daydream
set in
his innocent London,

to be supplanted
by fear
lazing
with her legs up
***
open,
***** smiling
vertically
and
her
red-pink ****
an apple
on scratchy bedsheets.

Because there is an opening
fire all over your body
the tight space in your pants
being its nexus.

Who Am I?

Well,
I must be
that ******,
the one
in the black hoodie
***** sweatpants
and an uncombed eye,
that's always wooly
scratchy,
bloodshot
with searching for
my stash spot,
that ******
in your peripherals
that you keep your eye on
because he's
not
in a polo
looking nice,
talking
"well-spoken"
and
not
a threat
to your beautiful
lily-white daughter.


Because I grew up
fixing myself
ramen noodles
and
lifting the welcome mat
after school,
I must also be
that ******
whose father wasn't
in the same house
until he was age 13,
and when I tell you that,
you weren't expecting it
because "you're not a racist."
but
you weren't surprised.


You see,
I must be
that ******,
a stand-in
for all other *******.
I must be that ******
who represents
all *******,
not because you are racist,
but because I'm the only
******
you've met
who doesn't talk like
dis, y'know whatmsayin,
and i talk like
this, do you know what I'm saying?
I must be that ******.

In order for you
to feel okay
being around me
I must be that ******
who goes to college
does the right
thing
the white thing
and gets a job
a nice little house,
a nice black wife
with a nice
new england
clear
dialect,
(what I was
trying to get at
earlier
is that ****** dialects,
by their mere intonation,
denote stupidity,
right?)
and doesn't say a word
when his white friends
make ****** jokes
or talk in a ****** dialect
mocking some Aunt Jemima
they heard at Walmart.

But,
I also must be that ******
who doesn't step out of line
and say
"WHY IS IT
THAT IN EVERY SINGLE
ENGLISH CLASS
WE READ
ONLY
TWO
BLACK AUTHORS
A SEMESTER,
AND THAT'S
ENOUGH,
JUST ENOUGH
TO KEEP THE
****** PARENTS
HAPPY."

And If I happen to be a ******,
I,
by all means,
must not be that ******
who had a white girlfriend,
and
this girlfriend
after dating
a ******,
tried to date a white guy
she liked,
and when she told him
that she had dated,
loved,
and yes,
******
a ******,
he had said back:
"I can't believe
you ****** a ******."

Then again,
I must be that ******
with the big swinging ****
able to destroy
a white girl's ******
with its pulverizing
power.

And,
please,
If I am going to be a ******
don't be the one
who writes a poem
about
having to be
that ******,
because those
kinds of *******
are being
over-sensitive,
those dashiki-wearing-*******
who think
"Da white man dis."
and "Da white man dat."

Because
I am not one of those *******
descended from the first people on earth,
your brother,

not in the ****** way,

but the familial,
species way.

Why am I even writing
this, ****** isn't a main operative
word anymore.

Search and find "******"
and
replace with
"Black Guy." That way it becomes
a joke.

I wish
I could have been alive
that hot summer day
when that yellow dress
clung to her
by surface tension.

My mother said

they sweated alive.

Sweated
arm to arm;
elbow to elbow;
limb to wet limb;
all crowded into
Mount Morris Park
waiting to see her.

To smell her.

the tacqueria's
and fish fry's
were going
and the air was filled
with grey smoke
to make eyes sting
and noses clench.

Babies
that looked like black marbles
bobbed
to the surface of the crowd
escaping their mother's arms;
perched on shoulders
screaming
into ears
not listening for new life.

"it seemed so far off."

people fainted.
One woman
fell down beside her.

A hole opened up
to let the paramedics through.

A long ****,
where her fingers,
hanging limp from the stretcher,
slid across thighs
in the closing crevice
in her wake.

"She was old anyways."

The hole closed.

The new world
formed
in her place.

Onstage,
a yellow dress
warped
in the sun.

From the back
my mother
heard a voice
like thunder,
close thunder,
thunder
like the roar
of the universe.

Nothing else was present that day. Nothing.

