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.

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

Two-dollar waffle makers.

Black girl
with eyes
like coals in snow.

Black girl with super-dark skin,
that just  
makes
me
cry.

Black girl
with long
curly hair
littered with light.

Black girl
with lips like slices
of wet wings,
lips thin
as
happiness.

Black girl
with hazelnut eyes
with a grey
bent.

Black girl that knows how to make
me so happy in the cold,
with her closet-full of words
that can make a ******
think of warm weather.

Together we meet
in the woods,
at the cabin front-steps
taking turns
twirling
each other's cheeks,
touching each other's
lips
and I just want you to know
that there are no dreary
days
ahead,
even when it is cold
and we have to hold
each other
to hold
everything
inside.

Because we might just burst;
explode
in a thousand limbs climbing like spiders.

Some dudes are down to fight
but they don't.

But what's crazy
is that *******
won't fight around white people
they're trying to impress.

They don't want to be a ****,
even though
they don't know that we're all *****
in some way.

So when I slug you,
I'm not slugging you,
and when you slug me;
you're not slugging me;
we're just trying
to break free.

I miss the days of black pride,
black panthers
and black determinism,
when we weren't killing each other
and we weren't killing them
we were killing
what needed to be killed;
a mindset.

Without Marcus,
Malcolm,
Tupac,
Martin,
and Carlos
we are lost and we fight,
because all the black flowers that used to bloom
no longer bloom,
and the hope the resided in the birth of a screaming child
no longer resides.

Bob and weave,
keep your tongue
out your teeth,
keep two fists up at all times,
don't let your hands drop
below your hipline,
that's how you get cleaned,
that's how you wind up
with a head full of bees,
move your feet,
off the heels
jump on the combs,
keep your toes wide,
and once you feel that
supreme blow
to the temple
give yourself a lil tap
wasps come to **** the bees
when the queen
is incapacitated.

I'd like to be
Bukowski today,
I'd like
to get a good **** in
before
dusk,
and a good drink in
at some point,
I've wanted some Wild Turkey
more than anything.

A good ****
when done right
without
the spring-loaded
traps of love,
just *******
until your body swells,
can make you come
for days,
and a good drink
is good for washing out
sadness as it pukes dramamine
in your stomach,
and Bukowski for a day
would be a lemon.

This is pretentious
as ****. I am a
pretentious ****.

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

Other than that,
he's nothing.

Worse than that,
he is sore.

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

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

A perpetual scowl
like
a
scar.

I used to know a girl named Calypso,
she had beautiful shorthand
and we used to fall asleep
in her mom's house
until that was gone,
until the storm came
and she was an island
I had drawn with ink.

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.

Backyard brawls
and sunflower gardens.

Bezzled nights,
twinkling jeweled fireflies,
musky, humid air,
the tickle of rain on your cheeks.

Washed away,
down
the
drain,
youth,
gone and can't be recaptured.

Fistfights
in high school hallways,
tumbling in stairwells
with the beasts of our fear,
and the rolling thunder
of adulthood smashing
against our minds
like tropical waves against
arctic icebergs.

Youth, again;
mother's warm body
cuddling together
in the morning replenishment
on a spring mattress
that is continually sinking down abyssally
where boy and mother
cope with the aftermath
of the brokenness
shrouding their home.

**** drifting up to the ceiling
as we drank our full
of Everclear,
bought by fathers
who's lives had been beaten
down to a depressed mattress
in the corner
of
a garage
speckled by oil slicks
and draped by fiberglass
falling in curtains from the ceiling.

The absent smell of crack in the air.

Sunday breakfasts,
grandma in the kitchen,
mom in the basement,
kids farting around in their rooms.

Mom's curdling yells ripping the house to shreds,
as she sought peace,
in a quiet, and moldy sarcogophous.

There is a place where bombs
and mortars fly,
where a smile is as hard to find
as a mosquito in a desert,
and self-hatred is easy to come by
when regret blankets your mind
with every sand-choked breath.
And in this place, time crawls
by only springing to life when happiness
blooms, and idling when emotions
are sautered, and the search for feeling
is like waiting to get bitten.

