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.

Bit down,
****** up tongue.

Little eavesdroppers
run from my windows;
pretentious *****
go vegan
as the world turns;
coffee ***,
cigarette ***,
love ***
all become one;
a lot to say
in the moment 'fore the big bang,
but daddy forgot to pull the trigger,
and
none of us are on the run;
nobody loves me;
nowhere to go,
no-one to be.
Take it.
Be ****** by it.
Love it.

Take that *** of despair,
bite down,
rip away the ******,
and **** up your tongue
on all that up-chuck
because if you don't
you're the one that's getting ****** up.

The raven
comes to me
constantly,
always in my dreams
crowding out the streets
where I made beer bottles
into Batman and the Joker,
clinking them against each other
mimicking a fight,
I could save everything
back then.

Now the streets are filled
with ticking feet,
the streets are filled
with streetlights
threaded with
feathers in the glow,
in the same
moment
I could wake up in a cold sweat,
****** myself,
fearful
that someone's in my
room,
I don't know what has happened
to my mind,
but it's not a safe place
any more,
no confidantes,
no saving grace
or saving bells
except the one
in the distance,
the foghorn
behind glass,
and the fog
a house
of caws.

Oh, hope
make your mess again.

Hope
don't keep asking more of me
than I'm willing to give.

Forreal tho,
I was in trouble before the boat sunk
and the drowned
finally let loose their blood
in bouyant droplets.

Because I was a little boy,
on the ship,
and you came in to my room,
and laid beside me
with a watermelon smell in your barrettes,
and a "I'm forever"
in your  siuking voice,
as the ship tipped.

So much of me shrieks;
you make me.

Pac would tell u
he waz gunna
throw a riot
and he'd tell ya
y.

Rappers nowadays
throw a riot
and don't have the inteligente
2 tell you why,
see now it's
about
mizguided bravado
and *******
it used 2 be about
all the old homies
and
G.I.R.L.S. u used 2 know.

She loved rolling L's,
I'd plop down on her bed,
she'd have A$AP or some
OFWGKTA on,
she was a New York girl
in skinny jeans
and camo Jordans
with them gold doorknockers,
a transplant
both from there
and into my life,
she'd run her pink nails
long as needles along
the Swisher,
and I swear
she had to know something
about internal anatomy,
cause she'd do that ****
to my belly button;
how long have you been practicing?
How many bodies have you split open
and left for dead
in the ashtray?
You rolled a tight L,
and I hemourraged
for five minutes,
it became a local anesthetic
until the procedure
was over.

The woman could do more
than just lick the insides clean,
she was humane,
she'd fill it back
with something you could burn.

She could roll L's
to Webster
all day,
not even the big L's
like love, lust, lascivious
more like
loner, longing, and live.

Apples and Oranges
means
that I give you something
of lesser value
and you give me something
of even
lesser value.

Like Natalie asked for the rent money
and picked at the lint in my jeans pocket,
formulated a ball of it
worked that little ball through the hole in my pocket,
to my *****,
they smelled horrible,
I knew it,
massaged that ball around my *****,
pulled it back through the hole,
out of the humidity of my pocket
and put it in her palm.

"You *******,
either you get me the rent
or I'm calling the police
and having you taken out of here."

"My name's on the lease too."

"I don't give a ****,
you're not paying it."

Apples and Oranges.

I have hope for the little black boy and girl.

These Mars to universe-colored,
golden-eyed children of the sun.

Some of them sprout up
out of cracked earth and concrete.

Their root-minded growth being spurred on
by the nourishment of the sewers.

These are tiny black flowers
pushing out their pistils like tongues,
and licking the unsanitized water
like nectar.

They
take everything you throw away.
Watch them make tree houses out of
trash cans, and spaceships
out of discarded cardboard boxes
that smell like beer, and *****
and sweat.

The sprinklers are on
and they slide down a hill
covered by a plastic sheet
the size of a whale's tongue.

Their smiles
open wide like zippers,
and their teeth are coconut flesh.

The milk of their laugh contains enough calcium
to mine happiness
out of overly-injected fructose bones.

