The irony of
a smoking awareness stand
yielding free cupcakes.

I do not intend my poetry to be
inaccessible and yet I refuse to shower
this recycled verse in pretty words
to distract from disinterest in my own life
and the things I surround.

Cupid sang about sunbeams
and blooming grapevines before
darting a single arrow in either
of our directions—I suppose

he knew better. I suppose it was
all part of the Master Plan, because
if there wasn't a plan then what's
the point of planning a *******
thing anytime, anywhere. There

isn't one. It was written that I'd
meet you. Shakespeare said something
tragic about it, but he certainly never
felt what I felt. Not like this. The feeling
of loss is never familiar. You are talking

underwater without a snorkel or air
to pray with. Cupid never misses, that's
part of the plan. But maybe, ever so
often, he hits the wrong people right
in the ***, and forgets to pull the arrow out.

Sting of sloppy light.
Purse, bow, amphetamine.

Brown hair & a pink—
wind current cut through
               one open car window

to the other car window
pilling cigarette smoke cheap

               & steady forward.

He's a beauty, that one.
Wallet, vest & tie, coke.

Cut open her stomach &—
waves of salt water
               bolted to the ground

like tiny rocks & hardened
shells lain beneath the sea,

               a doubtless factotum.

Pull & stitch.
Sting again.

It has been one year
since my last haiku; one more
year spent trapped in skin.

It took until now
thin and mid 20s
to comprehend
that as a child I was
and as an adult
still very much am
spoiled

little childhood
traumas to mine
               no festering drama
               no shrouded mess

calm can bury like a
gravity blanket
               too hot or too cold
               I complain

I have never clawed
at my belly in hunger
felt my body
fall off in jeweled
pieces but I have
at times been
hungry

adulthood is a lake
blue black and endless
               rife with mudtraps
                    brimming with viperheads
                         scraping at the surface water

I am spoiled
I have not known pain
but I knew a person
whose eyes prodded
               like nails through jello
my insides and cut
tendrils of muscle
and delighted in the
stitching back
               the pushing of
                    needle through
                         meaty bits

some time after
I was grown
but flailing madly
as a comet poised
for landfall

a beetle in
a dust storm
a child with its
first scraped knee

my flesh yearns
for the needle
and for skin all
smooth and
scarred and
like the color of night
               singing
like the color of night
like sky like light
a rapturous blue

It rained the whole time we were laying her down;

Plucked from earth to elsewhere, some fantasy. She left like water after a rain, running to the sun to again slide down. And it

Rained from church to grave when we put her down.

Soaked the soil, left it muddied. Someone stifled a cry but the wet and cold made it sound like a sinus problem. There was something funny about it, but not in that moment. There,

The **** of mud at our feet was a hollow sound.

So many lists
So little **** to
add
               to an expression
               of the expression
of others

I spent a decade
letting others
express my feelings
for me
               and not for
               lack of flaking

I've almost 25-
years strapped to my
belt
              and the greater
              of those years
licking evil

if I'd the ***** to
spit my faults as
simply a product of
nothing then
              they were me
              always me
in tongue-sposed summation

Time wasted neck-deep in
idolatry, pretty bottles of
pretty liquids, light gold,
amber, charred oak brown
soaking vanillin and wood
which warms the tongue
perfectly.

I pop my pinky finger in
funny ways, relegating
flow of blood to necessary
extremities only, thumbs
or forefingers or whiny
joints screaming loudly for
sustenance.

There are days in my past
I wish I had skipped,
accidentally sleeping past
my alarms and the sirens
and noises of cars passing
past my window in whichever
home I find myself to wake.

There are days more recently
I have skipped, my mind
spending hours drunkenly
slipping from action to act,
poor me and my problems,
always worthy of an award,
a statuette of broken glass.

I'm too juiced for this **** this
can't look out the
windshield **** this is
the type of **** I usually avoid
'cause I can never wrap my brain
'round tight enough to think past
          stimulation

LIGHT LIGHT LIGHT
acoustic encoding all ****** & raucous
retinas not working
corneas not working
pupil sized up like puberty
and I say
        let her spin *******

Because I've never sensed like this
it's something new &
something old but I'm here for the first
and I would love to leave soon
          but just let me hang on
          for a second longer

'till my brain shuts the **** up.

A lightning crack. A blinking television.

