someone left a letter
for you,
it's at the front door.

it talks and talks about
breaks; beginnings; ends;
beginnings.

you were never comfortable
in the first place.

behind the door
hatred stems
from the pill of ignorance.

the letter was sealed by a tongue
of both
fire and futility:
a big fear that someone wanted you
to be there's,
but you never would.

I stopped as I went
past RDU International.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 actually tried that poetic
Rico suave **** with a girl.
We were both naked
Lying in bed, her messing with the hair
On my chest and me lying there
Trying to come up with an excuse
as to why she couldn't stay
or why I had to leave.

I like her enough,
but the way
she looks at me,
she's inviting something bad.
She's so lonely in her eyes.

She twirls one hair in a pink fingernail
and looks up at me.

She says to me:
"Give me some poetry."

I says to her:
"You've got green eyes like the Mediterranean, I think I could mine
something out of you, your eyes are just that full of something beautiful."

It sounded fake
and corny as **** coming out of my mouth.


I hated her for even asking me
To sell out like that.

But she smiled a hungry,
ravenous smile, because she hadn’t had love
or even flattery
In a while and she was
hungry for that kind of poetic
Hollywood *******.

I'm a sucker for
girls going weak for me,

and me going even weaker for them.

It's a form of humiliation
and a bad way to end something good
like we had.

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.

Disaster starts at home,
in the hearts and minds of lovers.

No insurance to sustain us
in the aftermath of storms.

A hurricane force, burst the windows
bowed the walls.

The joists screamed, twisting.

the roof hollered Hosana.

All night long, I made you stay
in that house covered in rain.

Shackled to the refridgerator
I waited feverishly,
you waited to go.

I didn't hold you, just had to have you,
a firefly I shook in my glass bottle.

A firefly, I wished those wings would break.
You wished your wings would break.

For different reasons we remained,
love of prison,
or love of self.

I can only write now,
there are windows
that open
and never close
and I am one of them.

There are bees
that bumble
in the sun
and die of over-exhaustion
on flowers with licks
of color on the petals
littered with the other papery wings
of my lovers,
I am one of them too.

There are wheels
that scream off of tractor-trailers
and impale people,
I am one of them too.

I am one of those men
that kisses women
who do not
or  
cannot
love him.

I fall from frothy clouds
onto your doorstep;
I run with ants
until my flight bones
are yellow
and the marrow
is dry.

Admittedly,
I am both
of them.

I am
a
completely
oblivious
destroyer of
the sky
and I write
because I am one of them.

I'd rather
chill in some place
and burn an L
with you,
than let my tongue
get live
in any other
larynx
that never knew your name,
I'd rather
read a bad book
in your name
than a good book
in someone else's,
I know
that I was looking
at a landform
and not a landmass,
a being
more
than a thing,
what I want to know,
is why we leave each other alone
when no one
is an island
and there are no boatless
harbors?

I'd rather capture
your laughs
as I cup my ears,
and your tears
in the stern
of my fears.

I'd rather be
a relic
and possibly
a fuel
rather than
a nautilus
with nothing in its shell
to give.

I've taken the boat out
and the oars
trip up on grass
as I paddle through the bay of the asylum
across lime oceans
contracting scurvy
from too much fertilizer
and not enough fruit.

****** you up
horrible decisions
on my ******* again
harvest moon alive tonight
liquor flowing
got me tight
cant say how mad I am tonight
gotta let it go
I just cant
how could you take him over me
but its karma
just couldnt believe
youd sit there
and take a backseat

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

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

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

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

They can't destroy.

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

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

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

A crazy one
is a girl that gets by.

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

But a girl,
alas
a
girl.

A girl
is full of love
and platitudes.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

In a long time,
like a good dream
that just faded away,
and now I relish in its memory
like a ******,
I can't stop holding on to what
so badly needs to let me go,
can't stop tugging you closer,
as he calls your name from that crack
in the front door,
can't stop saying how much I love you,
in how many different ways and shades,
that you can never remember
or never cared enough to in the first place.

