Judgement is not poetry.

Poetry is bird-watching
and
quail-hunting.

A poet observes lovers
preening wings,
and holding beaks,
because a beak
does not break easily,
and lovers
only touch each other
with
unbreakable things.

A poet
hunts
and feels the weight
of a thousand wings
as she shoots them out of
the sky.

So paranoia is for the poet.

Pain is for the poet.

Love is the bible.

Fear is the safety
the poet
never clicks on.

A poet does not judge these things
to be true;
judgement is discernment
and for placing value
and poetry is not a
crime
or
a
rose.

The poet knows his arsenal
as he traces across the sky
in the unbreakable mouth of his love,
and falls
by his own gun.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poetry is love in the worst
and most unimaginable ways.

I think about my death.

The seed of life
is so
profuse,
and that
is
my demise.

I might live,
but I will die.

When I dream,
I dream
of Judy Greer.

She's been there
talking
about
love and *******
and death
and hurting.

So what can I say now,
when bulletholes
of lightning
people my dreams.

When a couple
shots of whiskey
have put me on the edge
of missing you
over memories.

I moan
and dream,
because dreaming
is a moan
for hope.

And being in for a bid,
is the same
as your lips
to
my
lips.

So I evade promises
and dribble
into traps
of
depression.

I've had this problem
for so long,
it seems inconsequential
that I might
wring my neck
by an electrical cord,
or by the chords
of your heart..

Because i miss you
and that
type
of
thing
never lets go
to much.

I stare at humans with an anchor in my hands.

I don't know if I should break
their noses,
or
tell them how it got there.

Don't hate me,
just be grateful;
that I told you I'm so sad
and worn out.

Things had already started trending downward for me and Natalie. We'd talk about new people. Old people. People like old boyfriends. Or a girl I'd met that was different in a way that no girl had been different to me in awhile. And we hurt each other like that. Or by pretending not to hear each other. Or by just ******* when one of us didn't want to, but we felt we had too. Because it was normal. And per usual, we started arguing and throwing things at each other and smoking on the balcony by ourselves late at night listening to the dogs bark and sirens.  And we grew. Grew in cancerous separation. Once it started we couldn't stop it. One day she told me something final, she'd hooked up with an ex, and he had said something about "having changed" and she seemed optimistic. I didn't give a ****. My pride was nicked, but she wasn't **** to me then. I helped her move out of the apartment, boxed everything into that tinyass mini cooper she had, put some of her stuff in my car, and drove her to her new apartment. It was that easy. We hugged at her door. She said I'll call you later. I said okay. She never called me later and I moved back in with my parents. I think that what did it is that being in love is like being a parent, the love becomes the baby, and when two people stay together for the kid and not because they love themselves as much as the baby, then it goes from bad to worse. Then they really start to hate each other. Then they don't talk for years. Don't even talk about that grown-up elephant in the corner ******* on its own nose.

Our cries for hope and peace and stability were usually the signposts for an innate and cultivated bitterness. From birth we had planted ourselves in the middle of a struggle for both hope and a good hold on realism. We chose pessimism as the avenue to realism. Once we began to hope and hope only, we couldn’t look at ourselves fully in the mirror. We’d start smiling and thinking that goodness was as easy as smiling at the other person, whoever that was, who was on the other side of the mirror, bus, or classroom. But as we got older, we saw this hope as stupid. It contaminated our bodies. Hope is a wound that festers. Hope not only festers, but it grows even in the worst conditions. This is why we grasped for realism and pessimism. Because hope could so easily grow and wrap around us and make us stupid with its poison.  We had been hurt too many times by this stupidity. No, our philosophical doctrine was to **** or be killed, to feel hurt constantly so that we could despise the poison of hope more acutely. We still cry for hope and peace and stability, but we hate ourselves for doing it.

Me and the homies
built
up
a foundation of beer bottles in the corner of the living
room
that slide
down
when we play our music.

It's a pyramid
of transparent brown
******* bodies.

We stick our tongues into mouths
that will never fully be
ours,
and throw each new brick in the corner
with a clink,
*******
our
pants
and waking
up
in
entrail pools
of their digested innards the next morning.

A brown shimmer
like flashlights on the lake
bounces off them
bumping against our hips
and
mesmerizes
our upper thighs
and
inner groins.

