i sometimes wish
we had made love
so that at least you'd
have one redeeming
thing to say about me
but maybe I'm just
that crazy one who
told you she hated
you.  

is that what you tell people?

I so often yearn for the brilliant freedom
children exude at the public pool--
in their Tahitian orange board shorts
swinging like mudflaps against youthful
legs covered in fine, blonde wisps,
girls in lemon sorbet one pieces
standing triumphantly akimbo
at the water's edge with small
protruding bellies for no other
reason than to be, beauties
much like wildflowers, lone columbines
or other pale fauna--

evenly evertan or milky white,
beet sunburns that creep down the sharp points
of shoulder blades, barely held in place by sheets of taut canvas
leaking water and blinking rapidly
beneath oily fingers smeared with sunscreen and diluted
peach creamsicle--fresh glass blades pressed and dried to
little feet as if they were pages out of a wriggling book--

slapping wetly against pavement so hot you could
swear the children sizzle , leaping over bathers--teenage
girls that flinch and scoff--as if they can fly and we are ants,
them, giants who we cannot touch. Whose droplets barely
graze us, whose enveloping warm wind we ignore or
reproach.

If we grow dim and colder as we age then these are still boiling, still
utterly reactive to any and every substance
every limb a curious proboscis, mercurial temperaments and
tiny hearts that flash like switchboards and wallop against
caverns heavy with discovery.

They say a human
can spot the flicker
of a candle from 30
miles away, Hey,
out there, in the
dark, I can feel
your warmth
you're on a
train, I can
feel the
sing of
your
wheels
on the
tracks, lighting
rails towards me.

joe always
asked why
I didn't just
decide to be
with you and
the answer was
always the same
always something
he couldn't grasp

it's not as easy as you think.
but he always
said

[                                ]

I wrote a poem about a lie you told
but instead decided to commemorate
you in a better light, probably because of
Paul Harvey's God Made a Farmer,
rememberin' you hoist a bale up at least
three stacks, starin' off into the distance
as you curled baling wire together, looking
like some ****  painting
probably because I know that if you were
out in the woods up behind the hay shed,
I might've mistaken you for a  wounded buck,
all caught up in wire, struggling for whatever's
left of you, with your antlers speared
through clumps of spinney--what a sight.

that even though your heart's in a different place--
albeit a different country altogether, that you are
your own state and nationality, even when your
pride is the biggest plot of land from here to Oklahoma
City--

Your chest reminds me of the helm of a ship, and in my mind
you're still an old tree, gashed and notched with chopped roots
that cleave the earth and ripple above ground in grey knuckles
of european beech wood. You try an' grow into whatever you
can and whoever you can, marriage ain't ****, just as long as I'm happy carved into your branches that I tried to smooth over as
gentle as I could without comin' on too strong--but, darlin', you
never wanted a woman's touch anyway.

Still beautiful as ever--your smile still'd be enough to warm my hands
and I wasn't lying about the way you stand makin' me feel some sort of
way, clinging to your neck and losing feeling in my shoulder
biting your lip hard enough to make you chuckle and memorizing
the specifics of your spine--
so now at night I might be caught thinking about the way you'd feel
if I whispered your name--

but you said it yourself that actions mean more than words, that you probably wouldn't remember something you said two weeks ago so
what's the use in me callin' you a prepossessing man (see also: imposing), I could write more about just your forearms and continue
comparing you to trees and bucks but none of that really matters, I realize. To someone who wants kisses and thighs and just
the outsides, you're fascinated by my spirit sayin'
you ain't ever felt this way, and I wonder why.
Why?

You're not into that kind of thing, but I am that kind of thing.


so, say no to me again.
like you mean it.
keep sayin' it.
keep sayin' it.
you had the answer all along.

How do I love the
way my skin lays
how my skin folds
the way that it bends
the way that it holds

Kendra posted a
faded picture of
you with the blurred
swatch of evergreen
at your shoulders,
I'm a universe and
a half, more pigmented
than I could ever be
at your side, at that
window, would we
have lasted? It's not
for me to tell.


Happy Birthday, Chris.

you left
at sunrise
while I had
my head turned
and disappeared up
the mountains, I went
looking for you in Nepal
even down dark hallways
where I wouldn't normally
spend my dreamstate, I'm
spending my alone time
looking for you, but
you're always leaving
already gone, sharing
yourself in New Mexico.