Just the yellow sun
and it's yellow birth of black
spinning,
sweating skin,
and a lilting thunder
like the roar of a universe
coming from
the black earth
at the neck
of that yellow, clinging dress.

"Hello."
the thunder said.

Bleaching
the shirts
stark-white until they hold
your skeleton
like a vice is supposed to.

Feeling pain
and a grip of hope
like biting your fingernails
to the cuticles,
only to see the soft
skin-like crescent underneath your teeth.

Today
in church,
the preacher talked
about God.

God and his ability
to hammer your soul
to it's infinite potential.

Able to hammer you flat
and tired
until he could mould you.

He talked about a clean house,
and I thought about my ***** shirts.

He talked about the pleasure
of the crucifixion,
and I thought about
biting my fingernails too hard
and too often.

I am searching for
equilibrium.

I am not a writer.

I am a fox
in a man-suit
pretending to be a writer.

Just to trick you all.

Just to trick myself.

If I put down
the pen
and the pretententiousness;
pulled the costume off
in a papery rip like a jet breaking the sky,
and
looked in the mirror
to see
that fire of fur,
then it would mean
that there is something inside of me that I've been using as fuel.

Something
non-renewable.

She always laid out her paints
right before bed.

The oils nustled up against her thighs.
Some of them,
cradled in tiny white baths of containers,
lay in the open space
of her folded legs.

"Just in case, something hits me in a dream, I want to wake up and run and be ready at the right moment."

The carpet is rough
and stained with the shrapnel of dry paint
that *****
your soles
when you walk through
the living
room
to the
pale kitchen,
while she gurgles and
pops
in her sleep.

All the time,
the paint gets on the floor,
she paints in thrusts.

"You're going to have to pay for this mess, you know,
I'm not paying to have this carpet cleaned,
it's not my ****."

Condescension and guilt
spread through your lips
numbing you
in a fog of arrogance,
that you perceive
as good-natured caution,
while she hurts the canvas
thrusting harder.

She
paints
clowns.

Tall, fat clowns,
with long tentacle fingers,
bellies
out to                             here,
and tiny people
curling in black oily slicks at the corners
under the pressure of the clowns.

"Why the **** do you always paint clowns?"

"Why can't you just let me be?
you don't know anything about art."

The bed
is tiny.

***
is soft,
methodical
and
pre-emptive.

"I'm tired of stepping on your paint at night,
I'm tired of my feet
looking like a rainbow."

One night,
you come home smelling
like grease and fried chicken.

Your button-down
with the slippery gold name-tag
is dabbed
in the chest by leaves of oil
and
shadowed in the armpits
by
strokes of sweat.

Your manager kept talking about:
"You need to improve
your checkout efficiency,
you've been lagging lately."

Dropping the heavy black
flak jacket
with it's flare of orange lining
on the floor,

You see her,

with her arsenal of paints
arrayed at her criss-crossed
limbs
like the implements
of
a war.

She looks up
at you,
black circles
under her eyes,
an easel
holding up
a canvas of almost minsicule drippings of fabric.

"Oh,
I see you're still there,
great."

You walk to the kitchen
and open the fridge,
there's a half-gallon
of 2% left.

An apple
slowly crumpling into itself.

And a bottle
with a swig of orange juice left in it.

***** always leaves a swig.

You take the bottle up to your mouth and swallow down a trickle that you can feel in your bones.

"Don't drink from the bottle."
she says
with a nodded head.

"I can do what I want,
I bought it."

She looks up.

The clowns
she says:
"Are the type of people
that gain power,
the ones ruling the world,
the ones who become *******."

You laugh like an idiot
"People like me."

"No, you're not a clown,
you're one of the tiny ones."

"*******."

You want to wash yourself
of the stink.

Drain it all down into the gutter,
let the stink
sit there.

So you take a shower,
while she stares at the white cartridges
of paint,
and a conflict brewing.

We pull
the Humboldt
out of the water.

Sometimes
they eat each other,
and we pull
up
shredded hooks
clotted
with white meat.

