Way past delusional,
I drove, forced down
into ******* by noon,
almost ***-***** by that suppressing sun-God.

And I saw something
confusing, but all to truthful.

A Boeng was coming in for a safe-landing,
strafing the sky,
when a Raven dropped from dim heaven
and got ****** into the turbines.

Crimson-mist, across the sky,
and my car as black as a feather.

I rumbled down this carbon-dioxide tunnel,
crying over love, heartbreak,
too drunk to be alive and
still trying to live,
and you know what,
I have nothing
and I wished that somebody
would hit me.

I don't know
if I'm gonna make it back. I need to be more tipsy
than just this.

There's a girl
gonna be in my bed tonight,
who's boyfriend used to strangle her
something crazy
when they'd fight.

GOD,
I could die in her
red-black hair with its pulverizing smell.

I wish I could offer her something more
at four in the morning, when she cries
and I just grab her close--
never knowing a thing
about anything.

Night twinkles,
winks,
with cross-dressing jets.

I catch a thousand spider-webs,
until I'm home. Caught up
with all this silk, tickling my arms
it's a trap.

I've never had
more than I've had, a share of
love that loses money every day
is the only investment I've made,
and I'm poor in her hands.

My caretaker
might be meeting the undertaker
soon, the gingersnaps baked
until they burned, but she served them
anyways, and she made me feel good,
because she was as heavy and reassuring
as an indigo-less night,
she was my black night.

But I'm seduced in the night,
caught up,
held down
force-fed debt,
and reassured.

A night is heavyness.

A night is a ceiling,
in whichever way you think of ceilings:
either in your home,
your job,
or your love.

If a girl is drunker than
me
I believe
in taking her back
to
her crib.

I'm not some male feminist,
but she gotta be
on my level
in order to ****.

Kiss her on the doorstep.

Tongue and all that good ****.

Lead her back to her bed.

Lay her down.

And leave with a whole bunch
of not actualized *** in my *****
because
I got standards.

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.

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.

An army
in flower-print
dresses
resides in our backyard
on a guilty clothesline.

Their bloated bodies
float in the water
of the wind.

In our tiny gestures, we tell potential buyers
that we had two beautiful daughters
who left their clothes everywhere,
and we have finally killed
them.

In small voices
they sing for justice
on the clothesline.

But the dresses
are our own childishness,
and not our fake childrens'.

And we tell our buyers these things,
because we want to leave this place,
but on our own terms.

I be dapping
random *******
in the club.

A ***** walk up to me with a beer,
throws me a hand
and I dap him up.

We smile
and I don't even
know dude.

I swear
I've
signed Peace Treaties
in the club.

It's crazy, because sometimes
the girls
be acting foul
and cold;
even when you try
to grind
handing
them
a beer
as
a
peace-offering
they look back at you
across
demilitarized zones.

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.

Sometimes
I check up on her.

(I believed it to be
Some masochism
deep within
me.)

Over facebook.

We're no longer facebook friends,
but I gather snapshots
of her life
through her profile pic.

I
now
like to think of it
as a healthy breakup.

A way of communicating
while not communicating.

But before it was horrible;
before I'd get depressed
just seeing her hair.

He is wearing a tux
and holds her around the waist.

Her purple dress is ruffled
at the hips and where
her tiny ******* nip outward.

Their eyes are closed full
of something that only they could explain
between each other.

Lips are smushed,
her very red,
red giant red,
lips are softened against his.

He is taller than her,
but not by much.

And they seem happy
at whatever wedding,
gala,
or whatever Bourgeoisie **** they were doing.

And
before now,
I probably would've raided my stash of Wild Turkey;
cried in my room for a few days;
skipped meals.

But now,
I feel content.

Happy.

Not so alone
and wishful.

I don't miss her anymore, or love her for that matter. And I'm happy that she has found someone to begin that journey all over again with.

This is how we atone for things.

A ritual
of constant pain
ending
in
contentment.

You want to love me.

You want  to ******* fear,
and cure
my insecurity.

What you hold about me
seems dear
when it's in your pocket
and
close.
as a child
when the ice-cream truck rolls around.

The looping rhythm
of every day
is a clear sign
that you
need to move
and hold me more.

I **** your *******,
lap at your legs,
crumble in your words,
erupt in your anger,
and you think I need you,
and I relish
in you needing that
needing.

But then the need bites,
rips,
destroys,
and the black hole of our apartment
is reality
when you sleep
and hear me snore.

