With my hands on the back of your neck
I see the crackling raising erecting
Of your swan skin
My thoughts are gasping for breath
       Going upwards in the
            Filling shame
War and city battles, apartment bullets
Motel room fiascos, jigsaw pounding passion

With my body cutting you down the center like a diamond
I’m breaking you into formlessness
Jagged like clean glass
I’ll pray to your white scars
              I’ll reinvent myself
Come out of the still lake
             Cleanse myself in black oil
Lips like razor blades, teeth like wet wings
       Innards on the pillow case, on the
Boring walls, on the idols

With your hands around my neck, your fingers in my mouth
Cheating life out of life
Taking it out on one another
                    Bruised peaches bleeding on the ****** scene
Dead red balloons left over, molding cake
Boot marks on the white rug
I want you puritanical, *****
We’re finished
We’re glowing
Lifted up waiting
for the floor.

Tamed not
I cannot believe in this beating so much
Let rot
We need to calculate this, we’re *******

You Lady Laz-
No, you my Plath
With your heart in reverse
Your hand on mine
On the relation gears
Your lover and his shadow’s near

You cruel shrew
You insatiable cage of bones
******* like a goddess at daybreak
I do love you.

This, my confessional
This, my pornographic revival
Eat me
**** the air out of my
Thin second coming
**** the miracle marrow
Of my bones, make a soup
Say a spell, yell, melt.

A mouth like a witch
Hands for my itch
Bit chiseled by bit
Us, lower in an atmosphere
Hidden from the house on the hill
Hands full of placebo-***-pills
Tiny wrists shaking in fear

Tamed not
The muddied housewife
The war plot
The trapped door trigger shot

God is love
Love is biochemical
Love is the bathroom stall

Holes everywhere
In the walls
In everyone
In the suspension
I cannot believe
In at all

You were born better than me for now
More prepared, your skin smoother, even,
Your black boots that look like
They’ve been licked by junkies
Your oil-eyes are able to divide the images
T.V. orange and a tangerine
One is not the other
When I will seep inside the hole in you head
I’ll pick and pull to get you
Really get you
Before your full mouth moves
I’ll nod and tell you
Quiet quiet, I know I know
I am an idiot, I run scared
I hide in cars, I cry at celebrity gossip
The red carpet is the ****** scene
Your tongue rolls the same way
Unrolls, let’s the stars fall out
Then rolls, let’s me disappear inside
I hate myself
I reach for better thing than the sky
I grab your hand in mine and I reach for
Toy monsters
For romances written by wine and ****-buddies
For meaningless problems
For music carved in plastic
I let you unguide me, undo the zipper, unbreak my glasses, the ones that are tiny mirrors
But then you speak
And it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen
So
I make surgeries on myself like a night-doctor
I build a tree house in a pear tree that you can’t see

Yes, that’s me buried up to my head in your yard
Yes, that’s me telling strangers I am dying of sadness and lack of substance
Yes, that’s me trying to fit in your head
Yes, this is me setting myself on fire wearing nothing but your black boots
I win.
Keep ignoring me
I write better poetry (and we all know I hate poetry)

La. La. La. La.

The cursed and fated prince had prophesies, I’ve got soap operas
I’ve got night and nights of blank, blank, ****
I’ve got a freezer-burnt heart
And pictures of you drinking neon drinks
I’ve got the dichotomy and pungent mixture of art and ****, of God found in the gutter
You’re drinking anti-freeze aren’t you?
That would mean so much if you were
Keep ignoring me
I’ll send you my hands when you’re done with them
They won’t work
               But you can touch yourself with them
     They will be gray
Paint them red
A red that can’t wash off.

Everyone around me
      I guess I’m at the center
Is coughing, coughing in the warm sunny day
                        The blue bright happy day
They cough like they dig at life
They cough the toy-factory worker’s cough
The cough dressed in summer dresses
In high heels and red shoes and tuxedoes
Cough up wine cough up cheers and congratulation
Cough out their
“don’t worry about it” sickness
cough out pop songs, cough up boppin’ along
cough out vows and Hallmark poetry
cough deathbed knock-knock jokes
“it’s me, Death, coming for your blue-eyed boys”
cough out laughter like phlegm
cough up black bile as a party trick
cough up recollection of stuffed animals
(you and I are in there)
gasp for breath, their faces filling up with blood
going from apple-red to royal purple
eyes dishing out tears
a pat on the back
and everything is okay
people are wrong
about the center holding.

