This is crazy,
having to re-define
everything.

What will my mother
think?

My dad already
thinks I'm crazy,
and I don't even stay there.

Sometimes I have black coffee,
and that's it for a day.

When I walk to the ABC store
on bland nights,
I pack
a pack
of Marlboros,
and I leave breadcrumbs of butts.

At night
I suckle
the lick dry,
right down to the bottom
of the breast,
until there is nothing more
it can give me.

During the day,
I work out
haphazardly,
and **** in the toilets,
like a big boy.

I have to learn how to speak again.

I've got a whole new dictionary
and it's got the same word
on
every page.

Can I be human,
with one word?

*******,
hoes,
crazy,
*****.

Catch me on a friday night,
and I might
say them all.

But what I say
and what I feel
is a different
thing.

Because *******,
hoes,
womps,
don't have vocabularies
like boulders.

They can't destroy.

And with a new mindset,
I can say
a few things.

A ***** is a girl
without hope.

A ***
is a girl
that likes ****
and doesn't
like
love.

A crazy one
is a girl that gets by.

A ****
is a girl
that doesn't know the difference
between the three
and operates
on a thin line;
because *******
have treated her like ****
and no new ******
can make her think
any different.

But a girl,
alas
a
girl.

A girl
is full of love
and platitudes.

A girl
has her hands
on your heart
all the time.

She has a vocabulary
and says **** a Webster's
because she's got a new dictionary
that didn't even exist
before she let it out her mouth.

A girl
makes you re-define
the word
love,
with all its
futile resentment
and
disenchantment,
because she'll keep you coming
back
for more,
even as she says
"no,
you're talking crazy,
you gotta
go."

So trust me when I say this,
I could **** with a girl's head before,
but this girl
she's maneuvered me into thinking
about how ****** up
I
really
am.

And that's as smart
as
I've
ever
been.

There is pain
in too many
communities.

Too many murders
that
go
missing.

I saw a man die
the other day,
watched him scream
for God
as every man
does
in the last few minutes.

When me and Leez,
walked outside
we'd catch the whiff
of death
and our nostrils
wouldn't turn.

A dude was getting his twists re-done,
as the dying man's
entrails
revolted in his gut
and he cleared himself,
ready for death.

You could say there's a genocide
in America,
we just turn our noses
up to it.

With averted eyes
people walk past
the dangerous places,
but the most dangerous place
is complacency
and people live with that
every day.

I swear,
I love
a girl
with
biggg-***
lips.

The kind of lips
that could pull a ****** into
a sanatarium.

I'd go crazy
willingly.

Put me in the strait-jacket
of your mouth.

I'll kiss every crevice because
you've got two anacondas of muscle covering
perfect teeth.

I'll grip the shoulders of your jaw,
as you squeeze me with those
biggg-*** lips
so hard
that my backbones
break.

I just want to meet poets.

The ones
in
the clubs
not
made for poetry.

The one's who
reside
in places
where
their thighs are places
for grinding.

The one's that push dudes off
without malice.

I want to meet the poets
at the bar,
taking in all their ears can handle,
because someday
they will
write it all down.

I want to meet the poets
in the middle of divorce,
becuase the pain of separation;
is a fissure of
love.

Poets in their cars
at five in the afternoon
with the windows open,
because carbon dioxide
builds in the system
and a greenhouse
of hope
may
be
feeding
unborn seeds.

I just want to meet poets.

When I'm not back home
in the city
where the bulls cry
in fumes,
**** goes awry.

The girl
that
I loved
once,
calls
twice.

And then a third time,
I pick up,
and it's war
from the first
breath.

D-Day on a tuesday night,
the troops storming the shore,
the bombs blazing
in the infrerno of night,
my ex calling me
talking about
compassion.

So what did I do?
really?

I just tried
to be
civil.

I tried to tell her that my heart
was in another place,
that it was bending
and finally
broken.

Compassion doesn't live here anymore,
because so many questions
about cheating with white girls,
the same kind that her irish-italian blood
resembled,
boiled down
to
self-hate.

I tried to tell her
that I was in love,
that I was over her,
that these arguments
were the mute points
of her politicism.

She couldn't sway me
with a thousand dollars
or a million.

I was in love
and it hurt to argue,
because I wasn't talking
to the one,
I wanted to.

I was ******* with heathers,
when I wanted to know more
about  flying eagles
and the depth of feminism.

I wanted to know how deep it reached
her heart,
and how.

So now,
I'm angry
that you called,
because it wasn't the number I wanted,
not the voice
so clear
and liquid
as
truth.

I caught Gnat
cheating.

caught her in it.

Not in the bed,
but enough
in the heart.

She said,
"Yea,
I ******
Jose,
so what?"

And I said,
"so what?
I love you,
and you **** me
like this?"

I wanted to hit her,
wanted to say with an open palm
that my heart
was a closed ******.

That it hurt
when she forced her love in.

So Gnat left,
and I got bitter,
I drank
and drank
in that lonely apartment.

She had a good time
with
Jose,
but came back
when he was done
with
her.

