Mother dearest, please stop crying.
Your eyes are red and waterlogged
like a heart in a jar
of seawater.  Those clumsy eyes
dropped their intentions again,
dropped their bombs without thinking
about the impending nuclear winter.

The say grave flowers are watered
by tears, by grief and love (and good
fertilizer).  Considering your ****-filled
flash of teeth, you should know.
Your heart is a graveyard, flowering
with thorny roses and black
berries, locust trees and crab apples.

If you shook any harder, you
would jostle yourself apart.  Rusted
bolts twist free of their joints
rolled too tight.  When you collapse,
you'll say it's my fault again.  But,
how can I shatter your bones when
you never let me stand for myself?

This howling monster will eat
me alive; that is no question.
My bones will grind between
its teeth, white powder in a void
black maw. I can feel its breath
on my neck, wet and hungry
like a teenage boy in the dark.
This howling monster will not be
satisfied with surrender; only sunder
will fill its canyon belly. It can
rest no moment until it is fed.
Those eyes are too full of souls.

This howling, monster will cannot go
quietly,
              growling I EXIST
                                              until its throat burns.

The milk man died last week.  I didn't
know him well, just enough to know his favorite
chew and how much he hated Fritos.

I knew his lover and her worn-out
windbreaker, her frizzled hair as gold
as her Marlboros.  I sold her a pack of silvers

once and she nearly snapped my neck.
They take (took?) their tobacco dead
seriously.  She hasn't come back

to work yet, though her five allotted
days of grief are over.  The empty
milk crates just aren't empty anymore.

I never liked beets; too soft, too red
too round, too bulbous,
too much like a bloodmoon.

I cannot live in these shaman
sleeves. They're heavy as rocks beneath
the waves, soaked to the bone
by a salty, sunless sea.  Too much
blue is bleeding into billowing wool, red as beet.

There's never an anglerfish
when you need a light, no beetbulb of flame
for that last rush of smoke before the black
undercurrent squeezes the air too thin.

My hair smells like you--
Old Spice and popcorn smudged
lips.  Hold the butter.
I want grease dripping
from your palms, a salt
sea of foamy yellow.  We
reject kernels bob along
unpopped, burnt, steamed to bursting
refused the right to blossom.

The neighbors have a noisy truck
spitting exhaust onto my rear
window. Gray. Hazy. Ugly
as the reason you're covered
in glitter.  You taste like gin
and ginger, orange tea and cold
chai latte, notebook paper
in a dark coffeehouse.
The elves are holding hands
but your hand is on my *** and
this movie's boring--wood
pannelling in a split-level apartment
above your father's bathtub.

Your mother wouldn't like me.
She's a ***** anyway.  You tell me
she can't cook because she can't
subtract.  But you're no good
at math either, lovely boy. Double
your handprints on my ***.
Curl your toes to the three-four swirl of my hips.

This is the desk I sit at
and this is the desk where I love you too much
and this is the typewriter that sits before me
where yesterday only your body sat before me
with its shoulders gathered in like a Greek chorus,
with its tongue like a king making up rules as he goes,
with its tongue quite openly like a cat lapping milk,
with its tongue -- both of us coiled in its slippery life.
That was yesterday, that day.
That was the day of your tongue,
your tongue that came from your lips,
two openers, half animals, half birds
caught in the doorway of your heart.
That was the day I followed the king's rules,
passing by your red veins and your blue veins,
my hands down the backbone, down quick like a firepole,
hands between legs where you display your inner knowledge,
where diamond mines are buried and come forth to bury,
come forth more sudden than some reconstructed city.
It is complete within seconds, that monument.
The blood runs underground yet brings forth a tower.
A multitude should gather for such an edifice.
For a miracle one stands in line and throws confetti.
Surely The Press is here looking for headlines.
Surely someone should carry a banner on the sidewalk.
If a bridge is constructed doesn't the mayor cut a ribbon?
If a phenomenon arrives shouldn't the Magi come bearing gifts?
Yesterday was the day I bore gifts for your gift
and came from the valley to meet you on the pavement.
That was yesterday, that day.
That was the day of your face,
your face after love, close to the pillow, a lullaby.
Half asleep beside me letting the old fashioned rocker stop,
our breath became one, became a child-breath together,
while my fingers drew little o's on your shut eyes,
while my fingers drew little smiles on your mouth,
while I drew I LOVE YOU on your chest and its drummer
and whispered, "Wake up!" and you mumbled in your sleep,
"Sh. We're driving to Cape Cod. We're heading for the Bourne
Bridge. We're circling the Bourne Circle." Bourne!
Then I knew you in your dream and prayed of our time
that I would be pierced and you would take root in me
and that I might bring forth your born, might bear
the you or the ghost of you in my little household.
Yesterday I did not want to be borrowed
but this is the typewriter that sits before me
and love is where yesterday is at.