When they tug at your pants
and ask you questions,
they just want to know
where the moon came from,
and how to get there.

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

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

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

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

Think I'll wash you out,
I'll drown an ocean
and I'll milk the moon,
I"ll think about you
at the wrong times,
I'll eat ice cream
from melting tubs,
do your lips taste
like sugar?
I don't know anymore;
don't think I ever knew.

Could you just be one of those things
that never goes away?
could I be one of those things?

I've been eating too much for a morning
and too little for an afternoon.

Coffee is good
for turning barrooms
into bedrooms,
and girls with boredom on their tongues
into oracles.

Sometimes I just want to eat
my soul
until I"m full and nothing,

To finally be
impoverished
and ***** again
would be the best breath
my lungs
have ever ushered in.

Eat me.

When I eat my words
I eat them
with bitterness.

A whole
grape
of wine
couldn't encompass
the
sour seed of my soul.

I make promises
over the phone,
that I love you,
that whatever I did wrong
can be made right.

Just like those withered
scuppernogs
I think,
I can climb the vine
again.

But there is no
remedy
for a broken heart,
except pain,
and letting go.

So over dried tears,
I tear myself apart
over the thought of you.

Even in the burgeoning
night
full of fat storms,
I am malnourished,
and waiting by the phone
while my friends go out,
for your call.

Love isn't right,
or logical
or even compassionate.

Love is hateful,
but love
is
also love,
and the well-spring
of humanity
stems from that deep
acquifer
embedded in rock,
where you are the
drill
and
I am the spring-loaded
limestone
full
of
nourishment.

So bae,
come back someday,
let me climb the steel stairs
of your blue eyes,
because I've been out
and
about,
and other eyes have found mine,
but they have found nothing.

You have found
and mined
everything,
and I don't love them for finding nothing,
I love you
for your scouring
and
discerning heart.

So dismember me,
make me human,
I'd rather die mortal
than immortal
and
inhuman.

I have run down
broken stairs,
I have twisted
inside
twisted showers,
bent backwards
on five-fingered clocks,
in the fray
I rumbled
with a spider
of a woman
as she crawled on eight legs
over my sternum
to my lips,
at the top of the bridge of the world,
the world
turned
rightside
up
and the sky
was peopled by
clouds the size
of goldfish,
and the sun
was a dappling bowl
in which people put their
hands
to wash them of pain,
and so the world was all right,
but I couldn't handle
so much happiness,
none of the other
fish
looked like you,
even as I looked up
out of my
apartment
made of jenga blocks,
so I travelled back down
the twisted
showers,
broken
stairs,
and over the underbelly
of the bridge,
until I held you in my arms;
your tiny body
whole to me again,
I could touch the sky
when I touched your body
and told you to call me
whenever you needed me,
but you walked away,
and so I returned
to that hell
of perfection.

I hate living in the sky,
the ocean where the fish
look all the same
and there are no real clouds
to speak of.

I hate taking twisted showers,
and rumbling with spider-women,
I hate bridges that bridge
worlds.

Firstly, I hate love,
Secondly, I hate heartbreak,
Thirdly, I can't live without those two things.

Worst comes to worst,
don't go crazy
on a Friday.

Don't lose it on the train tracks,
you will get reamed.

If you decide to lose your mind
at the bus-stop
don't forget that there are some irrevocable
hurts
in this world.

Maybe you will go
to a seafood spot,
at Southport
and stare at the gulls
and scream
from inside the sound studio
of your car.

The kind of sound studio
that could deaden
sound
itself.

Maybe you will hammer it out
in your garage
and destroy your entire face
with a buzz-saw,
because insanity is your husband's love.

There is a bridge
where cars stream
and make
river-noises,
jumping from pearly concrete
to volcanic asphalt,
you might feel how it feels to
go from heaven to hell,
maybe you're always at that place,
but if anything
don't
do
it
on
a
Friday.

Mondays are better for self-hatred
and
suicide.