Sometimes
they
scramble
underneath the surface
and the film of water
separating us
from them
becomes pink and flashing.

We pulled up
a black
saucer
of an eye
one night.

It clung
to a hook
by
pink strings of optic muscle.

Our flashlights
put little continents of light all over its placid, black surface,
and I felt human sadness
some type of animal-human
empathy,
it ****** me up so much
that I threw the line overboard
again,
almost hitting Nestor in the face,
with an un-baited hook.

Our hauls
are getting smaller.

The carnivores
used to jump
into our boats,
slicking
the planks with an excretion
the consistency of placental fluid.

Now,
sometimes dusk burns
as
we yank
seaweed,
seagrass,
and
toilet seats
over the prow;
our bodies tenebrous;
straining with the line
like warriors
stabbing the sea.

Today cops had to break up a riot in the cookery aisle.

Two-dollar waffle makers.

Today
go outside
after you've had
all the turkey,
stuffing,
cranberry sauce.

After you fill
your belly
with
a cornucopia
of food.

Go out there
and thank god
that those
Indians
died off so quickly.

Thank god
for giving us this land,
because we own it,
we can own
it.

It is ours
because God
said it should be ours,
not because
we took part
in one of the greatest
genocides
in history.

Breathe in
all that good air,
and thank god
that you don't have to be
on a reservation.

A refugee
on the motherland.

Our bad.

The kind of cars
that I like,
are those 87' monte carlos,
subs
big as aircraft carriers
in the back.

Gold spoke
wheels,
able to turn
holes in the sky.

Chameleon
paint jobs,
green
and full
in the sun,
fading to black
and
glossy
in the shadows.

When I was a teenager,
the kings
used to ride by
in the
monte carlos
with open
windows
letting loose
a humbling roar
so loud
that it
put
ubiquitous vapors
into
the air.

The neighborhood smelled
like the thumping
and the hard hum
of their vibrating
windshields.

The kings
always
let the car slide slowly
in neutral,

and as they took
stock of their domain,
Their glossy gold fronts
made you realize
why gold
was
so important
each tooth looked like
a tablet of commandments.

Our wife-beaters
were
stained with ketchup
and other things
that bleach could never
get out,
and we smelled
funny.

But the kings
wore hawaiian shirts
and smoked
cigars.

The kings
were the preachers.


One of the kings
was Luke's brother,

whenever he stopped at a corner
we'd pile around
putting our fingerprints everywhere
until
he told us
to
"*******,
don't you have any
home-training?"

Luke would stand closest,
squinting
as he leaned on the driver-side
window,
all that bass
hammering
his bones.

"How much
did you pay for it?"
Reggie would ask
from the back,
peeking his head over,
trying to see
the king.

The king would smile,
and say
"enough."

we'd all be rapt.

He'd get a call
on his cellphone,
and we
would come up
with crazy numbers.

Luke didn't even know
how much
was
"enough".

The kings held the secret
of god
and power.

I wanted to be as close to god
as they were,
I wanted to know the secret
to contentment.

I wanted to come back home
with money like
the kings with gold teeth.

I cannot get into ******* rhyming poetry.

I just can't get into that ****.

I'm not trying to down anybody
who does it,
or loves it,
but the only time
I can take it seriously
is
when a bass line kicks in
wrecking my heart and head to pieces.

Maria
kisses
like she wants
to take your head off.

The top lip
is an umbrella
all the way to the bridge of the nose.

The bottom
slobbers
the
cleft-chin.

When I kiss her,
I want to push her away
and
tell her
"quit that ****."

but she's green.

she's never been with a dude
the way that I want
to be with her.

And so,
the kissing
I tolerate.

The way she takes her tongue
to every black surface
that the shadow of her mouth
creates.

I shake it off.

Or
how sugary my mouth gets
with all the extra saliva
she wets my teeth
with.

I'm cool with it.

But one night,
she gets down
on all fours on her
sofa-bed.

