just look at the overgrown flood in the field
that was an ice skate rink

it's for the kids to skate but they won't
skate they'll pout and shoot is what

who the **** ice skates I have a tiny
pistol I stole and I want your wallet

I walk past the sad sodden ice rink
a cold flood in a forgotten field

where children would skate but now
they can only lurk

I think I'm suffering from something. This morning I woke up feeling a weight on my chest. I felt like a compass at the core of the earth, it was like all that iron was just throwing me for 360 degrees. And I realized what it was, like, I'm just trying to be successful, you know? And that hunger couples with fear so much for me. I'll wipe my eyes, and lay in bed in a scared stasis. A feeling drops through me *******. First it's a desperate feeling for action, to do something, to be productive. Then this desperate complacency washes against it. A rock, a body, a me.

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.

Hers are the awful kind of lips,
like a flounder split down
it's flat middle,
with it's tiny intestines
licking outward for more salt.

This is the broken sea
of love.

Your love is the kind
that makes a fish out of her.

Her lips are mercury-colored
and mercury-shimmering.

Inside that fat head of yours,
while she kisses
your belly full of hair,
you are constantly
swerving and shivering
looking for the sharks.

But you are comfortable,
in a way.