Love is a universe of sorts,
in many ways
two people can become
galaxies
on a collision course,
their arms waiting to wrap
and warp
around each other,
or one will be smaller
and less bright
hungering to be consumed
by the supermassive heart
at the center of its lover,
or one lover
is a comet;
the other
is a sun.
the comet burns
against the corona;
it lets off a trail
sweet and cooling,
and against the sun
it feels like the beginnings
of a nova,
the final cool-down
and planet-consuming explosion of it's outer layers,
but instead,
the comet uses the sun's gravity
to slingshot into deep space,
and the sun screams
in engulfing bursts of light
as the comet trails off,
leaving behind a dissipating gas trail
in its wake,
tugging less and less,
forging an ice-road into eternity.

Every guy has a ***** ball smell,
a putrid essence
that takes a lifting of the sac,
and a not to thorough examination,
to detect.

I detected mine
while working out,
I was on the treadmill
going 7.5 miles an hour,
when I smelled
sour milk.

Ball maintenance
is very important.

I spent about five minutes
down there
with a judicious wash cloth.

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.

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.

Not seen or heard from
you
in awhile.

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

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

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

Not seen
or heard from
by some other woman.

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

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

Not seen or heard from
you
in awhile.


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

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

loss.

Not seen or heard from you.

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.

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.

it's no good,
no good,
no good.

No good for tomorrows,
where coffee's been cold,
tastes like battery acid,
kicks nervous systems up into highest gear--range = infinite.

then kills.

It's no good.

No good for saturday afternoons,
lonely as clear blue sky
on open highway
hurtling through ferocious air.

No good.

Definitely not a monday morning thought:

A day for hangovers,
tightly-capped lips,
****-smelling ****,
and linoleum stained as an old man's scalp.

It's no good for that time.

It's good for moments:
the window open, the tune of hurled air humbling your eardrums. Music loud, but not unbearable.
someone laughing in the back, kicking up their feet on the headrest
and taking the last sip of Wild Turkey.

Asleep in a securely blue bar;
laying your head on the wood paneling;
feeling the hum-drum earthworm of puke
on your tongue: Tasting guacamole and seared steak.

When the cop hurls around, cuts the lights, and hops out the squad
like a monster with a conscience.

You know you're drunk,
but fear doesn't hit you
until everyone involved
has peeled off.

Fear lingers, like shaking a dead man's hand,
but there are other things that wash well.

you and her.

It's good for moments perplexing,
it calms.

It's good for moments of fear,
it throttles you into sanity.

It's good for moments of confidence,
it humbles.

It's good for clarity,
it maintains.

I love you.
Your lips
and how you
put your teeth first.

How you tickle yourself
silly
with your incisors
as you think.

I love your depth.
Your black eyes
and curly
animal hair.

The things you say
are too important
to be remembered.

They are better for
cups of coffee in Mcdonald's
while I perform
necromancy
over a small cup
and need
some higher power
to call upon.

You said:
"Some call it coincidence,
but I like to call it fate."

I love you Yukimi,
love me forever
my little woodpecker.

We revel in the sky,
and dusk,
and eventuality.

Love,
hopelessness,
diaspora.

Moment to moment,
we are the ever-changing aurora.

Our lights and our heat,
in the fading dark
we watch the horizon
where the mountains meet.

The tracers go,
round by round,
beginning at the muzzle in heroic glory
ending in the stomach with epic sorrow.

The sky is large,
the moon is bulging,
the clouds are pastel and burning,
smeared by the wash of darkness.

I am famished, but painless
because pain
is the dim smolder of love and freedom
suffocating deep inside.

That fire has not been stoked,
untouched for a while.

The oven has gone black,
the charcoal tastes mild.

And I have been loved with no freedom.

And lived for freedom with nothing to love.

I have gained wisdom,
and talked to myself.

The sky aches for its reunion with the horizon;
humbles itself, all out of color now,
and hungers for the embrace
of the mountains.

Into the murk,
the tracers go,
round by round,
lighting up that dividing line,
between hungry sky
and famished mountain
creating separation
in a world lost in time.