So what is trouble,
but attachment?

Attachment that you can't
pry loose,
even when the loosest nails
are easy in a crowd of girls,
when the heart
is a rigid baseboard.


So, I felt happy
for a second,
then depression hit again
when we ******,
and I knew
she
was
gone.

I'm saying this a thousand times,
but bitterness grows,
and when I find a good one,
I let her go,
because she might cheat,
so I cheat on her
and in conversations over verse
I let it be known.

But I miss
companionship,
true love.

Now it's ruined.

I'm trying to move on;
I wish you'd get the ****
out
of
my head.

I want to force love on another,
when the words
are lost because
they
are words
meant for you.

I want to take
your misery
and make a cake.

I want to be the candles
dripping wax
over you heart.

I want to be the heat
of knowledge.

*******,
I'm ******
up.

Maybe
it's *******.

maybe
I'm
confused.

Maybe moving onward
and upward to the next one,
is just a way
for me
to hurt
gracefully.

To feel nothing
as I have felt
so many times before.

Because I've had girls before
that went back to old boyfriends,
and it's easier for me to say
WELL, **** IT THEN,
and **** HER TOO,
SHE NEVER CARED.

Instead of uttering,
I care too much
over too much coffee
and too much Evan Williams.

Stay away girl of the Eagles,
find a new one,
a one
that will
love you
as beautifully
as I did,
but didn't say.

I was afraid
you'd run
away
if I told you
I think
about you
constantly,
because I'd wake up
at
four
in the morning
and still tipsy
mourning
over
if
I can
be of service
to your heart.

I thought you'd leave
and I'd be stuck here
with a licquor heart.

I'd be stuck here
as I am.

Know that my
heart
is
quick.

Understand
that it has movements
like a fish,
spurring
to the next
bubble
of oxygen
in an ocean
deep
without it.

I move as soon
as I know the love
of that bubble
has been ****** dry
by ***** gills.

I want to know how you're doing
because I care about you
deeper than love,
because friendship
is greater than love
in my book.

You can choose your friends.

Not your lovers.

So,
I hope
someday you call
to talk
about writing,
because when I said
I loved you,
it meant,
I love our friendship,
and I ****** it up
that night
we made lips
into gestures
of companionship.

Take a second
and remember
what I said,
that friendship
is greater than love.

That the bubble
is never
greater
than
the
ocean.

I want you to be all right,
because a second
in the library
is greater
than
love
daily,
to me.

I want to hold you tight
in the palms
of understanding,
and not
let you go
in the discipline
of youthful breaking.

Heather,
I could fall
into
your
brown eyes.

I really could.

Time's not waiting
on
any
man.

So,
with that little ***
and littler
voice,
trust me
when i'm saying
I could talk to you for days
as your body became
nothing.

I fall in love easily,
let's hope this one
has a stamp
of truth.

heather,
with the long
brown
hair.

heather
with the long,
brown
voice.

heather
with the long,
brown
legs.

let me be redundant,
let me
be
unequivocal
in the recitations
of my heart,
when I say,
I'm feeling you
and my knuckles
could burn
as I grip
the soft limestone
holding me
from
your
eyes.

Germel had the dead-eye stare like he was
going
to
puke.

"Bruh,
smoke this,
let it
cool
down,"
I said.

"You're on it right now,"
Germ said.

But he took a hit.

Germ and I were smoked
and drunk,
we'd been at it
for the last hour.

And over that time,
love had reached
it's *******
into my heart.

had pulled the hurt
right
out
with a single knuckle
and a single
digit.

Sometimes bud
will
do
that.

I wanted Germ to be all right,
as I dealt with the tornado
inside.

So much pain
on a sunday night,
so much
anger.

I wanted to punch
everything,
especially
those dumb
happy
lovers.

I watched Germ puke in the bushes.

And
I felt awful
because I knew
she'd finally dipped on me,
and that
was
puke
enough.

Jacky had a tiny voice,
a voice
like a whistle.

But she carried
Julian
like she was holding
goodness
and those tiny arms
had veins
in anacondas.

"There's my little man,
my little soldier,
my little hope."

Julian
giggled in twinkling spoons
and vivid joy,
the joy of a mattress
of Jackie's love.

Jackie wore like
a thousand wraps,
applebottoms
and chucks
clinging
to the
soles.

But she loved
Julian
and took him in her arms
when he screamed.

With that tiny voice
she sang
and made ice sculptures
out of the cold blocks
of his hunger.

Elise
and
Romeo
got on the bus.

Elise carried a cake
with a thousand red
ribbons
dripping like
loose ***** lips,
or so they appeared to Romeo.

Romeo came on with
a hard-on
on his face,
or so it appeared to Elise.

"I don't want
any other man
over at my
house,
I don't care if he's your cousin,
you hear me?"

Elise let out a silver snarl.

"I'm not playing with you
woman."

Elise's whispers
wavered between razor-thin roses
and soft spikes.

"I love you
Romy,
but you're on some
other,
I ain't seen a man
in a while,"

The roses that break the skin,
the spikes
that blunt the pain.

