last night
while you were preparing your
ammunition, i felt you
tugging at the tips of my hair.
out of all the strings in all
the universes, ours shook with
the same vibration.

last night
while you were preparing your
self for death, i was talking
to eric (with a c) from
the suicide hotline in new
york city. he told me i am
bright and successful, i wish
he had said the same to you.

this morning
while i was swimming in trazedone
dreams of new york city, a
woman, not too far from there,
felt her womb close like a
wing. the energy and matter her
body lent to an extension of
her bloodline was returned into
the universe. it has become the
brightest star, it has bloomed from
a poppy flower bud on a rocky hillside.

this morning,
while i was deep inside the caves of
my soft synaptic clefts, a
woman risked her everything
for the breath of two young children.
somehow, in the deep wood of my
slumber, i finally forgave my vice
principle. i finally forgave the vices
of my father.

this mourning
did not begin at 9:40am, that is just
when it culminated. you cannot tell me that
you don't feel it too. the rocks falling from
the sky yesterday were an omen.
the transgendered youth taking their
own lives are an omen. the carbon becoming
the atmosphere, the oil engulfing
the salted seas, the corals dissolving
in acid baths are all a shouting omen.

when the mayans calculated
the cycle's ending, they gave us
the gift of the wheel. the nature of a
circle requires revolution, the presence of an
ending requires a beginning.

how do we honor the gift of the maya?
how do we create a cycle of light?

that pressure on your chest is a
fear that you cannot do this
alone, and i'm telling you
you can't. how lucky we are
to have each other. how lucky we are
to have a new moon, the universal connection
to all sentient beings, the snakes that
slide slowly down ancient aztec temples,
the star that rises without fail in
promise of new freedom.

how luck we are for the teachers
how lucky we are for the artists
how lucky we are for the martyrs
and murderers and storytellers
and the collective unconscious!

if every single hand picks up an ember
from this wreckage, the power of our muscles
will turn them into diamonds, the sparks
upon our fingertips will turn us into healers.

imagine what seven billion healers can cure.

across mountains of infamy
pompey oozed his way down
the port like chèvre, the
screeching miles behind him.
he wanted to be alexander
the great, just like all men in
his position. in 1999 everything
was blue, and before that grey,
and somewhere in between a few
communists painted themselves green
and now we have vesuvius.
now we have the arctic ice
sheets falling into the ocean,
now we have machines that
turn root vegetables to liquid.

alchemy was never one of
pompey's strong suits, and for
this caesar mocked him
outside every bodega in lower
manhattan. a fine servant of
pythagoras was he, and his
feminine ability of transmutation
unparalleled among his contemporaries.

build tributaries for gravity.
don't let this world, with its
smug disapproval of tesla & *****
demand a full fledged eclipse
of your hair, the arterial extension
of your crown chakra. many
avian predators will create
ripples in your hyperspace
continuum, remember the myth
of gravity at times like this.
vladimir lenin was able to
come to terms with his reptilian
heritage, right there in st. petersberg,
right there in burma, right there
in pontus, right there in zaire.
why would a maple leaf constricting
a tail light bring forth a civil war
in archaic rome or egypt? as pompey

felt the velcro snap from his
spine when the swords went in, he
cried the same words that caesar
would a few years later. he said
"i gave your father my finest figs &
cheeses & you betray a guest at your
own psytrance party?" the nile
flooded low that season, but across the
sea in sicily the lasagna piled high.

that is what the buttons
on your flannel are.
everything else is honey
comb through my skin,
lava moving through muscles
you've had 200 years in this
wreckage and you still won't
say a word. then suddenly
i have to talk over you, suddenly
you can't fit your emotions into
your sentences so they start
creeping into mine. when i
kissed your scars, i meant to tell
you that i understand, that they
mirror mine, that you should take
pride in every curve you have
survived. you will not give yourself
that credit, perhaps that's why
you taste incredible.

off to nowhere leads the brush
and cold against the sky
a freight train runs a midnight rush
and here are night, and i.

i thought in times before, i saw
footsteps behind my trail
but now it seems the minotaur
hung blackness on my sail.

the fates, they saw my cord and sighed
they loved me through one eye
but in their hollowed skulls they knew
the haste of my demise.

show yourself
don't hide brown eyes between skirts,
hiking down your lace so nobody can see knee
caps. your arms are not a source of shame,
we don't all subscribe to patriarchy here.

reveal your intentions!
you can't bring something upon yourself
unless you were playing with flames in
the first place, nevermind be self aware of
the self sabotage of springing- the whisper
between the lines that you're still sprung.
and this is all hebrew to me but
if you're on the hunt for something i've claimed,
and he has no issue with being your prey,
then who should cook &eat; the game?

show yourself!
if you are smiling here, but hiding there,
how can i trust your prowl is pure?
after sniffing my **** &flirting; gently with the tree
aren't you going to ask yourself what
you want? did you smell yourself from long
ago? would you have asked a groom to buy you
a drink on your holy day, would you have asked
the groom if you could come stay with him one
night before his wedding, did you forget about sun
set &moonrise;? your makeup bag has your name
engraved in it so why is it so full of poison?