His hands, like packed sand melted to glass,
rugged and burning on my torso.

Shoveled feeling and lust and gilded
passion. Tears well, a guilty mind
strung up again.

I stop. Our eyes locked. Lost.
Lost, lost. I see lips. Slowly dragging
his head, I wed them.

I pull back. Flashing lights,
blinking television.

The night is young.

‘I set the ******
on fire with a gallon of
petrol. Overkill?’

Imagine burning by fire,
hustled bones piling up, a sanctum
seeped in dust.
It his here where I compartmentalize
the fire, its embers and heat
stacked neatly on hotbed coals, a flame with
labels, numbers, a name.

I keep the space neat and airy,
I have room for all of the fires
as well as some extra storage
yet to have a specific set purpose.
In this room of fire I read
constantly. I am currently on Marx, and
my next read is Durkheim's
Suicide, which is much less strenuous
than one would believe, having been
familiar with Durkheim but
not his work. All of this clatter and
sociology.

The fires remain lit, I have no need
to run the heater this winter.
Fire, in all its compartments,
organized and labeled as it is,
and still, with my world in such a state,
I cannot hold fire in boxes.
I am blindly adding fuel.

I am plastic, c-through

the gnats in my bedroom know as much
they fly into me as though by accident

an impossibly clean sliding-glass door
that upon approach is nevertheless shut

these small things hit my skin
but leave no physical marks

no gnat guts splattered
on my pocked arms

I am not glass but plastic
I can bend without breaking

Steadfast reminding
me all good plays are written
one line at a time.

Is narcissism
an excuse for worshipping
my own handwriting?

When one is forced to stop drinking, the first thing felt is shame. It is recognition that coerced abstinence was inevitable. The court told me No alcohol and I said Okay. An assessor of the state told me If you picture life past 30, you stop now: he might have added For the longevity of both you and your relationship(s), but it might be his own history stopped him. The morning I crashed my car was not cold like today. Suburbs are generally quiet at four-thirty; runaways choke-chain drooping eyes to a bedpost for a few more fickle hours, hoping (praying) body keeps pace with hunger. I was hungry, and we went to get food. My brow beats ripples into the airbag. In county my sheltered white life was a blanket doused in gasoline. The sheltered white mind may scream but the sheltered white body cowers under concrete. In class I was assured Alcoholism runs in the family. The gene plagues Hendrix men as a curse of choice. It's a gun in a knife case. Six months sober; it still itches. I'm still hungry. The state told me I was Lucky [I] didn't **** someone. I was selfish. I was selfish because I thought they meant me.

Some fresh scent of drowned leaves
crackled into autumn & I am
born again into daylight, breeze
playing with my tangled mess of head
still dancing like soft summer shadows
on the concrete & the basketball goals.

It is no longer hot. I do not sweat
near as much as usual &
cold sticks to night like thistle &
I am awake again & almost praying.

I wish for fall to yield to spring.
I wish this slowness away.

Let me reconstruct.
I am always in winter.

At which point in vivisect ​
of the physical body
do we parse in twine
the real and the imagined
self? Some point soon
muscle must cede to
hedged bets in extraspace,
wish upon itself mercy.

It's my last hope.
The sun in its afternoon swirl. It's up there. Far,
                 far and I still feel that
There's always hope.
It's fresh fruit meeting the tongue. It's playing
                 King of the Mountain.
It's the budding smell of spring flora.
It grows on trees.*
                 We pluck it, make it purchasable.

Blues:
singing, grumbling

vocal chords soaked in a
vat of golden whiskey, aged
like the pain he sings of.

Blues:
white, ivory

piano keys stained red
from the blood his guitar strings
cut out his fingers.

Blues:
chimes, rhymes

more like a feeling
than the color
of the cloudless sky.

a dish containing my bones
& several vital organs
laid to rest on a bed
of colander and sage

a pretty platter
a selfless oblation

one hopes a gift of such
heart might be atoned
& wrapped in a cocoon
& sent away to float the sea

my insides ravaged
my restitution complete

When I was five (and this I barely remember mind you, I was five or so—maybe younger, who's a boy of five to say—and all memory is as cloudy as Seattle in copyrighted images or Tom Hanks movies I've never seen or something) I carried a dead squirrel into my small white boyhood home by it's bushy tail. I presented the creature to my mother as a gift, like a dog with a dead rabbit between it's jowls, limp and nubile. I guess it could also be a rabbit.