Can't say that I've grown,
and become greater than what I was,
a new shoulder for you to rest your head,
new muscle to make you feel comfortable.

Sometimes I wish that I could scream,
at the top of my lungs, just the way a rabbit does in the maw of a lion,
or cry the way the sky is blue,
infinitely, with new meaning everyday.

Sometime I wish that my anger,
could become as ****** to you as anything,
and that it would be as masculine
As everyone of your most embarrassing desires.

Sometimes I try to find things to cry about,
and when I don't, I drink,
feeling emptier than ever, because I can't seem to feel
what everyone else feels everyday,
like I'm missing the big story,
the biggest, brightest explosion ever known to humanity,
the show of God in the light of your eyes.

I wish I could say that the long swish of your brilliant hair,
is it.

Or the tiny crinkle in your mouth, the trickle of a smile,
is it.

Or that hopeless cuteness in your ***** brown eyes,
is it.

I have been overlong,
wanting to understand everything about what I could never be to you,
thinking more about what you were to me.

Each memory a needle against my heart and brain,
trailing across nerves, tickling and destroying,
and all the times I couldn't satisfy your hunger.

But, on the edge of my desperation,
reaching out and holding air,
grasping molecules,
swiping at nothingness,
slapping away feverishly at my own dark emotions,
I keep looking for you,
like the memory of me that you are,
while I'm sifting through the dream of me that you became.

The idea that I couldn't make whole,
the ache I couldn't bend in my favor,
the lie I desperately plied as truth.

I have loved you,
I have loved you.

Making love
is the city of ruin.

The worst kind of fog
captures it,
a fog where the streetlights
are not pushing out
light
into the right places.

Light falls only on the glossy mercedes
and it's rims
full of hope and wealth.

The skyscrapers
reach the sky
and finger the underbelly
of an afterlife,
as if there is something to look
forward
to.

The buses
transport
souls
and
promise,
or seem too.

But this is all a lie,
the lights only create light,
darkness grows,
the skyscrapers touch the sky,
yes,
but they don't know a thing
about goodness,
and the buses are full
of
hopelessness.

But when we make love,
it is like
we are only looking for the good things
in the city
as we get robbed blind.

When I touch your belly button,
I can feel your heart in your stomach,
so low and so unwanting
that it dropped
to a place of digestion,
of eating what we had
and ******* it out.

It is ok to realize
this untruth
late in the game,
it is wrong to continue
when we know of the untruth,
and that is what we are doing,
that's why I hate
you
and still *******.

I love the city,
in its ruinous returns
I keep fooling myself
into thinking
this is the best thing that's ever happened
to me.

Your ***** must be the greatest,
because I'll never leave
even when we call making love
a city of hope
when we ****
and it's a dystopia
of
destruction.

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.

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.

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

"Come down here," John yelled.

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

Thinking he had said,
"Pull them down."

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

later that night
she did come down.

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

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

They got her back to the hotel.

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

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

Eric plopped onto the bed,
pulling her with him.

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

"You guys should come back next year."

"Maybe," Eric said.

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

But she felt something physical
on her body.

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

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

John and Eric
tag-teamed her.

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

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

"She's out cold,"
he said.

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.

Ever felt like you had the one
for you, and
you just let her duck out?

See, I got this girl.

See, I had this girl.

See, this girl really ****** me,
see?

This girl was an island girl.

This girl ****** in torrents.
Argued in cannonball barrages.
And hugged like a linebacker.

Those island girls are thick:
all thighs,
all ***,
all fire
like the volcanoes we all come from
and forget to remember.

But they remember.

And they live it.

See, this island girl, was a bigger, thicker one,
and I could throw her around any way I wanted.

And she liked it,
and I liked it,
and,
I'm telling you,
this island girl could take an ***-canning whooping
like nobody.

I mean, I'd make sure her ****** became
a bruised rose
and she felt it.

But,to talk about love,
the *** was a good thing,
but she could argue,
and I think I like that
more than I'm beginning to realize.  