reveal yourself!
you know **** well i am delilah &i; will clear
cut this forest if you do not pick a tree.
i should show you compassion, but aren't you gonna
ask me what i want?

i thought i'd never step outside
lightly, without haste again.
how is it possible to stand in your air
without wool, new england?
it's the vitamin d sliding off
my skin into another *****, i
try to tell myself.

today someone i admire said that
i am dharma.
and i thought, he must be
confused, because i cannot
sleep until the birds converse, i cannot
read until someone holds me
at gunpoint, i cannot
do laundry until i am drip
drying in -4 degrees at wide eyed
3am. how does one who teaches me
claim i have done the teaching?

also, i thought i'd never watch the celtic
wolf pup with any woman
calmly, that my exotic fires will always
blaze your landscape when you
inspire my first love to lay eyes on
another, new england. i know you
favor the irish girls, i thought
i'd never lose that finger. but last
night when he kissed his
new blonde girlfriend in my
dream i didn't feel like fire,
nor ice, nor the typical acid bath
i expected to turn into.

it was more like the very
last snowflake gently swayed
her hips down to the peak of
mount olympus. the final atom to
complete a solution suddenly switched
to soft frothy white. i stared
at them a moment, puzzled while
the piece clicked in, your frigid
breeze irrelevant, without consequence
and the way laid out ahead of
me, cavorting down the mountain.

i want my life to open
i want my life to shut like a tired
ocean wave
i want to sleep and eat and
die, i want to die
and be reborn and
never have to look at any of this.

i want to drop this burden

i want to cry and cry and
i want someone
anyone
to understand this.
i want to feel a fire
i want to run outside and escape
escape     escape     escape
the word sounds like it wears
expensive cufflinks from a
boutique in downtown boston.

i want to ***** all over boston

i want to ***** all over myself
and then lick it back up,
lap it in, feel the chunks slide
softly down my pharynx.

when my faith is tested
i recoil into the lurid nest
by moonlight, by the sound of a lyre
whose blood whispers dank currents
into the low hillside.

and over the hillside
pour screaming maenads
who pluck from the damp ground
snakes for their altars.

a timid peak out of my grotto reveals
a crawling sailor scattered on the rocks.
Apollo’s choir releases hymns
from underneath dark sediment.

i am secure inside the den
the man writhes on the shore for help

but even if i let him in,
i will consume his rooted soul,
so he dies one way
or another.

foot
steps

does he really wish to
become absorbed by this
dark cloak? where he will kick
and drool and never again
see rain stretch over the Aegean?
as i have not seen past this
constant haze of lead,
an infinite bang on a finite drum i
played long ago into infinity?

and the swirls
of infinity
shedding outward like the
tresses of a fire haired fae.
a sprinting sugar fae,
the wind inside the hair
outside her head,
blowing behind her.

she dashes through the wood
until her feet fossilize
within the rock below.
one day several naturalists will find
the slabs of granite
and make a map of elegant
collarbone etched into hardened stone.

all the while i will guard this cave, alone.
and if my foes send winds as
messengers, i will saunter in
amusement, with an olive
on my tongue

the wind cannot destroy
the seashore,
the moon and sun
command the tides.

what if
when we play the tape recorded
song of rival birds in the wild,
the male of the forest
gets ready to defend his
territory, digging claws
into branch, arching beak
into moist summer morning

in the same exact way
we as human animals
open the watergates of our
veins, in response to
the tape recorded clouds,
crashing ocean waves, and falling
oak leaves which the creatures
from andromeda have
elegantly placed along the
freshly wiped laboratory
shelves of planet earth.

where is the cadence moving?
is it towards jesus christ?
is it towards a shining *****?
is it foreword?

how does anything happen
linear? how does anything happen
spherical? remember that time
when devin townsend masturbated me
with his guitar pick?

i'll tell you about this plum:

when albert hofmann gave me the
gift seven lifetimes ago, he created
a radioactive island. it needs no aid,
it sees no faces, it survives auto
trophically on moldavite &moonbeams;.

tight strands of betrayal
come out in licks, light of
cloudy afternoon, hiding behind
a thirsty sprinkler, bathing
my face in smooth anathema.

reiki rain will always run
off into the rainbow soul
gutters where i bathe.

inhale deeply.

what do you hide in
those claws, other than ice
water? it falls like a gong
until it crashes into me, and then
the warmth hugs it, and then
the molecules move so fast they need
milk of the poppy to release any
energy at all. when you told

me your rapids join an underground
river, and that i am the nile
hugging delta silt, i felt like a
sunrise, like a capillary, like a
sphere of light dissolving the boundaries
of our bodies. i want to follow

you like the nymphs of Hekate,
i want to breathe your torch because all
my faith is inside it. i want to gently
pull your son out of my horned womb,
under an old pinus halapensis
on the foothills of mouth olympus.

i want to fiercely hold you
like waves of the aegean
under a full aries moon, sky
clad with our soles half in water, half
in ancient rock fragments, the ivy

a filigree binding our wrists,
our soul merging into infinity and
then surging forever, like the
endless forest fires on the arid
and rocky venusian shores.