But in this place,
there is a garden,
where youth and adulthood
collide, where the sunflowers bloom
once more, and the blood spilt
before the war began, gives life
to the seedlings,
and the soil is not so rotten
as it has grown older and tired.

The mind, finally centered
among the chaos, finding
its concrete horizon in the oasis
of a centered self,
centered finally,
in the midst of this brutal
and beautiful disaster.

That cheap stuff
will run through you.

It'll give you a hard time
going down,
and then,
it'll hold your belly like a baby's hand,
soft and sweetly,
then it'll smack the **** out of you,
because you trusted it.

This cheap **** is a bad ****.

It tastes like molassess and *******,
it kicks like a jalopy,
turns over in bombs,
slices your belly button,
and pops its little head out of your stomach.

I like the cheap ****,
it makes me feel this way.

This way is the only way.

Kind of like
how they say
alotta love
is
good love.

Sometimes I can't help myself,
I just can't.

It won't go away.

When I try to tell her,
I can't help but see how much
she laughs at what's on TV,
and in the tiny screen
I stare back at myself.

Later, On a bench,
I sit, watching
the fading amber sun
glaze the glinting, tin rooftops. And
the smokers' cherries
glow and subside.

Sirens break the silence,
screaming bells
from
a
distance.

but in my faraway place
they whisper,
an augur of pain.

"Chris just got kicked out of his house."

We rode over to his house,
and I listened to her sing.

Christ sat on the porch railing
dangling
his legs,
biting his fingernails.

I stood on the grass,
as she walked up to him.

He looked
at her neck.

Yukimi
put her hands on his shoulders
and kissed him on the lips.

Something
could have rose
in me.

But it didn't.

We rode back
and Chris slumped into the couch.

I heard him *******
his fingernails
as me and Yukimi lay in bed.

"Lips can do more than talk,
I can tell
he needed that,
I'm sorry if it weirded you out."

"No,
it really didn't."

Hers are the awful kind of lips,
like a flounder split down
it's flat middle,
with it's tiny intestines
licking outward for more salt.

This is the broken sea
of love.

Your love is the kind
that makes a fish out of her.

Her lips are mercury-colored
and mercury-shimmering.

Inside that fat head of yours,
while she kisses
your belly full of hair,
you are constantly
swerving and shivering
looking for the sharks.

But you are comfortable,
in a way.

Far away, across the emptiness
and unbrokeness of the desert
a thousand
pebbles are strewn,
each one begging to be picked up.

In some eastern city,
a girl and her friends
wander, and laugh, and joke,
and jump, drunk. She looks
so good tonight. Her hair
wavy and long, her eyes
a thousand different wavelengths
of blue, green, amber.

In a room,
there's a bed,
a desk,
a dresser,
a bedside table.

The girl and her friends,
wandering darkening streets,
drunk, looking for the next ****,
next bottle to **** dry.

Outside his window,
the setting sun reaches out
for it's last burning grasp
of skin. Scorching all day,
now it relents, but it always leaves a mark.

There's a guy in the club,
all up on her,
and she isn't trying to push him away,
even as his lips brush her neck.

In the room, in the dark,
he goes subterranean,
spending hours staring at her feed,
at her notifications,
where she's been,
and who she's with.

The brushed lips are the first warm thing
in forever,
it seems.

Going even more subterannean,
he runs through and through
all the scenarios.

He goes back and forth
in his room,
looking for something,
looking for nothing at all.
Up.
Down.
Sit.
Stand.
Calm.
Explode.
Reassure.
Anger.

And tonight the most harrowing thing,
is those lips and the strength
of pain and sorrow.

He saw,
He saw the snapchats.

Emptied him whole,
right there,
filleted his stomach
and dropped some rocks
for his way down to the bottom.


All the rights he has now:
the right to the joy of betrayal.
the joy of being right,
and its incumbent wrongs all at the same time,
the comfort of madness.

I would like
to understand holy things.

I pulled up to your trailer,
and parked in the gravel.