Just like a short poem on a ***** day.

Cotton is everywhere,
it's on the ground;
in the ditches,
all brown and soggy like
wet hairballs; in the wheel wells,
the rotor tiller;
the SNAPPER'
the squash;
your wife's *******,
tingling her constantly;
the speedometer,
the pulled pork,
collards,
mashed potatoes
and most definitely
the gravy;
it's in the eyes,
makes them red
and explosive,
it's in the dark loam
and gloam; the unwashed streetlights,
the blue dark
and even bluer
lampposts in the middle
of fields black as oil;
the pink sun,
white clapboards
and redwood siding
of that burned-out homestead;
the cotton is everywhere;
thrown up by the slaves;
a ceiling made just for
February lovelessness
as I pull on my Marlboro
and crook my arm
like the cornices of a power station.

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."

It's hell down here,
hell in blue lights
and sweaty
bodies
hotter with desperation
than an empty frying pan.

From the frying pan to the club
we burn
and die
to wake up for work
in the morn.

When I come home,
I swear
I saw my mother
in blue and green
walking away from me
pushing a cart
wrapped in garbage bags,
looking cold as hell
and her plastic eyes
were clouded with brown tears.

When
I trip over my ****
drunk
in the middle of the night
and I hear sirens,
I swear,
I see God
doling out peace
while I'm afraid
for what years I have left.

I just want people to know I exist,
to know I existed,
to know that
there's something wrong
and I'm the black tornado
spinning up garbage
and dead bodies
in my mind.

If I die,
and nothing's left,
then you'll know why,
hell is a storm
and God hands out weather reports everyday.

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.

Gnat
really did love me,
she cooked soup when I was sick
and came over
and listened as I told her flu stories,
I held her
as she cried over lost loves,
We glistened
in the sun
as we laid in the sand
of a contaminated lake,
she put her hand on my ****
like she was holding
love in her hands,
and I played in her pelvis
like a child, innocent
of anger and resentment,
so many of the lies
that we attribute
to adult relationships
occur
after love.

I hate that Gnat and I
no longer talk,
hate that she can't make me
pancakes in the morning,
or that I can't put blueberries
in her waffles.

I bumble down the street
to get some Wild Turkey,
remembering her last call,
our last talk.

It'll be ok,
she's gone
and I can find
place-holders.

This will be easy,
right?

Love is easy,
right?

Heartbreak is easy,
right?

But it's not,
it hurts like nails
in my forearms and palms.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Come to me,
come to me
with paper and pencil
and too much coffee.

Come to me
like the Sahara.

Come to me
like skyscrapers
and bandaged
clouds.

Come to me
in a whirl of flesh
vivid as oil
under a streetlight,
I will make a rainbow.

Come to me with optimism
or pessimism,
hope and death.

Come to me
like I came to you in the night,
when you were suicidal
and I had to hold you
away from your stash
of oxy's
like a knot
and uncoil myself
in the morning.

Come to me
when the fish run,
and the whales
scream
and the jellyfish
wash ashore
like glass hearts
solid and fracturing.

You don't feel the same
chemistry
with me
as you do
with him?

I asked.

And she just fell into my arms
like
a building.

She was a building.

And I held her,
the biggest girl
I'd ever known,
as she cried,
in my tiny shoulders
and cut out canyons
with her tears.

I had tried that night
so hard,
I wanted that river
of hair,
a river of coal,
to be white with stars
again,
to be so full of a cosmos
with it's millions of chances.

But it didn't work,
and I held that girl,
so close,
because I wanted to hold
that big girl
and let her know
it was okay
to feel small
from time to time.

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.

A quiet kid,
lonely in the rain,
fingers the nickels and pennies
in his pockets, waiting for the bus
to splash around the corner,
so he can get to work.

He lives with a demon of a roommate,
and shares snores with the roaches,
Bathing in the shower of their incontinence.