"Oh that's how it is?"

"It has to be."

Elise
carried the cake off.

Romeo
got stuck with the cart
full of groceries,
and three wheels missing,
just dragging
the thing.

Elise strutted like fat *******
strut.

Romeo called after her
about other men,
other men,
other men
that had been in his house
without him knowing,
he hated and loved her,
dragging all the sustenance
in the world
behind him.

Elise loved him too,
loved him
even when she was with
other men,
and that's the thing
he couldn't figure
out.

Love is a hard thing
to deal with
for anybody.

There should not be
a fiddle of pain.

The chords should not
strenuously
vibrate up the line
from love
to highs
of depression.

Touch them
feel the strings,
feel their strength
and breakability.

There is nothing
more touching
than empathy.

And when the final reside
becomes a resurrection,
put it in your place of empathy,
not hope.

Randy was drunk and high
and skipping school.

She'd sipped on a few too many sips
of crown royal,
and that wasn't the reason
but she says,
"that didn't help."

Javaughn picked her up
beside the chinese place.

"You want to go back to your place?"
he asked.

"whatever,"
she said as they passed
a fat blunt,
fat with the demise
of depression.

They wound up in her room,
him taking her clothes off,
her saying no
in her mind.

So drunk and high
she couldn't say anything
but saying no
in the asylum of her mind,
the peaceful place.

But she said no.

"I gotta finish," he said.

NO she yelled.

But it was colorless.

And she receded into a space
of novas,
a space where bodies exploded
into a web of elements;
a web of objectivity,
of lost usage.

He pushed and pushed
and it hurt her more and more
as she saw his nostrils bending
more and more.

He continued his huffing,
no she said,
placing his hands on his chest,
no,
she said,
placing her hands
on the echo of his heart.

But he continued,
he had to finish,
and he did.

laying there huffing and puffing
human
he did,
as she lay
with a t-shirt still on
and ******* wet with pain,
crying in her mind
of the cosmos,
the paint of objectivity
and lost humanity.

He left,
and she stayed,
locking the elements
in her heart,
like the trapped carbon
of earth.

And so she cried
and I held her
as she told me,
because I did not know
what else to do.

What are we doing?
Why must she cry?
Why can't everything
be all right?

Because it is not.

The horn moans
inconsequently
like a train
baring
down
on a car with no wheels.

A bass
can rumble
across my heart
like thunder
rolling across the sky
in circling f-16s.

The trademark of war
is loss.

The trademark
of peace
is complacency.

I would rather
drop bombs
on your heart,
than rest in the obesity
of redemption
and graves.

So when the jazz
begins
in the jazz club,
I feel nothing
but war,
no peace,
no knowledge,
just a war of teeth-*******,
mind-*******
drenching
limb-*******
hope
that
I
will
see
you
again,
when I know that no peace treaty
has ever been signed
without a loss
on
all
sides.

What peace is there
for a love-sickened heart?

What dreams reside
in the memories
of kisses?

I miss you
like the tree and the leaf.

It is inconceivable
that I have been given to you
and you to me
without the generosity of fate.

i thought you were
just a pretty white girl
and my ignorances
was dashed
upon the rocks
by your voice of freedom.

nature could not conceive
of a purity of a secretive love
more than you
have given to me.

There are a lot of yous
in the world,
and yet there are none.

I have tried to propagate
the same seed
in you
as I have
in black girls,
puerto rican
and irish
that I loved
who fell for my rico suave ****
so easily.

And that is not to say that
you are as easily
enforced
by the landscapers
of love
as them.

Love is love,
but I have not
felt a seed so
irrevocably
as your seed
that burns
the root
so easily.

And in me,
I have never felt so crazed
because i have learned the bias
of flesh
that wraps my heart
deeper than your skin.

Trust me
in the depiction
that I have
constantly visited,
that your flesh
is numberless;
your cheeks
so
fleckless
yet with so many scars.

I can eat a thousand
worms in a day,
I can devour
the whole of the earth
with the roots
of a player.

But there are girls
and there are women,
there are leaves
and there are seeds.

The leaves browning
in autumn,
the seeds giving in spring.

And the colorless
gender
of night
knows no bounds,
because there is not a race of love
but an insanity
of love.

So to the black girls,
white girls,
puerto rican
and italian
that I have loved,
I am not color-blind
but blind
in the dank night
humid
as your voice
with no name,
no race,
no label,
no gender,
no reputation.

I have headaches.

Maybe I drink too much,
and my family thinks
I'm an alcoholic;

put too much sauce in the venom
and it becomes
a pasta of destruction.

How little
we value
each other's hearts,
when they lie
in oak fingers,
so old
and
so known
that it's hard for us
to know
their beginning.

When compassion
lies dormant
like the dogwood
with no lavender,
it is easy to forget
that we are human.

Because I love you,
and I should have more pride,
I should never say that,
it is unbecoming.

But it is easier to say,
than I have forgotten you,
that you are broken
and twisted inside of me.

Kaleidoscopes
pushed the music
through our bodies
in triangles of ebony,
purity,
hope
and confusion.

