I'm sitting here just to think of my thoughts
I had to come here to sit down with a coffee
just to pull them out of my head
I come in and set up a chair
Pick a good spot
Stare out
Think whatever I think
But at first nothing comes
Nothing comes out for a long time
Then it starts to leak out like jam through a sieve
I don't think they want to come out
My life is an art of holding back
I'm always keeping it from exploding
Erupting
in one long loud chaotic ******
of pain or heartache
melancholy, happiness, wildness, rage, anxiety, avarice and all the rest
Oh god
It's all so near
Perhaps near to us all
Which is why we seek the infinite distraction
the world provides in plenty
Silence can *******
Because there's too much there

I don't even know what this song was about
Cigarette break

I love a good cigarette now and then
In my dream I can smoke them without dying
In my dream I can have the things I want
I'm not ashamed
In my dream I find all my lost sweaters
and I swim naked in the ocean

There's something wrong
when I see his phone on the couch
But he's not home
He's at the store
for sure
I say to myself
But my face slides down into it's familiar position because it knows
What I pretend not to
But it's hard to pretend
4 hours later
And it's hard to pretend
10 hours later
When I get off work and there's no new messages waiting
And even though I was cool
when he told me
he stole 700 dollars from me
It was hard to pretend
When he told me later
He'd been doing it for days

And so what am I supposed to do
when I return to this mess
To this overturned chair
******-up cover
This disgusting room tarnished by your wrath
Well I just turn over the pillow
to hide the tears and mascara stains
I just toss it over the other side is fresh
ready and waiting
But it smells foul like
******* please leave this house
Crafty manipulator that you are
You think everything has submitted
to your unspoken whim
Hiding weakness and sensitivity
It's plain for me to see
I know it seems like I know what I think
But I don't know what I think about you
Violator
You are a grotesque farce of a man
I take a shower so the water silences
and washes away my tears
So you don't even have to know
And I turn right-ways the chair you threw
So you don't even have to remember what you've done by tomorrow
But I will not go sit with you now
and watch TV
acting as though this never happened

I stand by the window
in front of my kitchen sink
in the motionless mid-winter noon
I'm thinking
Wandering
and I hear a bird call
through the cold air
from the height of it's branch
A saddest loneliest bird song
A plain unpretty song
more like a sound
but not quite enough to make it not a song
Plus
I know songs that sound like that
From high branches
In the blossomlessness of winter
It had just one song to sing in it's heart
It's heart had a one clear echoing sad little bird song to sing out
one time
to crack the clear ice
of the winter air
It sang not even loud
But it didn't have to be

I step out
to look at
to watch to
live
the sun setting over the ocean
down over the pool and the hot tub and the pavement
which is pink and peach
I pretend it's summer
as I sip my coffee shivering smoking a cigarette
Camel Crush
I have a crush on life
the sky is
sky blue and pink and orange like a hot day
not orange like winter which fades to black
only one bird
dots this vast seascape
flying high above the reaches of dreams
we do not know freedom
below, the palm trees sway and are happy the sun is not partial
it hits everything
the palms dance in it's light
to music from another time
every sunset is beautiful
Myrtle Beach
has stolen the sun from every part of the world
and spreads it across the ocean to the edge of the horizon
to make me smile

You know what
here I am
You know what I am
A forlorn drifter
Drifting ever the nearer
Close enough to see it almost touch it
Definitely pocket full of sand
Weighing me down on one side
Walking always walking gimpy dragging
Like a club foot--everyone stares but never says nothin
Like I'm in a big city all shut down at 4 am rapping at windows looking inside
Just to see not to hope
Or wonder
After everything closes before the early people stir
I take shelter in a side alley
Safe
No one draws near for fear
No one comes here
Other gutters filled with gutterballs, not my gutter
I move on I move on
I never leave a mark
I never land
I tread soft and silent
For a *******
People need to to know where they're going
They ponder they question and they find out
Something they already knew
That they invented
I don't ask questions.
I don't want to know.
I do know I'm coming up on it though
The edge
Cause I feel less human
Yet strangely twofold more
Desperation segued to having not
To having too much having very little at all
To morose disinterest
Brutality to punishment to disengagement
Whipped with the thorns of my stupid lie
You know,
I used to cry
I was a silly girl needing learning
Silly needed smothering out
A spark can conquer a forest and all it's trees
No point to die trying
If you're dead you're not on your knees