The tracers go,
round by round,
beginning in heroic glory,
ending in epic sorrow.

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.

Your love is hard
like rocks
in my belly
in the morning;
like starting the countdown
to a three-day drunk
a week later,
at every turning point,
every shadow
of an angle,
I am taking roads
I have never
crossed,
I am watching
water run
in crystalline rivers
toward alleys
I've never known.

When they ask me
for money
or Marlboros,
I say yes,
please,
I would like those too.

I would like to eat
bagels
in the sun
with crinkly paper in my teeth
and sour cream cheese
sweetening in the liquor.

My landscaper's shoulders
and granite deltoids
are now green with lime
and lichens.

Girls like to run
their
hands over them;
but they are hungry
for your hands
and the lavishing footsteps
of your fingernails.

When I wake up
I put enough water in the
coffee-maker
for about
twenty cups,
and enough
***** in those
twenty cups
for a three-day drunk.

Your love is hard like ice-cold *****
and boiling coffee
that
mutilates tastebuds
and
makes my belly feel real good.

But not talking to you for awhile;
it's easier to warm up in the morning
so I can cool down at night,
and by the pink dawn
of darkness
I could get back to working my belly
with *****, rocks, and
Marlboros.

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

Two-dollar waffle makers.

**** it,
imma go to the store
and get a few more
beers and some marlboros
im stumbling
all over the place
making circles in the hardwood
with my feet
and swing doors in the air closed
with spaghetti in my veins,
but imma make it,
imma shut that *******
dog up
too,
keeps barking,
shut the **** UP.

"That's Rob's dog,"
Elcie says,
spit ripples at the corners
of her mouth,
and some baked ziti
is rumored to be
in the toilet.

That ******* thing
is getting six 60 milogram
perky sets in his morning kibble,

right after I puke
some more baked ziti
and wodka.

The gravel crunches
as we walk
and it's cold.

We push our breaths out
of chapped lips, and wipe
away dried spit, with nicotine
fingers.

Pigeon feels the baggies in his pockets
full of vicodin,
that's gonna get us ****** up.

His fingers look like earthworms through his jeans
as he gropes for the baggy.

I get that jolt, just thinking about it;

that jolt of happiness you feel right before you get
real ****** up.

I look around and pull out a Camel Light,
because that's all we smoke.

And light up. It's real
white out, white and cold.

The moon's fat as a snowflake
and foggy up there too.

I move my toes,
and can't feel a thing,

****.

We crunch through the woods,
catching glimpses of the moon, and the lake
through the trees.

I want to hit this fifth of Henny
jerking in my backpocket,
but I'm saving it.

Pigeon stops.

Me and Gus keep walking.

Pigeon coos.

We turn around.

He whips out the plastic baggy,

In the moonlight the Vicodins look
like those tiny, candy skulls you get on halloween.

I feel like our relationship
was too short.

Too many times did I take
your
******* in my fingers
and listen
for the ocean.

Your stomach
was fired in a kiln,
and still tastes like heat.

In your bed
we made out,
with t-shirts on,
and I slid my fingers
underneath cotton
because I wanted to
play in your belly button
and work the clay.

I know that you like to
Dance in fields
with cotton
on your lips
and talk to God.

Talk to him
in a subterfuge
of light,
and not in the marrow
of darkness.

Our relationship was too short,
because we snuck liquor
into dark theatres,
and left bottles in the aisles
like empty artillery.

We kissed in your car
and never cleaned up.

I had breakfast over at your house once,
and met your mother twice.

And it seems the alpine
was too much for me,
because I never took you to the mountains
even when you asked.

Carolyn,
when I see you
again,
I will take you to Appalachia;
as far from the ocean
as we can humanly get.

Carolyn when I see you
again,
I will not eat the fruit
of the fired bowl,
and will not
think of playing
with clay.

For the first few months
you just want to **** yourself
and
everyone around you
in a machete mash-up
or a shotgun divorce.

I remember the girl
I started messing around with
after
the
thing.

She'd get on top of me
and reach down into my pants.