I could lose you
in the music,
you could lose me
in the bass
and destruction
of ear-dums.

What thumps
inside us?
as we thump genitals,
and ride
against each other
over interlocked
thighs.

Put me in your lips
more than your
put your own tongue.

Wet me
with a burst
of love so jarring
it could break my mind.

Because I like to put
*******
on your breastbone
and pull down
your shirt
so that I can see more.

And you like to grab me
harder
than
anyone
has
grabbed
before.

And the pain
of love
is all about grabbing,
about having
possession
in the middle of a club
hopping on mushrooms.

We get closer,
judging our distances
by how little we see
the kaleidoscopes
of broken light
and reformed blues, reds, greens and
yous.

We judge distance
by our stale Colgate breath
and drunk tongues.

We judge distance
by how close
our hearts have become
when we know nothing else
but drunk love.

Heart's burst into a thousand
brutal glowsticks.

The vase of the body
pulsates
with shoots of light
and in the night
You can be seen
from space
a head a thousand filaments wide.

when i put my hands
on my chest,
thinking of you
and lick my lips,
thinking of you,
I can taste
black,
I can feel
black,
I am blackened
and dark
in my bedroom.

Touch that orb inside me, or mercury,
that loneliest lover slipping
off the cuticle of the horizon.

Reach out with your hands
to that compilation of so many lights
that seems one.

Become the glove that traps
infinity and bridges gaps
that break bodies into particles.

Make love to an earth of oblivion
an earth of nonsense,
an earth of pointlessness,
make love to the years of youth,
the years we waste
not making love.

After a while
it tastes like sweetwater,
and I can bumble through a bar crowd
with haletosis.

The heartless jest
is this,
I call you
and call you
and call you.

This is the heartless jest,
and in the pantheon
of the heart,
I am minor Hermes
ferrying messages of love
across the brutal galaxies
to a lover
that will never hear me
in the suffocation of nebulas.

The nebulas where i was reborn
and died in an instant
of fire so rapid
that it could break a pulsar
in two.

I have found the vaccuum of space
to be comforting,
it hugs me with a feirceness
that I have never known
and a love for my oxygen
that is downright flattering.

I've got a date
with the devil,
she never wears stilletos,
just a pair of chucks
and them lee dungarees,
if I order a drink for myself
I have to order one for her.

"Are you going to drink that?"
I ask.

It's just been sitting there for awhile,
so warm and hungry.

"No,"
she says,
and her eyes are already pocked
with burst blood vessels,
already glassy with my soul,
she's got it now.

So I take it,
and take everything she's got to give.

Which is a lot,
considering.

don't drink
like you don't mean it,
drink like you want it,
like you want no more
sorrow
and a ****** is in dire need,
put your lips
all the way to the cusp
of bitterness
to the very vector
of unhappiness,
let your tongue
loll in
the shadows
of your mouth,
let it droop and kick back
against the acid wash,
but don't hold it too long,
sorrow is a monster that likes
to creep in
at high tide,
when everything is under covers
and restless.

Kick that **** to the back of your throat,
kick it to the bottom of your heart,
the top of your soul,
the end of your salvation,
the tipping point of your love
and the blasphemy
of your hate.

Don't call out to her now,
she isn't listening
and you're not even close
to being finished.

Some things are sadly poetic
Like the cougar whose boyfriend
Won’t come back outside and she’s alone
At the only table in the cold
smoking a pall mall,
Having a beer.

Some things are refreshingly poetic
like leaving the office for a bit with the boss
and going somewhere
where there are domes made of pure gold
and priests who pour milk on them from
helicopters.

Some things are interestingly poetic;
like the poet, turned novelist, turned artist,
who does landscaping to cover the spread.

Some things are courageously and nostalgically
And hurtfully poetic,
Like not seeing your family for nine years
Because the money’s good where you're at,
And plane tickets and passports are outrageous.

Some things should not be
poetic, but they are, because they are truthful
And that is verse;
like the waitress who was *****
when she cashed her check at a grocery store
after the night shift
and she wasn’t the only one in her car
when she got back.

Some things are poetry because they come
Into this world quietly
And bleeding internally,
and yet they survive
Even though their lungs are full of fluid,
And they can barely breathe.

Some things are poetry because they happened
And nothing can change that.

And because
Poetry is
unchangeable, immovable, and
grotesque, beautiful, uncomfortable, calming,
disfiguring, life-giving, ****** up,
Possibly ******, possibly a nectar
That God
or whoever the ****
allowed to be put on paper,
Possibly a way to talk about pain,
Possibly roided up with someone else’s words,
Possibly a way to talk about
the pure dream of a girl’s body
Without being  a ***** *****.

Poetry is love in the worst
and most unimaginable ways.

With a few strokes'
He drew a crazy boat
Full of perverts and lepers
In the middle of the desert. The lepers
Were picking at their skin and the perverts
Were getting drunk and pulling their *****.

Some hung over the edge
Of the boat like they spotted water. Some climbed the mast and
Hung themselves looking like ripe peaches
From the distance. A red, red moon just
Sits there in the background
At the top of a black sky
staring at the whole thing
Fall apart.