the new moon really got me restless, i guess.. spinning out the ceiling like some headless daemoness, don’t wanna give my car a rest over that pothole on the backroad and baby, i’m not scared when you throw punches, give it another go. that bubbly went straight to my head, a place you can never find- wind it up now i’m ready to dance again, haven’t got pulled over yet so strap yourself in and grind that skin, you’ll never win.
i’m too good at this, you said it
your
self.

enemiga mía, hace cuatro años
nos conocimos y hasta este día
todavía no hablamos ¿recuerdas
cuando éramos amistades?

todas las noches en la hierba,
la nieve, revolcandonos sobre el
piso y a veces en el
cielo. ¿qué le pasó a nuestra
unidad? estos días me temes,
estos días quiero perdonar.

te echo de menos.
deseo que seas bendecida
que se jodan los ex novios,
quiero ser otra vez tu amiga.

I don’t want to write this manuscript
I want to be a deep
Sea coral at the bottom of
A Norwegian fjord.
The great expanse of ice spirals
A rhythm to my swaying
Protected by the pressure
Of a bear hug water column.

Nobody will find me there except
Zooxanthellae who poured
Out from inlets around Greenland
Just to seek my warmth and
Feel the walls of my branchlets
Which they navigate like dirt
Roads in the Midwest, like oranges
And taste buds.

pouring myself over green candle magick
my hands are the warm wands
letting the healing eucalyptus fire
seep into my throat chakra
seep into the tulsi i’m brewing
the california poppy herb.
my olive leaf aligned in a
tipped isosceles
and your sound waves are
melting the part of my stone
wall that obscured self awareness.
but now, if just for a
few moments, i am
awake.
in the city it is the witching hour but
in the cosmos it is no-time
                                          infinitytime
ti­me is a river making
golden spiral waves
i am replenishing the circles
like ancient amber blueprints
now fated by the stars to be built.

*poem for grimes ~~

if the god of impulse and
furious fire decides to strike our
planets with etherial combustion,
then let us bathe each other in
plasma, let us crack like red glass
into madness, let us mine deep into
our lungs for oxygen and tie our wrists
tight with the bonds, proud, covalent,
bursting forth, so exothermic that
the molten waves submerge us.

we are not two animals who have succumb to
the embers of electromagnetism. we are plates in
the lithosphere who have built infernal mountains
across the ocean floor, millennia of melting together
atop the blazing peaks.

today i caught myself not
thinking about you for longer than
one heart beat. i was fooled.
had been completely engrossed
in a conversation with a judge
inside my mind, you're standing
across from me and our apocalypse
is here! she asks
me what i mean, she
hates my people but loves
my pedigree. if she asked you
what you thought of me would
you do right by jesus christ?
what rogue elixir could ever tie
the tubes before your embryonic
lies come spewing out onto this
relentless carboniferous slice of
spinning lava?

parasites
just like your guns,
you reckless bandit.
just like your sons,
a leech on the planet.

two moons have crawled across the surface
of gaia's crown and i am
still obsessing over your
death.
it's not fair, it's not real, and it wasn't
supposed to happen.

the news reporter didn't care and
the catholic priest didn't care and
the cops could give a **** less
just as we had expected.

heather, it just doesn't make sense.

and we all blamed it on ourselves
and then on the drugs
and then on the blue skies themselves
for letting the seams rip out from under you.

when we first met you held
that bottle with your teeth the way you hold
the sound waves so tightly
as you weave them round the corn stalks.

and when you bought me that pink wine
the day of the glitter, all i could hear
was your knuckles cracking blunt raps
and then edges of cans clinking
as the tower grew taller.
you passed out in your underwear that
night and i need to know
what did you dream of?

right before i lost my purse at the studio
a deer told me a secret that
i still can't understand, i still can
remember his hoof dragging like
morse code, and i think he knew
something, but mike was in the mudroom
and it was a hot summer.

and heather, it just doesn't make sense.

how could a sharp knife be bent by a feather and
how could an endless beach
suddenly disappear and
how could your embers be
bloated by water?

there are few people and things
that make you feel comfortable,
you know what i mean, like the
bowel comfortable, the clicking
into blackness, belonging through rebellion,
like every mistake and disaster
is a virtue because the night has birthed us that way.

i don't know if this has brought us closer
or farther, i don't know
what i'm supposed to tell you grieving
mother, i don't even know if it was
you in that casket, or a puffy scarecrow
doll they crafted out of fear.

just promise me i'll never forget the moon
that night at south harbor,
promise you will slip that sinister
smile, wherever you are,
promise we will smoke one more
dutch for your jamaica,

and i promise the streets of
southold will always breathe
your name.

draft coming in through battle
wormholes, they lead to a fixed
yet slightly cardinal dimension
that i no longer wish to
hunt in. if i were confined to ice
sheets as my platform, i'd need
to move to higher latitudes, but
fire remains my eternal ruler, and
the farther one runs from solar
radiation, the closer one gets to
bowels of magma.