"Eat me."

"Eat me."

"You're not using
enough tongue."

"Put it right there,
then hum,
the vibration really helps."

"If I put in as much effort
as you do."

"Just come up here
then, and put it in me."

"Oh."

"Oh."

Quiet.

It is always a quiet five minutes
from me.

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.

The raven
descended
last night.

Flapping black wings
opened up a hole in my ceiling.

Spackle rained
in drips
of sweat.

The raven opened its beak,
laid down
and spread its wings on my chest.

A black man
was shot to death
on a clear day.

With his hands up
and nothing in his  
spread fists
they still shot him.

The raven came to comfort me in the loudness
of a coughing,
suppressed cry.

I was hanging out with this girl

I just didn't care.

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

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

Yea whatever.

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

She left the bottle
she brought over.

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

Sometimes a girl
makes you bored.

Sometimes
she makes
you think.

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

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

I blew a girl once,
blew her so hard
she tapped me on the shoulder.

She shook her head,
and I ended up
jerking off
when she fell asleep.

I thought I was a force of nature,
but all that screaming
was her.

My ego was low,
so I woke her up
and told her she had to go,
she didn't want to,
so I started railing
on her religion,
that got her so riled up.

Them clothes flew on her
like God was promising salvation
if she just got in them jeans,
and I was asleep
by the time
she slammed the front door.

She's gone
Little dove.
Gun
Little love.
Done
Little love.
Done gone
Little love.
Done done
Little love.
Gone done it
Little love.
Done ****** it
Little love.
****** up flew away
Little dove.
No love from the glove
Little love.
Nothing done done it since like my
Little love.
Nothing quenches, nothing touches like my
Little love.
Oh, how it hurts to think of my
Little love. Lovely dove.
Dove with blood on the wingtips
And a tear for each eye
Little love.
How oily little love flies now
A paintbrush of pain in the evening sky,
Oh how she smears the heavens
And in my eyes the colors of the rainbow
Blur,
Lovely painted dove.
How i wander naked, these streets at night,
My shame and rage my only garments, and i can barely stand straight.
Oh, little love.

Still haven't let it go,
Don't know why i can't,
But every hint of laughter,
Is haunted by the shadow of a tear,
I regress as i digress trying to avoid stress,
Back to the bottle again,
Back to the rage,
Back to the fallow, shallow grave
Trust falls into the arms of a skeleton,
Dreaming of God wishing he was Satan,
Cause then my weight would make since,
Seem more like i'm getting lifted
As i'm falling deeper and deeper,
Lost you, now i'm gone.
Fading away everyday, a peice of myself
Constantly flaking away, they say
Love ain't supposed to feel this way,
But what do they know about love anyways?
If i find myself
In the twisted embrace
Of a semi's grille,
Shrouded in steel,
I'd finally feel the crush of love again,
Easier said,
Than done.
Wish you could see
The raven's leaving their keep,
Each night they flutter and rush
Out of my body,
And i run through the streets
With an insatiable thirst
******* the life out of me.
How i wished things had worked out differently,
How i wish i'd worked it out differently,
Hadn't made so much of the mess
Between you and me. Now i'm handling
A lot of things on my own, the mantra
Becoming a slogan, gotta move forward,
Move now, fast. But am i healing?
I can't tell, don't think so love.
But this is what they've all been asking for.

The boats in the harbor
flirt with the pilings,
their sails have trapped
nothing
and are flaccid,
the gulls scream at the masts,
scream while they lift
their spindly legs
and tiny feet
escaping
the noiselessness.

I sit with the sun
as it bursts
and the cirrus clouds,
like cotton,
are filled with blood
or tears,
or some brutal combination
of both,
as the needles
poke through the house
and the sun
is pushed out.

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.

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.

There is something about her
that's not good
for letting go,
so I say this here
on a muggy winter night
as she lays on crags
in the wind,
pulling me closer
to those lovely halcyon stars
but a valkyrie of gin.

so I must say goodbye,
to this war machine of love,
I must lay my heart
back in it's proper place
against those soft cheeks of hers
where my lips were boarders
and my heart became wily.