Her skin:

patchy black
and white
from the moon coming in
and scattering
against the leaves
of an oak
outside the window.

Her jaw
working
in square motions
as she swallows
down
all that extra
saliva,
from all that
extra kissing.

And she said to me,
her eyes
placid,
glassy
and black
as leather,
"**** me like those **** girls."

Ever have one of those moments,
where nothing is beautiful
about anything you're looking at?

A taste in your mouth,
gets sour
like you've been chewing copper
and
nothing is beautiful.

Maria's mom
had an ***.

A nice
peach.

The kind that made
Maria
uncomfortable,
because her mother wore
green bikinis
to the grocery store
and bought
every green thing,
even the hard bananas
that wouldn't be soft
for months.

in the lime bikini,
the creases
of her upper thighs
were places
where men wanted to put
their tongues.


Maria's mother
was a
thirty-seven year old
milk-skinned
body.

And other than
the green bikini
she wore
the black skirt.

When her mother
wore the black skirt
it made men
want to slide fingers
up the black hemisphere
and feel for the rabbit
in between her thighs,

to feel the magic

of soft
stomach flesh
and a still-tight
almost hermetic
***.

Maria's mother,
called Ms. Herrera
by Maria's boyfriend,
resumed the old name
Judy
in the mirror.

She spent long, distended moments
in front of that
mirror
in the black dress,
watching the folds of fabric
slide.

Although her stomach
was starting to sag
and she could hold
the flesh
in between
an index
and
a thumb,
She could still take solace
in the still-tight
gift;

the one part of her body
that she could turn her back to
while it gave her
gracious returns;

It was a capsule of the past:
intact,
still vital
and still
hers.

Maria's mother
wore those tight black dresses,
g-strings
and bikinis to the grocery store,
because they were
relics.

Maria was a relic,
but not the kind
that made her mother
still
feel pretty
or young
or at least
valuable.

The girl
with two long braids
hanging from her temples
like droopy
antennae,
looked up at the sky.

A foggy halo
circled the moon
in a snowy paste
and
a tiny sister
pushed itself
redly
outward.

Out of the halo.

Out of the white shadow
of
the pearl.

The haze was so thick
that the girl
had to squint
to make sure
the tiny red dot
was there.

But it was there.

There
licking at the halo.

Eating it.

Eating its way out.

The black telescope
shined.

She laid her eye
on the viewfinder.

She felt suction
and the momentum of her eye
zooming
out to the vaccum.

She will tell the tale
of
the stars
and
the war-gods
full of blood.

Whenever I'm around my family,
I get this low kind of feeling.

My family is full
with the kind of people
that become vps,
investment bankers,
nurses,
lawyers.

me:
little ****-head
that smokes ****,
calls himself
"a writer",
and doesn't like to have
long conversations
about his future.


I am not one of them,
I am not a black sheep, or a black pharmacist,
or a black lawyer.

I am something
that wants to become
something,
when I am unsure
of what that something
is.

A continual
rebirth of somethings
likening myself
to God
with so much
internal creation.

This is malignant
to my family's ideals
of self-assuredness
and placement,
brutal placement
in America.

"Have you talked to dad,
since you've been at school?"

"Nope."

"Are you coming home
for thanksgiving?"

"I don't know."

Josephina
breathes in a crackle
over the phone.

New York,
a cacophony
in the background.

A background of cold,
and
people talking
while walking
while hailing a yellowcab with a left
and slow-rolling heads locked
onto the phones in their right.

These people enter taxis,
not knowing if they're ever
going to reach home,
or the airport,
or union square,
just going
on the promise
that they won't become
road-****.

I can't feel it in my yellow apartment.

If anything,
my yellowcab
idles.

Through the receiver

A squad car
rings nervously,
then
after a lungful
of garbage-smelling air,
it becomes a full blare.

A pause
of
noise
always ensues,
just for a second,
the entire corner
becomes a silent silo
of human beings.

"How's new york?"

"you know,
dad called me
and asked about
how to get on a diet,
can you believe that?"