the drill holes outlined in the survey plan for
photo points 23 and 46 could not be located.
the roots from garnet palace, promised to a
great moon-axis deity, chiseled from an
artery of zeus could not be located.

we have received contact from the physical
plane, and are now awaiting direction. we don't
yet know how to manifest our vibrations into matter.

if by any chance a moth should feel
the waves of this distress
call, we urge her to embrace
her fur immediately; to lie without worry
or obstacle in the slow delicious darkness.

give me back my blood and
i will give you yours.
i am crying into tomatoes
i am scrying with wheat flour
and there isn't enough black
pepper in the deccan plateau
to satiate my flaming roots.

i have just received a message from
the yavana tribe of iron india, and
they sent it through a slow red
river warm and creamy. do you care
to know what they said? of
course don't, you never have, and of

course i will insist to tell you. "he sinks you,
he covers you, he stifles the breath
of your core." they are ionians and
thus they understand the pain and peril
of drowning.

speaker of inferior tongues
you may not cross this earthen border
traitor from the Netherland suns
your chaos mask smells of forced order

on this land we do not follow law
on this sacred land i demolish your flaws

your genetic traits bear a history of ****
you have no true rank
and you have no ethnic tribe
your courtship is pathetic
your existence a mistake
i'm gonna have your baby
and then leave it on a cliff to die
i'm howling with laughter
as i curse its blasphemous blue eyes

***** of your mother's ****
as you lie with joy beside me
you'll think of names for your first son
whose birth is utmost blasphemy

on this land we do not interbreed
on this sacred land i destroy your vile seed

your genetic traits bear a history of ****
you have no true rank
and you have no ethnic tribe
your courtship is pathetic
your existence a mistake
i'm gonna have your baby
and then leave it on a cliff to die
i'm howling with laughter
as i curse its blasphemous blue eyes

it's only that i want to
permeate particles like marie
curie did. lay your lungs out
on a slab and i will show you
intricacies in fissures. i don't know if i
want you inside me but i definitely
want you inside-out. the aches come
on worst in the morning and at
night, hold me in those moments like marie
curie would. demonstrate an interest
in the unseen and i will bring you
spectrometry. demonstrate an interest.

voices happen all day and i am
fixated. that friendly fire barely
shows herself at all anymore, only
in your absence, like an ill-conditioned
cat. i don't know if you noticed but
my boots are booking miles. my daemons
feed on a seed in my back, so do not
wag that tail. do not turn those beads
of fleshy water, there are magnets that
your cornea can't block. i'm past my
half life and you've passed your lethal dose,
so don't let me decay into an isotope
with half my strength. i'm leaving

traces on the walls you can scrape off
like brown ice. don't let me decay into
a softer neon. hold me tight like marie
curie died.

when i think about you not
being here, i imagine outer
space. no gravity spacetime and
then rubbing your feet in a forest.

it's raining, but we have a  
straw roof. i'm obsessed with
collecting the water and you're
splashing it out of the clay jugs
telling me
it's infinite

laughing
kissing me
im on your chest. we're not saying
anything but we're using the rain like
morse code. my rain says i love you,
yours says something about a flying squirrel.

i laugh because you're weird
and then you kiss my third eye.

it makes so much sense, it
fits so perfectly, it fills all the
gel electrophoresis reservoirs.

its a spider watching her eggs
it's like when fluorine finds
hydrogen, that's exactly what it is!

it's a really high charge finding
a molecular body that brings it back
to equilibrium, that's what this is!

so i don't care what anyone says
because they obviously don't
understand molecular orbital theory.

she doesn't seem to have
time for a sceptic like you, the
stomach for a shot like you,
respect for anyone who dresses
acts or howls like you do at the
darkness. for her the darkness is a
hiding place, not everyone can see
down here. for her, intelligence and in
tegrity are hushed while clutching a north
face who said it was ok to do so.

but jesus said forgive her.

and we're in boston so let's face
it, everyone loves a redhead. no
body notices the shards of rotting oak
creating a biohazard near her temples,
as long as the hair stays irish and that north
face matches the free candy they're
handing out uptown.

but jesus didn't wash his hands

before he ate candy. he didn't wash them
after he caressed the lepers, he held his
***** palms up to the pharisees and said
"this is what i've touched," then they told him
he better put on a north face, and secretly they
tried to read the future in his lifeline.

first grade playground, greece: rena is getting
chased again, because on this planet fat
shaming works fine if you're trying to make some
one cry. and i hopped that fence so fast, what
would jesus do? and i got her to the other side,
and i told my classmates to go away, but her skirt was
caught in the wire and they got her to cry anyway.

plus we must be lesbian lovers (why else
would i help her?) plus i'm gonna catch her fat
ness (how else could this virus be transferred?)

and jesus was a carpenter. and jesus was a jew.
and jesus ****** mary in the books that never
made it, the ones they still keep hidden at the north
face headquarters basement. and jesus saw rena

and she was so slow, but gentle. and he said "it is not
what she puts into her mouth that defileth her." and
jesus saw us eat together, with mud under our nails. and
jesus saw iscah's red tree filigree spiraling from her blank
brainwashed eyes, and he saw the north
face covering her true form, and he warned the
pharisees that her clean hands do not sanctify her,
the poison which escapes her mouth DOES defileth her
because it was born of a cardiac poison, the coat she wears
is the mark of the elders; and we shall wear what we want.