I was proud. In elementary I took upon myself to own the blacktop playground for what it was; a mound of black something to step and pound on and run and scrape knees and kick things, forms of kickballs or tetherballs, always red. I remember standing in line at Sunny Vale Elementary and promising the girl behind I was not cutting but not quite knowing how to say it.

The summer after we moved. I don't remember school after that, not until third grade, but it was different. My attention felt divided. I was a boy in two, interest piqued by different sectors of memory, such a selective doll. I remember reading with my father and having fun with my mother. I remember my father's beer and my mother's youthful smile. She will be forty-three years this year. My attention is divided. I am a half-man in two.

Trees bent in, sobbing,
weeping as mists have weeped like
summer rains gone sour.

So ******* heavy-
handed that I cannot put
anger into words.

I am inopportunely shy.

I cannot apologize because I know this will not change. Like so many moments (in-between unusually hot seasons for instance) the sweat of ceaseless back-and-forth wears heavy on my nerves. I suppose this acts as penance.

The process of a ***** analysis, for those unaware, is as follows:
—Drive an unusually long distance
—Enter a dingy storefront as quickly and quietly as possible
—Pay your $20 ****-cup processing fee at a counter that smells nonironically of cups of ****
—1)Wash your hands, then 2) lift your shirt, then 3) drop your pants
—Put your mind on Do Not Disturb as you try to pull focus from the man pretending he is not staring at your *****
—Urinate (following an uncomfortably long drought)

When considering all possible alternatives, this is easy. It is benign in all respects. And yet, for the life of me, I cannot shake these shoulders free of worry. Too easy to indulge the mind and its vice-grip on the body.

We aren't ever really in control, are we?

We sully women who think,
unbowed and without corsets
to prop or hide whatever fuddle
we've told them exists.

We need not be told, all
of us. No is not an abstract
concept, it rides no waves
of uncertainty, no great barriers
or walls need of climbing.

Verily he told her she must
cover for not to be mistaken for
impious. Shell-shocked and
sullied she bides her time between
bites to plot her spiritual escape.

This city I've found,
ruined and beautiful,
cloaked in floating plastic bags
full of pipe dreams and
unhemmed seams. Shards of light
stitch the surface together.

This city I've found,
benign in all it's wanderings,
never sharing it's secrets and
never quite hiding them either:
the ugly walk the streets in
alluring strut.

This city I've found,
sifting through my veins and
pulsing in my head—

This city I've found
that's yet to find me.

A Jim-Davies-esque poster cartoon of my guts
on display at the Smithsonian as though
I could pretend to be any other poet
with my insides outstretched because
I cannot feel without cohesion or medication or
either, or—
it's lost upon synchronization.

I hear some wormy **** gobbling
(insanely might I add)
about Marx or Engels or one or both twice over.
I'm too busy trying to impress myself with this
Jenga block tower of carefully balanced fibs to notice
why you cry when the sun sleeps.
I don't exactly care so much as it intrigues me.
Another feeling stimulating what's lost.
I imagine sunshine & weep.

Walking down 17th, I  found a note in a
dumpster—don't ask how these things happen, they just
     do. Things. It read,
Freely run, gentle traveler, but be wary the ground
beneath your feet; it trembles under the immense
weight of your fear.

I took the note and crammed it in my back jean
     pocket, hoping a vibration would soar up my
leg and shake the coarse curve of each letter off
the page and into the air so people stepping on my
     heels might catch a whiff of exactly who they're
dealing with.

This boy, he carries his fear in his back pocket and
     not beating in his chest like a bass drum. I haven't
shaken all the words yet, but every traveler has his day.

Today, tomorrow, yesterday. No, no.
     Not yet.

Eyes can't help but follow
long hair in long coats
wind shaking the strands like
snowflakes, their own little patterns.

The cinemaplex is open,
negative seventeen degrees Fahrenheit and
someone is still making money.

Wrapping around a blocked-off
manhole I turn the corner too quickly,
bump into a homeless man and his chair.
He asks if I've any change.
I say No, my pockets are empty.

Inner monologue firing, always,
I cop the corner and take a moment to my
physical self, ask it questions, How are you?
You've been a slight bit distant during this time.
Do you miss home?

I'm not sure I've found a home to miss.