1.
You say the most awe-full things.
You say things.
And if that's not troublesome enough
You really put your guts into it
When you say:
"If you want me to dance
I have to be able to hear your
beat"

That strange flight
I don't make music for dancing
I make music so the dancer and the dance are impossible.

2.
The ears attached
The you can only say one thing
when dancing is impossible
The thing is:
"I want you to give it to me,
Anyway you want"
Standing on the ground
in a bedroom open-ended
hair, shooting out like rays
I can't tell if I lied or not
about dancing.

If you had a more pretty name I would use it
You’d find it splattered all over in my blood your name in blood
You are fleshy like balloons like *** dolls they find in yellow celebrity cars
But I did do did do did do  love you
I don’t care that your head is filled with green pool water
I don’t care that any of Donne’s poetry doesn’t speak of you
I mean any of it. The weird sisters, the witches have done me in.
I want to boil your chick-flicks, your cheap religion, your bad vampire stories
And take the needle to the jugular, filled from the cauldron
If I fed you some of you to you you would say
“I think I’m going to be sick”
I would want to unroll my finger and point it at your face
And scream with my inside-voice
“Ah-HAH!” That’s meaningful. With the casket
you are deep and beautifully empty
We need more of you, I will clone you and rename you a thousand and one times
I want to crawl through the wet streets like you
Unconcerned and perfectly meaningless
Perfectly meaningless
*******, I am becoming, fitting to you and
I am crazy and
I want you to get this
So bad I feel bad, the lady-killer, the ****** unsexed puppeteer’s got nothing on you sugar; you are a plastic pie,
a blackberry one
Your name is always in pink bubble letters in my shrinking head
After I used the needle I will hide it in your bed
And when you bring shining boys from the night
And you don’t put on soothing **** music
It will ***** one of you
I hope you deflate and melt like a witch and scream and scare yourself
But all the magic will already be boring in my veins
And meanwhile I’ll be morphing in a back seat car
And under long trees shaking like unsettled cement in the yellow yellow low low street lights
Becoming that neon sign you want me to be but
You never told me what to be
**** this hurt, I’m getting cut with your miraculous hair, it feels like aluminum cans are slicing me in slow motion
I am a spiral like an orange peel
One time I saw one glued and it looked real but there was no fruit inside.
When I reached inside of you, not bleeding, you moaned and stiffened
I pulled out what you couldn’t reach with your fingers
If I told that story in all its details people would be grossed out
They would puke up each other’s hearts, be embarrassed of course and shove it back down
Some people just can’t hold their hearts
I felt like a doctor who cross-dresses as a ****** lover at night. What ****** man is that?
I come out breaking through the windshield without my monarch *****-wings
I come out with my head full of demonology and Cosmopolitan ***-tricks, babyblue thoughts
And knowledge about hunting
I am ten feet tall, my jaw gets squared
I don’t eat ***** and I sleep well at night.
I don’t trouble your patterns, my hair and eyes are bible-black
And we wake up to fair-weather
When you let me, I wear your skin and inside I have near death experiences
You come three times a night and
we own a color T.V.

Please let me fit inside your paintings
The ones where the telephone wires are
Standing like towers over the burning orchards
Naked lovers wrapping themselves in picnic blankets
Holding white wine.
Make me last.
Let me be a fossil in the dust of your bones
So they can date me back to this ice age
They make fake snow you know

Remember I dented your car that night
Pushed up in metal your tiny
Thighs reflecting our disturbance
You dared

Please let me fit inside your whitewashed molds
Make a cast of my head, fill my eyes with lead
Coat my organs in liquid plastic, make me your favorite piece
A real beauty of a dead man
Display me in the store windows of history
Make vulture that can’t eat me
Make worms that can’t get to me
Make me famous.

We dug holes in the night
The earthen wombs trying to hide
Our dead futures. Make these tombs
Swallow faster. We dug holes in the light like blackholes
In the blackblue.
Make me antimatter
Make me matter.