the pharisees, of course, urged him to buy a north face.
but jesus gave me these ***** palms instead, he flung them filthy
in front of the elders' faces as he commanded me to love them
as i would love myself. and i'm afraid to

but i'll try.

i'll tell you something: every day
people are dying. and that's just the beginning.
the death which spreads its fingers
on their lips is nothing
but a window.
once they step outside the pain,
then anything is possible. the universe
is just a big old vacuum and
no matter

what you do, you’ll never stop the
constant spark: the entirety of all
existence. forget about
your birthday cakes, your lakeside strolls,
your speeding tickets and project deadlines
-those were all just vibrations
that came out of the light.

and i’ll tell you something else: on the day
you truly die, you will plunge into
a lake of dancing triangles. and when you swim
through violent ripples melting to a bonfire
drumbeat, and you reach the rocky shore,
you will find yourself a squeaking pup
in a fuzzy wolf litter, a striped shell collecting
erosion from the golden spiral, an infant of a Lithic tribe
whose members scooped you out of the
harsh winds and left nothing
but afterbirth poured like puddles in their
foot steps along the Bering Strait.

why hadn't i thought of this before?
why are children hidden in the floor?
why is our mother missing and
why is carbon four hundred parts per

human? historical doubts, unusual droughts, i thought
i'd never say it but **** canada. **** budweiser, ****
saint valentine and his pagan oppression, bless my blood
for being dark. there is consciousness in the pores of corals,
a strong mind in the **** at the polar regions of this table.

i am not an arctic hare, i am not a vector
for your raging codependence, four meters
into the thermosphere i am not vulnerable to
methane, early snowmelt, or severe wildfires

but you are.

i need this listerine for my bad
breath he said, but i knew better
than to give him a quarter.
he begged me with blue eyes
and every puff we exhaled into
the back bay that grey morning.

i’m here to help
i answered him
and i’ve been there-
at McLean in ART, where the girls
didn’t like me cause my music
was a trigger. but
i pulled through, sometimes
on my own, with help
from a court appointed drug group
(even though i carpooled
every wednesday in a baked
out mini van).

i’m here because day after day
i dragged my spinning
body to the toilet, sun dawning,
to spew bright yellow fluid
into the waiting water.
and i’ve hit the ocean floor:
i used to sniff the bowl to make
the ***** come up faster.
i’d say if i get up again in less than ten
minutes, it’s gonna be a rough day
(but yesterday started this way
and i ended it with a beer
in my hand anyway).

i’m here because when
officer spirito dragged my racing
body through the hallways handcuffed,
because of the purses
missing from the locker room,
i still spent the night on the
closet floor rocking back and
forth, knees to pounding
chest, a hollow
voice on the phone saying i’ll be fine
(but i know that ****’s cut
with ether and i’m gonna
need a hospital).

i told my sponsor
i wanna get clean cause
dope is taking my friends one by
one like bowling pins, and i’m lonely
cause all my ex boyfriends
are still locked up
upstate. she just told me
to pray to god
(but everybody knows
that prayer only works
in emergencies).

i’m here because that relapse
my first year of college got me
pretty close to death. i didn’t know
i could puke that far and
the emts didn’t know
a heart could beat that fast.
but **** the past
and **** the future. i can’t
say much about the rest
of my life, but i can
make sure i’m sober the rest
of this night. you can get through
centuries one hour at a time, so
since i know what you want it for
why would i give you that quarter?

no response except a drop
of spit hung from his silver beard
like a pendulum, and the smell
of the chicken i left to cook
too long inside that soup kitchen.
if i didn’t laugh, i would have
cried the whole
time that he said to me
i need this
listerine, baby,
i need listerine
i need this
listerine for my bad
breath.

a sign shoved in the dirt
identifies the hamlet you've just entered.
each crop is a town spread over the fork.
years ago, inside their huts,
algonquins traded wampum, trembling in the ice age,
popping their corn to the beat of the glaciers,
exiled a ****** from mattituck to cutchoque.

now we smoke our own peace pipe
on the sands of the tranquil sound.
the only algonquins left are huddled in the bed
of a ford, laughing in the sunlight.

i walk down to the cemetery
i walk down to the train tracks
i walk down to cooper's farm
and they all climb into me through my ribcage,
and hide my poison under the grey
stones scattered through love lane.

some people built houses they only visit in the summer,
but they've never seen the inside of the broken down valise.
some people like to ride the carousel in greenport,
but they've never rolled down third street,
smoked blunts under the halfpipes,
picked crystals off the bay and eaten them for breakfast.

i tell the people that i know
about the great big world outside,
they nod and light a cigarette,
they speed faster down sound avenue.