You know that i will get fat
when I am older,
and I know that you will slowly
become bitter
as raspberries;
Me thinking you're ripe
and perfect,
when you're holding in so much
and don't
even
know
it.

Don't touch
those broken stars.

Don't try to cup
my nebulas
in your hands,
or grip
my exploding novas
into concrete baseballs.

They cannot be hurled into oblivion
to make a sizeable dent
in eternity.

They burn
and crush you.

And I whiff
at your beautiful pitches.

Your words crumble,
and slither,
when they are meant
to soothe
and restructure.

My love
is horrible,
stupid,
and placating,
because I made ramen noodles for two
and you ate them
because it was a sweet thing to do
and that was the only reason
you ate them.

On the way down,
those noodles say that my love
is the best love,
but poison
in your gut.

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.

Really?
Why don’t we just
Break it off?

This must be a test
Of endurance
Or self-sacrifice even.

We both don’t know
the waters around us
anymore.

There are no safe coves
or humble islands.

So we drown in the
fishbowl of our little whims
And tiny gripes.

That keeps us together.

I know that every-time
You get into bed,
You think
“****,
this guy,
again?
I hope he chokes
on a cheerio.”

And I’m thinking
“****,
this girl,
again?
Why can't it be socially acceptable
to **** someone
with a spoon?”

So why are we still here?

Why do we remain
When everything else has left
in boxes.

We eat our sorry cheerios in silence.

In bed
you keep mentioning a bowl,
that separates the milk
from the cheerios,
like I'm not good at code.

And I feel us growing closer
in scales.

I think
you are so beautiful
Heather,
that I could search for clams
on the beach
and only find fish.

I am unhappy with fish,
they are too stupid.

But your open mouth,
and the pearl
of its tongue,
is just too much.

You have a ******* boyfriend,
with a ******* mustache,
and flannel
two sizes
too small.

My heart is big enough.

I could eat you in a gulp.

Your heart could be dinner
for days,
most likely years,
and if I could just taste
your complexion
I
might finally know heaven,
even as I talk about it
too much.

If I go to Hell soon,
I would tread the fiery waters,
fight the three-headed dogs
and a burgeoning Cerberus,
for the touch
of your skin.

Aphrodite is not beautiful,
neither is
Zeus,
you are the goddess
that puts
all else to shame.

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

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

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

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

You and I,
are across the river.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The candle,
That burning dispersion.
The wick prespires.
The nitro-oxygen air
eaten up with every breath,
in such commonstance as to be ordinary,
and unrevealing.
But how much do you know
about yourself,
about it?
Can you blame a flame?
Can you truly hurt a fly?
Where are you now?

In some place so stuffy,
that you can only wish
that you were something more,
something stupid enough to live,
and not feel the pangs of your billion needles,
cascading down like a waterfall
of death, disappointment, and disorder.

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.

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.

Loves
meek-mongerers,
calls when there's
no alcohol left:
no more balling
today.

****** on you in the morning
and walks out the bathroom
laughing like a pig.

A response
and a beginning,
now in a blanket,
my blood boiled when we were closer.

Had so much fun,
those times,
when love
asked you to stick a lime between
your teeth
and pour salt on her *****.

Cats howling at night, right
outside my window,
and I call and call and call
a whole bunch,
until every single one
asks from the brawling fence:
"you still talking about that ****?"

"get off her."

"she's not the one."

"no need for all of that."

"keep it chill."

And they still--don't know.

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.

The first time
I saw a ******
I saw it in the open legs
of a smouldering woman
pockmarked by bullets,
and her curly black
hair
was pink
with brains like worms.

Her knees shook
spasmodically
like spider's
when you smush
them under your thumb.

The first time
I saw and
held a gun,
I yanked it from my father's
eternal fingers.

His head was open too,
and it buzzed
in a black rain of flies.

They were shooting,
and little plumes
of dust
exploded all around my feet.

Whizzing, Banging, a roar
of warfare, and I burned myself;
the shells kept falling against my skin
as I held that AK
squeezing
and falling
as the gun
pow'd
and recoiled.

Little bubbling lakes of skin
hurt my arms for days.

During this time
of looseness,
my heart
or anyone's heart
might just
thump itself
so hard
that it breaks free from the ropes,
breaks free from the ribs,
breaks through the epidermis
in a wave of slicing
with it's newly evolved
animal hands
and a knife.

