Crimson red beset
on body and brainmatter,
be it blood or ***.

How many days until tomorrow
(& do not bolster me—I know the day is long)
because tomorrow I promised something
to myself, a sort of present for the hard work
of not repeatedly ramming my skull into a pack of
venture capitalists & I'm pretty sure I could take
the Koch brothers in a fight even though I am the minority &
Fox News killed racism just as MSNBC killed watchable TV &
all of this is so incredibly unimportant because
I saw the sun born of yesterday's ashes
the rebirth of light as so many slept & dreamed
but I do not dream, no, I do not wander so far away.
I think I hold my world closer than that.

You're blocked;
you're bugged;
your eyes stay screaming
but I can't hear a thing.

Wash through me like knees through mud
not yet caked over by the heat of the
sun; like you're looking for something
you dropped and it may soon be entombed.

Look at me as you would a tree
caked in mud.
          Name me by my leaves, or
                    my sinewy limbs.

You're soft;
you're coarse;
the lines that puzzle your face
make frowning silly, and small.

          Name me Steinway like the
               piano. Or Pecan, like the
                    tree.

Find me forward, trudging through mud.

I can see solid ground but my branches
can't reach to touch the grass or its flowers
or to smell the rotten-ripe crushed leaves of
the pecan trees.

Stick me where I'm stuck,
save the mud. Give my leaves
some snow, some lightness,
cold. Give me color. Paint me
in storm clouds.

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.

So pointless, still starting sentences with
and as though I am curtailing from
previous profundity into present thought.

Silly, still. Finally I have found
inspiration in the smallest places,
skin-deep moments, echoes.

might fish dream of land

to wonder How many sharks
fall concious to the water

they must remind themselves
mustn't they

here is the water & life &
here we are surrounded

we escape via accidental hook or
suction of the propeller but never

on purpose: "fish out of water"
unnatural half-things, semblance

seeing sunlight through a window
and marveling the splitting rays

they jump and catch and dive
so soft

against the buffetting of waves

Hard to imagine life by candlelight.

Dinner and reading, days of rain.
Fire and its heat. I am used to candles with scents:
grapefruit and fir; eucalyptus mint; tobacco leaf;
sea salt and chamomile; red hibiscus flower.
Hold your hand inches above the flame, feel its itch.

The wick of a wax bedside candle can burn
unevenly and flake at its edges. The wax will
pool at the base of the wick, a reservoir of scents.

For millennia this wick was rapture, a flame
lighting moonless nights and lightly warming
little spaces. We made fire stay put, gave it a
finite life and watched it burn away from top
to bottom until it was dark once more.

Now we light the world with gaudy neon,
pulsing blisters and hulking electric strobes
that do not change. Cold fire in a glass bottle.

These fitful wicks have been replaced by manlight.

Searching for answers as to
why I'm so alone is like locating
the holy grail in sand-ravaged
desert, like rationalizing human
action, like taking delicacy
with a grain of salt.

I have turned depression into self-
fulfilling prophecy, so many days wasted
on loathe and pestilence, resisting change,
shutting out what I perceived
to be white noise.

I am drunk during this writing,
This is not medicine, let it be known.
Nor emulation, for simple fact that
I am whole, a whole thing,
silently splitting its ends.

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

I didn't think it was
that bad. Just the way
she was talking, she
felt chilled, okay and/
or something like it.

My friends say she
becomes the people
she hangs out with,
maybe gets a tad bit
obsessive in spurts.

People pity weakness
in the same way they
pity ignorance. They
don't know what's right
and it may **** them.

The purest of pure irony in that
we live to die, this is endgame,
nothing reminds us about life more so than
death. And so we fear, because we
do not know the result of the thing,
only the thing. Humans who assume too
much makes for messy subtext.

If I could pop open my skull,
find the part of my brain so often
mistaken for the heart, and ask it
a question, do you think it would
have the courage to respond?
Am I a soul, or is this brain and
its infinite connectivity capable of
fooling itself so deeply? I side with
the latter, not for depression,
but truth.

My poems sound like mindless simplicity.
They are poems because I call them such.
**** what the editor says.

They say ****** is an unforgivable sin.
I beg to differ.

Why?
Because it's fun to differ. And also, I could fathom myself committing ******.

