14
Every song or sonnet
singular in its intricacy,
in time it becomes something
other, hyper-personal and resonant.
14 things may burst into millions.

13
Three times I've felt alone
this minute. I should stop tallying
hours in my schedule, messy
rubric.

12
11-years old and jumping off
mud-mounds, playing King of the
Hill. The strongest rises to the top.
The cleverest usurps.

11
One thing for certain:
we are human. We are
not human.

10
Six times in school I got
detention. It was often due
to my willingness to be a
follower, silly sheep to a
slaughter.

9
Five languages of love we are
sure of, no more so far.

8
10 tally marks looks a lot
like less. Some things, like
people, refuse to show their
face.

7
13 is supposedly an unlucky
number. At this age I uncovered
a part of myself I did not know
before. Discovery. This is luck.

6
A dozen is meant to represent 12
because it is simpler, same syllables
only one less letter, a convenience.

5
If you flip an eight on its side
you can see forever.

4
Seven times I've thought this poem
gimmicky.

3
[redacted for time constraints
and continuity]

2
The artist places her pen to
paper and borrows, not stealing
so much as salvaging, wrapping
old presents in neat new bows,
satin or silk or rough twine.
Nine variations on the same
subject.

1
Four lids harbor two eyes,
a galaxy, universe,
each hiding half a heaven
from view.

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

I've lent myself to self
parody. I am yellow grass
in summer. So easy to see
in daylight, split-rays.

Again I stumble through the
door too closely, nose grazing
siding too rough, not fit for
suburban living.

I am outside now, cigarette in lungs
almost empty of airspace. Tight
breath, silt sinew of exhale and
burning, eyes painted in panic.

Four smokes in, cherry blossom
cheeks, a rosary of liquor, perhaps
lending myself to sanity,
a bright morning in autumn.

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

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.

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

Almost everything is okay as the leaves are changing.
I am seeing the season take shape and not
neck-deep in ironic rambling of how
this happens every year.
It does, but it is never the same.

Autumn is the briefest season.
My car has broken down and I will not
be able to drive myself to work come winter.
Fall moves faster still. Red-orange canvas of
trees becoming leafless and I am too entangled
in people. I save my errant gaze for next year,
another season.

It tastes of auburn and cool mornings and smells
like summer in retrospect, as though I never noticed
in full bloom, only after. I have problems focusing on
the surrounding world as it plots and plods.
I go along. I am occupied.
She has changed the color of her hair,
soft brown to blue-black.
She smells of leaves falling, of
cold nights and fires to burn.
She is my favorite season.

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.

I

I am often attracted to things unhinged. Not necessarily (traditionally) romantic, more akin to an unwillingness to ask permission, one who might say It was never your permission to begin with and not be angry or upset about having to say it. Few are so willing to evaluate situations without the overwhelming cloud of emotion. Judgment fully withheld, kind banter catching wind. A needed immediacy.

Jean-Michel Basquiat was aware of the past. He pretended to not care if you did not like his paintings. Part of him was upset some people did not understand. Basquiat strangled history down to basics: music, culture, society (not the same thing), generations of family after family. His point was not for you to obtain this. This was his conscience—tangible. Brain processing. Synthesizing. To him it was so simple. I refuse the word primal because it is misguided, it does not factor purity, clarity. Sugar Ray Robinson told Basquiat to stop painting the background. Tuxedo told Basquiat what words to place and where.

So much of my art is stripped and lucid and enacted with only me in mind.

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.

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.

He figured the birds were chirping.

It's a beautiful day, just warm enough in direct sunlight. Squirrels hopped around the fenceposts.

The neighbour boys, splashing and jumping in the swimming pool,
mindful they didn't run around the concrete edges or their father would step outside and firmly correct them. He loved them, didn't want them hurt.

Spring is alive.
Birds are chirping.

He wondered what birds sound like.

If ever you find yourself
surrendering to the darkness,
look to me—

Listen.
I will never claim I can save you,
Lord knows I can't save myself,
but I know, for a second, our
eyes carry a comfort the dark
has no power to put down.

Listen.
There is nothing that can
divide the bloodline that streams
into our hearts when we touch
skin, when we grasp and
piddle at the wind, searching
for a safe breeze to cart us home.

Home.
Fields of lilies, dayflowers, marigolds,
things we thought were silly before.
Look at us now, prancing about
like the couples we made fun of
not so long ago—love was a virtue,
not tangible bliss. We can touch it.
It whispers of springtime.

If ever you find yourself
surrendering to the darkness,
look to me—

I will swear to whomever will
listen that I will never again
be that far behind you.

Dear.
There is always light; it is simply
a matter of opening one's eyes
and finding it.