The **** does a heart
get a knife
and animal hands?

"If i'm gonna make it out of here alive," heart says.
"I gotta have hands."

So it breaks free,
scissors right through the sternum
and crawls
in a trail
until it falls from the counter
and the front door opens
a crack.

I look out a window
and it is hailing a cab,
although there aren't cabs
like that
around here.

It'll find it's way
where other piece-of-**** hearts
reside.

It will make it's way,
and I'll make my oatmeal in the morning;
that grey ****
that I shovel into my mouth.

Iron's good for the blood
you know.

My heart had a knife,
you can't tell me a ******* thing
about the iron
in oatmeal
being a blessing.

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

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.

Do you love him more than me?
Is there something beautiful and indistinct
In him?

Can you bow like never  before,
A prayer of spine?

Do you kiss him like an angel,
And dole out your lips to the stupid others?

Does ignorance call your name,
And hope drive the nail?

When I see her again,
She hugs me casually,
And the smell of her hair
Is an ink,
On my wife-beater.
It soils, and oils
And stains.

Beneath the darkness of her car,
The shadows become loam,
And in the cabin she squeezes out a waving hand,
By the time she pulls away
I am working hard
not to pound her hood,
And demand a return trip
To the factory of my heart,
Where she could be a foreman
And wish things of me all day,
Working a hot sheet of my skin
Into a pliable mass,
And the body of my sins
Into the image of God,
So much so,
That the mere dream of that forge would make her stop
Her car
In the middle of the street,
Hop out,
And walk up to me, repeating a sentence in this gist:
She doesn’t know anything anymore,
Not even how she feels about him.

Make me that God of your
Life
Once more,
Deliver me from evil
And the hands of wickedness that render my soul.

I must be a God in your midst,
a love of the mist.

I know my sins,
I only call you when I'm drunk,
hollering your name
in hurtful epithets.

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.

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.

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.

SO
high
we ******
up
right
NOW.

ALL
we do is
YELL AND LAUGH
in the crib.

I BROKE
the xbox
a couple times,
so
WE BOUGHT MORE,
MACK
came through
TALKING ****,
so I hurled
THE LAST BOX
in a splatter of shiny
FRAGMENTS.

SOMETIMES
the neighbors
come up,
come through
for a little purp.

WE
on the
COME UP.

The Supreme Reacher
was a watcher of dreams.

The Supreme Reacher
was an inclination.

The Supreme Reacher
was the instantaneous
and the forgettable.

The Supreme Reacher
could recede into the shadows of a thought,
only to emerge from its triangles
clean as a remembrance.

The Supreme Reacher
had veins for hands
and could reach across the mind
like lightning.

The Supreme Reacher is not
a person,
place,
thing,
or God.

The Supreme Reacher
had thighs black with feathers
and shoulderblades
hairy with time.

The Supreme Reacher
could talk and talk for days.

Lazing on dreamt-up
park benches,
green in their concrete holes
with algae,
and become green
as well.

The Supreme Reacher
could lay her heart on your
heart
and
place her lungs
in your palms.

The Supreme Reacher
could never be reached,
but only dreamt of and felt
like heavy fog on a tongue.

If ever there was a time for the Supreme Reacher,
to be Supreme,
this was the time,
the time of limes
and wicker minds,
of transposition
and aberration,
the time of larks
and loons
and goons,
of thugs in power suits
and kings in jumpers
and dreads,
of revolutions gone stale
in their infancy,
crunchy and pale
even to their cores.

The Supreme Reacher,
could not be reached,
but it could reach out itself
with lightning hands
firing up the whole earth of minds.

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.

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.

If there are Demons inside of me,
then there is God.
No metaphysical
Jesus-Freak ****,
but the God that was there
before Bibles and Holy Roman Empires and even Holier crusades,
I'm talking about the God who ****** up one day and said,
"this place needs humans."
I'm talking about the God who put these Demons inside of me.
The God who came to me
when I was having a bad trip
and told me--
even as I'm tripping
and seeing pureed bodies
slicking at my feet and
I'm thinking *******
about screaming for help--
"It's going to be ok."

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.

The cat
followed me
in the door
last muggy night.

on a return trip
from a beer run,
Kurt heard a yowl
as screaming as any hurt guitar,
and looked under his volvo
into the far dark.

Two canary eyes
leered.

Then,
slinking,
the canary eyes
moved.