The painting stops. The painter
Coughs up some blood and his heart,
And shakes his brush like a maraca,
Making his music over blood, perverts
Lepers, and a red moon.

A girl stands behind him,
Beautiful and horrified, because she
Is witnessing a nightmare, and she wanted
To feed her head full of it, full of dreams
And demons, droughts and terror,
and wake up a
Prophet.

You have
my
heart.

It's not
eloquent,
but
eloquence
is
for
roses.

I don't need
a thousand
words
to say
how much it
hurts
when i mix
my emotions
with
whiskey.

There is
no
nectar
as sweet
as the
spilled soul,
and I hunger
for
more.

Even as
I puke
up my stomach
with a thousand
stings.

To the lake
is where our prayers
were air.

We dipped
our poles in the water
and bobbed
with our floats
in the bladder of blackness.

Nelle and Sabrosa
laid down together at the edge
of the still body
as the beasts of night
laid down at their feet.

Me, Dang, and Matt
took sips straight
from the mouth of Kentucky.

The night
creamed me.

Burst into a thousand
remembrances and I wanted to cry
with the fish.

I got angrier and angrier
and eventually we all left,
because I was yelling too loud
and the fish burrowed deeper
into the stomach,
a stomach I had yelled at
as love.

With so many poles
and so many fish
I slipped into the lake.

Let my body
wilt in that sink
where babies were made
with dead bodies,
dead ******* and dead *****
and spasmodic fish bodies
that were made for one thing.

I thought that thing was love,
that's what got me yelling.

The beasts let their whiskers get wet,
even their paws,
as they tapped at me in that water,
hoping for me to rise,
a flotilla of flesh
upon which they could feed.

And so we walked away
from the lake
wet,
and drunk,
the windows down
feeling the paws
and gills
in connection with life.

Nelle and Sabrosa
holding each other
in beach towels.

Me sitting in the front on a plastic sheet
Dang had previously reserved
for the fish we would some day
broil and eat.

So,
I sat on a plastic sheet,
made for love and loss
of the lake.

I sat on the bladder and
upcoming womb
from which night ******
and then made love
with the dead beasts
and catfish
of a shallowness reserved
just for me.

I just wish no one
would know
that I'm crying.

That i'm inside
this lonely house
and I'm putting on different suits
just to get through.

I just wish you'd take me back,
just wish you'd give me one more chance
because you've got a hold on my heart
and it just won't let go.

Touch me with a kiss
or hand print on my soul,
I don't know know what it means to love,
but for me,
it's defined by the threat
of this super-massive black hole.

You **** me in,
and I want to let go of my light,
for the last second
of my life.

Love fills me up
and I water the garden
desperately.

With dead petunias on the floor
I crawl on my knees
just wishing for them to grow.

what is regret
but a bitter berry
that you suffer
through the day with.

What is it
but a place
in the heart
that opens
and closes
like daylillies.

Because I think
about you so much,
even as I walk to the liquor store
I count
hashmarks in the road
in as many times
as I held your eyes.

There are too many
hashmarks
and not enough
of your eyes,
perfume,
cheeks,
tiny fingers
in mine.

I miss you so much
and it's wrong
that I spend time
with my boys
and different girls
knowing
that they can't tread
the asphalt
like you can.

Nelle says
like too much salt
there's such a thing
as too much love.

When it wraps you up against yourself
and you become the wall against which you are trying to force
through.

You become the line of fire
and the angling arrow.

Sometimes too many slings
reach the heart,
and everything tastes like wood
or lead.

A good rabbit can go bad,
with too many arrows
or
too many bullets.

Like hunting
love takes patience;
like salt,
a person can get stones
inside of themselves
when they get too full
on love.

The kind of stones
you can't **** out.

Lisa Nelle
had this cat
Suki.

A calico.

Suki would wiggle his
******* in your face,
a black hole of fur,
then plop down on your belly.

We smoked that cat up so many times
while the TV was on
and the volume was way up.

Then we'd turn on her amp
until her house buzzed
and we couldn't hear the neighbors.

They'd knock their brooms
against the ceiling,
on a ******* Friday.

We watched
that cat twitch
across the floor
and twirl in the sun
by the balcony door.

He'd pass out
when we
passed out.

Lisa Nelle
had two names
like a pornstar.

She'd put her makeup on and stick all this blackness on
under her eyes
like she was holding night
in bags.

We watched Hey Arnold! DVDs at five in the morning,
and smoked the whole place up.

Sometimes her and Alexis would go in the back room.

Alexis never liked me.

Lisa Nelle had this way of looking at you
where she'd take her eyes
and she'd work her way
down to your stomach.

She could find a star in my intestines,
a dwarf light could warble in my stomach
and she'd see it through my belly button.

She'd pull it out
wings and all
and tell me
that Khalil knew the answers.

Out of this two-ton purse she carried around,
she'd whip out a compilation of Khalil Gibran.

One time she told me how her father
used to pull her hair
and thighs.