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

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

Spring yielded it's light blue, sending
little spines of fiber-work glass clippings about
and smelling like summer and sun and
reminiscent days long past and gone away.

He, blissful, weary, marched unfettered
amongst the wrecked flora, a hop in his step,
prancing about like someone younger
than he, who had seen little and felt less.

He had an attitude; bumbling, messy,
he was hardly a man for all men, but rather
a stoic symbol of time stood stone still, a
slapdash rendering of a simpler, better era.

Summer gave way to Autumn's yellow chill.
Soon winter stood, watching still and
silent, frigid as the bones in the funeral home.
The seasons painted his headstone. A canvas.

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.

******* of suckling cheeks
taste of wine gone vinegar
left out too long exposed
to sunlight

twice ways between nowhere
we drank a bottle or four
before resigning ourselves
to defeat

we woke so many mornings
in drawn shade sunlight
with our heads split twain
by buzzing

we'd never known what it
was to taste hurt or defeat
until we likened our arguments
to chemistry

The day he locked himself out is not specific, a
Monday or a Thursday, some square on some calendar
I tossed in the trash years ago.

We lived in a small white house yards off a small suburban street. I dubbed it The White House. I cannot remember how many of my holidays passed inside. It's all stuck in fog.

Some time later my mother and brother and myself moved not a quarter mile from The White House; a trailer park, owned by Aunt Charlene and her callousness. She cares deeply for my mother. I still pass The White House as I drive to my great-grandma's home, years later. It is hidden from the street, all branch and leaf and overgrowth, flora hiding its face from the cars and their people, the birds, sunlight, illumination.

My great-grandmother's eyes are thick with a knowledge I am fortunate to not possess. Great-grandma. My father's grandma. Mother told me he began to drink when Grandpa Jesse died and never managed to shelf it. I meditate on my genes. My great-grandma is 84-years on this earth. I have trouble bringing myself to talk to her.

It is so much. So fast. I am a man now—not grown, hardly seasoned, no hint of gray—of 21-years. I have not seen my father since I started smoking. I wonder, now, following all these years of silence what, exactly, we might have to say to one another. He may ask about my girlfriend: I may ask of his. Years apart, a ridged gap, and yet still a kinship, some foreign hurt deeply threading the vein.

The malignancy of feelings.

I bury my anger and let it age, whiskey soaking in the oak, cultivating a taste, a character, an identity. I cannot change this. It is my blood. I will always bear his name. He may die before me. I will always bear his name.

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.

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

1
O black golden cleanser
O ebony shrine ballast
Pry open mine eyes,
sharpen my senses like cutlery
& envelop me—
Is the day so young

another cup please, just to
Get me going

2
Heat
Not quite that of a fire
"but trust me, don't touch it"
Let the smoke stiffen
& soften become the
summation of particles & at once
lose all sense of being

I'll have a smoke now—
maybe I'll kick it a little later

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

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

How to apologize, how to apologize
for so many things at once when,
regardless of my words, the world
will spin at a constant speed.

The bees we chain to their nature
and pull their spoils for ourselves:
they were not the first sign.

The trees that fall without hands,
if only they could catch themselves.

We squabble as the concrete dries.

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.

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.

You smoked your throat gone.

I'll sit in bed opening and closing my Opinel No. 8 and stare at an unread compilation of a then-alive poet's correspondence with a then-and-still-dead poet and wonder at the cover art, a fishing-line-thin threaded rope that could well be tied in a slipknot. Tendrils that look like loose straw scattered thirty different ways.

He said You can't **** your life away and there are many ways to do that. I'm stuck inside a small bedroom dreaming or hallucinating an open space, streams flowing from nowhere near and flat space so full of sky it is sin to call it empty. The world can be hot and fast;  I am bad at resting. I don't sleep well. I can float a river and not once hear it moving.

You drank and dissected your drinking so it could masquerade as something under your control. We all are guilty of this at some point. In some way or another. I am lucky to sit in my bedroom and write that the next two years of my life have well been mapped. I do not pout, there is no malice here. My head is close, fastened between my small shoulders. I share no heart with Yesenin.

You can't **** your life away he said he thought. These things change. *But you can!

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 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?

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.

How sad must I make myself?
When petty annoyance turns to
dust, a swirl of caster oil on my
tongue, need I stab in infinite
direction for something to grasp
onto?

When does blood end and choice
begin? How much *** must I smoke
to stop paying attention? Do you want
to be here?

The answer is assuredly No.
I know because I know you.

You will numb yourself until the
little tiny hairs of your forearm
rise and prickle and beckon for
sunlight, escape from dark room
of blanket piles and ***** clothes.