And this cat
rubbed its body,
the length of its shivering spine
along my
small shins.

And that cat
followed me
in.

Christmas
makes you realize
how lonely
and pointless
you are.

Everyone's at Jared's,
laughing with the overly made up
thirty-ish
forty-five year old
behind the counter.

Making jokes about
how
the bride-to-be
"lets him get away
with certain things,
but he knows who's boss."

While the groom-to-be stands beside her demurely
as she flexes that nice glinting rock.

"So when's the wedding?"


Or seeing people
going to Micheal's
for some string and
beads, and wood-carved letters,
to make a homemade
necklace
for her,
because commercialism
ruins love.

Real love comes from the heart
and necklaces made out of heartfelt twine
glistening with green and red beads
that enclose her name
in wood-carved letters
that have probably been chewed on
by a progressive four year old.



I think it's the whole idea
of togetherness.

This feeling of closeness brought on by the cold.

The need to be warm and vitalized,
while realizing
that you are rubbing your own shoulders.

you are shuddering against your own pillow.

you are curled up inside your own covers.

you simply are

and there is no one else around
to affirm
with love
and ***
and ingenuity
that
you are.

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.

Temptation
all around me,
I want to hug it
with a *******.

Place your hand
on my stomach,
feel the wash
of digestion.

I slide my fingers up
her
rib cage
strumming
them
like chords,
until I hear a giggle
of music.

I let myself
in
that night.

As you waited
in the backroom
bedroom,
with all your backroom
sexuality.

All the latent
passion
that crept during the day
is let loose
when I unlock
your neck
with my tongue.

Shivering
neckbones
make a noise
like ornaments
caressing
on a christmas
tree.

The gift
of your body
isn't lost
on me,
but the gift of love
can't make it through
this process of unlocking,
unraveling
and
*******.

Love
straps her bra
on,
pulls her ******* up
and closes her legs.

And I don't even miss it,
because love speaks
with a tongue for talking
not
*******.

There's this cat
that moans and moans
like it's going to hell.

It starts up
crying around 4 a.m.,
this ugly, pronounced
violent and deeply intonated
yowl.

It wakes me and Heather up,
it just comes into my dreams
and pulls me so hard
that I stumble back into this world
against this wall of sound
so ugly
that I'm tip-toeing insanity.

I want go out there
and strangle the ******* thing,
I want to find it where it yowls
and silence it.

heather says I'm the meanest person in the world
for wanting to strangle an animal
to
peices.

But the thing I hate is when an animal
lets the whole world
know
that
it's dying,
it won't let anybody get any sleep
until everybody in the vicinity
is standing around it
in pjs, boxers, doo rags, scarves
slippers,
gowns,
that pink thing Heather
got from
Walmart
watching the light of life being reduced
until this dying thing
begins burning
precious oxygen,
oxygen that we all need,
and it just becomes a waste
and a nuisance.

Last night, a thump.
A body hurled, third floor.
Second floor doesn’t do that kind of thing.

It’s 2 am.
That time of night when people when wake up anyways.
Blue-dark like antifreeze.

I was hard trying to go to sleep.

My bank account’s been throttled by loans,
Bills, Coronas, Blunts, Girls.

They shut off the water.
I walked to the store and saw a friend.
Ashamed, I laughed,
Said I liked water. “Water like liquor
like Koolaid like fun. “

What I really meant was:
“Water like survival like broke like stupid.”

This girl operates in ideas,
Dances like a ballerina,
Acts like an actress,
And will probably get bored soon.

There’s one across town that knows her way
around a lollipop, calls me sweet,
wears red just the way I like it,
***** **** with both hands
and doubles over to her tiny knees to laugh.

The actress is less sustainable,
but I sustain thoughts about her more.

The thump, it interrupts,
Distorts a globular fantasy into a brilliantly skewed
Pixelated awakening.

Pixels drain out. Room
Clears of smoke. Velvet embalming begins, purple night quickens,
Halogen streetlights invade in battalions.
**** me.

There’s a girl with a rancid *****
I still love.

The electricity thrums.

I’ve never been humble;
Super-conscious.

I can hear second floor:
footsteps light like *** fear,
tipping to the nexus. To the spot
where some hurled
lies,
above even them.

Third floor gets down like that. I can’t be a hero.

I used to think it was second floor.

But they don’t get down like that.

If we shut off the power,
You’ve gotta pay.

I know, I know,
How much?

180.