some of us ended up in boston and some in manhattan
some are still battling the current, trying to escape,
but let's face it:

your graduating class parks outside sevs every morning
the men here have paint on their knuckles and black dirt on their boots
the streets are not spotted with lights,
but you know how to weave through them as
fast and blind as the blood knows your veins

when you step foot here, it's like a magnet grabbing your toes,
when you drink your cheap beer and
complain that your neighbor knows your business,
just remember that at least you've met your neighbor,
just sit down there and listen to the crickets in your veins.

you reeled me in from
the aegean's slow murmur,
my gills covered in algae, my jaw
chomping rhythmically under
the hollow tree of my mouth.

didn't anyone ever teach you that
fishing for nymphs is more painful
than comb jellies, slower than marlins and
as safe as the glowing earring of
an anglerfish mother?

on the deck of your vessel
you cradled my skeleton gently,
fed me crispy hard coral and
begged me not to eat you in
the night, when mars made his way

toward the fiery backdrop of our
natal charts. how intrigued i was to
find that under your beard hid a
chain mail of scales, the map of
your palms was drafted in plasma,

and your iris is not pigment, but
a distant reflection of geysers
snapping like scorpions out of
the ocean floor.

you spent the nights dancing to the
howl of sirens like no man i'd
ever seen, and somewhere between
our fingers, where you passed me
the whiskey, i threw my arms up
and remembered how to move.

you spent the days following the
wind's hips, you didn't care if she
changed her mind, you said.
you are like the belly of a sea
star. slowly in the twilight
i uncoiled my fear of wandering, i
threw the pit into the open ocean and
the rope followed, slithering down.

now all we have is constellations.
all we have is moon fragments and
bird islands and my hair flying
like a compass, like a shining battle flag.

i can't smell land for miles
and i am not afraid.

in an ancient temple
under a taurus moon
you showed me your feathers
with pride, as if my flaming hair
could not consume them.

today you brought no water but
flew from it, you betrayed the
constellation that ascended the
horizon at the moment of your birth.

and how did you convince
a priestess of fire to offer you saline
streams amidst your drought?
it must have been aphrodite crawling
in skorpios, it must have been ****
amphetamine mania, it must have been the milky
way my owl mother raised me.

and if by chance it was your fingers commanding
chords, if it was the scar upon your
chest, if it was your moth-lust, your
keen prose, your wolven lunar howl,
then i have been stung once more while playing
in the poison. it was likely just my
horns itching for your ex's over
powdered eyes. it was probably my god of war
demanding human sacrifice.

you ill-fated soul, how you must thirst now
in glucose starved darkness. don't you know i float
freely in deep lakes beneath the caves?

don't you know a python chokes a whooping crane with pleasure?

this is the finally finished poem that i had uploaded last year as untitled:


wake up inside a faerie
ring, sun probing
between canopies,
a musty odor leaking
out of the Styx, the dark
Master waits in hollow,
aching trees.

from the stumps
he calls to me, he wants me
to play hide and seek.
he can't hear, but he smells
and feels each warm, hungry
step bringing me closer
to the river.

a stew in my chest,
a stake for my shoulders,
i know he is my ancient Master but
i though i was released.
now i drip down like the slugs,
i scoop jelly out
of my eyes and feed it to my children.

like the bite and bark
of a Celtic Oak, i slice off calluses,
stratum by rooted stratum, till
i have a full basket of raspberries.

i just want to slide this naked, dead
weight body across the pointed treetops.

by the light of starving embers, i eat
my knotted hair and cough up muddy ice.
i burn down teepees at night so i can see
the souls of screaming children
rise like red dust to Andromeda.

last night the Acid burned
a hole right through my cauldron,
and when i could see
the other side,
i sat there- speechless, dumbfounded,
at all i had
forgotten:


a ball of mugwort, still aflame,
a purple spiral galaxy,
ten micrograms of safety,
and an echo
that escaped from me
every time i tried to pet it.

the flames are a warning. that quick
paced *** ***** of a flower shedding
fire-pollen, the same substance found
amongst the flora of that salty gelatin
core of earth, melting the mountains
together with her belly dance.
"onward," she whispers "we have waves
of high frequency yet to consume."

closing latches,
pistanthrophobic, antifocused
brown books full of
wet matches

pounding iron to iron
lips to live wire
sparking and convulsing like
torn off lizard tails, like
a fruit fly holding on
when the wind has other
plans for her

when the wind has other
plans for fire
flames just laugh
while drinking them

so why are my flames contemplating
containment and compliance?

a horde of kale &western;
europeans longing to be gypsies, not
knowing their grand daddies
shoed us from the train station
at central square for the shape of our
noses. i like to imagine all these
blonde northface gypsy women
look in the mirror at the age of 8
&beg; God for plastic surgery, beg
Him to look normal, to
feel safe in the sugar cult
ure asphyxiation through her child's lips with so much hair on top
she's mortified she wants to make a
pact with God! but her grandfather
was enforcing national socialist curfew
on stolen earth in the winter of '43 &mine;
was in an execution line. if the german
troops tagged behind her beautiful blue
eyed smile &asked; which village she
hails from would she hashtag gypsy?

an old friend of mine
keeps paying me visits
in the early hours of the
morning when the dogs bark.