Yellow backs of chair
           we're in a classroom
               it's outer space
I can see through your shirt, almost to the
                                                           skin
we're in a machine, we are strangers
                   I want the shirt to
                                                show your heart
It should be there somewhere
             in contrast with the green chalkboard
                    we might be on to something here
We are kids inside the classroom
                your hair has some rust inside it, your hands play,
                   we should learn our lesson
I don't know you
                        I love you
Let the world turn away, let the oxygen strip itself in air
      Books are burning, schools out
                 Apples are rotting
It's bad. I have a knife I'm not allowed to have
           this is unveiled love
as we
     will
come to know of it

1) Poetry was a lot more poetic before I learned about what poetry was. Not is.
2) Poetry is like a plastic lemon or orange. And you can cut it but not eat it. But you can do anything else you want to it.
3) Poetry is the most beautiful failure there is
4) If poetry is honest then it is always better than what is seen as good poetry. And what is known as good poetry.
5) Poetry does not listen even when you say no. It will make you bleed.
6) The poem is a very hungry grave. A very patient grave. A poem is not poetry.
7) Poetry is not poetic. But it has something to do with fetish-ising the poetic. And ax has something to do with a tree, even without the violence.
8) Poetry lies and doesn’t do anything.

Trilobites were extinct
Once, just like the Dinosaurs
a hundred million years ago
and also,
in the bible, the end comes when
the sun turns black
the seas full of life drain
and the images of Hell are images of the Opposite

At least wood comes back to the ground, to the Earth

I feel like everyone is acting
-just acting-
underneath the
Play
There is an ounce of Real
People
Under the
Plastic surgery in Plastic Life in Minutes
The made up
I made up
The Concepts within the metaphors
The circled
Answers
Or historians fighting over
( I want to say)
History

What does the knowledge of
Certain decay do to you?
To the psyche?
And more importantly
To your
Self?

Plastic doesn’t even decay, unlike wood.

I thought killing someone was the only free choice
Not denied
Then again,
We all want a singing God
But no one ever gets one
I got a Styrofoam box
And plastic cutlery
At the eating place
I can’t sleep
I can’t believe in making love
And the bats are acting like birds.

Today
When I see you in front of me
You run through a thousand words and bits
Of
Bits
Of lives you know
I am part-werewolf part-pop reference
Part great archetype part lover
I am never whole I am never me

There is no insight

Today
when
The blue of your eyes
Is only as vivid as the paintings I’ve seen
They are not your eyes
you have taken them from the blue of time
you’ve dressed your self and yourself
from cruelty in factories
and the love of the cloth

today
I am losing it
You are millions of people
A shaky picture of a picture

It must always be like this

There is no insight

Today
When you unravel the things in your purse
With gumpacks tic tacs god and a weapon
I don’t know which one you are
Who have you stolen you from?
Say existential crisis again
And I’ll disappear into the walls

There is no inside-out insight
There is no in side-out in sight
There is no in side out in sight

Pressed shirts
And a pretty mouth
Laughing like lace and polite
Mirrors in every inch of every cocktail party
If you feel what im feeling
I can relate to you and know you  (your lizard soul)
Finger nails being bitten while      (calming your)
No one is watching            (core              )
Making a note to send flowers       (your genitals)
to the sick    
Pushing away the dawn-blue thoughts
Of mass agony
A stop sign is a stop sign                                  
Clutching the noisy pills in a brand new purse
Wiping your hand before you meet the love of your life
And then some
                        (When you)
I’m trying to turn off                     (escape the)
all my mirrors                                (funhouse)
I’m stuck in my room                    (mirror)
On purpose                                     (hall )
With my Toys’ R’ Us                     (How)
Chemistry set trying to come up    (long)
With a way to infect the                 (does)
Choreographed planet with             (it take you)
Asperger’s                                        (to accept the new )
                           (distortions?)

The world started as a mouse maze
science knows that but not Miss Anthropy
the hunger lets us smell the happy-meat
Run, children, R-U-N, witches and **** wolves are coming you see
I aimed the small gun for my head but got the shouldered white-angel instead
accidentally made a blood paint on the wall like glaze

No doctors! I do this my own self fast
Trap some daylight in a jar and go inside
Poke some holes in you Miss, like a reverse vampire death
let the light out. Burn, Burn. It's you are me all that's left
I'll mouth you and duct tape for mount ride
Invade. Take the tall kingdom. Shadow cannot last.