After college, he lost it and wrecked his mind
in a haze of liquor so foggy it
swallowed the moon for awhile.

He stumbles through pitch black nights
with an ugly soul and redemption on his mind;
The worst kind of late night wanderer.

Coffee and sugar keep him alive--
just like war and famine are the black angel's wives--
bringing him back into this liquid reality.

In the mornings he breathes in this world,
totally sober.

It tastes like sourness
and the milk of ***** entrapped in blue jeans
in 100 degree weather
all day.

It was the worst kind of sobriety.
All the horrors of birth.

He lives many lives:

One for his mother,
where he plants fruitless kisses
on her cheeks.
Little wreaths of future disappointment.

She hugs him so warmly.
It makes him want to suckle his .45.

One for work,
all smiles
and plumb submission.
9-5.
5-2.
12-9.
6-3.
4-12.
And if he's lucky
12-4 on saturdays.

All this in 5 dollar clothes
and a rumplestiltskin attitude;
trying to weave his own ugliness
into truth.

One for his girl,
the one who'd hurl her tongue at Appollo,
puke up her month's sugar intake,
and curl her fingers so tight that she cut the cappillaries,
making a red and white fist like a christmas cinnabon:

If he ever told her who he really was.

His love for her is secret.

One life for himself,
to keep the mirror happy.

This kid.
He's all or nothing.

For instance,
I could just stop
right now,
and dress like a thief,
or take everything
and
drape myself
in mauve robes.

Sing your praises,
wish me a good demise,
empty those heavy bags
full of treasure
and drench the world
in silence.

Oh, I could see it now,
if I tried,
I could see it now,
if I tried.

The velvet quadriceps
and thighs,
the spindly fingers
and their amber warmth,
the tiny crimson tongue,
and it's legs striding across my chest
in conquest.

But then,
I am not stupid.

I am an instance;
a t-shirt flapping
on the clothesline
with all its infant sounds.

There is a bird here
with a broken wing.
It cants off to the left
drooping almost to the ground.
The feathers are oily,
shredding.

He hops around the base
all day, scavenging,
picking up things
here and there,
making a living.

I left for awhile
and came back.

He was still alive.

I thought he would've died
already.
That wing was so ugly.

I asked him how he'd made it.

He raised his head above his shoulders,
just like a king,
as he said to me:

"I am a bird
with a broken wing."


For a minute,
he stared at me,
then hopped off
with that broken wing.

Know
that I cannot lose you easily;
you are not my apartment keys
or a mango;
you are
an ID
or a stranded muse;
I am a number waiting to be laminated
or a boat with
blue bedsheets for sails;
I will sell what will get me to you;
blue bedsheets for sale
and photocopiers
in overstock.

I spike my Koolaid,
with *****,
and pour in
too many blue packets
until it is black and icy
and whales of clotted powder
bob at the surface.

I am trying to close this gap;

trying to bridge this form,
and break your reflection
hovering at my hips.

But
in weeks
or just a few days
I have lost you.

The carcasses float to the bottom.

I get drunk
and fall asleep
to a singing blue tv
calling me to the deeps.

To the lake
is where our prayers
were air.

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

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

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

The night
creamed me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nelle and Sabrosa
holding each other
in beach towels.

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

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

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

Just let me kiss you,
because you said hello
in the first place,
in those plaid leggings
and beautiful greens.

I didn't tell you intimate secrets,
and you didn't shed yours.

But I touched your naked skin,
and shared the same leather,
as our bodies meshed,
and the universe unfolded.

A flower grows through reeds and thickets,
and reaches for the sun,
while being eaten away by fungus.

The sun drops its dress,
and undresses until the flower is wet.

And even in their unknowing of the season,
the flower and the sun share pleasure
and reason.

And even though your mother didn't like it,
I made you wet,
and in the basement,
I regret not kissing every part of your body,
because the moonlight won't let me forget.

Irritable and hateful
at the computer.

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

I could hold it in my hands.

