I am going to buy a billboard
in the middle of some city
Big white words on a ******* canvas:
"Stop romanticizing love."

City people in their white city shawls
holding their black city umbrellas
will stop and laugh or take a picture
City people will walk on by

I tried every piano key and
the door to your heart or soul or brain or
whatever, just won't open
One part of me wants to try my shoulder next

I'm going to start a support group out here
We'll play chess and read old newspapers
A circle of lovely, miserable silhouettes
Complaining about our animal instinct.

It is far easier this way.
It is easier to believe the stories.

We do not know just how wrong we are
But we are vaguely aware.

Someday I'll think back
forget your name for a sec.
Until then I will enjoy
Watching you dodge my gaze.

and so yes i did go back to where
we'd once balanced
on stools  

from the chill night into the buzz
where memory
waitfully pooled

but no right here was
"Brendan"
pouring the gin oh so slick                      

sizing me up across the bar
said that he'd make me something quick
(and slipped some ginger

in the glass)
asked me to taste for
"a surprise"

but all that the bottom
of the glass cupped
was the reflection of your ice              

in the bottom of my glass, still there
that reflection, oh yes
your ice.

oh no i didn't want to talk
i clearly wasn't there
for him

said he'd just read something Chris Kraus
said he'd just watched something Goldin                                    
then he leaned over

took my glass, and lit
the tealight
swift and sly

but all i saw deep in the flame
was the reflection of your ice

so when he turned his back i fled  
out of the dream into my night.

I fell in love at a McDonald’s. I expected it to happen in an overpriced cafe or a fancy Italian restaurant, but it happened at a McDonald’s and it was love all the same.

We were on our way back from the beach. We went whale watching but the ocean could have been empty for all the fish we saw. We paid good money for a caricature of the two of us. The graphite image of a happy couple with our faces sat in the back seat of your car. It would be framed and put up. We went into the sea as deeply as we dared and laughed and screamed as the waves came and came and came.

We were driving home with bits of mountains and boulders stuck between our sandaled toes and that’s when you pulled into a McDonald’s.

You ordered a sandwich, 100% real beef, never frozen, and asked me what I wanted. I said I would have the same. 100% real beef. Never frozen. I hate spending time and money on that which can only be consumed. We sat down with our food underneath the fluorescent lights next to a Happy Meal kiosk and I decided that I was in love with you and it was love all the same.

Every self defeating metaphor anyone has ever birthed
A mug of orange juice in a giant’s hand
Three tablespoons of soil that you will misidentify as dirt
A motif specific to the reader
The sound of a tree falling alone in a forest
A manual titled Insects in the Garden of Today: Pests & Benefactors
Three redwood seeds in a row without pause

This poem is thumping like a boulder
at the bottom of a river
And last year’*****
is fighting static on the radio

We sat against the waves
all day yesterday
I still feel the rocking
That anti-movement

The best part of a meal is right when the food arrives
I’d rather stay hungry than be satisfied
to stop wanting
to stop chasing

I sleep on the ground
to be farther away from you

the whole time we were stock images
choreographed feelings
unrealistic props
and a well timed photographer

Now we’re stopping in yesterday’s parking lot
and today’***** has turned jarring.
They’ll be running our circles
long after we die.

I made a dozen
peanut butter and jelly sandwiches
before my mother came home
and took the knife out of my hand

I’m running to you
like you’re a pint of Ben & Jerry's
and I'm lactose intolerant

It stays in my mind
like choking on medicine

It’s like that pregnant silence
when the waiter asks
“together or separate?”

It’s like driving up a mountain
or criticizing the lack of representation in a Hallmark movie
alone from my couch.

There’s nothing poetic about stalking you on twitter.
but it’s part of the story so here’s a stanza about it anyway.

[Pause for effect]

I hope next time we meet
you’ll ask me how I am
I’ll tell you I am super
and both of us will believe it
again

I hope one of us will smile and say
“0ne day”
and the other will notice the typo.

words in a blender
too slushy
pain behind the eyes
frozen thoughts
lime green
exorcised projectiles
turning heads
with demon smiles
and whispered snarls
in a dead language.

r ~ 8/1/14