I'd do it with a knife. It shimmers—it's clean; cutting flesh with primal ease.
It's painful.
It emulates so many feelings we have—brings them up to the surface.
You can see it in the victim's face,
right as the blade slides in.

They say ****** is an unforgivable sin.
It's a sin, no doubt.
—I ask now for forgiveness, for what I may soon do.

A sick reasoning of mine is this:
"In some defeated way,
I feel as though you should be thanking me."

Chicken-scratch staining
this prescription glass grasping
on getting life back.

All new people
crowding the heavy cage,
dribbling on to West 33rd
in heat.

All new people
mid-mourning, 4am, heartbeats
ring the streets like gong-strikes.

All new people
I've never seen. Faces
who, tomorrow, may
never again see the
lightness of me.

And some day
I will sit on my back porch
in infinite, consecutive jest,
staring at the night sky.

And, best of all,
I won't trouble myself wondering
why I have the itching inclination
to look up.

And, even more so,
I watch, contented,
a celestial understanding:
The stars. They speak.

Few things spoken
the way her hair played bingo with night air
& she grabbed my arm twice
I remember
                              exactly

1st at the bus stop (the way back)
a wind, chilly, rolled in/caught
her spin in a second—she squeezed
& giggled & goggle-eyed looks swept
the year away

2nd was the doorstep & I am not
sure this was not by accident but
her eyes fish-hooked me & reeled in
I, a hapless liquid-mouth fin-thing
lapping up *******
                               salt water
& where I'm left was/is NOW

she stirred with a spin in that dress
                               w/ the flowers
the ground/foliage/birds &
all their noises & all her
tiny exhalations suspended beneath
tiny worn wings, a current

all moving
up

Winter, night. Snowfall. Lake house. The family is gathered for a beloved relative’s “celebration of life” (we’ll say he/she didn’t believe in funerals).

Father, mother, two offspring, distanced by 8 years (27 and 19). Mother’s brother and his two children, staying at a separate, unvisited location. And a dead grandparent.

/

Winter was not the most opportune time for Grandpa to die, but he loved the lake, so because he passed in winter we are here and we are pretending to love the lake as he did. It is difficult to find joy or relief in a lake house. The whole idea is vacation. People go to the lake to swim in ***** water and drink and not think about things for a while. Winter is suffocating; it traps you indoors and surrounds you with walls and chills

Egos are firecrackers with short wicks. Do not light them in your hand. They explode and sting needles. Humans tend to trap themselves in the mind and that reality remains unbroken from formation until death. It really is a shame we make it all up. I wish heaven seemed a desirable prize.

It is said a trait of an
inadequate man is his
reluctance to admit
that he has done wrong.

You are human and that too
is a hard thing to admit. The
armor you’ve donned and
fastened has loosed at its
straps.

The English word care
stems from the Latin curae
which is remarkably close to
cure. I thought you might
like to hear Latin because it
was common for you to tell
me to Seize the day.

It was some summer in August
or something and the coarse
brown mound of dirt aside the
house had caught rain and
muddied.

We played King of the Hill
and I can remember thinking
what a waste it was to, for a
few fickle seconds, be royalty.

I told him what it was to
tread water and he, for the
longest time, believed me.
My friend is a musician and
the instrument that chose
him is the keyboard, with
it's near infinite possibilities,
incarnations, iterations.
Different lives, so to speak.
It is a craft that as it is
learned learns you. Small
flash of contact. Text
message. Unreturned call
with voicemail attached.
We've learned to sing over
the phone. I hope that doesn't
ring flat.

the softless slip of your
fingernail across the
bloodside of my wrist
sends shivers up my
arm straight to the
shoulder and neck
          I imagine

there is so little reward
in being sad at our
distance I'd rather
kiss the gates that keep
us apart and wish softly
sweetly that they open
          I wish

esther She says
she's it and
double that
she Says all
doubt you'd held
in the chest
dormant like
some sort of
bomb

was just
prison

*******
you're more
of yourself
than you'd
wish to
admit

I felt the presence of so many souls in this empty room.

I felt something brush against my neck. The brush was cold.

It smelled of rotted meat and toiled field-ground, sticky.

I broke the ice cold quiet with a question. Who are you.