Do you want to be here?
The answer is in the How.
Should I keep projecting or
wear my insecurities on my sleeve
like a good boy, feelings and
resolve and dedication to family?

Where did my poem go?
Does it want to be here?
Should I pull it up from the
ether, all hot ember and critique,
or might I let it flounder and
drown, all not together and
scatterbrain, best left on edit table
in drunken somberness and
existential envy, slow motion.

Do you want to be here?
I am asking for a friend.

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

And now we see the singularity
of the artist, wrists spread bare on
mimed canvas, finally we see
his consistency.
Lazarus is dead on the first day.
Gold background, rocky outcrop,
sense of cluttered space.
Do you see the decay?
Can you sympathize, or do you notice?

I cannot sympathize with Duccio,
I am too vain to admit his Maestá
survives while my brain rots from
alcohol. But I remember Duccio is
at least fifty years old when his Maestá
preeminently destroys my career
as a visual artist. I do not mind.

Lazarus is dead on the second day.
Duccio had many pupils, among them
Simone Martini, whose Annunciation
is a cropped rehash of Byzantine/Gothic
flopped with Duccio's handy flair,
a pious reverence and virtue.
It sweeps and moves. Or attempts.
Lazarus is no longer sleeping.

I have never been to the city of Florence,
not now nor the 1300s, so I need not
explain my lack of comprehension.
Lazarus has risen now,
but it is different than I remember.
Lazarus is all alone, and
Lazarus is alive,
doomed to walk in mortal Hellfire
a second time over.

He paints his ashtray
alkaline blue,
a petty tip-of-the-hat to
harbingers of evil,
men between men and
women sitting aside,
head bobbed
in embarrassment.

What have we become which
normalized gestures do not
puncture?

His alkaline blue ashtray
trading dust for roach buds
and where is he off to,
brain sorting sentiment with
barred numbers, statistics,
inaccessible phenomena.
Pains to say most often he is
wandering in the wings
flapping for attention.

How humanity must suffer
in the name of
self-effacement.

He and his
alkaline blue ashtray
skitter across the landscape
(a da Vinci,
a Mona Lisa)
again in apathy to watch
petty tip-of-the-hat prisoners
wag thumbs and call
each other names.

In the end of things,
reason does not prevail.

The dust is all.

He was a father's son:
quiet, respectful, hard-working.

He loved the winter. The snow flaking
off the trees. Chilled little prayers.

His father had seizures. Every once in
a long while, his father's eyes would lock
his mother's and his being would tense,
frozen like Cybil's lake across the pasture.
Writhe, foam at the mouth.

He was an old man now. He remembered
everything about his father.

His raspy, charmed voice. His knowing brow.
His leather bound skin wrapped around years of a blunt ax and needy firewood.

As the son's eyes closed into nothing,
he remembers Christmas with his father. A reunion of sorts.

He would ring the doorbell, his father on the steps.
He would invite him in for coffee. He would refuse, only to say, It was nice to see you, George.

Yes, you too Dad. Take care.
Goodbye.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

(stopping here to tell you about my first
******* because it was terrible &
the one thing I remember most vividly,
a pock under her left eye
marking my shame & confusion &
this portion of the poem is a lie)

I wish I could write poems of distraction. I sit all day in rooms and there are times I am outside and it feels unnatural. I am curious to the state of my insides. Sleep is not reliable. Dreams are not patient.

It is night and it is cold, and as I look up to stare at stars and planets I see car crashes. Orion totalled by a Chevy Cobalt. A pickup dislodging each dipper and sending them reeling to infinity, smacking empty space.

Cold nights are cleansing. I need more time to think. There is so much to be thought, isn't there, so much potential just floating around, pathless, empty. The season will not change for a while. I must build a fire and warm myself.

Picture the word Devastation.
What do you see?
Bodies in a motorcycle accident.
Buildings of fire falling.

But that is not it,
it cannot be. Picture the word
DEVASTATION.

                                            ­          What do you see?

I see something so unbelievably
personal.

Devastation must mean my own life
in wreckage. A body in a
motorcycle accident.

                                                        A jump from a
                                                        burning­ building.

I cannot divulge how deeply
this is seared in my thoughts.
Picture the word

Shame
Incidence
Accident
Immolation
Remember
Breath­
Grass
Water
Wreckage

Picture the word Love.
What do you see?
Picture the word Devastation.
What do you see?

Are you surrounded?
Only a few?
Are you alone?
Do you want to be?

There is no shame in any answer.
I do not press my morality on others
but we must, must believe that.
There is no shame in any answer.

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.

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.

A good man
ought to be left
alone,

lest this evil world
wrap itself
around and
swallow him whole.

And I said to her
Those lips could tear worlds apart
as she smiled that smile.