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

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

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

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

The farmhouse is bracketed
by two loaves of fire;
in the night the house looks like the face
of Satan; the black void of the nose;
the house: vacant and shut off.

The two loaves burn beside it
through the night,
eating the stars and all the time
in the world.

A Tom and the thousand others
sleep in the foyer; closed off,
held in
by a tootsie roll the size
of a block of wood
used to keep the door closed
and the screaming
within.

Sometimes the cats slink out the windows
and make circles around the loaves;
silhouettes of fur, shoulders,
and contemplating tails
that swing and arc
through the night; it looks
like there are cats at the feast,
and they have brought the snakes
with them.

This
is how you tell a story.

From the beginning
to
the end.

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

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

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

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

There is no home to go to;
there are cigarettes still burning
in the ashtray we made
out of a Folger's can,
and you have forgotten
to put them out.

Forgive me,
I'm bitter now,
and I think it'll be hard for me
to love again,
because you are my teacher.

Do you believe in heaven?

I still think about five years ago,
and I know you do to.

I still think about
being horrific
and you getting red in the face
and crying
over the past.

I remember pregnant anger,
and you hitting me,
and me
hitting you,
because I said I hated you.

I think there are good things that last.

Sometimes I mow lawns
and try to make the straightest lines possible;
I am afraid you will see them
and be angry with me.

Sometimes I have nightmares
about not being able to fix things.

I have kissed you tenderly on the cheek,
but because I'm not young anymore,
it seems stupid
and
wrong.

But there's a bigger question:
Do you even like me?
Do I
even like you?

And we manufacture love,
because you are always sad and hurt
and
I am shy
and scared;
afraid
that you will say something
that will make me leave
and be scared
for a lifetime.

This is crazy,
having to re-define
everything.

What will my mother
think?

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

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

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

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

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

I have to learn how to speak again.

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

Can I be human,
with one word?

I used to
write, a lot
of lovers do.

My drive:
a cancer creature lovely,
crazy,
uncontainable.

Watched him rip mind
in half, fillet
innards, sew it
all up, hand me
some Evan Will.

For the longest time,
all the best writers--
lovers and creeps, fools
and drunks--nobody's
done this thing better.

Never realized 'til now:
when you fall in love, best
to lose your mind, heart, and
soul, then, get your writing in.

Not when the root is rotten.
the rancid meat you toss in--
the words--just to keep it going.

A moon-shaped belly button
full with sweat
where i hung my tongue



where did you put that
poem i gave you?



I think you tucked it somewhere
in your bra,
and let the ink run
over your skin
that day it was too hot
for shirts.

You sat by the a/c
in your *******
and sweated out every
sin that god ever
created.



Right below our apartment
were the subways filled with people
in the tunnels where
the heat made the people want
to strip down to nothing.



I don't have to tell you about that day,
but i want to just in case I forget
and forget this final *******,
not to you,
but to those
underground rumblings
and tiny teeth of electricity
that flitted up through our bones

as though we were just tracks

of steel.

This love
was the thing running us over
grinding our skeletons
out to a mechanic thinness.



the day we said goodbye
we said it
with middle fingers.

Lovers trapped
in flourescent corners.

Skin shimmers underneath
loose tees,
beige with the kind of sweat
that blackens
Levi's in the crotches.

Her fingers *****
at his mice-sized ears
which hunger
for the acrylic traps
she lays with her fingernails.

If lips had tongues
his lips would say:
"I've had plastic flesh
and mercury is in my veins
cooling me
until I'm frozen
in the arms
of death."

And his lips never touch
hers:
neck,
breastbone,
cleft-chin,
chapped ear lobe,
crackling scalp,
fracturing spine,
splitting abdomen,
scarred heart.

his are never touched by
hers:
lips.

They finger the hills
of each other's skin:
velvetine,
innumerable,
wet.

Starships beep in the night.

Beep through receivers
from a place against the earth,
but not touching it.

THeir voices are intimate
and not there.

Cries are heard from space
and cradled as breathing
treasure.

Intimate,
but not there.