Nothing. A creak, maybe, a disembodied patter of dust, set flight.

—

Someone hung from the rafters in the attic, I'd been told.

Only that wasn't true. They found him in the living room.

Apparently his eyes had popped out of his skull and lay on the carpet.

He'd been there for a while, air soaking in his last exhalations.

I was altogether surprised the ceiling fan had held the whole time.

—

I could touch it, slight sulphur-burn on nosehair and lung.

My arms bumped up, a flat-tire-road-like indicator of augury.

His voice was soft and weak, and he spoke only to me.

"My shoe's untied. Do you mind?" Hair once of my neck ran away.

Strike, redress—I heard his coughed cries from my dented boot-heels.

In which life did your
body float the Ganges on
soft cuts of gum tree?

There are those who die with the wind,
and those who inherit,
staring, steam-eyed, at the blistering cloud scattered sky,
scanning for a safe place to land amongst our feet.

Everything starts at the bottom.
Sun peaks over the orange Horizon,
Sea crests and bellows, ebbs and flows,
History begins at the Beginning, and so on.

People start at the feet, and wheel their way up.
So often there are toes caught in the zippers,
the hairs of our feet singed on the swelling soil
we plant our feet.

A Sun rising.
A wave crashing.
A human being born into a dying world,
deprived and blinded,
it's beauty swept away in the panic of a coming storm.

Eyes pickled and raw,
we have wasted undo hours
stealing sleep like thieves.

Sat in silent place
hop-pulse-pounding my feet in
ecstatic motion.

There was the moon
and then there were the stars,
so bright and boisterous,
far away from us. Less familiar.

We were always looking up. Be it
the stars or the moon in the night sky
we always found a way to stir up
some trouble under the endless
cover of darkness.

There was the moon
and then there were the stars.

We loved the former because
it was close, reliable, beautiful, serene.
We loved the latter because
it was adventurous—you couldn't
fit your small fingernail on it.

We loved what passed. We remember.
All the stars are gone. Now there is darkness.
Nothing to light the way home
but memories and kerosene.

'Binge and purge,' she says,
'It's a self-imposed poison:
hurts no one but me.'

don’t numb that brain silly boy

put it to good use



cleave in half

the line parsing

chest from

chin hair

        you’re a man when

        you say you are

save the streaks of palm-filth

dug-under nails broken

buried under dirtweight



what do you know of slippage

        —something  



****** as inch-thick glass

run through a filter

                        tossed aloft

                into

        the ceiling

fan  



I’m left for nothing of my efforts

it's dirt under the fingernail

        you can taste it

it's dirt


        taste it

There's water here
for you to drink
if you'll drink it

but there's beer in
your backpack

congrats

You're finished
as far as the county
's concerned where

as your backpack
clinks as you walk

*******

Upraised hairs on
your thigh north to
touch of cold fingers

you're still drunk
kid when will you

grow up

Boldness is akin to desperation.
No no Love, do not
weep for the tree or the
mountains jagged—

                                   w/ their bulldozers
                                and iron
                                                           fist

do not cry Love for
we are all in mourning:

                                    it is not the tears
                                    that sting, but the

ebbing thoughts—

the warmth

Save a piece of me.
A laugh, a smile, a subtle flicker of my eyes when the lights turn on.
You have to remember something, so make it small. Don't keep the battles,
the strife, the words I said and never meant, the words you never thought you knew.

If you save anything, let it be a moment. A second.
So brief, so inconsolably unmemorable:

A candle's flame. A flower's lonely petal.
A breeze, pushing us both in opposite directions.

This wall has skin
     a signal
stretch and collapse
w/ each breath the bent
mind keeps pulling—

See how far deep we can cut
you should have told me
anything but that they say
his pen tipped skin—ax-head straight through

when we left he was asleep and later
I got a phone call and the
voicemail, it said—

you need to get back
but first, you need to
tell me what happened

tell me
tell me
please
tell me

later, as we sat,
he said he didn't mean a word,
said, Maybe you should just
forget about it.

I don't have anything to do with this

          imperfect receptacle,
light of pre-dawn-breaker-
bringer of boredom.