she is here now,
swirling her pale finger through
my hair, trampling mud through
my trembling synapses.

she traces over my scars, smiling
she reels the shrieks out of my trachea
she carefully collects the tears from
my jawbone and adds them to her murky hourglass.

i try to tell her i can't
play now, i have things to do,
but we both know that itself
is the reason for her visit.

let me tell you a
story. one time something
convinced me that i was not
beautiful. it was society
it was anxiety it was
the others and the i.
then i took a sage trip on a
spaceship, i sat inside myself
the real myself, and felt
the warmth of the core of the
earth, i felt the power surge down the
roots of my feet, i felt
the light at the center of me
and it was connected,
somehow inseparable, from
the sun and the moon and the
other stars. now that i have felt this,
the "size" you speak of illudes me.
what is it? a warp in space
time, a measure of gravity?
how huge are you, really? a dot
inside a planet inside a galaxy
inside a universe. what do you really
feel when you have so few clothes
on? irrationality that can be turned
into freedom within an attosecond
infinitysecond. what do you really
feel when you have so few clothes
on? listen to the wise wolf
woman inside you.

you remind me of a dark place-
my mother’s village
far away,
first day of third grade
blonde girl cried through eyes
the color of my country’s basins.
she wasn’t new to this world,
she wasn’t lonely and confused,
tripping through a concrete forest of
false idols and plastic shadows,
just missed her brothers.

a pitiful excuse for survival.

and i
(olive skinned, hair on my legs,
stubborn, reckless,
fire chugging aries,
everything a jagged rock to scale,
all the bodies must be sniffed
before i release my eyebrows)
always hear your muffled whisper,

coating the air like dew
the intimidated glances
hit me blunt in the face.

but holding my tongue is not an option.
your baffled countenances nothing but
fans tickling flames.

you people are connected like iron on a magnet
and god forbid one of you steps out of the line
one of you speaks your sick mind
one of you opts not to shock the man behind the wall
and devours the corpses instead.

i want to cry, i want to throw things at your face,
i’d want to show you my tribe is better than yours,
if i had a tribe to speak for.
i want to walk into a portal and never see
any of you again.

you think your smile conceals your malice
your innocent voice a curtain at intermission,
but the aliens see everything and
when they arrive, they will only take me
back with them.

just feel this rush of happiness
about the mushroom on my neck
remembering a cold criminal past
as i walk the path of a
sun-kissed, auspicious future

in a field that never ends
in a field that stretches out and
kisses the dirt roads where i used to
conduct my wretched business.
i still visit there,
only now my head's on tighter and
i have numbers in my pocket and
patience for the bus

never knew there'd be so many gains and losses
that came with growing up

but i think i'm getting the hang of it.

it's cold in the gut, like
that first time you had to throw
a sea robin back, even after
the hook had reached through his
left eye. cold like the flapping
of blackfish in a bush asphyxiating,
as i have all day. if dying as a
fish were so easy, oh how i'd love
to jump from the caves of anchorage
into the pacific; how ironic, an iron
islander on your brittle coast.

sometimes the way you hold your spliff makes
milk come out the bottom and i love to
watch it dance around your bottom lip.
i can't bring myself to scan the past, the
beads falling to my cheek refuse to
move, even in my highest doses.

sleeping without you,
it's free and slow but it's also 6am.
and what do i really want? with freedom?
with comfort? forgiveness wraps her white
chiffon around my breast, heart vibrating, but
the horns on my temples take it away.
those old relics, the constant frontal pyramids,
they rip everything open without my permission
and yet they hold the fire through which i thrive.

if you were here you would say, do not
take the seroquel. i listen even in your void.

sleeping without you,
it's a crater in my back, right now i
don't want you back but —imagine!
i wail right away when i see your
frown in my third eye, where would my
anchor be and how would you find sails?
and your hair, would it darken from
missing my fingertips? and my waist,
would it harden if you did not open its
harbors? and what about our hands?
the magnets in the lines of our palms,
they will probably tie cords to each
other until a loss of frequency.
most importantly, what would the

stars think? would they form the same angles
or would the earth be forced to move backwards?

sleeping without you,
i'm so enraged, but please don't
make me do it. you are not an ocean,
you're a fjord. glacial ice irises, a
buffer for the north sea's calamities, a
singular and diverse habitat. if i could no
longer rest my head on those whisper
waves, i'd stare at my palms all day,
i'd wait until they found your lifeline.

break down your snow
flake ******* obsidian,
what did you lace my ****
with that forced me to join
the yakuza in service of
the rising sun?
what kind of anthropocentric
jehovas witness temple
taught you to count?
to envision the navel of
gravity? you say there is no
tectonic plate beneath us,
and yet we stand on the
trench of your lies.

today i achieved the farthest state from meditation
humanly possible
i slammed down the horn when the
wrinkled egg tried to place her stick in front of her.

my cat's hunger is only met by my
own intestinal growls,
and it's my anniversary.
i belong in a tribe of chimpanzees.