Their fingers touch each other,
infinitely
and not at all.

He feels her
as the earth feels
remote beeps
in remote intimacy.

I loved you,
in a way that teenagers aren't supposed to love.

I loved you in a hard way.

"I can't be with someone who can just do that to someone else, that isn't love or trust."

And i broke.

I broke like a machine.

Woke up
steel.
Feeling parts
screaming.
Circuits
zapping, zipping
almost
jumping.
Heart
thumping,
then stopping,
thumping.

The bodies
wash up
in the night.

Wash up on the neuse
and I stand
with a trashbag;
talking to myself.

I spend the morning
walking along the shore
picking up dead bodies.

I look like a man throwing
wet, leather purses
into another
black bag.

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

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

"Let's go!"
you shake me.

You go hard.

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

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

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

Am I going to make it
through this night?

Stumbling out of somewheres
into the salt of Brooklyn.                                              

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

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

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

I hate those mornings
when all I have
for breakfast
                            is a
Marlboro.

It's a cool place to meet.
25 cent wings.
Nice, tiny booths
Lit by tiny electric lamps
In the guise of candles,
That give everything a nice, golden glow.
It's a Corona light,
And Corona-colored light always makes me feel
at ease.

She pulls up in a silver acura.

Gets out of the car and I can
see her ***
from the front of her
as she syrups over.

She’s got on a Black tanktop;
black bra straps showing
against white-pink
puerto rican skin
all while holding up those veritable C's.

Her hips burst against
a
long, beige
d
r
e
s
s,                                                                                
and I'm wanting to slide my hands all the way up her shirt to that black bra, and snap it off.

We have conversations about feeling older than
eighteen
and twenty-one
respectively.

Our lips are saucy
and oily. Tiny chicken scraps
can be felt in our teeth.

"I just started reading Starship Troopers."

"Yea, I love that movie."

I've never seen the movie,
but it endears her to me

that she loves it.

"Do you have any plans?"

"Plans?"

"After college?"

I plan on finishing my wings
before you, then I'm hoping
you'll let me hold your ****.

"Not yet."

"You know I've read some of your poetry."

"What do you think?"

"I like it," She smirks,
uncomfortably.

She ladles a wing in a slick of sauce.

"Truthfully, it was too much for me,
you really shouldn't talk about things like that."

She brings the wing
to her lips
and smacks it down
with a loud ******* noise
of a working, pink tongue.

I’ve wanted to hold her **** ever since I met her.
Now I’m lost.
Because she’s got black eyes
and I’m not even thinking about her **** or her bra.


I start thinking about how white her teeth are,
and how much two people can never know about each other.

I will add a poem
of love.

I will tell
you
in words,
that missing you
is the deep end
of the pool.

The part
I can forget,
and not
forget.

Jump with me.

Run around the water
with me
and my black heart.

Teach me
about torture methods.

I remember you
in the things you said,
like teaching me
about the flying eagle,
and I remember it
when I'm playing basketball
and cant get you
out of my head.

Trust me when I say that
I'm not a mongrel.

Trust me
when I say
what is on my heart,
and it may sound feverish
or
even
part of my game.

But it's true
and simple
like my heart.

I want to supply
the distinction
of the world.

I want to be your bench,
sit down on me
tell me what's going on,
because I'm so selfish,
so much do I relish
in your remembrance.

The ambulances scream all they want.
Sirens wail if they must,
Those sunset colors are killing her.

Let those angels hurtle down the highway
Gripping steering wheels with white knuckles,
screaming on their way to her.

They call out over their cb's
"We're five minutes out!!
Any casualties?!"

I lay sleeping,
In the nonsense of a dream
Thousands of miles away from the scene.

My body could not twitch
with the pain unknown;
My mind could not wretch
In ignorance;
My heart could not wither
Under the cover of nubile darkness.

But you lie there on the highway
a sideshow I feel so horrible about.

I felt no pain, didn't wake from my dream.

midnight tragedy you have taken my mouth.