I am in love with you sometimes
like when I am riding the bus
beneath luminous buildings stapled deep
into the polluted black of the sky
that sadistic monoliths so horribly scrape.

Then there are times when I want you dead.
I scream loud into my pillow
then press my ear to the cotton
but after my punches it is too scared to reply
so all I hear are the echoes of my scream.

You ought to be ashamed for what you've done.
I am a strong, resilient, independent young person
and you blank face, you liar,
you slaughterhouse chief...
You ought to be ashamed.

Does your heart beat like a racehorse
when the Jockeys come off?
Are you aroused when a man in a suit,
a business-man suit,
tosses the homeless a quarter?

Do you hope that it lands by their tattered, torn shoe heads up?
Do you think they just need a little luck?

If you do,
then I have a secret to tell you:

*You are the most flawless person I have ever seen,
and holding hands on the city bus scares the living **** out of me.

The butcher would be a troll,

but there was no bridge

for the girl to cross

in her white dress

sewn by the seamstress

married to the writer

in the grand, white house

built by the builder

married to the girl

who sleeps with the writer

but never tells her husband

because he'd die of a broken heart

and never build the bridge

that would give the troll a home

or get her and the writer over the river

and into the lovely, black city

where they can be heroine pin cushions

and he can write words

and she can look pretty

and at the end of the day

they can all shoot ****

with the seamstress's son

who has been in the city

for years and years and years

because

*he knew how to swim.

I would love to learn how to waltz before I die
because that will make my dance into the ocean
that much more unbelievable, remarkable, dramatic.

I'll be most endearing as I move against the tide twirling with oxygen
as my beautiful partner; she acts with finesse and is unbending in the moonlight,
predicting my next moves and graces into the ice cold dark of the sea.

The water is soft and encouraging at first, supporting my moves without question.
As it deepens to my legs then chest then chin it fights my gentle rhythms with ferocity
Oxygen keeps dancing on the surface. Why won't she keep dancing with me?

She bids me àdieu rather harshly as my head finally goes under,
and the music blaring from my phonograph on the shore is drowned out.
I hear the rushing of a billion bubbles, yet my open eyes see only black.

What was once a dance is now a march without beat as I continue ahead
the iron shackles I wrapped my legs with seem to be the only glint of light
in the shades of blue that ought to be black that envelope all of my sight.

When the music died my will to ended as well.
I want nothing more than to drink tea on my patio
my record player off the shore and near to me.

I wretch and I turn, my eyes set direct on the surface
where I see the moon filled to brimming with jade milk.
I reach to the greened moon, but never come back up.

My pants tighten as I scrawl across photos of you
alone in the sewing room of my grandmother's house.
Nobody's been pricked here for years, maybe decades.

The stroking of my pen against the paper
sounds rhythmic, a resilient beating and motion
as I delicately carve out ***** verse into the white.

The ink stands black as widows' veils
against the **** colors of your pallid hands
pressed firmly against your etiolated *******.

Your red nails filed into clear, elegant points
act as arrows guiding me to the carmine of your lips
which hang low in a whimpering, begging pout.

My eyes strut southward following the lips' drop
until they arrive to the spread, blossoming like a rose
in the spring, or erupting into the conflagration of July's fireworks.

Photo after photo I stare and write my hedonistic desires
the gravity of which could **** me to the second circle
or rather, I think as I lift my pen, just help me to get off.

Rumble.

The earth loved San Francisco so much

Boom.

That he opened wide and swallowed it whole

Crash.

I'd love to make an earthquake with you

Moan.

In a steady, illiterate static
this room is my study.
And you are my book.

Legs spread 'cross my lap
hands firmly upon my frame.
I lean in to see the words.

Your soft lips graze mine
like branded cattle in a glen.
Wet and cold we sit there.

Then your tongue begins flickering
beguiling like the serpent of Eden.
How could I resist but to bite?

I kiss you sweetly
and you kiss me back.
Minutes pass in the study.

My tongue examines your mouth
like a cartographer mapping a new world.
Each slick and ***** is wholly new to me.

Teeth clink like crystal glasses
during a wedding day toast.
Eyes shut tight make the black of mourning.

The noises dribbling from our mouths sound akin
to a murderer tromping through the forest mud.
Shovel dragging hard. ...Plop...Plop...Plop...

Our hands run over each other's bodies
open-palmed like a child examining the globe.
I want to feel you from pole to pole.

I pull back and run my fingers through your hair.
Your color is rushed with red and you wipe saliva from your lips.
Your smile is without flaws, and you taste like ambrosia.

I love being literate.

They sell bundles of clothesline for $6.99.
That's how sad men play shirts from the tree
we named Alice after the ugly old lady
who waters her flowers in postmortem.

Or more likely denial, as water
and love and care and rich soil
is no way to conduct an autopsy.
She saw green when we saw dead.

Yet day after day we drove past her home,
pink paint peeling. White windows whining
and creaking for salvation from her songs.
Alice loved to sing to the floral corpses.

Alice wore pajamas just in case it was time for sleep.
The others called her hag, hippy, and witch.
The others would yell, but we only watched
from down the street or in the park, we watched.

And listened
to Alice
singing.

We sat on the tree named Alice
which hung bent in defeat, an ugliest sin
smoking spewing like milk from our lips
as we murmured along, mesmerized.

She sang low with her tapered watering can
cradled like an infant in her calloused hands
drowning the shrunken bundles of empty stems
just in case, she hoped, it wasn't time to sleep.

And after Alice played shirts
we heard song no more. Just city din.
The empty dead blew away,
the house bought and painted green.

The owners planted hedges in her flowerbed.

The secret irony,
a grand conceit,
was that to Alice
the hedges were brown
and the tree was evergreen.