                    There are systemic means of
                    hurting oneself, the constant

ripping and stitching of that cherry-
          covered cloth

                    it's like drowning in
                    maple syrup, sticky and

sweet. I've been told that dropping
drink was the hardest thing I've

                    never done.

          I found these things,
these iron pores dripping
iron sweat, remarkably

                    easy to ignore.

However long spent staring & you've yet to move your feet.
Ten yards of breathable space, scent of honey or lemon,
I can't remember.

                                        Her walk, his walk.
                                        Why spoil the fun?

The ****** falls from the branch almost always,
then so too will I fall I feel—less gravity
in headspace, room for words to float.

                                        Step one, step two
                                        Step 3 step 4

& they move like wine together & here I am
up to my neck in blood-tainted water.
No TV show has ever felt like this.

                                        How many cities burn
                                        for sake of
                                        love & death?

I want to build a city of her living bones
magnificent skyscrapers dance with the
slightest gust of my breath—

                                        I send
                                        that city
                                        shaking. They
                                        are waltzing
                                        now.

Lehár's The Merry Widow.
The irony cuts holes in my veins.

Let us ignore
the wall
built in his honor

a looming crow's nest
black mangled stone
and onyx

Can we not forget
the bodies
the people lost after

the ground sank
deeper

In those brief places
of prompt and pause, is it truth
if I am smiling?

His words kept pouring
in the rain like the rain and
it stung like new skin.

In supposition
she'd laid her hand in mine and
her palm felt Fate retch

To place name on faith
is blaspheme—aside from the
faith one names oneself.

Little tiny objects like cigarettes can
**** you. Not sure

                    I know this
                    secondhand
                    or if

forgetting is a coping tactic. It's best to
put the things I most forget on paper
because writing burns into the
brain.

I can't be sure who told me.
No, I can't remember.

Wait a day and pray
your god forgets sins confessed
under influence.

If only your eyes would lock mine.
If only I could stop time, wind clocks
back and back until years passed like seconds,
became nothing more than leaves
drifting in an autumn wind.

What dreams we'd share.
What things we'd see and touch and live.
What fireworks would light the sky.

three days remained;
the decision made
to pull it

no one knew
exactly how to
break the news

the gravity pulling
down a room:
tons & tons

i wonder, softly,
might we change
all our minds

if we should,
don't let it
be too late

never too late

sorry I said
sorry—you were almost there
that night
and sorry—for the mess
my skin is woven
from straw
     & therefore
prone to
slow splitting
     & knives
in general

same you said
same that crowds
make you jumpy
     & disappointment
wraps you often
like an afghan
of fresh pelts
home to flies
     & putrid
     & ******
     & that
forebears a
partnership in
liquescence

sure we said
sure we can try
     & see
if tandem is best
or single is for the
better because
happy alone
     & happy
together are
commensurate
     & equivalent

     & sorry
I am so slow to
peer out a new
window at newly
spring'd trees
under a new blaze
of hot yellow light
     & not
feel like a slug
in a salt bath

there's no advance
to this thing
i'm writing

i've heard tons on
tons of the palisades
and i've never lived
west of the
missouri and
where are the palisades
define it
geographically
a minimal

comprehension or-
some other thing-
of the perception
of how people
talk
here
in
missouri

would go a far long
ways in the palisades
somewhere in
flor'da                              or
califor'nia
god i wish i'd known
the weight-per-
pound a baton
centered on a
human forehead

but you had

i hadn't

When I'm forgotten,
God will scatter my ashes
in the Land of None.

How many more seconds until this cigarette is all but broken ash?

How many more questions must I ask until the answers start to **** their way in?

How many people went to my funeral?

How many people didn't want to go and went anyway? Someone give these people a medal.

How many people have I killed on accident?

Was it quick? Torturous? Which is more horrible?

Did it happen too fast to enjoy (or recognize) the end, or slow to the point life was no longer a desirable option? If it ends in this…

Have you ever planned a ****** in your headspace? Where did it happen? What did you use? What were they wearing? How quick? Why? No, not why. No. I don't care why. All good people have reasons.

All bad people have options.

We fixed the middle.
Now Gaza's desert is glass,
Israel byegone.

Why do we care
so fully

to an acute point
of exhaustion

to the
     extent
we suffocate

in the
     moment
we're told to

speak