She didn't say anything about it again.

When we tripped shrooms,
she took my hands and put them on her neck
and asked me to feel for the nebulas
underneath her skin.

When I read
some of the stuff you send me,
the emails,
texts
or poems,
I can't help but wonder how many words
I now know as a result of you
that I wouldn't know
if I hadn't been looking
around for bud
and someone I knew
that
knew you.

I'm sorry Lisa Nelle,
that things didn't work out with you and Alexis
when they did
with you
and
Sabrosa.

Sometimes I hate myself too.

Have you ever noticed
how you don't have anything?
Not that girl
you pretend to put
in your glove compartment
when she's in your gloves?
Or a car?
Or a job?
Or real, feasible hope?
Or **** all?

Put yourself in my position,
I can't stand looking at you,
your head caves in at the middle
like dough with a thumb print,
and you could fit
two *******
or two *******'
in that nose of yours.

All you think about is ***, companionship and pancakes.

A lack of hope,
that's what's missing,
I'm talking
feasible hope,
that's the one you really need.

If you could feel it
like yesterday's bile
still on your tongue,
maybe it'd be easier for me
to work with that head.

Or
those gloves,
if you actually put them on
instead of pretending to put them on,
instead of playing with that girl.

Tell her what's really going on,
even though she'll laugh
and laugh
and laugh.

Tell her you're actually going insane
every second.

A shish-KABOOM
that slows down faster
than accelerated Swiss particles speed up.

Tell her about your heart,
that underneath the ink across your chest
there's something else tattooed.

Or maybe she won't say anything
and you'll be talking to
fingers in a ***** glove.

A car would be good too,
you could go places,
use those free passes to Puregold
your friend gave you.

Then again,
you'd want to save every woman alive after going there;
you'd think you could do it,
some hero,
some fake,
some male with a complex.

And finally
the job.

You have over $10,000 in outstanding loans,
either you get a job
or I do the right thing for the both of us.

So do you really want all this?
Want to be young?

Want to know what it's like
to have this ******* heart
and keep it forever?

A heart that doesn't shut the **** up
and goes off calling angry everybody's
at four in the morning
because it's drunk?

Want to know about fear?
I'm not talking wise fear,
I'm talking fear-of-death;
tiger-in-a-bunny-suit fear.

Once you turn those lights off
and can't handle yourself in the dark
then you'll know my fear.

Hometown girls
are real with you.
If they don't like you,
they'll even make their *****
look ugly;
pulling them in all the way
to the tops of their thighs
through their buttholes
and you can smell the stench
in your brain.

But when they let you in,
when they let you sit on their ears,
it's like warp-drive.

They smoke virginia slims,
because that's what their mom's smoke,
and the bags under their eyes
are filled with nicotine,
but they're pretty bags,
purses of flesh
full with the kinetic beauty of coal.

Hometown girls are mostly black,
mostly white,
fifty-fity,
but nobody's checking
and when they whisper something nice in your ear
it's colored with a microbrew
or a wheel of Jim Beam.

Sometimes they'll take you by the wrist
into the bathrooms;
sometimes they'll take your drink
when you're not looking
and smile when you catch them
with it on their lips.

But that smile is good even,
on par with a supernova
in its ability to crush
and make beautiful.


But most of the time,
they stand around
outside Casbah
and Motorco
--if they're bougie
it'll be West End--
in the middle of the night
under the porch of the sky
looking out with amber
slitted eyes
like cats,
their legs twitching thoughtfully
as they wait for cabs
and pick at the night.

Hometown girls
are ****/beautiful
because they'll watch your every move
from the gallery
out of empathy,
knowing they've been that ***** before,
knowing they've been that lonely,
knowing they just want to get drunk
and want to be around randoms
that aren't so random.

I'm not one to hold on,
when I know that I am being let go.

Don't cry and act like I've wronged you,
because you know that's not right.

When I reached out for you countless times
you burrowed deeper into the mud,
and I do not chase crayfish,
because we are not crayfish.

Pretend that I am evil and malicious,
but you know that you can only act that way.

I have a heart and it doesn't lie,
even when it finds a mattress of magpies.

I never had intentions to get you in bed,
I just wanted you to come inside
for some coffee and some sober.

I cannot speed up like a high contrast mix,
I cannot slow down chopped and *******,
I can only operate on what my heart feels
and what your heart tells it to feel.

And your heart is telling me to move on,
to churn on the exit ramps.

I have not wronged you in the right way,
or righted you in the wrong way.

Is caring about you the next left?
Is that where the houses knock their feet
on the concrete and the guardrail
at the dead end?

If so, hate me for good,
**** the engine
and idle with your lips on the guardrail.

Her voice is sweeter than its path.

With so many berry leaves latticed
into the chain-link fence,
it sounds like millions of feathers
tinkling.

Her eyes are in Arizona,
in impacted zones of clay knuckles
punching their way outwards
into the redwood bone of the earth.

Her smell is wet limestone; baked apples; hungry petunias.

And the sound they make is a train,
a reveille
moving away.

