I spent years trying to be
one of the boys because i
couldn't be one of the girls
that boys like or girls liked

so now I've learned to be
whatever boys like, whatever
men like I'm not sure. so I search
for those perfect traits that align
with mine and they're never in
the same place, all in different
bodies.  And however petty
it may seem, i'm worried

that no one else will ever like
me for me.

it's abut 9pm and I decide I don't want to be alone



there was a car crash earlier that day up west towards Salida--
some Kansas man who was killed by a driver trying to pass
in the right lane, declared deceased on scene, another man
from Monument who was air-lifted to St. Thomas Moore,
no critical injuries.

I tend to ask God for these big signs, signs that I'll recognize. I tell him
that they need to be something I'll notice because you know me, sometimes I can't hear you. Anyway, signs, crashes. A Kansas man died.  It's 9pm and I pull on some jeans and leave the house.

I'm supposed to be at a rodeo dancing, but maybe I wasn't supposed to be there after all. I have this white dress in my closet that you can't even see, tucked between everything else because it's so thin, lays flat beneath the aztec smocks and cream cardigans. I take it out and brush it off, thread my fingers through the open lace--

10pm. When I breathe soft enough the stars look like they're hanging on strings, like I could reach up and snap them off,
they'd be no bigger than dew drops on a spider web
so light they'd drift up in the night breeze and
set up in my own natural atmosphere.

What good would it have done me to be there? I only ask
myself to assuage the warm fear i've been feeling since Friday
night, a lingering umbrage I did not think would stay--
I can see the white stitches in my jeans that look
like they're glowing,
smells like rain out here.
I wish I was out at Chaffey
for a quick moment, enveloping
someone else in this chanel perfume
makin' someone else envious of the
way another man got to spin me out--

I'm trying to be all these people at once, an  
audience of crowd pleasers piled into one body
It's so quiet, I'm so quiet up on the sideways knoll in
Florence, tired of letting people down easy off the sidewalk
curb and being tossed off the bridge over the state highway myself,
I can't help it, I want to say aloud.

I can't help that I am this way, collected.
calm in hearty hysterics, anxious to tell
you about how I've been fixed,
that warm fear growin' hotter
a coal for every man who suggested
I be less than who I am by pourin' more
into my cup,

I'm trying. I'm trying.

we sing the concrete jungle
(you can get lost in the country, too)
in fact, you can get lost anywhere that is
and people that drive away from their problems
thinking that it really is location, location, location
are lying to themselves

because the reason he decides to take a job in Utah,
probably isn't because he hates where he's at, or because
his boss is a ****, but because the unease that pulses through
his hands tells him, verbatim, that you could belong somewhere
else, you just need to keep moving.  If you've ever tried to run
and talk sense into yourself at the same time, you'd know that
the two aren't so much mutually exclusive, that you're either
running or you're thinking and most people
don't like to be




alone




with themselves, so we've perpetuated the notion that distractions
are healthy and ourselves are not, that most thoughts are too heavy
to bear and the crack of each cannon drives you borderline pyschotic,
so we hide in the trenches or break for the trees,
pretend we don't exist,
pretend we don't hear
what goes inside our heads
and all the feelings that could
be real that churn inside our chest
like the taffy machine in Depoe, Oregon
wrenching and loving and yearning and angonizing--
how we've learned to so mercilessly ignore ourselves
is beyond me


so when we pack up our travel trailers and claim that
anywhere is better than here, I'd propose that everywhere
is the same, and here or there, whether between the red rocks
in Moab or the aspen trees in Palisade, while ultimately different
coordinates, look
just
the
*******
same

there is more to it all
than running away,
which i have always
and never done

i used to cap my
bones in steel
wash them over with
milk, stand at the river's
edge and feel myself sink
in the pierce,
without ever wading
out,
you could call it a somatic
symptom, as if blowing away
were a disorder--
and yet feeling heavy
enough to sink a thousand
ships but they
should know i'm
no Helen.

He said
all girls are some kind of crazy
it's hard not to be hurt
when people say things
like that

I realized just now that some day you'll
stop loving me for someone, some one
something, some thing,
will creep into your head, with thin fingers and undo the
knots I tied between your ribs with my tongue
she'll hose down the paint inside your heart that i threw
in buckets, angrily and with a vengeance
hang up her own art that will look better and hurt less

you'll slowly edge away and forget why you were
so passionate about staying, with less words that I'll miss immediately
even though I never reply but to you
to you
you're walking farther away, to come back
although at one point the sun will go down, you'll
sleep on a road and wake-up to find
you could go further
you could walk further and
somewhere along the way you'll turn back

because wasn't there someone you were supposed to love?
[me]

when you arrive i'm surprised and
you fail to recall the part of you that was so deeply enamored, he's
gone.



i realized just now that someday you'll stop loving me

I used to say I love you in
dim, flushed moments as
if I might have an epiphany
but the sheets rustled and
you always hesitated

I hid in
my hair
today, let
my fingers fence me in
his voice was so nice
but I still said no thanks
and turned my head
you can be in our group
you can be in our group
you can be in our group
you can be in our group

Once in a while when the city lights
are cotton candy and the phone poles
are licorice wires against melon skies
the chatter fades to clacks like drum
beats with the wind inside my lungs
all the cheeks are red bowled Okinawa
sunsets beneath mocha stained tips
of fingers and we are all humbly aware
of the way our feet scuff against the
pavement on our way past the 5th
Avenue Theater.