The pebbles crunch
the same way under my feet
as they do under the wheels.

You are not outside,
like you said you would be.

I lean in the window
and honk the horn.

I hold onto it,
until you come to the door
with the baby,
and you both stare at me,
blurry behind the screen.

The horn is too aggressive
and you know it.

Will you teach me
with kisses
like you teach
the baby?

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.

We are just one
big conflagration.

One hope
for oxygen
as we spread over the earth
in fire
hoping to burn
forever.

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.

I had a dream
about
Contact 16.

We were above
the green planet
and the two moons
watched with us
as
the black flower of death
spread
over
Uris
like
agitated silt
in a slow
murky cloud.

We reached earth
and there
were a thousand yous.

A thousand people
that looked just like you
and
the thousand yous
destroyed me.

A thousand
of them
so close to me,
and those thousand people
didn't notice
that I was devouring them
slowly
taking
vital peices of them
and incorporating
them
into me.

Becoming
an amorphousness.

I have devoured sixteen already.

The police
watch the *******;
put bass in their voice
when they talk to me
"Hey buddy,
you know your tail-lights were out?"
All that bass.

Cops always call me buddy
and I just want to flick my switch
and cut a *******,
but I don't
I gotta stay steady.

*******,
I'm just trying to get to work
on time
and you might get me fired,
but that don't matter,
you want to keep me in my place;
make sure to rest your hand
on your holster
as you're leaning into my driver's side window.

I'm just trying to pay my bills
aren't you?

Your fingers manipulating
her hips.

The way her skirt rides
and rides.

Her moving
with you
waiting for you to show her what's next,
to give direction
with your fingertips.

Hello Kathryn,

You left a message the other day,
I heard the phone ring,
but I didn't pick up;
didn't know how to talk to you;
or why you wanted to talk.

The **** was there to talk about?

I went to an estate sale;
big house,
big cherubs with their fat cherub hips and cheeks
and all that algae caked on their bodies
made them sick
on the front lawn.

I walked into someone else's house,
took what I wanted
and left.

Then I drove to the beach,
and I wanted you to be there,
so I could *******.

I wanted it to be a loud,
hard ****,
one that made me and you both
hurt,
one that made
my **** burn
and your cheeks blotchy,
one that made
you look at me differently
as you pulled your ******* back over your ankles,
slowly over your thighs
and quickly to your crotch;
One that made
your dress
some fabric
and your shoes
some soles;
one that made
you open the door
and just walk down the street
for a smoke
and some contemplation
about what kind of life
you were really leading;
the kind of life
where people sit in cars
and drink
and ****
all day.

I put the car in park.

The gulls sat on the dock,
raining **** on the water,
and I smoked half a pack,
just waiting.

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.

The way
we used to handle it,
was through bars,
we'd rap
and I'd start
throwing fists,
I catch a ******
in the hip
quick,
catch him in the hallway
or
anywhere else
he chose to spit.

I swear, my face was bloodied
so much that I couldn't see,
a ****** six-foot three,
tried to put me in a headlock,
said i was a *****,
so i started going in,
i got my face
messed up,
my cheekbones are high
because they were punched
up there,
but when i was a kid
i'd never do ****,
i wonder what my legacy will be,
will i be remembered for the love
that i was afraid to show,
or the hate
i was too ready
to make plausible.

There's a part of me,
that you have never seen,
it's large, burrowing, dysmorphic
and it tells
me that this is okay,
this is natural,
that the cold rush I feel
is the thermometer saying I'm cooling down
and that love that kept boomeranging
won't be able to reach me
because that part of me
is digging deep for the both of us.

And so,
stuck inside that soggy center
it burrows for fun and survival,
because it knows it can go as deep as it wants,
and no one will ever see it.

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.

I wanted to toss
something,
I wanted to feel
your body
like
palm prints
on my windowshield.

Write
"I HATE YOU"
all over me.

I can take it.

I've got thick skin,
but my heart
is shallow;
you could touch
it
before your fingers
grace
the pleather
of my backseat.

I fake it alot.

