Everybody loves *****,
they tell you it's wrong
to call it that:
*****.

My mother
slapped me in the face
when she realized
I was thinking about it.

I was five.

She caught me
sticking my hands
down my pants
handling the soft
warm muscle of myself,
as Jeri Ryan
spoke cold and hard
to me
from the cargo hold
of the U.S.S. Voyager.

Jeri's ****
were so hard and stoic
in that grey spandex,
and a slight *******
took hold of my hand
and my body cooled
and warmed at the same time.

When I was fifteen,
I first felt one,
a *****.

It made itself known
through a hole
full of wetness
and stink
in Mary's bebe jeans.

Mary,
was a puerto-rican girl
who smelled like marlboros
and perfume.

She talked about bubble baths.



I took my finger
and ran it through the
rough fabric
until i felt her.

I felt her pelvic bone,
and a soft, giving
rubber of human flesh
on the tip of my finger.

In the movie theatre I searched
until I felt an infinity of giving
an indention in the soft flesh
of breathing warmth and maximum.

With a whole world
in tow,
the lander of my finger
slowly entered a wet,
sticky atmosphere

poking, prodding,
returning
and re-entering
this wet,
fishy-syrupy smelling
world.

"I can feel your *****," I whispered.

"Don't call it that." she hummed back.

It's supposed to be
98 and cloudless today.

By the time I roll in,
and park my car,
Roman's walking up to me,
his gold tooth a
full yellow smile in the sun.

“Hey meyer,
I need you to
Pull the box truck around,
We’ve got some plants we’ve gotta load,
Then we’ve got a landscape job
About an hour from here.”

“Are we gonna be back here
Today?”

“Probably not
until
late.”

The box truck
Is a holdover from the old owners
Of Ken’s Nursery,
It’s still got
Ken’s Nursery in large comic sans
On it’s rust-streaked sides.

The wheel wells are rusted
brown as salt deposits
On the shores of sulfuric oceans,
and little ringlets of decay
rock as the truck bounces;
It’s old springs
Giving back after all these years.

Today we have:
Forty-two veriagated ferns.
Ten dragon lilies.
10 cannas,
But cannas have to have a male and female to flower,
So 20 cannas collectively,
And we’ve gotta mulch.

By the time we’ve loaded all the plants;
stuffed the mulch in with the Bobcat,
And thrown in our picks and shovels,
My shirt is soaked through.

98 degrees and cloudless.

Roman walks to his car
and takes off his shirt
To reveal a pink belly
full of folding skin
and matted black upwelling *****
Singing with sweat-diamonds
In the unperturbed vision of the sun.

My shirt is soaked already too.

But even as I loaded the truck,
I thought about Melissa.

When I get home,
She probably won’t be there.

When the female is separated from the male canna,
Nothing dies, the two live happily ever after.

But the canna does not flower,
And doesn’t remember enough
To miss it.

Just continues quietly with a black bulb
The color of a skink’s underbelly.

This morning
I woke up
and
told Melissa we wouldn’t
make it past three months.

We're at month two,
and I can feel it.

Either I’d drop her, or she’d
drop me, but either way
“we don’t have staying power,
and there’s no point
in either of us
pretending like we’re grown ups
who can just power through things
out of sheer complacency”.

I wasn’t looking at her.
Just up
at the spackle and a spinning fan.

It’s so hot in here,
that we sleep on top of the covers
sweating little puddles of skin
into the comforter.

Nightly,
we mash those deposits of dried salt
deep into the mattress
with our sloughing bodies
to get stuck
and form
tiny caves of skin and boredom in the springs.

She rolled away from me
swirling off a cloud
of stale, watermelon shampoo
And reached
With a tightly domed deltoid
towards the blue milk crate
where her purse sat.

She rummaged in there,
her back muscles working
like a landslide of flesh.

She finally dropped the purse,
after an effort of five minutes,
and I heard the successful flick
of a lighter.

She started
puffing and chugging down smoke
As she laid on her side.

My eyes watered
in the bluish smog,
and as the fan turned
raining down peices of our own skin
in a dusty, undetectable cloud of particulates
I could just see her,
out of the corner of my eye,
Shifting the weight of her body
from her deltoid
to her trapezius.

Free concerts
are full of potheads,
they get all in your ear
and start talking about
the land of milk and honey,
DENVER ******* COLORADO.

The beers cost
15 bucks
for pisswater
and barely a pint.

The girls
all wear pink spaghetti straps
sagging acid-wash jeans,
and a smell like
old milk.

The old people
dance.

the old people dance;
there wrinkly
pterodactyl arms
flapping as they swirl the air
with bad knuckles.

The air smells,
like sweat.

Sweat smells like
toilet water.

Free concerts are usually outside,
so hope to ******* Gaia that it doesn't rain,
because you're stuck there,
drunk and yelling
dancing and laughing
******* and falling.