I hate this letting go,
it'd be easier for us to hug,
searching lips buzzing
for the growing rose of the tongue,
I would rather
have things be easy,
and never have to
not see you go,
but whatever we had,
let its skeleton of love
grow old in the murk,
let its bones be recast
into something of worth,
let my heart reside easily
in the oilyness
of iniquity,
someday soon I'll meet another
and start this war machine
with its grandiose sacrifices,
and subliminal pains,
all over again.

So maybe this was your plan all along,
the great general
pushing the arteries around
like so many toy soldiers,
until the whole thing
was gone,
and there was nothing
to remember,
I really don't think so,
but maybe I'm wrong.

I hope you meet him
somewhere nice,
where you are warm
and flakes of yourself fall into
him like glaciers,
I hope he can become
the beast of love to break you down
again
and make you love him insanely
with only the best kinds of sin;
the kind that make you burn warmly
and feel young and wily again.

Their was a  bartendress
in a costume
of superlatively
curly
black hair
and a tight body
snugged into
a tight blue dress
that shows off her upper thighs
and exposed
musclely
short legs.

Rests her hand
with splayed fingers
on the wet table.

She asked,
with a long tattoo
of the ****** of Guadalupe
snaking
down her wrist,

"Are you all right,
do you want any more?"

"No."

I tell her.

No,
I don't want anymore.

My people
are the kind
that were
sharecroppers.

From the dirt
of North Carolina.

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

Somehow they rose.

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

Punches
cold
and
steel.

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

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

But I am not of them.

I realize that now.

I do not
have the resolve.

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

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

The way I memorialize
a woman's heart
against my own,
is by pointing
to the scars she has left
on my heart
in my moments of solitude.

Like the wounds
on sharks during
mating,
I hold close
those moments
when I sank my teeth in
and when she sank
into me.

So
when
they
ask
me:

"Would you have done
anything differently,
now that you see how it
turned out?"

And I say:
"No."

I cherished those moments
when your placed your mouth
on my heart
and squeezed with
perfect teeth.

This morning
I woke up
and
told Melissa we wouldn’t
make it past three months.

We're at month two,
and I can feel it.

Either I’d drop her, or she’d
drop me, but either way
“we don’t have staying power,
and there’s no point
in either of us
pretending like we’re grown ups
who can just power through things
out of sheer complacency”.

I wasn’t looking at her.
Just up
at the spackle and a spinning fan.

It’s so hot in here,
that we sleep on top of the covers
sweating little puddles of skin
into the comforter.

Nightly,
we mash those deposits of dried salt
deep into the mattress
with our sloughing bodies
to get stuck
and form
tiny caves of skin and boredom in the springs.

She rolled away from me
swirling off a cloud
of stale, watermelon shampoo
And reached
With a tightly domed deltoid
towards the blue milk crate
where her purse sat.

She rummaged in there,
her back muscles working
like a landslide of flesh.

She finally dropped the purse,
after an effort of five minutes,
and I heard the successful flick
of a lighter.

She started
puffing and chugging down smoke
As she laid on her side.

My eyes watered
in the bluish smog,
and as the fan turned
raining down peices of our own skin
in a dusty, undetectable cloud of particulates
I could just see her,
out of the corner of my eye,
Shifting the weight of her body
from her deltoid
to her trapezius.

shiny toy
dazzling in the sun
but nothing
to love.

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.

I have written so much
****** poetry across this city;

left it in bars, under streetlights, and

In the bathrooms where people have ******
all over the toilet seats
and I had to use my poems
to clean it up.

They are on napkins
and receipts;
pieces of toilet paper,
and even a one-liner
on the carcass
of a piece of paper
that once held a straw.

The words get soggy on wet bars
and bloom like black flowers
losing all consistency and coherence.

Sometimes
I write them out of pure impetus.

To get me going,
I need a couple beers and those
Pabst-drinking, past-drunk
drunk girls that get close up to you
and put their lips on your earlobes
like they want to tell you a secret

But all you get is a present
of soft stinging breath.

Sometimes
I write them for some girl I meet,
like the one who came up and sat down
right beside me.

She said her name was
so and so.

I said my name was
so and so,

so we got to talking

And the topic finally reared its
fat, ugly head:

“Are you going to school?”

“Yea I go to State”

“Oh that’s cool, whats your major?”