Some girls think I'm macho as ****,
but really,
at my creamy center
I **** them
like they are splinters.

Just trying to get it out.

So let's back out.

What's a splinter
to a whole human?

Nothing.

Nothing but an irritant
that itches,
when the computer
is on a high-wire
glitch
and these girls climb telephone poles
thinking
they're fixing
me.

When really you've boled
a hole
in everything
and climbing poles
gets them farther
from my core.

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.

I’m  at work
Buzzing to get out of there
Out of the fluorescence
And the din of screaming children
As it downplays the howling heads
Of their mothers who
Dream of their children’s exposed
Necks and getting out of the grocery store
Before it starts to rain.

I am Bobcat Goldthwait
underneath
The large hanging lamps,
pale green as barge lights
I make little sounds with my lips
And tongue, little incoherent sounds
To push the time forward .

A man comes through
My line holding a beige patch
Of cloth
Over his exposed trachea beneath,

with a voice like he crushes cement
puts it in his coffee
and ***** it up through a fiberglass straw.,
He drops some
Toothpaste and a brush on the counter
And says to me with that mutilated
Voice:
“there are only two types of *****,
Big old *****,
And old big *****.”

His skin is blotchy in the cheeks
like the husks of craters seen from the sky,
and the corners of his mouth
are dry and cracked
snaking and splitting outward like dry riverbeds.

For a second I want to laugh so hard,
That people will think I’m crazy, and
Maybe one of the twitchy managers will have
Me committed.

If he says any more, it’s this:
“You’re young, enjoy it,
if you worry
About the fuckups now,
you’ll Be worrying
until you’re an old ******
and that doesn’t do you any good,
***** hates the old **** ups.”

Beer:
All gone.
10 bottles each.

Twenty in all.
Crowding my desk.

White foam
covers the last film of beer,
and looks like the top of ****
in a toilet gone sour,

but at bottom of the bottles.

Stomachs:
There are no shirts on our stomachs and they heave and sweat.

Arms:
One Underneath her back, hers on top of my chest,
fingers splayed like peacock's feathers
and cold as freeze-dried hot-dogs
dripping thawing oil on concrete.

Legs:
Hers are a trellis. Mine are the base beams.

This is a trellis made of loose bones and loose limbs,
loose lips and and sweaty, tired thighs burnt out
from repetition
and stupidity.

We are stupid
because we like to **** each other,
and we don't do anything else.

Stupid is when you delude yourself.

Stupid is feeding
off the final boredom of your corroborator.

I get off on her looking disinterested,
it really does make my **** harder
and I can feel it pushing up against
her walls.

It's the most truth,
this truth of disinterest,
we've ever
shared.

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.

When I place my heart
in hell,
I place it in your frying pan.

When we ****
I see the listlessness in your eyes,
and I'm not hurt,
because at least you're there,
and you're letting me enter
you
for
a
moment.

At least your letting me be a part of you,
and that's what I think *** is,
more than an entering of the body,
it's an entering of the soul.

So when I push my *****
I push
my hopes
my regrets
my hurtfulness
and my
******-sociological
*******.

Can you take me,
because I'm crazy
and I've got a few ****** up
idiosyncracies.

So when I catch
this love **** quick,
it's on a whole 'nother tip.

I might just fall in love,
and Natalie might come calling
again,
so don't be hurt
when I resume with her
and I chase every single girl
I could have loved
into the distance.

Don't be hurt,
because
misguidedly,
I think I'm meant to be with her.

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.

I've got this ****
in my arms,
cuddled tight.

I could have it forever,
cold and beatless,
my heavy love.

Maybe there's no place to go,
but I feel like there's a place,
that only you know
about. That
seems so long ago.

Don't you know you've got a strong tongue,
and a whiplash heart?

This is why
you always have a boyfriend,
and I lay with you
in a bed that's not mine;
I never tell you I'm hurting.

If, one day, I see you crossing
The street, I won’t wave,
I’ll let you be.

More beautiful now
Than you’ve ever been,
A couple butterflies
May come fluttering up
Out of my mouth,
And my heart may skip a beat,
But if I see you,
I’ll look down at once
And stare at my feet.