She'd do this
mechanical yanking real hard
until I started
getting friction burns.

Until I had to come
or else my **** might've singed off.

And when we ******,
she wanted everything hard
and she kissed real masculine:
aggressive
and her lips
braced against my teeth.

I hated her.

But what really ****** me up about her,
was that I only told her once about
Gnat,
and she didn't seem to hear me.

All the yanking and hard kissing,
she seemed there just to burn me down.

Not to destroy or anything malicious,
just that when she hopped in her car
and drove around in la-la land
I felt charred and empty.

Sometimes I'd call her over
to ****
and I'd just stare at her naked body,
closing my eyes
picturing gnat.

It never worked.

I always came hard
and it burned.

Eventually,
I stopped calling her.

Maybe she's dead or something.

I don't know,
at that time
she was just that inanimate to me.

I barely remember what she looked like,
I spent so much time
trying to super-impose.

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.

You are too drunk, now.

But the ulcer juices;
and you know it's finally true.

She used to run
her fingernails
down my sternum
all the way
to the bottom of my belly,
one little snake
tickling me
as she split me open,
and her jelly-smelling hair
coiled in jet-black
against my shoulders,
and her
amazonian lips
made my heart muggy,
so what I did
after she stopped splitting me open,
after she stopped
making trips from my heart
to my lower intestine,
is that I went to the coldest place
in the world,
but even then
I was warm with her constriction,
warm in the coldest places
warm without distinction.

When the time comes
will you have
an open ear
for a closed mouth?
or an open mouth
for a closed
ear?

What did Orpheus say?

What birds left his mouth?

Was there anything left on them?

Or did they fly naked?

Their feathers had been taken
to tar and feather.

The heart, bitter and bruised
broke through his chest,
in the furious night
of those
cold bird's
wings.

What did you say?

Did you say you'd be right,
that I'd be wrong?

Because you only
ever let me
hold your body
in stillness..

I could never hold you
like death.

So when we see each other
again,
in the blue balm
of day,
what kind of salve
will we choose?

will it be coffee?

or tea?

or whatever the **** people have?

Will we look in each other's eyes
instead of devouring our birds
one by one?

The liquor doesn't bite anymore,
it comes over me,
in a flowering,
a thunder-wave.

I have dreams of killing him,
with a chainsaw and a rose,
the rose for you
to place
over the tendrils of his separated neck.

Or smashing his face
into a stone lion's mouth,
then forcing him,
inch by wriggling inch
into a granite maw,
trapped forever
behind the vicious wardens
of stone canines and cement incisors.

I usually dream drunk,
too wild in myself,
to roam the day sober.

So, work is drunk;
eating is drunk;
breathing is drunk;

Orange juice spiked,
ready to go.

Meatloaf dinner; date with milk, *****, and sweating
at five.

Can't you see the carnage?

The flotsam;
The raft of bodies
of stupid, pale men
who give out their positions
to hateful women.

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 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.

If the ceilings dripped
liquid metal
and the scratchy rose-print sheets
bit out for our bodies,
we wouldn't know a thing.

If God jumped into bed
and tried to cram in between us,
there wouldn't be enough room.

In the deep night,
all the stars could come down shattering into knife light,
It would be perfect.

All the asteroids
could warp the earth into a bowl
of milk, and splotch
the solar system into a giant cow,
but we could not join in the teet-mashing mayhem;
there's nothing pure here,
and our fingers hunger for bad places,
instead of ushering in the good.

I do not know what we will do,
but the world is falling apart.

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.

A whittled will
exiled from the cave-mouth.

A half-hearted goodbye,
a full throat
full of sorrow.

A doe
hiding her fawns
in the suburbs.

The sadness that I feel,
is a sadness bereft of refuge.

Since you called,
I've been writing,
here and there,
truthfully,
skinning the night,
searching for meat.

I've peeled back
the clouds: crimson,
the sky: split,
the stars: lit like the mossed edges of a scab,
the cosmos: a ****.

I'm getting weary,
all of this beneath me,
the earth becoming
a speck of dust:
absurd.