Yes,
I can
dad is a fat ****,
a pink, white belly
of a man. And a few
sandbags for chins.

"That's good."

"So I'm not going to see you?"

"Probably not."

"Well, you should call dad,
talk to him,
he loves
you."

Some conversations,
acheive nothing.

The same
tired, dead things
get run over.

Road-****.

Josephina believes she is the spatula
that will bring back
pancake squirrels
and
pancake relationships.

As much as you don't know
about me and dad's relationship,
I can give you a kodak moment.

A snapshot,

of a hovering man,
pointing at his son's neck,
searching for the misplaced vertebrae,
the lack
of fear for the world
--"the right kind of fear,
the fear a man
should have
of himself"--
and a son,
hunched,
small hands in fists,
a heavy haul of muscles
pulled into a dark brow
right over black eyes.

This picture
will suffice.

In this country
a black man is only legitimate
as
a musician,
a ball player,
or an actor,
or a small-chance
president.

Other than that,
he's nothing.

Worse than that,
he is sore.

Truthfully,
If you saw
me
walking down the street
towards you,
you wouldn't think
poet
first.

I'm that ugly,
angry
and black-looking.

A perpetual scowl
like
a
scar.

I only smoke
when you're around
or when I'm around you,
I don't know which is which
just that a consumption is going on
within me.

You reach down into your pocket book
and pull out a few killing sticks
hopefully,
I'll die of consumption.

That little creature
inside me,
the pink satyr,
jumps
in between my ribs,
whenever you go rummaging
in that golden shimmer of stripper's purse,
and **** out the Marlboros
with a wet-lipped,
wide-arcing
smile.


The creature,
the real me,
plays with his
satyr ****
all day
and bites his nails
and soft cuticles
until the blood runs
and pools in
little
red
pearls.

I am love-starved,

and the satyr is afraid
when he jumps
because that means you're around.

When I'm around you,
or you're around me
something smells,
possibly the iron
of the ******
left-over finger flakes.

The satyr picks up
the soggy,
spit out nails
and shingles
my heart with them.

The satyr shingles my heart
with the fear that you will leave
and that I will have no one
to consume
or be consumed by.


You are my ******
nails and cuticles.

What a ******* emo
you
make me.

I am uncomfortable,
even,
with the notion
that you have an effect
on me.

That's why I dismiss it,
with that whole
"What a ******* emo" title.

And that whole
"What a ******* emo."
last line.

As long as it doesn't affect me;
as long as it's not immediately relevant
and something I have to immediately worry about;
as long as it doesn't **** up
my credit score
or my
shiny
new
house
then,
**** it.

And
*******,
for bringing it to my attention.

how dare you.

this was promised to me,
it's predestined,
my two-story, three bedroom, two bath; the foreign workmanship and american artifice; the creamy halo of vinyl in the sun; the wrath of windexed windows and their hard missiles of bright, reflected sunlight; the soft lips of my children; my wife's pillowy, warm stomach and scratchy *****; our retriever that eats his own ****, picking apart tiny specks of feces from the sun-pricked tips of our rug of fescue; these are the works of God, this is the land of God. You are marring this flat earth

Walking home,
a girl in an orange
of a shirt and long
bell-bottoms
with a small protuberant
***
turned around to look at me.

Her eyes were large,
and the way she looked at me
was a question almost:

Are you dangerous?

Maybe, she wasn't looking at me,
maybe the breeze kicked up,
and she just wanted to shield herself.

But I don't know,
something in the way
she looked at me,


The quick stoicism
of her large blue eyes,
shocked into a quick
heavy moment of recognition:

black guy.
hoodie.
black baggy pants.
the scowl.


I knew that soon her eyes
would wiggle out of there sockets
and dangle behind her
always looking back
even as she kept moving forward.

The illusion of moving forward.

I felt like the black guy
the news tells you about,
the one that's dangerous
to all lonely white females
at 9:00 at night,
as his tongue lolls
and his head wags.

Maybe,
I'm being too sensitive.