Dear Cristina
my friend Cristina
The wisp of March wind
could not have come sooner
I just walked down the road
in the purple hour
through an unearthly tropical mist
that swirled around my body
like the ocean swirls around a dancing mermaid
like the snow that encircles your body in a snowstorm
like floating on the enchanting breeze of a love song
I don't go to bed until dawn these days
when the earth is blue and sad
and echoes the emptiness of the desert with no stars
it makes me happy
it makes a strange sensation overcome my cheeks
as my teeth are exposed to the air
and my mouth stretches
into a smile
it feels a bit like pain
but it's not pain
and it feels a bit like acting
except it's real
a smile from the dawn of man
a caveman monkey smile of vague origin and strange ceremony
a smile that might disturb and perplex
even closest friends
but it is not my intention to frighten
so it's for the best that I am mostly in solitude
and that the few remaining friends I had
are all gone now
I bounce around from place to place
5 places in 5 months
I'd forgotten what it was like not to have a home
it's nice
I was spoiled
but I can tell you for a fact
I know
I am alive now
no questions asked
no doubts
I'm sitting in a ramshackle old beach house that's haunted
with a ghost made of mold
surrounded by a clutter of bizarre and beautiful paraphernalia
dusty antiques that haven't been touched in years
and little statues in corners hidden by five hundred green plants
dinosaur plants
here and there my clothes scattered about
my open suitcases in a corner
my new acid wash jeans bunched up on the floor
The kind you've been searching for
for a year now
I spent my last 5 bucks on them yesterday
I haven't much in the fridge this week
so I eat potatoes
I'm still on Steinbeck's "Cup of Gold"
sipping it slowly like a fine wine
the March break kids are in town this week
shooting off firecrackers outside my window
and stealing all the cool sweaters at Goodwill
We should go to Paris
on our way to India this fall
we're gonna paint that town
literally
until then
read some books
and go to the movies at night
and when you put on your first shorts
with still-prickly untanned winter legs
think of me

Riding out
away from neon half-assed action
the lights of cars ahead
blur in the distance
Driving out
out
out
Past all of it
to the ghetto
in the back country
I feel sick
like a stick's stuck in my throat
and a goldfish is swimming around inside my stomach
We get there
just in time
We turn down a dirt road
and we're amongst
banged-up crooked trailors
and parked SUVs with their doors open and lights on
I immediately open my door to *****
I watch people through wet eyes
congregate around the cars
some moving from car to car dealing
Deep bass sounds coming muffled out of bad stereos
Far-away fake laughter
but faces with no sign of joy on them
It's a hot night
We're nestled in the night
under a low scraggy treeline
in this little clearing
in a little hole in the wilderness
We pray for a chance
to survive
and to go on
surviving

The slam poet in cords, in denim,
rambles from neon beer haven
to flybuzz brothel, cracking quiet
jokes about soup to shiny junebugs
in the relentless moonlight.
One hundred dollars in thirty-five bills
slowly retreat from wallet
toward water-cut whiskey.
He’s got a chapbook widely
available at frozen yogurt shops
across the metro; he’s got a
tour in the works, tri-county,
every middle school from
Shawnee to Seminole; he’s
got a collection of ex-girlfriends,
made up almost entirely of wizened lesbians;
he’s got an MFA from UNC Wilmington,
and he shouts this more than speaks this
from his treacherous barstool to the sleepy bartender.
One of the girls, she takes him upstairs,
and to her he says, Your freckles—islands
in the sea of your milk-white skin.

The night passes, warehouses are razed,
and he watches the loft apartments emerge.
The food trucks come. He parks beside them,
typing poems made to order out of his trunk. The
money flows in, crumpled and sweaty and
in one-dollar denominations. The Old Fashions
transfigure into Old English. And in his pocket
thesaurus he looks for a word. It’s not vagrant,
nor vagabond. It’s not homeless, nor wayward.
He lies in the long shadow of a Midwestern sunset,
starved and shaking. Up from the blackened
city shrubs comes an indifferent breeze and
just as he thinks the word Pauper, he dies one
on the corner of 23rd and Western.