i'm too lazy to shower,
too angsty to sit still,
too apathetic to lift even one limb from that
sweet honey mud that clings to me,
that bubble of no-space, and
i have so many ideas.
i want to do everything.

but the pebbles turn to dark walls when
they should be cobblestone,
everyone cares and is trying to help me
i'm alone, alone, alone.

in a thicket of white
robes, grape jelly &electrodes;
i hid carefully an a
typical circular sanity anti
psychotic. it tasted industrial
in that space between my gums,
it bled a fertile crescent out
of the sock in which i left it.

underneath her floral
robe, wild black hair &pointe;; nose
she hid playfully a plot
of bones laced up & showed me
the secret at sunrise. it looked
so familiar in the gently rising
fire, it turned a prison into
a hemlock forest, it gave a
new meaning to the empty term "wing".

in my life there have been many
mothers, but this one had a smile of
pure patchouli & this one shook
my cot until i was awake.

in her life there had been many
storms, and the day she surrendered her
lips to the water a fisherman hooked
her & untangled her bones.

they say i'm supposed to smell old
memories, but a decade later i
most clearly hear her singing.

they say light is a particle &
sometimes it is a wave, &when; it
is which depends on where your boat
is floating. &tha;; time i was a
fish with a hook through my eye
i kept swimming downward to salvage my life.

i was afraid of brightness drilling holes
in the surface, afraid of the dark spots
under the corals, and the whole time i
struggled to breathe in the water, she
patiently reeled me into the moonlight.

imagine my amazement when i saw my own two feet.

what sick mutiny caused
eyes to dictate righteousness?
if you have a brown iris you
are not invited into valhalla
until you have paid your dues
to the karmic protein memorabilia.

i never checked how long this
pie will take to thermoregulate.

strands for animals and strands
for fungi and braids for plants
and still not one article on
archaea. push your hands together,
listen to the hair grow from
your knuckles. push your minds together
and listen to the neurons coiling
around each other, preparing to
reshape the face of the earth.

a thirst for the divine inspiration
which is probably hidden
in this coffee bean.

structure & form are reflective of
meaning & function,
so what does that make my body?
what does that make my face?

other people's opinions are always
teasing like they were brushes
and the strands of my hair were days
but the 80s are long gone and
i've got bigger dogs to wrestle.

if you compare a strong mule to a
peeping baby bird
you've wrapped up the history of thought
in two corrosive words.

i want fervently to have hope in my species.
but i walk a path that weaves tight
between compassion & contempt.

if structure &
form are reflective
of meaning & function,
then i am trickling down
with the fresh melted snow,
pouring myself in a muddy stream
filled with silver gold spirals that span
the visible spectrum, elongating & growing forever

if your body is a particle, then
my body is a wave. it's like what
you said about gas flowing through
machines, but electrons are here or
they are not. how come i can still see
them lined up inside the ceilings, buzzing
like plasma, at the top of their slide?

if we were to reverse the magnetic
throne of the cosmos, we would need
a loud flash in the sky, we would need
to sift softly through fingertips of the mid
atlantic ridge, hiding some old geological
secret between spiderwebs of sediment.

or perhaps we could just use the polarity
of your countenance. when deep layers
in your bottom lip mold into the glowing
curve of a waxing crescent moon, the
circuits lose hold of their currents like
dry wells, the ancient secret is unveiled.

and that is what you want, right? an
apocalypse. a royal key into the ground
through wilderness. once we return the roots
of our ancestors into dirt, will we suddenly
connect the triangles looming in a nuclear sky?

you and i, we lick our bonds so tight, if anything
crashed into them they'd shapeshift into seismic
waves released as thermal energy.

Finally the dial has moved its shadow
to punish my careless scandals.
You tell me it is not too late
while burgundy drips
from your white lip.

When we fled Actium, I felt
that thrill we get from
running in thick darkness down the
muggy streets of Alexandria,
clutching one another’s hands, dressed up
like peasants, the wine
grasping our veins so tight, it
rivals the clasp of your fingers.

But now the wine spills from
your mouth, stinging my eyes
like a pearl in vinegar.
You will always be my
fierce warrior, and this
is my fault, my fault.

Tomorrow Nathifa brings to me
an asp obscured by autumn’s alms-
the living wombs of figs will bear
death for me beside my lover

so we can share an earthly tomb,
so we can take the heart of Egypt
with us to the afterlife
and watch our sacred souls
unite to reign forevermore,
while our bodies peel away
and slough off
and are carried by rain
into the winding Nile.

in the tropical blanket
when the forest whispered
the first letter of your soul
you held a soft stone
to the empty ***** of earth
and chiseled pieces off
its skin to the beat of
the cracking rain pulse.

in the thick of moon milk
when my hips shouted
the number of your pack,
we burned the guts
of a fattened pine
and watched its tears and blackness
escape with howling fury
into the crystal shards of wind.

somewhere in the plasma
where you had scratched eyes out of
trembling waves
where you hid the drops of saturn
that otherwise would have collected
on the surface of your dreams,
an eagle laid her eggs
and dusted them with starlight.

was helen of troy named after greece?
or was greece named
after helen of
troy?