I can get over the face in the mirror.
In fact I kind of like it, bunched and
furrowed in thoughts, wet webs of contempt.

I wonder if I'd be a good father.
It doesn't take much to show up.

How am I going to tell my step-dad
my grades ******* blow this semester?
These are the
important questions.

How will I tell this futuristic child
St. Nicholas died in the 4th century CE?
Is telling him/her a bad thing, or
is there somehow more fun in that?

I've caught myself treating twitter profiles
like messiahs, without the martyr.
Those two lines sound very self-serving
because I don't write sarcasm well.
I've found coherence to be tedious
and boring and that's barely it.

Most sad poems are also
beautiful because they are pure,
untainted and untouchable, some
golden pendant forged of
***** not given.

If I have a son.
If he has my face, my mind.
He will be sad. He will not know why.
He will be an artist. But he will not just create. He has to learn.

You cannot make a thing without first
taking a thing away.

In Lincoln
two times I was drunk
one only slightly.

I was lonelier than I'd
ever been. I hope I never feel
that way again.

Three times I felt alone.
More times I was sick to my stomach.
I do not regret a single second.

The subtle act of meeting
old friends with lines on my
face, pock and blemish
dominating the right side of
my face, left to them. Swing
left if you've an inclining.

How many times have you
reached out to a friend, tiny
gestures or grand statements
that state the grandeur of
relationships, twos and threes
and dates and early mornings.

Left to myself in bed I sleep
and toss and dream of friends
I remember and forgot about,
not but a text message away
from a rekindling, idling in
neutral and there's a hill ahead.

Hot breath, twist and bend,
bite down soft, release, linger,
teeth scraping new skin.

Base instinct betrays
graymatter, brain left grazing,
gutted by daybreak.

For what it's worth I've come to find that people and things ****** over make like lead pockets. Old business is just old business and yet the mouth stays sour, curdles at its ends like milk left out. I wash my hair and wash it again.

How do you **** a city? Not a short-change of ideas or institutions. A city. People, granite columns. Street lamps. Long lines of wooden benches. Car horns.

Bags and bags of bug-out gear: drop point knife; feather-stuffed bedroll; one dozen pouches, depositories. The **** is the escape.

The drop point.

Some thing in all of us wants a way out. It aches for freedom. Messy, nasty freedom, sweet as it is.

Boys & books & long
lines of bone-dry rosebush &
all of it burning.

the rim-rocked voice bellows
'I was a maid once. On the
Titanic, most famous one-trip-ship
in the history of mankind.
A tragedy. A massacre. And I survived it.'

a shapely cigarette clenched in her jaw
'It was such a magical place. The air
was so static and vibrant. Everything
was bright, audacious, unflinching.'

sound of sirens stabbing through smoke
'And as soon as we were so sure the
world we left behind was quiet, mortality
reminded us of its omnipresence. There were
screams, terrible screeches piercing the beautiful
starry night.'

smell of spoiled milk, sour
'I think God turned his back that night.
He couldn't bear to watch. But He knew He
had to remind us of our place. Somehow.'

the sky is never blue before sunrise

When the end shows face, what
would or could he say?

When the wind tears trees
hundred-year rooted in thick,

fertile soil hot-lit by an
erupting sun—what does

he say then? Could he process
the light, the colors, the heightened

senses, awake again, alive,
back from Catatonia.

               could he see me the way i deserve
                 to be seen in a pale-white/tan hue
                 & linen & perfect & perfect & perfect &
                                                             per­fect

Asphalt is on fire and
beauty becomes the source of

light for the dark rooms and
undusted corners of his brain.

When the ends shows face,
he could say yes. Yes.

Nothing I make of words can ever be confused with beautiful because I don't see beautiful things, only things in tandem, stuck between, feverish and naked as my burning brain substitutes ******* for dead protesters. This is a sickness I will not grow out of; I cannot say I want to grow because I do not want, I am a mind in a hollow shell which I keep beating with toxins that will **** me sooner than most. I do not care if you read this. This is not for you. This is not about you. It is always, will always, be about me. That is as close to happy as I will be. When did my poetry become so self-serving: I have turned art into work, art for the sake of speaking literally about my conscience and how are you still reading? I am not talking to you. This is not poetry but narcissistic whining and who doesn't love wallowing in the endless sea of their own *******. One thing: When I am dead, do not say I am gone. I have gone nowhere. I have been the only place I will ever be; a brain in a skull in a body, every second I know trapped in crawling skin. Do not say I am gone. I was never really here to begin with.