Heather tells me about a recent trip to Los Angeles;
about forms of travel
that don't move on tracks,
where there is no discernable distance.

I tell her I have been here all along;
I know where you have been
and how you sound there.

I know the heathers of the world
by the berry in your mouth.

the older generation
thinks we're all ****-heads,
ritalin-riddled serial killers,
serious ingesters
of buckets-of-blood thrillers,
they look at me funny
when I sag my pants
look at me funny
when I've got my girl in my arms
and her hands on my zipper
moving slowly
to the biggest dipper, too loud,
they say,
too loud,
too much cursing,
too much blood and gore,
too many games about getting money
and running over grannies to get more;
Ren and Stimpy,
and
Bert and Ernie,
two homos
that need to burn
for their sin,
the world is going
to hell in a handbasket.

Walked up to the store
for a little more gin,
caught a car passin,
jumped in front of it,
"WHAT THE **** IS WRONG WITH YOU?"
All that honking aint nessary.

****,
Imma have
a few more drinks.
Found a ditch;
an empty
drainage pipe;
had a few more hits.

Lit up a Marlboro
and I'm back at it again,
jumping in front of cars,
yelling at *******,
stumbling the whole way,
falling like frogger
in the ditches,
passing out for awhile.

I'm just tired of being
here,
tired of being,
so imma get drunk as hell
and tell my ma
that when I'm gone
I'm gone.

I stopped as I went
past RDU International.

I killed the engine
next to a sky plastered
to a lake.

With a thousand wilting
banana trees
in the back,
and a needle jumping
in the red,
I came to a stop.

Planes scoured the sky with their screeching,
soured the lake
with their contrails,
the geese watching from the middle of the lake
in flotillas
idling in the heat
because it was too hot to move.

If I didn't get these bananas back to the nursery,
they'd die.

Taking out a gallon jug,
I walked to the shoreline
and reached in between reeds,
and cattails and contrails
and cirrus in globs of clay
to lift the water to the radiator.

As I poured the water
into the radiator,
I knew that humanity
is neither the geese, the truck,
or the airplane,
humanity is the needle.

I am a **** writer
when I'm sober,
too much thinking.

The liquor
lets me get a breather;
gives me a chance
to process
the haywire;
the game slows down
when I've got even the cheapest ****
in me.

We place our wishes
in the canines
of spackle.

Above us the teeth
wait
to be broken.

While we watch
the Dog Whisperer
breaking
mustangs,
I wrap my arm
around the eternal flatness
of your shoulder.

We say nothing,
we don't even whisper
as our dreams fall around us,
in an automatic spray.

I get on the coffee table,
to fix the fan.

You arc your neck
around me,
like a diamondback
you coil until you feel the heat
of the tv in your eyes,
on your cheeks,
on your lips.

As you watch Cesar
more than me,
I dust our dreams off
of the fan.

I am a sculpture
that you must break your neck to get around
as I fidget with the monkey wrench.

There is nothing eternal,
we burn our love
like shoots of wheat,
so much beige grass
extending over your shoulder
into forever.

What kind of dogs
are we?

The ones that no longer
know the plains
of each others' fur,
the fire in our teeth,
the sun of each others' eyes,
the rain of our lips.

There is too much heat between us,
too much dryness now,
not enough calcium raining
from basalt clouds.

What I'm trying to say,
is that I do not explode
like a force of nature,
I am rock.

I don't know
how to miss somebody
in the right way,
I can wake up
in a bad state
still bitter
over things I said
or didn't say,
hungry for brine
and salt licking
my open chest
and curved spine.

The ribbons curling in the sky
move out across
the bluest bay,
I have fished so many times on the rocks
overlooking the military base,
the carriers roll by;
the submarines hum in the deep
there antenna in an operatic frenzy
and the captain is to busy to sleep.

I wonder what is moving
inside of you
just beneath the breakers.

Each time
'I throw a fish back into the fray,
I hope the bombs of their bodies
make noises that you can hear
even where the ribbons
can't tie up your soul.

I always leave around noon
my gills burning
and the air crashing
with all those sonic booms.

I gulp,
and gulp,
and put myself to sleep,
with some bottled ocean,
and a few good memories
of your heart,
that trembling, silently scared
deep.

So let me know how to be right again,
take your line and weight and
squirming bait,
and teach me how to miss you
in the right way.

I was hanging out with this girl

I just didn't care.

We were sipping,
I was doing the most of it
so I was drunk then,
and drunker when I said,
"I'm just going to pass out."

"Maybe I'll just leave,"
she said.

Yea whatever.

Her footsteps
were ice on glass,
I didn't even count them
as she broke out.

She left the bottle
she brought over.

So I've still got some business
to finish with this
$9 Evan Williams ****,
but all the ****
in the world
couldn't contain
the boredom
of my lonesome.

Sometimes a girl
makes you bored.

Sometimes
she makes
you think.

That's when you get
apathetic
as hell,
when you're chilling
with a girl made of ice and glass
instead of a girl
that makes you think
about what she's made of;
what you're made of;
what anything certain
is made of.