Maybe,
I'm being hypersensitive.

Why is it
that whenever I see a white female
walking towards me at night
I cross the street?

Today there were two
people talking too much
and too loud
in the library.


Guy says,
looking down
nose moving with his eyes
over the Times New Roman legs
of a book.

"He broke up with her because
her ***** smelled like ****."

The girl across from him
has tiny fingers with no knuckles,
fingers that make tacking noises
on her Macbook.

She smiles,
in aquamarine
as the screen dazzles her pale
face.

"She probably had a yeast infection,
or something."

There are too many people talking,
but what rights do I have?

The right to laugh with them,
to be a part of it,
to be a comrade
to be mad because they're talking
while I'm pretending not to listen
and agree?

I broke up with a girl
because her ***** smelled like
an *******.

There are too many people
full of double-entendres
and irony.

The Brooklyn Bridge is
an array of lights
stretching limb to limb
across the water.

It slaps tiny sequins on the east river,
as those give way
on that anything but black and steady
to blinking eyes on the barges
and the flittering stingers of heliccopters
zipping from cloud to cloud.

This orchestra of human expansion
reddens the black walls
of my apartment,
with light.

The scratchy comforter
and starch-hardened pillow
scramble on my bed
in a mess of rifts and fabric mountains.

I love getting up
in the middle of the night
and staring out of this window,
but when I go back to bed,
the voices of the wasps,
mournful barges,
and falsetto of the old springs
give way to thinking
and restlessness.

Everybody loves *****,
they tell you it's wrong
to call it that:
*****.

My mother
slapped me in the face
when she realized
I was thinking about it.

I was five.

She caught me
sticking my hands
down my pants
handling the soft
warm muscle of myself,
as Jeri Ryan
spoke cold and hard
to me
from the cargo hold
of the U.S.S. Voyager.

Jeri's ****
were so hard and stoic
in that grey spandex,
and a slight *******
took hold of my hand
and my body cooled
and warmed at the same time.

When I was fifteen,
I first felt one,
a *****.

It made itself known
through a hole
full of wetness
and stink
in Mary's bebe jeans.

Mary,
was a puerto-rican girl
who smelled like marlboros
and perfume.

She talked about bubble baths.



I took my finger
and ran it through the
rough fabric
until i felt her.

I felt her pelvic bone,
and a soft, giving
rubber of human flesh
on the tip of my finger.

In the movie theatre I searched
until I felt an infinity of giving
an indention in the soft flesh
of breathing warmth and maximum.

With a whole world
in tow,
the lander of my finger
slowly entered a wet,
sticky atmosphere

poking, prodding,
returning
and re-entering
this wet,
fishy-syrupy smelling
world.

"I can feel your *****," I whispered.

"Don't call it that." she hummed back.

It's supposed to be
98 and cloudless today.

By the time I roll in,
and park my car,
Roman's walking up to me,
his gold tooth a
full yellow smile in the sun.

“Hey meyer,
I need you to
Pull the box truck around,
We’ve got some plants we’ve gotta load,
Then we’ve got a landscape job
About an hour from here.”

“Are we gonna be back here
Today?”

“Probably not
until
late.”

The box truck
Is a holdover from the old owners
Of Ken’s Nursery,
It’s still got
Ken’s Nursery in large comic sans
On it’s rust-streaked sides.

The wheel wells are rusted
brown as salt deposits
On the shores of sulfuric oceans,
and little ringlets of decay
rock as the truck bounces;
It’s old springs
Giving back after all these years.

Today we have:
Forty-two veriagated ferns.
Ten dragon lilies.
10 cannas,
But cannas have to have a male and female to flower,
So 20 cannas collectively,
And we’ve gotta mulch.

By the time we’ve loaded all the plants;
stuffed the mulch in with the Bobcat,
And thrown in our picks and shovels,
My shirt is soaked through.

98 degrees and cloudless.

Roman walks to his car
and takes off his shirt
To reveal a pink belly
full of folding skin
and matted black upwelling *****
Singing with sweat-diamonds
In the unperturbed vision of the sun.