Matt, Dang and Me.

We spent our summer going to free concerts,

because the girls that go to free concerts
think tattoos and finger-******* and toilet humor
is more ****
than money.

The old people dance with you
performing some type of necromancy
in the air
that brings dead things inside of you
back to life.

And the bud,
it's so ******* sticky,
and it causes a hacking
paroxysm of coughing
to the point that you can
taste the blood in your mouth,

because those people from
DENVER ******* COLORADO,
really know their ****.

She sent a package
tied in this biege tweed cord.

It turned out to
be a picture of you two
at the lake,
that day it was cold
and she wore that beanie with the flames,
her hair all curly and escaping,
your lips all red and chapped.

A folded note tucked on the inside
of the frame reads:

"I have Connie,
*******

Love always,
smiley-face,
smiley-face
smiley-face,
smiley-face,
me."

­Connie: your/her rat terrier.

You put the picture
in its black frame
on the tv table.

The tweed
you nail
to two spaced planks
on the wall above the tv.

It's like abstract
modernist-expressionist-
constructionist-art.

It's just one string.

A taut cord
of brown tweed.

The black night comes,
over and over,
over and over,
she doesn't return,
but the tweed remains
as taut as a fingernail
or an exposed artery.

Somehow
it's so human and obstinate
that the woven vertebrae
seems to curve minutely
and femininely.

As time passes,
the tweed moves
from beige
to golden
and gravitational.

A call to a friend goes something like this:
"Come over here, I've got this amazing thing on my wall."

The friend, Eric,
calls more friends.

The friends come over,
all piling around this golden tweed
after they've taken stock of the kitchen
and Wild Turkey.


They take turns
plucking it,
thumbing it,
putting their ears to it,
and studying it,
all
at your insistence.

Somebody,
******* Eric,
coughs in the room.
More people begin to cough.

Eric walks up
to the the string,
that is nailed at top
and bottom
on two spaced planks.



Eric gives it a final hard tug,
snapping it like a belt.

the tweed hums and shivers off a few flakes
of dust and amber material.

"I've just wasted five minutes
with this thing,"
Eric says

to the string,
and you.

Eric speaks for the group.

He turns and leaves,
taking the whole group of
twenty
with him.

They trail behind Eric
like a great, long tail
flicking
and knocking things over
in your apartment
out of sheer agitation
on the way out.

The golden gravity subsumes you.

You do not close the door behind them,
you can't even hear their tiny, black voices
as they all clamor into the elevator
and ding.

My dreams are full
Of skull-*******
And ****-*******
And ******* all night long.

******* girls I loved
And girls I came to hate.

They are full of that driving hunger
like being tickled
By the queen wasp's stinger
Until the syringe went to deep

And the want became a need

And
the *******
became

A plague,

so that I couldn’t dream
Of anything else,
but sticking my ****
into some pink *****
And driving it all the way into
Her
until
I could see it in her eyes,
forcing the smell of her
reddened, limping *****
out of her ears
like a bloated body
excreting excess venom.

I wake up
to a hard-on,
fatigued,
limping,
famished,
humiliated.

Every night I pull the power cord out of the digital radio beside my bed, the one with the lime-green numerals, and I wrap the cord around my neck until I can hear the muffled hammering of my heartbeat
inside my skull.

I remember the days when my world was pure & innocent.
Those were the days when I could always feel the sun embracing my ebony flavored skin.
The days when I knew no matter what, there will always be a happy ending.

But now..
My life is anything but pure & innocent..
Those days are nothing but a distant memory..

I've seen too much that no one should ever witness.
I've said too many things that no one should ever express.
I've experienced too much that no one should ever deal with.

Continual darkness confines her to this world with no chance of escaping.
The moon used to visit daily but just like everyone else, he left without saying a word.
They all commit suicide once they get a taste of what lays inside of her dark & twisted world.

She patiently waits for the day that glimmer of hope will come back into her life.
But little does she know, that shimmer of sunshine is waiting for her to realize that he hasn't left yet.
When will the day come for her to open her eyes to see the light she craves for is right in front of her?

The god-being
takes off her jacket

and
sits down on the edge of my bed.

She cradles a crinkling,
noisy bag of twinkling
cold coronas.

The god-being says:

"I got two for you,
one for me."

The god-being
is wearing one of my black beaters

and the pin-up nurse
on her left-shoulder
is splayed and exposed.

The nurse's body opens up
into a flaring
of too-long legs
and distended ****.

The god-being

is curled away from me
her whole being is
wrapped up
in holding the bag.

Wrapped up
in holding those sounds contained.

The god-being

unfurls herself
finally
and reveals the three
golden bodies.

The nurse
is no longer bloated
and stretched.