“Creative writing”

Then she smiles at me
like I’ve got some broccoli
in my teeth,

and she wants to figure out a way to tell me

without breaking
this three-beer-good-buzzing mood,

finally she says:

“write me something”

And I become a dog for her.

In my doggish way
I take my tail
out of my pocket
and tuck it's wiggling self
onto a napkin.

I write
about how meeting someone new,
is like trying to figure out
if what you’re looking at is a skyscraper
or a mountain,
or just a Norfolk freight train
barreling down the tracks
with your name on it’s front grille.

It's supposed to be
98 and cloudless today.

By the time I roll in,
and park my car,
Roman's walking up to me,
his gold tooth a
full yellow smile in the sun.

“Hey meyer,
I need you to
Pull the box truck around,
We’ve got some plants we’ve gotta load,
Then we’ve got a landscape job
About an hour from here.”

“Are we gonna be back here
Today?”

“Probably not
until
late.”

The box truck
Is a holdover from the old owners
Of Ken’s Nursery,
It’s still got
Ken’s Nursery in large comic sans
On it’s rust-streaked sides.

The wheel wells are rusted
brown as salt deposits
On the shores of sulfuric oceans,
and little ringlets of decay
rock as the truck bounces;
It’s old springs
Giving back after all these years.

Today we have:
Forty-two veriagated ferns.
Ten dragon lilies.
10 cannas,
But cannas have to have a male and female to flower,
So 20 cannas collectively,
And we’ve gotta mulch.

By the time we’ve loaded all the plants;
stuffed the mulch in with the Bobcat,
And thrown in our picks and shovels,
My shirt is soaked through.

98 degrees and cloudless.

Roman walks to his car
and takes off his shirt
To reveal a pink belly
full of folding skin
and matted black upwelling *****
Singing with sweat-diamonds
In the unperturbed vision of the sun.

My shirt is soaked already too.

But even as I loaded the truck,
I thought about Melissa.

When I get home,
She probably won’t be there.

When the female is separated from the male canna,
Nothing dies, the two live happily ever after.

But the canna does not flower,
And doesn’t remember enough
To miss it.

Just continues quietly with a black bulb
The color of a skink’s underbelly.

Shut up about it,
quit tripping,
give me a sec,
there not gonna see us,
you're more gone than me
I can see you fading,
all right
imma turn here,
I'll pull in and park
before they see me,
if it's a checkpoint,
shut up,
they didn't see us,
I'm sure
because I'm sure,
let's just pull in here,
**** the lights
and let our seats back.

Breathe, breathe, chill, breathe,
breathe
a little less,
I've had too much
fear
for tonight.

Imma sober up on your breath,
Imma ride out
only when the sun rises
and I can wipe your residue
off the dash,
Imma worry about
the birds in the back
in the morning,
just breathe, chill, breathe, chill,
go to sleep
like ice.

He went home
to a candle light vigil.

There were tiny jars of light
and a picture that flickered
leaning against the leg
of a bench.

He was part of a group
holding other lights
and there were those
in hoodies or wraps or badly put-on makeup,
and they were were quiet,
or quietly crying
in the smelling cold.

Some were in the curb,
or on the road,
or leaning
on each other,
shoulder to shoulder,
arm on shoulder;
and it was foggy
and the streetlights
burned in the fog
like it had just rained.

The picture couldn't say another word
and there was no emotion left,
to stand, or sit, or kneel,
or pray,
there was just a village
stranded.

Life is an array of lights
that burn against pictures.
There are too many
smokey days.

I make
stupid decisions
when I'm drunk.

I drink whiskey without food
and puke up yellow bile.

I put my hands on girl's *****
who have protective boyfriends
and get into shouting
and physical
matches
with dudes I can't remember.

I talk about love
and stupidity
in the same
sentence.

And I yell
like a *******.

Sometimes I yell some incoherent
*******,
while Josh drives back to the crib,
****
about how
I love the girls I can never ****,
**** the girls I could never love,
and don't know ****
about love
in the first place.

That's what I mean by stupid.

I'm a smurf that doesn't know it's blue
when I'm drunk.

Blue smurf.

I
think
"I'm sorry,"
is what she said
to him.

She'd broken down
all lines of communication
and he was hungry
as hell
for her taste.