My shirt is soaked already too.

But even as I loaded the truck,
I thought about Melissa.

When I get home,
She probably won’t be there.

When the female is separated from the male canna,
Nothing dies, the two live happily ever after.

But the canna does not flower,
And doesn’t remember enough
To miss it.

Just continues quietly with a black bulb
The color of a skink’s underbelly.

This morning
I woke up
and
told Melissa we wouldn’t
make it past three months.

We're at month two,
and I can feel it.

Either I’d drop her, or she’d
drop me, but either way
“we don’t have staying power,
and there’s no point
in either of us
pretending like we’re grown ups
who can just power through things
out of sheer complacency”.

I wasn’t looking at her.
Just up
at the spackle and a spinning fan.

It’s so hot in here,
that we sleep on top of the covers
sweating little puddles of skin
into the comforter.

Nightly,
we mash those deposits of dried salt
deep into the mattress
with our sloughing bodies
to get stuck
and form
tiny caves of skin and boredom in the springs.

She rolled away from me
swirling off a cloud
of stale, watermelon shampoo
And reached
With a tightly domed deltoid
towards the blue milk crate
where her purse sat.

She rummaged in there,
her back muscles working
like a landslide of flesh.

She finally dropped the purse,
after an effort of five minutes,
and I heard the successful flick
of a lighter.

She started
puffing and chugging down smoke
As she laid on her side.

My eyes watered
in the bluish smog,
and as the fan turned
raining down peices of our own skin
in a dusty, undetectable cloud of particulates
I could just see her,
out of the corner of my eye,
Shifting the weight of her body
from her deltoid
to her trapezius.

Free concerts
are full of potheads,
they get all in your ear
and start talking about
the land of milk and honey,
DENVER ******* COLORADO.

The beers cost
15 bucks
for pisswater
and barely a pint.

The girls
all wear pink spaghetti straps
sagging acid-wash jeans,
and a smell like
old milk.

The old people
dance.

the old people dance;
there wrinkly
pterodactyl arms
flapping as they swirl the air
with bad knuckles.

The air smells,
like sweat.

Sweat smells like
toilet water.

Free concerts are usually outside,
so hope to ******* Gaia that it doesn't rain,
because you're stuck there,
drunk and yelling
dancing and laughing
******* and falling.

Matt, Dang and Me.

We spent our summer going to free concerts,

because the girls that go to free concerts
think tattoos and finger-******* and toilet humor
is more ****
than money.

The old people dance with you
performing some type of necromancy
in the air
that brings dead things inside of you
back to life.

And the bud,
it's so ******* sticky,
and it causes a hacking
paroxysm of coughing
to the point that you can
taste the blood in your mouth,

because those people from
DENVER ******* COLORADO,
really know their ****.

She sent a package
tied in this biege tweed cord.

It turned out to
be a picture of you two
at the lake,
that day it was cold
and she wore that beanie with the flames,
her hair all curly and escaping,
your lips all red and chapped.

A folded note tucked on the inside
of the frame reads:

"I have Connie,
*******

Love always,
smiley-face,
smiley-face
smiley-face,
smiley-face,
me."

­Connie: your/her rat terrier.

You put the picture
in its black frame
on the tv table.

The tweed
you nail
to two spaced planks
on the wall above the tv.

It's like abstract
modernist-expressionist-
constructionist-art.

It's just one string.

A taut cord
of brown tweed.

The black night comes,
over and over,
over and over,
she doesn't return,
but the tweed remains
as taut as a fingernail
or an exposed artery.

Somehow
it's so human and obstinate
that the woven vertebrae
seems to curve minutely
and femininely.

As time passes,
the tweed moves
from beige
to golden
and gravitational.

A call to a friend goes something like this:
"Come over here, I've got this amazing thing on my wall."

The friend, Eric,
calls more friends.

The friends come over,
all piling around this golden tweed
after they've taken stock of the kitchen
and Wild Turkey.