Make my day!
Switch to another time/place to
once again be lost in the ether
     the cold and damp so sturdy in dark

But do not interrupt my impenetrable
bouncing because who are you
     (why are you is more apt a question)

You need not lose yourself in that
lightless chill to make your point, No,
     that is done

So please Friend, Fellow:
follow that tunnel to the end and at
the end you will come upon all that I
     hold dear and

as you exit the tunnel into day
you will be among the life-blood
     breathing in warmth and sunlight

The wood-burning fire
resembles a cusp of cloud
set ablaze by faith.

The history—you and me—
it's carved in sandstone
               
                   I've taken to asking
                            Scheherazade myself

As though capital-T time cones
into a chisel of wind with which
to strike its flattest face

                  There was a time I thought
                            you had taken to the idea
                   of leaving me and there
                            is naught to blame for
                   that but myself

There is little evidence to believe
in history on loop until you've again
been consumed by blindness and
fear and utterly sick of yourself

                    The one person you're with
                             every waking second

Just thinking can—at ***** times—
be an act of self-negation

You told me you loved me and
I felt it in your breath

There were days I thought I'd never open my eyes,
days I didn't want to, days I have long tried forgetting.
We called it the Aftermath.

The calm always settles before the storm.
So they say. Hardly could one handle the
violent twists and turns in the winds you spun—
I could never quite quickly enough grasp
a branch to hang on to.
I wasn't yet strong enough. Yet.

The days after the storm, I sat idle, nigh—catatonic
outside your apartment door singing 'Sweet Caroline' like a *******
child because, in my childish, young heart, I thought,
You can hear me. You're listening.
The return silence was deafening.

Nothing was audible, save the radiator buzzing in the hall and the fierce, intrepid lapping of winter wind against a broken window pane.

I need no prompt to zone out and dissociate or become unattached.

At nighttime, creaks of wood tinker like tall tales. There is less I can see. I am too reliant on my eyes to tell the whole story. Sound is a sightless animal. The house I live in was probably built in the 1960s and I've noted it doesn't croon with the wind like other places.

Does speech require a mind? The human voice cannot be as massive an instrument as we make it. As wholly self-serving creatures, do we hear ourselves between cracks in this patchwork planet?

Is midnight just a silly word for numbers, like any other?

An empty house reclaimed by nature and subject to her laws has no want of questions and answers. Shapes are not made whole by human voice. If I could speak to my great-grandmother now, as I did six days before her death, would she tell me what she always told me? Would she wish I'd go back to church?

Raindrops paint my window a blurry gray. There is not a straight line to see through. Each ripple, and in it a reflection. I can piece it back together; I can see my small self seeing through it, and contains therein some middleplace that continues to escape me.

A full moon is hidden. Missouri is covered by clouds, like a wet blanket. The house will creak under water's weight , and when the clouds disperse and nighttime sings brighter it will creak still. This house is not a thing of nature.

It should not be here.

What it must
be to be a
poet with
clarity of
thought

bully the knot
in my head
unwound and
***** and
bounding straight
for daylight

What I would do to
feel the warmth of her skin, the
tremble of her touch.

I thought before this writing I might
tear out this paper & roll up
give me some numb for the numbers &
no one is asking how I've been sleeping but
my words caught my urge mid-rip & said
You are so sad and not even you know why.
Blisters on your tongue from bottle-bottoms
chasing a rising air bubble running for life.
Copperhead, half-thing,
whole-brain, funnelmouth,
throwing bricks from bedroom windows hoping to
hit my head at the end of flight, free-fall.
I forget a few times daily how much animal
seeps past this face & I have not been outside this head
since who knows when & I just want it to—
Candy canes for teeth and I am indifferent.
The television smiles for me, red-white-mint lit
in the faded glow of almost-morning.
They would almost certainly mourn for me.
I have to keep believing that is true.
I am funneling and it will not stop.

Some things reek of
sameness. Winter rain
for instance

driving wind whipping
at light poles, chilling
other thoughtless things.

Christmas coming around
in a few weeks, money tight
with bone-cold breeze.

Five people shot in Oregon.
Happy holidays, please remember
to duck and cover.