And what he said to her
was the most
bitter of all the greatest cover-ups.

"It's okay."

Bitter like scuppernogs
in North Carolina
when the sun reaches down
and burns sweetness away.

It was an assassination
of faith
that day
they lit two cigarettes
with one lighter.

That day
they sat outside on park benches
unearthing each other
while trying to hide.

"So," she said
to him.
"Did you know
that I can roll the tightest blunts
in the universe."

And he said something,
something
falsified,
something
calcified,
something
ha­rdened.

"That's dope."

Because the love drug
had taken all control over him,
and rage
couldn't come out of him,
he didn't have the spirit
or the *****
to say
that he'd drank himself to death
all day long
because he thought
she'd strapped on an oxygen tank
and flown to the stars:

Distant
as
a
supernova
burning holes in that
murky
purple
night.

After falling
Off the wagon,
I ****** blood.

And woke up worse
Than hemorrhage
Suffering from a pain
I couldn't
Explain.

Pain troubling
Me thru the day
Knowing there were
Things I couldn't fix
Or understand.

Waiting for nightfall,
The shroud of darkness
And
Foggy light,
Knowing understanding
Would never come,
But searching for its source
In the sky.

While soldiers died,
Under a Syrian night.

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

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

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

Kiss her on the doorstep.

Tongue and all that good ****.

Lead her back to her bed.

Lay her down.

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

I'm a romantic, even when girls flip. I choose not to dip
even when it's over,
the home planet of love knows a thousand rovers,
and they all leave tread-marks
in yesses
and not
nos.

The yesses of coming back
and back
for more
moon rocks,
because no jewel
can make you
more confused.

So when the planes
march across the sky
in a cluttered
night,
I stumble over
marlboros
and trip
over the hope
for tommorrow.

The hope
that I could someday return
to the reaches
of your farthest
star.

It's such an escape
when I feel
your loving embrace
your tiny body
with
its
gargantuan
gravity.

I've never hugged
someone,
the way I hugged you.

Put me on the back
of your warping love,
because I could fall anytime
and the atmosphere
could rain in acorns
as I look for the dropping sky.

I'll always fall
for your games,
and I'll re-enter
with a broken heat-shield
waiting to break my neck
and teeth
and heart
over the heat
you
yield
in uncountable
atoms.

In the smallest manner
I pander,
trying to get you back
over messages
travelling like radio waves
across a galaxy
with a black hole at its heart.

The beep, beep, beep,
can travel forever
uninterrupted,
but when it hits a raw body,
it falters.

So I'll let the knees
of my heart,
bend at the altar
of your far-off blob
of life.

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.

Lisa Nelle
had this cat
Suki.

A calico.

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

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

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

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

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

He'd pass out
when we
passed out.

The sun beat down
the earth today.
Beat it down, beat down
the cats stretching and yawning
in the horrible heat,
plopping in the shade lazily.

Fatigue rolled through the desert
a horde laying waste to motivation,
and replacing it with depression.

We shut out all light,
shuttered the windows,
locked ourselves away,
turned off everything real,
delved deep into our laptop
submarines. venturing deep
into nothingness, away from emotion,
away from the beating, burning heat,
away from sunlight and UVs,
away from all that which,
though it beats us down,
strengthens us,
and yet we despise the heat.

She played with the sun-gods
in shadows
under the poplar.

Thin leaves
made even thinner shadows
and her face
was the face
of a leopard
underneath.

When she finally got up
after her fingers cramped up
from playing
in the hair
of the sun-gods
she had a brown smear
on the seat of her dress.

She'd slipped on the dress
without *******.

Her cheeks pulled
the dress into its mouth,
closer to her *******.

There’s a rooster
that runs around trying
to ****
every hen,
goose,
guinea,
and
sometimes Super Dave Osborne
will even make a pass
at a close-enough finch.


Occasionally Super Dave ****** off
the Rhode Island Red.

Red measures twice
the height
and weight

of Super Dave Osborne.

I am hopeful.

That is all I can be,
hopeful
for redemption
from whatever pain that has been caused,
redemption for those
still plagued by demons.

I do not know
when
your pain will cease,
I do not know
when he will return to you
as the baby
that was always yours.