The god-being turns
to me,
two coronas in her right
one in her left.

The god-being spiders
up to me.

Crawling over the bed,
making space-time
dimples
in the scratchy fabric
with the two sap-colored bottles
in her tiny creative hands
and the sadness
that she has created me
to look at her.

I have written so much
****** poetry across this city;

left it in bars, under streetlights, and

In the bathrooms where people have ******
all over the toilet seats
and I had to use my poems
to clean it up.

They are on napkins
and receipts;
pieces of toilet paper,
and even a one-liner
on the carcass
of a piece of paper
that once held a straw.

The words get soggy on wet bars
and bloom like black flowers
losing all consistency and coherence.

Sometimes
I write them out of pure impetus.

To get me going,
I need a couple beers and those
Pabst-drinking, past-drunk
drunk girls that get close up to you
and put their lips on your earlobes
like they want to tell you a secret

But all you get is a present
of soft stinging breath.

Sometimes
I write them for some girl I meet,
like the one who came up and sat down
right beside me.

She said her name was
so and so.

I said my name was
so and so,

so we got to talking

And the topic finally reared its
fat, ugly head:

“Are you going to school?”

“Yea I go to State”

“Oh that’s cool, whats your major?”

“Creative writing”

Then she smiles at me
like I’ve got some broccoli
in my teeth,

and she wants to figure out a way to tell me

without breaking
this three-beer-good-buzzing mood,

finally she says:

“write me something”

And I become a dog for her.

In my doggish way
I take my tail
out of my pocket
and tuck it's wiggling self
onto a napkin.

I write
about how meeting someone new,
is like trying to figure out
if what you’re looking at is a skyscraper
or a mountain,
or just a Norfolk freight train
barreling down the tracks
with your name on it’s front grille.

There’s a rooster
that runs around trying
to ****
every hen,
goose,
guinea,
and
sometimes Super Dave Osborne
will even make a pass
at a close-enough finch.


Occasionally Super Dave ****** off
the Rhode Island Red.

Red measures twice
the height
and weight

of Super Dave Osborne.

The bookbag leans
on the aluminum column.

The column is blurry,
someone cleans it
only when their are inspections.

The bookbag has been sitting
collecting the sounds
that leave the Staten Island Ferry
by foot,
for God knows how long.

When you get off,
everyone looks ahead,
but out of the corners
an entire black sea of iris'
rotates to the aluminum column.

It might be a bomb.

The girl behind the Ms. Anne's counter
is skinny almost,
but her *** is too big,
almost.

Munching on the semi-soft pretzel,
you think about empty calories
and the corners of your mouth get sticky.

The Ferry won't be back,
for another thirty or so
minutes.

Somebody takes out a guitar,
and starts playing
a little Dylan. People
form a circle around him.
This is the American Pow-wow.

You reach in your breastpocket
for the Marlboros,
but you can't smoke here,
and an official looking person
squints at you,
just to drive the point home.

******* smoking laws,
some places just feel good.

This place with all it's ringy sounds,
like the guitar,
and phones beeping with texts
and babies,
deep fathers,
and high mothers.

Just to puff and puff
and push that sugar down
with nicotine would really
up this feeling of comradery.

A guy with a gold-plated shield
on his breastpocket and a blue-button down.
Walks over to the bag.

The iris' move,
people keep talking but
they're just saying words
to make it look like they're talking.

By the time the ferry
rings in baritone,
the bag is gone;
the column is still blurry;
the man is still playing his guitar,
but there's an emptiness.

I actually tried that poetic
Rico suave **** with a girl.
We were both naked
Lying in bed, her messing with the hair
On my chest and me lying there
Trying to come up with an excuse
as to why she couldn't stay
or why I had to leave.

I like her enough,
but the way
she looks at me,
she's inviting something bad.
She's so lonely in her eyes.

She twirls one hair in a pink fingernail
and looks up at me.

She says to me:
"Give me some poetry."

I says to her:
"You've got green eyes like the Mediterranean, I think I could mine
something out of you, your eyes are just that full of something beautiful."

It sounded fake
and corny as **** coming out of my mouth.


I hated her for even asking me
To sell out like that.

But she smiled a hungry,
ravenous smile, because she hadn’t had love
or even flattery
In a while and she was
hungry for that kind of poetic
Hollywood *******.

I'm a sucker for
girls going weak for me,

and me going even weaker for them.

It's a form of humiliation
and a bad way to end something good
like we had.

Who is this ghost in the corner of my eye?
I've seen that ambiguous shape before.
Was it in a nightmare?
Or from a repressed memory?
I can't shake this feeling that I've seen this ghost before..
I want to meet this ghost..
But I'm worried of what secrets the ghost holds.
It's concealed itself in the dark abyss..
This dark abyss is beckoning to me..
It feels so warm against my skin..