Sometimes
you end up
with nothing
and cheap liquor
tastes like Robitussin
on ice.

Irritable and hateful
at the computer.

Coming fully down from a good buzz
when the whole world
was a jar.

I could hold it in my hands.

Now
coming down
and not buzzing for ****,
not even a beer
in my crib,
I get lonely
and I feel like Atlas
again.

That jar
being
too big
for
two hands,
and feeling my heart
taking scalpels
to my arteries.

It's trying
to find some new space,
new strength,
new alleys
for new blood
that'll be able
to handle all this
new pressure
of a planet-sized jar.

So now,
I'm irritable and hateful
at the computer,
and telling you
about being
broke and no longer
drunk
with nothing
in sight.

It's so sloppy
down
there
like runny eggs.

So smelly
like
hippo diarrhea.

So humid
like the inside
of your mouth,
in the same exact places.

How is it that this seems to happen
over night?

I'm not a grimy human being.

Hygiene
is the closest thing
I have to a religion.

It's time for a washing.

P.S.
I write a lot of poems about my *****.
They are very near and dear to me.
Don't hate,
appreciate,
ruminate,
metriculate
down there
and do a good washing
yourself.

"We need to maintain our nether regions
for the sake of posterity."

Barney Rubble
said that.

Put a few quarters
in me,
and look at the island
with the woman on it
swaying loosely beside me.

I don't know if I'll be able to make it
where we're going.

"Let's go!"
you shake me.

You go hard.

There appears in front of me
a lake of black coffee.

A caramel hand and its tiny bones
peopled by sweeter fingers
with fingernails as white as gondolas
stirs in a hurricane
of cream and sugar.

"Drink this,"
I sway to your voice,
but your body is as indistinct
as the sun split open
like an egg on the ocean.

Am I going to make it
through this night?

Stumbling out of somewheres
into the salt of Brooklyn.                                              

You
hold­ me
up
because it's high-tide
in Venice.

And I might've drowned
in the subways
without you
telling me,
"This is our train,
Get up babe."

And that's how we made it back
to my uncle's spot off of FDR,
you fording the waters
as I waded back
on broken oars.

I want to have a few drinks,
so I slide up to the bar
and put something
on the paper in my pocket.

When I run out,

you throw a paper towel
my way,
placing my straight shot
and a pen beside it.

I could see myself
rubbing your hips
as you rub
my traps.

We could press our sticky bodies
together
for a moment of holding,
later on
too much liquor
could put us in a closer position.

"What are you writing?"
You ask.

"Anything."

So I take that pen
and paper,
and talk about Iowa
with you: A girl with callouses
even on her pinkies
hailing from a little farm town,
with a voice
full of the South somehow
and ideas on how to get by
the pitfalls of religion.

I talk about
wanting to find places
to go
where I could write
and drink
until forever in the morning
in the city.

"I'm not supposed to tell
anybody this,
but there's a bar
over on 110th,
that stays open
all night,"
you say so close to me
that I could pick out your lipstick
at Sear's.

"What are you doing
after this?"

"I don't know,"
saying as you wipe the bar
down.

So I don't know's
become eventual
movements
between our bodies
to the door,
bumping your hips
against me
and me sliding
my hands
around your waist,
trying to get the bumps
closer.

And so maybe
with love from New York
I'll write somewhere
else
about girls
that understand
my obsession,
who throw paper
and pen
my way
instead
of fear
and unknowing.

Now he left you with scars, tears on your pillow and you still stay
As you sit and pray, hoping the beatings'll go away
It wasn't always a hit and run relationship
It used to be love, happiness and companionship
Remember when I treated you good
I moved you up to hills, out the ills of the ghetto hood
Me and you a happy home, when it was on
I had a love to call my own
I shoulda seen you was trouble but I was lost, trapped in your eyes
Preoccupied with gettin tossed, no need to lie
You had a man and I knew it, you told me
Don't worry bout it we can do it now I'm under pressure
Make a decision cause I'm waitin, when I'm alone
I'm on the phone havin secret conversations, huh
I wanna take your misery, replace it with happiness
but I need your faith in me, I'm a sucka for love
sucka for love, know you ain't right G but yet I'ma sucka for love

Whenever people see that dog,
they think of drooling,
hunger
and
boredom,
that dog
bit a few people
so they castrated him,
and he lays in the corner
all day,
licking at fur,
nuzzling out his pink ****
with his tongue,
and he's bored of being a dog,
he's just bored
of being alive.

That dog
comes to his bowl
like a ward of the state,
like he has to
and doesn't want to.

That dog
plops down at the back door
staring at himself in the glass
and the world outside
all day,
and sometimes they
rub his head,
most times
they just let him lie.

That dog
won't bark
for anything,
even when
he sees that *****
across the street,
he doesn't have it any more.

That dog
wants something now
more than anything else.

That dog
with his ability
to make you think
of ropes of saliva,
belly's bloated with malnutrition,
and watching tv all day;
that dog
wants to love something
the way he used to love
everything.

What'll happen
when they finally give that dog
a bone?