I am hopeful
that he will return,
and that you will return with him,
not to me,
but to him
and that he will be
with wet wings
for you to lick
dry,
to the hope
that once made you whole,
to the goodness
deep inside of you
like a taproot
that still reaches out,
I am hopeful
for the sun
and the hunger
for
radiation
and so much
heat; heat
you wouldn't believe;
heat that makes humans,
human again.

I know that you will eventually
be all right,
I know this.

Do you know what?
I've changed my mind.

Maybe hope is stupid,
maybe hope is just something
people use to get out of bed
and not **** everyone,
I will commit a homicide right now,
with the gun of my tongue
and say,
"I am no longer hopeful,
I am sure."

I ate two omlettes
this morning,
had a few cups of coffee
as you let me go
over grits.

When I walked around
I pulled myself along
by ropes thrown down
by the clouds,
and helped myself
to a full helping
of blue sky as salty as lobster,
and still I walked,
with too much sodium
in my veins,
I walked around
passing the others
as they were to me:
others.

In this alien world,
I pluck my blessings
from the sky,
as it darkens with thunder,
I place
my hope
in lightning and it's frenzied slapping of the earth
because it mimics my frantic heart
in its crazy destinations.

So I put you in tiny places
inside of me,
the box labeled toys
is where I put the buzzing
apparatus that is you,
in the kitchen supplies
I lie
and say there is nothing there,
when there is everything I have hidden
that is you.

So as I move,
I carry around storage
spaces
and boxes
marked in the wrong names
carrying heavy things
bearing you
in their heavy wake.

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

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

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

I let myself
in
that night.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes you wonder
how things can get so ****** up,
this happens
whenever it's about time for you to come home
and I'm watching Sportscenter.

Bodies flashing across the screen.
Commercials.
People cheesing over paper towels so hard they could be having aneurysms.
More bodies moving faster than I'll ever move.

Just bodies.

I loved you so much, I thought about you all the time;
just hot with you.

now when you unlock the door
around 6 in the afternoon
and walk in jingling all your annoying jewelry
you sniff at me, audibly, as you huff to your room.

But I'm watching you like a tiger,
out of the periphery;
you're just a body to get by and get through.

Today
go outside
after you've had
all the turkey,
stuffing,
cranberry sauce.

After you fill
your belly
with
a cornucopia
of food.

Go out there
and thank god
that those
Indians
died off so quickly.

Thank god
for giving us this land,
because we own it,
we can own
it.

It is ours
because God
said it should be ours,
not because
we took part
in one of the greatest
genocides
in history.

Breathe in
all that good air,
and thank god
that you don't have to be
on a reservation.

A refugee
on the motherland.

Our bad.

Wild Turkey doesn't get wasted
here, not today;
I've had too much
too fly,
I'm just a man
with a little peice of my heart
left to use
for consumption,
so when I put my soul
into you, I sweated
a lot from that little peice;
It'd been
putting on about 100 pounds of weight
lately;
but I lost about thirty pounds
and a suitcase
since you've gone away; I feel
that thirty pounds and
that **** suitcase
found me sitting here
and pulled out a peice
and tickled me
at the airport bar,
a muzzle ******* at my ribs
as I sat watching
the planes
take off;
I am right beside the avenue of windows
and look
like a dark spot against the sun,
I think:

"I want to blow up a million planes
because
I'd hate for you to be able to fly
and put your pinky on me,
I'd hate for you to be able to point
and shout:

"THERE HE IS, RIGHT THERE,
DON'T YOU SEE EM?
HE LOOKS SO STUPID DOWN THERE,
HE MUST BE CRYING."

And I sweat more,
shaking off
pounds by the gallon
until I feel the muzzle of the gun
less and less,
and the apparition finally evaporates
in a sizzle
and
it becomes just an oil spot
I could wipe away
with a thumb
and saliva.

I sober up
enough
to fly again
and not **** myself
when I pass out.

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

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

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

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

That dog
wants something now
more than anything else.

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

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

Who Am I?

Well,
I must be
that ******,
the one
in the black hoodie
***** sweatpants
and an uncombed eye,
that's always wooly
scratchy,
bloodshot
with searching for
my stash spot,
that ******
in your peripherals
that you keep your eye on
because he's
not
in a polo
looking nice,
talking
"well-spoken"
and
not
a threat
to your beautiful
lily-white daughter.


