poetry was much more fun when i was a cynic.
i wrote about politics and mushroom trips.
i wrote on mental illness and suicide.
i wrote with a pencil on clean white paper,
and i wasn't in love with the idea of being in love.

i sent a postcard
from a deserted train car
but you threw it away and
wept over the way i wrote your name--
the last time you saw me
i was wearing a pink carnation
in a pin-striped suit
but i traded it on a cold night
nearly three years ago
for a swig of rotgut wine
and a
*****
postcard.

--now i'm waiting for you
to turn into a paper bird
and burn
into
me.

when i look at you now i see a woman
who is stronger than most men i've met
but i like to remember you as a teenage beauty
a weird girl with wolf-whistle legs
and white tan lines flashing beneath your
delicate wrist as you walk by in cutoff denims
and frank zappa t-shirt

i like to imagine your jade-inlaid navel in midair
at a romantic disco with soft ballet slipper pink
lips quivering but trying to build a castle and
i am slumped nearby on a dusty corner stage
waiting in orbit for you to notice me with your
notorious blue eyes telling me either to watch it
or come scratch it

the thought of you in a daisy print dress
makes me weak and warm in the secret
ticklish spot between my own navel and ****
but i am just a poet-artist humming the first
sixteen bars of in-a-gadda-da-vida with a
third eye glowing in my forehead

i am an inexhaustible trumpet player
transient and eccentric in a dangerous
helpless swoon in a citrus grove calling your name
and all you want to do is shut my mouth
or ignore the sounds i make but i found you
chirping in a bloom of tenderness on a clover bed

you had just drifted awake in full sunlight
engulfed by the tiger fire of your own hair
with a copper halo of fresh dawn on your
shoulders and we sat together on the floor
of that smooth gold green florida hillside
surrounded by dark patches of pine and oak
we were only children and you had a long smooth neck

this morning we sat witnessing an act of nature like
two peculiar dogs perched on a long screened porch
with a squeaky door my blond hair flying everywhere
and you blushing on your knees as the early morning
fog raided our skin and left the fragrance of the trees on
our noses and lips

the fog burned off after our daily adventure
leaving a light blue haze on everything it touched
and sunlight streamed through the open kitchen window
you made zucchini breakfast enchiladas and i
stood dumb at the table sipping a homemade
kiwi mimosa listening to you sing to the dishes in the sink

some nights you still cry and unhook your
earrings before joining me in bed and we
wait for the twilight reconfiguration discussing
moon-tides and planetary magnetism on our waterbed
until you've stopped crying but your nose is still running
you wipe it on my shirt curled up with your
head on my chest as the stress world melts away
or i'm up late at 3am in a tuxedo at the keyboard
tithing all my energy to you in the dim hallway
with your eyes still wet and shining like a night light

you are indescribable
and i'll sing to you forever
without adderall or **** in my blood
until you come again
by yourself alone
this time on the tile floor
feeling jovial and strong
and weak and slippery

you were crying at my window at dawn
& your hair was only adding to the flood
i hadn't gotten out of bed
remembering how our souls danced undressed
in lovely weather on the fringes of a fair
you looked like a red bird in the morning sun
i just lay there, stolen by your shining face

i've been a barbarian most of my life
stop me if you've heard this one before
my blind approach to the steep paths of the labyrinth
plunging hard & immediately untraceable
i am a rude ghost ******* to your friends
feigning imagined mystery like the
stage door of a circus tent
that day was beautiful and the sky clear
carrying mute birds with paper messages
but the rain is on it's way

but sometimes, most nights
i am a lamb upon your altar
when i recall how i asked you
where you want to be buried
i said i would search for it
with a hand grenade
& you asked me the name
of the town where i was born

& if i am an animal
i am one of the few that is self-destructive
i will bring the empire thundering down
i have chewed through my beautiful muscle
to get out of that southern state & into your door
with my face against the wet gold leaves
& my nose burned black from the snow & wind

i use these
as an excuse
for new material--

baffling?