I miss you
you don't know how much*
the rest is incohorent, he keeps
saying sorry, over and over.

I guess I understand why, now.
the apologies, the childlike way
he'd turn and burrow into my
shoulder--something he'd
hardly done before

maybe I didn't understand
the reasoning behind the things
he would have liked, but the pain
was always so palpable
a heavy ache, a lonesome ache--

I hope all the blackest things
are the farthest from you,
and that you recede from
the places that only bring
temporary comfort,
i hope that you heal,
that all the ways you
have frozen over will
thaw, not a bitter thing
to be found,

i hope that the bees
find you sweet, Matt
because you are and I did,
you are not a body of
the things people have said

breathe, in and out


in and out.
with me,
in and out.

if i am a dead language
then you are fluent, and
if mandarin is the hardest
form of discourse then you
learned me as a back-up--

I have always been a tangle
a mess of overreactions and
sentimentalities, too proud
to call for help or be pulled
from the rough convinced that
if it  must be done at all
it must be done by sheer
willpower and
iso
      l at ion

i am trying to unlearn that
i do not have to be alone
but it's in the company you choose
that some mistakes are too deep
and coiled to come back from

if i am dead language then
i am old norse, a handful of
runes and sounds falling off
the tongues of no one special
just scholars and politicians
struggling to make sense
but not all too
concerned
in the first
place.

i like to remember that
waves still form in part
due to ocean basins

that my intuition
skims along the floors
and only reverberates
all that it finds to the top,

so maybe if I better
understood the reasoning
the seat of my heart, the crux
of why I am, this turbulence
would come a little easier,

the combers,  though heavy
and unyielding--predictable,
navigable, waters I can
sail on.

I'm a resonant body,
made love to the man I hope
comes around in my dreams
and his torso distended and separated
kissed his stomach before his legs became
driftwood and slabs of black marble--
his house was carpeted in grass with
rivers running through them
and I stood half-naked at the
stream with a makeshift fishing
rod, folding spotted paperclips
into hooks, there were no doors
but you came around the sunlight
as if there was, stepped through the
air and stood beside me--and the fish
came to you one after the other
until I accidentally dropped the wire
and it floated downstream to the front
entrance,
where is my heart?
in the misty moors
burnt off by noonday
convalescing in mossy burrows
trying so hard to make sense of
the people that become bales of hay
matchsticks and empty cotton shirts.

I never meant to get so sad
over trivial things, but why
do things never go alright

for me

i am sometimes reminded
of why we were friends,
I see the humor in old
writing, in old pictures
but I make the silent
ultimatums that no
one can live up to
but would you
have had it any
other way?

I lose matches against
myself where no fists
are thrown, just simple
thoughts, just do it
just do it because it
feels good there and
today it left me in a heap
on the stairs, as i switched
in and out, the part of me
of good faith desperately
taping the split ends back


So god, I don't know
how to control her.

I flew today
my feet were wings and
I glided home
across the divide

Have I ever not feared failure,
although everyone else said I was going slow
if there wasn't such a push to be a
someone
or a
something
maybe I wouldn't worry about getting anywhere, anytime
soon

Travis stands outside the grounds
with me and listens while I recount
the past two months, several times he
sighs and knocks his ball cap up, takes
a rough palm and wipes it down his face,
holding his jaw briefly,

he's smaller in frame, my height, makes eye contact
and holds it, takes you in when he speaks. He's been
treated pretty rough from what i hear but still keeps the
back porch open for visitors and I guess I am one--
twisting the cap on and off a tube of lip gloss, we
talk quietly about his brother who is in and out of
the swinging doors, there are so many men with
blue plaid shirts in here and I can hardly keep track--

and when we head for the Dome, I maneuver through the
old carousers and dark drunks who lurk in plain view, men who
murmur of course, hermosa when I gingerly place my hands
on their shoulders and inch past the doorway, I am searching for
you, for your blue sleeve,
but instead find Travis' and we dance a slow song--

I think he understands how I'm feeling, might be the lack of a poker face, we two-step and I trip over his boots, and when we're done he
kisses my shoulder lightly.

If I wasn't so affected by the warmheartedness I'd tell you I'd barely
noticed, but I am, when people are good, they are much softer. Their
intentions are palpable and tender--
and maybe I find comfort in touching people which i don't do too
often--and for a moment that was all i needed was a hint of
kindness after being handed off
from man to man, from feeling
intensely right with your arms
looped around my waist
with my fingers loosely settled
in your palm--to stranded with a memory
too many times where
you walked off and
i still had so much
more to say, like,
I truly love you,
maybe.

when you're out on the bridge
with neither end in sight, in the middle
or three-quarters way, barely there or
nearly-- never call the unsteady, the
hands that reach through the fog
or slap the waters through the
abutments,

you can love across wounds
with those who meet you, or
find their way, feeling the stones
gripping the railing, they've seen
you at the crossing and have come
to share the burden

but you keep calling, you keep
pacing, you've been waiting,
imbued with confusion, your
old self a ghost, all your worries
to the surface, belly up.

you've been inspired for all the wrong reasons.
You leave him alone.
I've been inspired for all the wrong reasons.
I leave him alone.

I'm too caught up in
piano notes, a crescendo
that pulls my spirit out
I was told what he says
gives life to the logos
so I'm inclined to seek
the water and dive