Because I grew up
fixing myself
ramen noodles
and
lifting the welcome mat
after school,
I must also be
that ******
whose father wasn't
in the same house
until he was age 13,
and when I tell you that,
you weren't expecting it
because "you're not a racist."
but
you weren't surprised.


You see,
I must be
that ******,
a stand-in
for all other *******.
I must be that ******
who represents
all *******,
not because you are racist,
but because I'm the only
******
you've met
who doesn't talk like
dis, y'know whatmsayin,
and i talk like
this, do you know what I'm saying?
I must be that ******.

In order for you
to feel okay
being around me
I must be that ******
who goes to college
does the right
thing
the white thing
and gets a job
a nice little house,
a nice black wife
with a nice
new england
clear
dialect,
(what I was
trying to get at
earlier
is that ****** dialects,
by their mere intonation,
denote stupidity,
right?)
and doesn't say a word
when his white friends
make ****** jokes
or talk in a ****** dialect
mocking some Aunt Jemima
they heard at Walmart.

But,
I also must be that ******
who doesn't step out of line
and say
"WHY IS IT
THAT IN EVERY SINGLE
ENGLISH CLASS
WE READ
ONLY
TWO
BLACK AUTHORS
A SEMESTER,
AND THAT'S
ENOUGH,
JUST ENOUGH
TO KEEP THE
****** PARENTS
HAPPY."

And If I happen to be a ******,
I,
by all means,
must not be that ******
who had a white girlfriend,
and
this girlfriend
after dating
a ******,
tried to date a white guy
she liked,
and when she told him
that she had dated,
loved,
and yes,
******
a ******,
he had said back:
"I can't believe
you ****** a ******."

Then again,
I must be that ******
with the big swinging ****
able to destroy
a white girl's ******
with its pulverizing
power.

And,
please,
If I am going to be a ******
don't be the one
who writes a poem
about
having to be
that ******,
because those
kinds of *******
are being
over-sensitive,
those dashiki-wearing-*******
who think
"Da white man dis."
and "Da white man dat."

Because
I am not one of those *******
descended from the first people on earth,
your brother,

not in the ****** way,

but the familial,
species way.

Why am I even writing
this, ****** isn't a main operative
word anymore.

Search and find "******"
and
replace with
"Black Guy." That way it becomes
a joke.

Something,
so unexpected
and
unnecessary,
becomes a gift.

A bad, worming feeling in your belly
because
you've had nothing to eat today,
and
you hopped in your car,
giddy as a bird,
and rolled over there.

There being the magic store;
the store with it's keychains of glory,
bottles of distilled religion,
and a whole lot of prayer
that your debit card sings.

Tomorrow means work
and the evil dollar that drags Jamaican children across
intersections
as they scream at the Americans in taxis.

It seems we all need a break.
We all need a chance to forget
and say we're not culpable
for anything.

This is the magic that'll save you from your whiny conscience.

As long as it doesn't affect me;
as long as it's not immediately relevant
and something I have to immediately worry about;
as long as it doesn't **** up
my credit score
or my
shiny
new
house
then,
**** it.

And
*******,
for bringing it to my attention.

how dare you.

this was promised to me,
it's predestined,
my two-story, three bedroom, two bath; the foreign workmanship and american artifice; the creamy halo of vinyl in the sun; the wrath of windexed windows and their hard missiles of bright, reflected sunlight; the soft lips of my children; my wife's pillowy, warm stomach and scratchy *****; our retriever that eats his own ****, picking apart tiny specks of feces from the sun-pricked tips of our rug of fescue; these are the works of God, this is the land of God. You are marring this flat earth

Oh ruinous apple,
the flesh
is too much
and sweet as hell,
sweet as
chicken meat
dripping off the bone
to swim in pureed flesh
on the tongue,
oh ruinous apple,
your stem
is no longer a caterpillar,
there is no tiny butterfly
of a leaf
on your dorsal.

Oh ruinous apple,
you say
"I have grown old
and
hate my skin,"
hoping that it will finally
be shredded
and given
to my belly.

Oh ruinous apple,
you are not so old to me,
you have become
a cougar
in your old age and
the seeds
still make tambourine noises
in your *******.