They take turns
plucking it,
thumbing it,
putting their ears to it,
and studying it,
all
at your insistence.

Somebody,
******* Eric,
coughs in the room.
More people begin to cough.

Eric walks up
to the the string,
that is nailed at top
and bottom
on two spaced planks.



Eric gives it a final hard tug,
snapping it like a belt.

the tweed hums and shivers off a few flakes
of dust and amber material.

"I've just wasted five minutes
with this thing,"
Eric says

to the string,
and you.

Eric speaks for the group.

He turns and leaves,
taking the whole group of
twenty
with him.

They trail behind Eric
like a great, long tail
flicking
and knocking things over
in your apartment
out of sheer agitation
on the way out.

The golden gravity subsumes you.

You do not close the door behind them,
you can't even hear their tiny, black voices
as they all clamor into the elevator
and ding.

My dreams are full
Of skull-*******
And ****-*******
And ******* all night long.

******* girls I loved
And girls I came to hate.

They are full of that driving hunger
like being tickled
By the queen wasp's stinger
Until the syringe went to deep

And the want became a need

And
the *******
became

A plague,

so that I couldn’t dream
Of anything else,
but sticking my ****
into some pink *****
And driving it all the way into
Her
until
I could see it in her eyes,
forcing the smell of her
reddened, limping *****
out of her ears
like a bloated body
excreting excess venom.

I wake up
to a hard-on,
fatigued,
limping,
famished,
humiliated.

Every night I pull the power cord out of the digital radio beside my bed, the one with the lime-green numerals, and I wrap the cord around my neck until I can hear the muffled hammering of my heartbeat
inside my skull.

The god-being
takes off her jacket

and
sits down on the edge of my bed.

She cradles a crinkling,
noisy bag of twinkling
cold coronas.

The god-being says:

"I got two for you,
one for me."

The god-being
is wearing one of my black beaters

and the pin-up nurse
on her left-shoulder
is splayed and exposed.

The nurse's body opens up
into a flaring
of too-long legs
and distended ****.

The god-being

is curled away from me
her whole being is
wrapped up
in holding the bag.

Wrapped up
in holding those sounds contained.

The god-being

unfurls herself
finally
and reveals the three
golden bodies.

The nurse
is no longer bloated
and stretched.

The god-being turns
to me,
two coronas in her right
one in her left.

The god-being spiders
up to me.

Crawling over the bed,
making space-time
dimples
in the scratchy fabric
with the two sap-colored bottles
in her tiny creative hands
and the sadness
that she has created me
to look at her.

I have written so much
****** poetry across this city;

left it in bars, under streetlights, and

In the bathrooms where people have ******
all over the toilet seats
and I had to use my poems
to clean it up.

They are on napkins
and receipts;
pieces of toilet paper,
and even a one-liner
on the carcass
of a piece of paper
that once held a straw.

The words get soggy on wet bars
and bloom like black flowers
losing all consistency and coherence.

Sometimes
I write them out of pure impetus.

To get me going,
I need a couple beers and those
Pabst-drinking, past-drunk
drunk girls that get close up to you
and put their lips on your earlobes
like they want to tell you a secret

But all you get is a present
of soft stinging breath.

Sometimes
I write them for some girl I meet,
like the one who came up and sat down
right beside me.

She said her name was
so and so.

I said my name was
so and so,

so we got to talking

And the topic finally reared its
fat, ugly head:

“Are you going to school?”

“Yea I go to State”

“Oh that’s cool, whats your major?”

“Creative writing”

Then she smiles at me
like I’ve got some broccoli
in my teeth,

and she wants to figure out a way to tell me

without breaking
this three-beer-good-buzzing mood,

finally she says:

“write me something”

And I become a dog for her.

In my doggish way
I take my tail
out of my pocket
and tuck it's wiggling self
onto a napkin.

I write
about how meeting someone new,
is like trying to figure out
if what you’re looking at is a skyscraper
or a mountain,
or just a Norfolk freight train
barreling down the tracks
with your name on it’s front grille.