When he catches you in his warm embrace
And plants a sweet kiss on your face,
I’ll clutch my newspaper close
To my chest, and hold back a tear,
But I swear, you’ll still be as beautiful
As you’ve ever been,
And I won’t love anyone
The same way again.

When he takes your hand
And you turn to walk away,
I’ll feel that same deep burn in my chest,
That I’ve always felt,
That will never change,
Even when you turn around
And look at me so strange,
Like the visage of a dream
From some long-forgotten place.

But honey, when you furrow that soft brow,
And turn away quickly,
I’ll remember those days
When I caused you so much pain
That you counted the seconds on the clock
Hoping all that time would just tick away.

And the shameful memory
Will haunt me,
even as I turn to walk away from you
And you turn back to him, to walk away from me,
Going down two different streets.

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.

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.

The first time
**** all the money
I don't have.

****
all the clout
i never earned.

I'd take her in my room,
feel her *****,
give her a tingling
of my tongue.

I'll put my whole mouth
in it.

I love eating
*****.

I love eating
her fears
for the first
time.

Like I'm the first
that ever did it.

I take  it in
mouthfuls.

Drunk love is the best love.

No inhibitions.
No dispositions.

She is merely
an empty drum
against which
your head bangs.

She has been empty for awhile
now, but you still plow
away.

It's easier this way,
to remain. Better than sorrow,
and the magic of pain.

She has been echoing all this time,
the sound of your skull
is a thunderclap in the air.

With each concussion
lightning spits
through your eyes.

But she is merely a drum,
been empty for awhile.

The blood runs down
your dented forhead,
and tears stream down
your face,
but you will remain,
it's easier this way.

Easier to do
what you've always done.

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.

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.

High as ****.

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

My soul


is possibly at the bottom
or top
of
me.

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.

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 are places
where people can come and go
as they please,
where derivatives
are anomalous
and the main source
can never move
or be cleaved off from itself,
there are places
where people are lighters
flicking themselves
on
and
off,
there are black moons,
and black tears to send
a universe asunder;
There are ravens
made of feromones
with receptors
always beeping
like satellites
in the middle of nowhere
with twitchy antennae,
and sometimes even the sun
is black;
there are places
where coffee
is uneccessary
where there is no sleep
no threat of it;
there are places like
my heart.

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

I don't know how to get close to a girl.

I can look at her"
Listen.
Remember.
Regurgitate.
Affirm.
Re-affirm.
Console.
C­onsort.
Combat.

But I can't get close to her.
Tell her things like
Meyer's definition of
Fear:
Being too much of something;
Something that the female didn't previously realize was in
the Meyer.
Something that makes the female smile in an
awkward and puzzled way,
a smile previously used in different contexts,
but she has never smiled at
the Meyer
using it;
the female never thought she could come close to
or
would have to
use it,
the Meyer previously seemed
transparent.

You see,
there is something in
the Meyer,
something
crawling
and wet
and in a cave right above
his pelvis
but
below
his
rib cage.

Sometimes
the creature
comes out
of
the Meyer's
mouth
and let's its name
be known.

No better woman
than her with ferocious eyes,
And a glow of life.

Some girls just like something very traditional. does that make them any less of a woman. can a woman be a traditionalist and still be a feminist? I think so. I think that what we shared in that time was exactly what we wanted, to fall back into structured and secure roles, because we'd been through the centrifuge lately. And that may not have been who the both of us were at heart, but it worked to heal us, to make us both better for the future, and most importantly, less cynical. I think that what is most feminist about any relationship is the ability to choose. I've been in relationships where I'm the dominant one, and others where I'm not. It takes the ability to check your own self and being a pragmatist, because if you love someone you will change for them. You won't change your personality, but you'll change the way you approach a relationship if you care about them enough. I think that's what feminism boils down to. Allowing both partners to choose their roles in the relationship instead of having them chosen for them. So, **** it, my girl wants to be Susie Homemaker; that's her choice and I lay my head on that.