Carlos used to live on third.
Wife took the kids and dipped,
That elephant footed baby,
And the mouse-footed teen.

Carlos brought all kinds up after that,
Muffin women with huge, roach eyes,
Emaciated blondes with seamounts running their spines,
Thick, buggy black girls with ***** I wanted to stick my **** all the way into.

Then he quit. Broke one day. Told me everything was mine if I went up there,
and he was gone.

Third Floor was there in two days.

Bruh, they caught u stealing.

How much?

Don’t know, they were just talking about it at work today.

****.

I watch way too much ****. Tonight,
I get ***** enough to burn holes in my palms.
Maybe it’s the fear and anger.

Third floor is not my problem.

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.

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.

does everything change
window washers
door openers
now
top suite pimpin’
used to think the life
was about big, tall buildings
and suite offices
was it all a fairytale in the wind
was it all a memory
gone bad
did we imagine
our greatness
take it to another level
only to be wooed
by cake
and free beverages
work
aholic
mentality
fogged out
by love
and
freedom

Hello love,
I've been away for a while,
contemplating this degraded earth,
putting different things into place.

I know you've moved on,
but I still think about your lips.

The sweetest joy of an impermanent heaven,
and the messengers of hope.

I took too much time loving you,
too much time holding you.

Our bodies were the worlds
separated by eternity,
your eyes
the distance
I could not bridge.

Wishing I could make you mine
was stupidity
marching in time,
and off-step.

Pearlesque moon played the lighting,
in our drama,
as I held you on top of my car,
lavishing in your plums of delight
and your wettest ******
of ecstasy.

Don't let me go now,
when I've just begun to remember
you.

My people
are the kind
that were
sharecroppers.

From the dirt
of North Carolina.

They pulled themselves
up
by
tilled mounds
with boots
always pressing down
on their knuckles.

Somehow they rose.

The sky turned its
bluest
with
punches rolling
in from the west.

Punches
cold
and
steel.

But somehow
they didn't
escape to the rivers
and no
new nooses
found their necks.

With
small crumbles
of dirt
clinging
to their backs
they shook off
that universe
of roots
and
boots.

But I am not of them.

I realize that now.

I do not
have the resolve.

When I think of the generations
of powerful flowers
before me
I look in the mirror
and see myself
clean
with no memory
of fingers
that used to know
black gold.

Constantly searching
for that
patch
of tilled black earth
inside of me,
I am dying
with a new noose
around my neck.

The throne of a metropolis is on the far side
atop the lake
that wrinkles the sun,
beneath a mountain
green with sickled pines;


The people use their boughs as scythes.

The people use trees to cut down
more and more,
and burn whatever's too pesky
to stick around.

In a backyard of a house in the suburbs
people get bored playing cards,
watching tv,
getting drunk in the evenings.

They party like pagans going crazy
over a peerless future,
and an impermanent past.

Sometimes a new bonfire is started
where the old one died,
sometimes the old one will flare up
and scorch the sky beautiful;
a smoky curtain on which the tongues of stars
can make good on all the promises
made on them.

And people kiss around the fire.
Hug,
make up,
joke.

The sealed souls of the people open.

At the end,
they regret it.
This newness of life.

They swing their wooden scythes at the night,
still furry and wet
with bark and sap,
cursing god in fury, fury, fury,
trying to cut down the stars too.

These people that take and destroy,
they whittled the throne of the Metropolis
out of ivory from Africa.

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.

there's a blunt out back,
that's got my name on it,
i need this time
to chill
and remember the goodness,
the parties
where girls danced up on me,
their ***** on my ****,
and their hips in my fingertips,
the girls that smelled like coconut
when their ******* smelled like ***,
but they were good,
****,
they loved me
for me,
and i'd curl their hair
in my fingertips
like a sadist
twirls hearts.

Me and the lil homies
chilled in the back,
smoking
while their moms
screamed at us,
talking about cops
and ******* **** up,
we just chilled there,
passing the L
and feeling ourselves
because the **** was good
and the girls
were around
to let us know
that we could touch
something
inside another person.

i'd come home
and my ma
would start in on me,
i'd end up in the hospital
with a few
neighbors
in my icu crew,
so maybe i'd end up
a **** up,
but me and the lil homies
liked to fight,
we'd go in until
one of us was ******
then we'd get drunk
and rowdy,
trying to put to sleep
the fear
inside of us.

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.

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

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.