The kind of hurt you like to dole:
still there.

Can't I be an astronaut in peace?

Do you like the flattening of me,
into a pancake
like the night:
hammered and nailed
across the hemisphere?

I am the gravity-crushed,
the soul-sored, the black-hole ripped.

Opened and steaming,
I'm under the sky.

The emergency room of the brinking night drugs
and
a story of gleaming scars is my heart.

I'm tired of seeing dudes
get killed
over some *******.

STOP THE GUNPLAY.

Stop the role of the gun
and misused bullet,
it penetrates
too much.

Too many kids
getting strangled
in the dark,
too many mothers
left behind
in the acrid past-tense;
too many of the homies
seeing blinding lights
and useless flights.

The winds
only
whisper
when
I'm
drunk.

The tea leaves
wither
in the soup
only when
I'd had a few.

They curl
like disgusted fingers,
or fists.

I scrounge
my pockets.

I litter in Marlboro butts.

I can't go to sleep
without
the biting panther
of the drink.

Those lemon eyes
make sense
by nine
when I've had a few sips
and my lips
are filled with their tears.

Do you know
the forrest of my heart?

Do you understand passion
that destroys
as it grows?

This is kudzu
this licqour.

This is meaning
this licquor.

This is happiness
this licquor.

This is the dissolution
of my anxiety
and fears
this licquor.

I will end
on a sour note
and say
that I cannot sleep.

I cannot sleep
when I am sober.

My aunt passed away

almost a year ago.


And I was never super close with her

but the things I remember

are important.


My whole family

Aunt Florence

Uncle Rodger

Aunt Debbie

and Romy

came down

and Stayed with Me, Ma, Joci and Grandma

when I was a kid.


I remember she kissed

me

and hugged me

in our living room.


And I felt the love

without words;

it just came out of her body

in waves.


Her small voice

was loud with it.

I am beginning to learn
Yukimi
like a backstory
and
her body
teaches me about love
in a different
but completely nostalgiac
way.

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.

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.

Sometimes I hate myself,
when i'm lonely
and no one's around.

When I was younger,
Mommy used to call me a ******,
Daddy used to call me dense
and then punch me harsh as an addict, addicted
me to pain.

I Used to wrap cords around my neck,
take lines to an addled brain:
crazy with masochistic Peter Rabbits,
tangling up their ears,
in mangled mesh wrapping.

Take sleeping pills till
I couldn't sleep ever again, from all the nightmares I was having.

But Mommy still laughed,
Daddy still hawked.

******* cry.
Don't tell your mother I'm drinking.

So no,
I can only love in one way.

When you put your lips
on mine,
I just love the sound they make;
a quiet fleshy sound,
the temperament of flesh
is softer
than the temperament
of even the soberest buddhist,
especially yours.

I just want to pray at your lips,
just want to fear the enlightenment
that your tongue
unfurls.

Your lips could be the second coming.

We have seen
and called for misunderstanding,
But I have seen our future children,
mulatto genearation,
Ticked off,
I am at our confusion,
Foggy like the farts of war,
The bullets continue to fly
even in silence,
From my brother's gun,
*** can you call youreself,
When you hold tight to the chains,
We must let loose,
We must see the sun and its morning fog
As the dew of renewal,
Because I have seen you witb oure
Mulatto children, and you looked at me,
I was a father.

Today drunks got up,
on an upended axis.

And wobbled
on driven souls,
driven to ****
and let the hate loose.

A drunk walked in mud
to work,
and his boss sported a smile
of sad pride.

He had done a great job,
and no one knew.

When they were sitting down
on the couch,
cracking the air with laughter,
the country man
looked up
and saw
a daughter of light on the floor,
slitted through the blinds.

He wanted so badly
to cry.
But didn't.

An imp limped
upstairs
and down, back again
to the basement,
and his old ma
heard him sparingly.

So much happened to day,
so beautifully
sad,
clear, and azure,
that the masks
of nails
spiking our faces,
slowly wore down
against steel skin.

When the sun went down,
aching for pain again,
they took the first swig,
then a second.