I cannot
defend
God but
who says
he needs
defending

i miss
your
feet
your
bad
breath
your
sweat
and
your
voice
that
shook
me
from
my
tree

The way i ask people
to hang out is kind of
predatory, if this were an
act in two parts, you
would see all of my
acquaintances board
a carousel, and then
watch me grasp at
their clothes as
they flew past
on their steeds
the camera
film would
shutter across
my face, and
a pair of arms
stuck out like
prongs or jaws
or claws or pincers


trying to catch on.

catch on?

last night i heard you
speaking, as i was
waking up, you
were speaking
to me, I heard
you God, I
heard you.

I am not in all
those pictures
but I am behind
the camera

does this make me present

it is awful
to see the
hatred in
myself.

reneged, reneged
like Matt Nathanson
all those nasty poems
I wrote about that one
kid are only half truths
because I realized I can
fall in friends and not
fall in love, would you
believe that kid, reneged
that kid, reneged would
you believe that kid I wrote
all those nasty poems about
made me laugh today, enough
to make me think I was burning
calories being happy instead of
the latter.

i want you to
take photos of
of me as i shift
unexpectedly
i want to know
what I look like
when I see you.

Maybe you don't count the days
because you are in a hurry to escape
me, and for a while I was too, but I
wasn't afraid to look behind me
because my feet still moved
forward.
But it's been 126 days
and my name is
still the same.

why does it hurt so
much to be the main
character of my own
story, I once was in
yours and while
hardly static,
I couldn't
seem to
remain
there

If I am to let the past
sleep, then show me
how to let



go

I'm
not
afraid
to fall
in love
again
I just
don't
want
to

You dropped change
in my pocket and I
haven't had the
guts to pull it
out. I wish I
wasn't so
painfully
sentimental

I have always
kissed first,
unzipped first
nuzzled into
your hip bone
first, while you
hid your face
beneath my pillow, first.
the nervousness evades
me with it's wispy fingers
too afraid to be afraid I
live by first come first



serve.

For once, maybe I could feel it
straight down into my thighs
grounding my feet to the stairs with the palm of his pupils
I will skirt around the issue because I've been here before
in front of the door waiting for someone to leave
go home
laugh and play it off like trust wasn't as big
of a deal as it was
but then there it was, living between my heart and a hard place
a rawness subdued and a sourness to be dulcified

oh wait
you were serious?

telling me to slow down in less words than there
are in a look, in two eyes
speaking calms
I've never
before
seen

do you
drive past
walmart three
times trying to
decide if you want
m&ms;, if only people
heard the fights that go
on inside your head, the
way you feel the weight
of your skin on your legs
you have scabs from thigh
rub from running up hills
apparently men like meat
compared to bones but will
strip you for all your worth
like a beef rib, have you seen
those rubberbands that have
sat too long in the sun? or
grapes at the bottom of the
bowl? strawberries in the
corner of the basket?
won't cut your hair
because you think it's
the only beautiful thing
about you, do you eat
bread in splendor and
pretend you're john,
peter, mark and luke
you're just trying to
be passage in the
**** bible, effortless
poetic, in red, his
words, spoken
by a prophet.

You made your
decision and that
deal never included
me.

When Chaz broke up with me I was
painting the old room on Hartford,--
this rich prussian blue--in the middle
of an indian summer, thick solvent fumes
shimmering outside the windows.  And the
sweat didn't leave your body, just dewed up
on your skin in a thousand glittering beads--

When he called, I walked to the playground and
began  to internalize the heat in anticipation--
the thick chunks of ochre tanbark and red-hot tar in the
playpit--sat on the edge of a scorching step and said things like
no, really, I'm okay.
of course not, I'm fine

When he hung up, i only remember the true indifference to the
mothers and their startled babies, in awe of the spectacle
of beings other than themselves crying--avoiding the strange
girl dissolving on the swings, a sweaty, positively remorseful thing,
baking in a pair of caked shorts.

When my parents come to find me a half-day later, I am a dried up husk, salty and shriveled from sunburn
--Sitting in the same place--
you vow this will never happen--that this pain, this hurt--will never touch you again.  It's too much to say that that day you broke, at most, you cracked down the side, a piece of drift wood hanging onto its branches
by a few sinewy fibers,
sewed yourself up with moss, with steel and rice paper--hoped no one
could see through you, enough holes for catacombs, fissures from here-to-there, across the state of i-never-thought-this-kind-of-heartbreak-was-possible--

at best, slightly used, worn once, okay condition. 19.99.