i'm searching for the comfort
of an old flame to keep me warm
tonight knocking on familiar doorways
to foyers where my boots have already rested dripping
with snow or shedding beach sand and all i want is her
the one i remember in bouts of photographs
bright hair hidden in a knit olive colored snood
with big blue eyes set on full power
as we set out on the open road together car
packed full of soft blankets groceries illicit drugs
cigarettes and the fumes of santiago ***

she convinced me to quit smoking saying
she hated kissing the marlboro man and
i'll take you to the coast i said meaning
every single one because i had harbored
my love for her in a million ways of secrecy
and only survived on a currency of torture
pain inflicted
pain withheld
pain drugged away

she was absolutely perky for the first thousand miles
hair haloed and face lost in shadow as we drove
into the sun out of a cocoa beach condo
leaving behind bikini squeals and smiles
she was with me like an ethereal dream
eating scones on the boardwalk beach
in bitter cold new jersey and that night she was
a long legged american girl astride me
sweaty hollering in a secluded gazebo

she was a blur of parrot colors to me
spending most of july dancing in a daffodil field
in oklahoma while i changed tires on the
hyundai her daddy bought one after another i
just gave her the pink slip to my heart
under a pavilion of light pink fractal fabric
pitched on high beams ascending into
pale gold otherworldly billows

she's sweetly ****** and surrounded by patchouli haze
hanging off my back like a monkey wearing a
wide high fashion soft brim hat she found before
i surprised her with a bunch of freshly picked
wild violets from the roadside she
cripples me and we go tumbling
wrinkled and aimless both exhaling plumes
into the paisley purple sky already full of clouds
blowing straight north hair tangled together
full of windswept snarls barelegged now
and writhing creating craved friction
just two souls of pure energy on the loose

but the best memories i have of that trip
are the nights we spent in joshua tree
not-sleeping beneath a meteor shower every
night for a week when her *****
was still running the show and i
was just a poison rash itching her
calf muscle before i became the master of myself
we were a flurry mess of long naked limbs
tuned to the exact same frequency

she was a fresh meadow flower naked
under taupe corduroy overalls cut ragged
into shorts walking with her arm twisted through
mine and i thought i was the happiest man alive
when we crashed in colorado for two weeks
and every morning i woke to her incandescent
hair sprawled lazy on the karastan rug under
the turquoise glare of the television or to
the smell of a gong sized breakfast casserole
consisting solely of her dreams the previous night
and i would kiss her good morning with her hair
up in curlers and my face between her knees

but she started to grow wings in montana
little nubs etched out on either side of her spine
i noticed them one night while she was sleeping
face down chest stretched across my chest
i watched them grow the further south we got
and by the time we reached the heartland
under those glistening river cypresses
or the banks of that great muddy river
canopied by huge florida palms
she was itching and molting them all over the car
and she finally flew away from me
said she was born for the city but i hope
she's waking up now not under skyscrapers but
a metropolis of oak strands governed by the tyrannical sun

and since that day i've painted her lips on
every girl i've ever seen in the morning every
face that emerges from indigo ambience is hers simply
i hear her nothing-to-lose laugh in every fog or faint haze
after every lunar prowl through a mushroom ranch by the coast
my eyes get shined up with dew every time
i find seagulls nesting in a cypress grove holding
some kind of seance for the flash of sunlight off the nape of her neck
in front of the watery green sunrise of the atlantic
and in my teeth-grinding night terrors i have
a hard-on and i can plainly see her dancing
luxuriously on a deck stretched out over a shaded creek
tight and smooth like the skin of a djembe drum

and sometimes when i feel very weird
with something like sick stomach hunger
churning in my gut i shave my ******* clean
and trim my ***** hair into a crude cave-painting
version of a mountain lion just for her
i wade out into the sea passed the orange trees
and wait for the moon or her lips
to rise and lick me full on my face but
she doesn't return my calls suddenly
having phone
trouble i
guess

while the young kids
burn their lips on
unfiltered cigarettes
and the poets
are distracted,
i'm kneeling in an alley
flushed with desire
clutching your number on a napkin.

while the children
and the saints
are crying in dysentery
behind guerrilla masks and guns
i'm imagining the flesh of your stomach
folded over the length of my thigh
and the roar of a volcano
in your heart.

We drink only
for
twists of
dripping hot


time.

We do not know
all the rules.

in a dream that i can't shake
she was standing by a fence post, shaking
all alone with tears in her eyes
with the dawn on her breast and lips
and the stains from my kisses there too

then i turned to the east
and look myself in the face
i am the sun and i am tired
i haven't slept in days
because there are
better things to do
in bed
when i'm with
her.

I'm not trying to be
A ****-talker
Or ****-starter
But I'm also not
A side-stepper
And what what I really want to know is
Why there are so many god-awful poets on this site?
Who gave you the right?
What idiot told you that you could write?