And you've been keeping your distance since you were fifteen,
where people deflect off a touch, bounce off your atmosphere--
so now, people come into your orbit and your gravity is thrown, when
he reaches for you all you see is the way it ends a year from now, a loss
you've already counted when his hands are threaded into your cerebellum--when he's beginning to push apart your ribs to know
you a little better, when your spine is not just a column of bones anymore but a grecian pillar, your body is not a cavity but a temple,
when he starts to wonder about what it might feel like to love you--

you only know a couple ways to keep men grounded,
maybe here, maybe there, maybe close.  You're so scared.

You're so scared.

and men don't like timid women
men don't like women that need time
he calls you cold and you say yeah, maybe. Yeah, Maybe.
How else should you be? How can you be warm?

I am trying to be less of a tomb, turn my insides out and
show you i am the warmest I have ever been, that if I am
to be pitted with holes then they are sweet and I am full of
honey--that where you were hurt I am hurt too--that I am
healing just the same, hoping for the best,

whispering


get to know me

get to know me.

I didn't admit this to myself until
now but the last night I was half
asleep while we were watching
Harry Potter on my laptop, you
tried to kiss me while i recorded
the pattern in your the way your
chest rose and fell but I pushed
you away because my breath
smelled bad. I can't tell if that
simple act of self-preservation
  was really that---
preservation or self...ish.

brief instances when
hands meet and you
would very much like
to linger.

I'm always loving myself off

a precipice, hanging from the
c r a g s  by branch and string
wet down by s  e  a  and dried
by salt, the  w  a  l  k  here was
long in the tall grass that has no
trail where the  wind whets the
bluffs and steals my hair from its
hood so that I am my own maelstrom
a shred of black off the cliffs, incised
into the gray like my body is only an
o  p  e  n  i  n  g but from far off i am
just a whistle against the headlands,
sea foam and pine needles or
the grains of sand that
never settle.

earlier this year I said something like


i used to drop people
which is half true, but more of a buffer
in case things fell apart and Jetsper told
me that he didn't care if I did, it was worth
getting to know me or something that sounded
that nice and I imagine he has the sort of new
car scent, or fresh laundry, something wholly
generic but pleasing.  I went about that
all wrong, i should never preface
friendships with my past
i don't drop people
i just peel their
names out of
my notebooks
afraid to confide
in any sort of
k i n d n e s s
because i know
they won't like
my secrets.

there is not
much to being
twenty, you
spend months
still calling yourself
nineteen in attempts
to get a firm grasp
on reality.

I remember when you
told us your dad abused
you and would lash your
bare skin on the ground
till you bled bones and
hair but he's your hero
now, I wonder if you
remember the lies
that you told, you
are so caught up
in yourself, I
can't stand it.
But they say
the things we
hate in our-
selves we
hate in
others

your parents
gave up too
early, right
when you
needed them
the most
and only
I saw it

there's a dale as you're entering
El Paso County where my fingers
feel heavy and my arms take on a
distant memory, a spirit dug into
the highway that radiates the way
the land does in Mailuu-Suu or Sellafield
because in this valley the rocks are coquelicot
and the trees gasp from snowy outcrops
in a tender, pleading kind of way--
so much so that I want to reach out
and thread through their weeds--a
demand so visceral that I feel the
pine brush on my palms and the
bark scrape skin from my forearms
but
then

the valley opens with it's shaved hills
and pulls back in the rear view mirrors
where its memories don't reach.

no, around him I want
to feel like a peony, like
i'm sinking my fingers into
barrels of sesame seeds, like
i'm doing everything right
when I fail a test, there is
nothing about him that
i need to fix, that in the
night i can fill up the
bed and in the morning
he'll still be there.

I want to feel like I'm doing something right.
I want to feel like I'm doing something right.

i had a dream that girls put purple flowers in my hair


for him to see across the dance floor
and when he saw me he laughed with
with his body, took to me immediately
with strong hands, kept dancing when
I fumbled against his knees because
what did tripping matter when we were

flying.

Do you ever feel the innocence slip
away from every corner till
the last bit you knew was gone
the last bit that wasn't yours to preserve
wasn't yours to protect
wasn't yours to keep
as if the one person you tried to save
couldn't be saved
couldn't be saved
couldn't be saved

oh but I'm
searching for
Cat down the
street alleys
without a
Paul Varjak to
tell me I am my
own cage, *Cat?
Cat. Cat!