Signifying not a thing-- Idiot Doc and weird *** science
and Hate Hate Hate, what would you do?
-- Eat 'em up, **** 'em dry. Of course, take them in. Drown them in acid
--Sounds like fury to me -- No! No!-- It's a valediction hid-
den inside your love-soul. All is careful in a yellow hue
Two sides to the hitting fence: Love you lonely or build a shoddy allegiance.

I’ve made sure the windows are painted
That was step one
I have to open my metal door to see
The world, the dying summer
Because it can’t leak into here
                   I am so broken I make myself believe this
And that
Love conquers the weak too

Step two is ignoring the bony girl and her crystal ball eyes holding
The pit-bull with the
Bleeding leg
                    And I believe, because my soul
                     Has been left in some purse or backseat
                     That the dog doesn’t know anything about pain

Step three is admitting that I’ve set fire to sunflowers
Because I thought, I knew, they could take it

Step four is putting God inside of an air-seal jar
For 3 to 6 weeks on my bedside table
While I tear into thin laughs

Step five is pretending to know
                   Pretending there was life in the dead leaves
                         Burnt orange and burnt red

Step six is climbing from under the bed trying
To be oh so quiet
                Because it’s midnight and that
                Glass-cut boy you’re ******* on
                Isn’t making any noise
Step seven is collecting dust

Step eight is sharing a pillow half-heartedly
Reading about bedbugs at night
Trying to chase the visions of your bare neck
    Glowing
Stirring her awake
And go south to fight off winter

Step ten is spitting pesticide on the spring dandelions
   They (you) are flowers, they (you) are sycophants
    They (you) are beautiful, they (you) are weeds

Step eleven is burning the bridge
Where I had to pull off
your dress to
Keep myself on

Step twelve I’m half-awake
In a puddle of my own fake blood, in everyone’s blood
Calling the doctor for blue-black sleeping pills
You won’t come looking for me
You’re busy
Sleepwalking away from misery

Alive
with a white fire
with the angel's sword
with cliches
and cheesiness

you're running through silicon valley
with your wide blue eyes tearing people to pieces
and putting them back together

drink them like your ocean

You acrobat, Death's jaw has dropped to the floor
soon in your millionaire car
and your diamond fingers on the wheel
you can take on the emptiness of this all
and make it shine

Dear Hidden, Ignoring, Empty Lover

I will fake my death and become famous
I will leave blood tracks to my resting place
Ants will eat my blood like sugar
And wolves my bones rare
So the story will go

People will run around finding secrets in
Between my words, they’ll make billboards
Advertising the movie, it will be called
Diary of a Planned Exit and people will
Think I’m a poet

They will make books with blue corners
And a bright red title, it will be a picture
Of my hands (not really but people are dumb)
Holding a Barbie doll dipped in ink
Black ink even

You will not change. Your lion’s mane won’t
Go gray. Your heart like the boulevards
Will move but not always, you and the other
Pretty dancers won’t hide in the hills
You won’t even put an X on the calendar
You’ll mourn with a self-inflicted sigh
You’ll mourn like you’re eating stale cake
You’ll mourn like you're painting your nail
You won’t even paint them black
I imagine my heart would burst
So I’ll keep it in a hotel bible.

The twelve people that still love poetry
Will forget about me because I will
Resuscitate, crawling out of the city sewer
Evil flowers in my hand
Business ethics in my hand
I’ll call five or six times and leave a message
Saying
“hey, it’s me, I’m not dead, your hands, your tongue look like the innocent flowers…”
Hang up. Slide down the wall like I’ve been shot. Defy god
And hold my mouth with both my hands

I’ll read my own books and be sick
I haven’t eaten in days; I won’t have eaten in days
I’ll go find witches
Doctors
Witch-doctors
They’ll give me fate-pills and I’ll finally
Stop daydreaming because I know
What will happen

You will get a C-section and your children
Will break you down, you’ll get a heart transplant and get a nun’s heart
Because Fate love Irony, you eat pudding in old age
You never think about me as a diversion in your tracks
But you hate magic and I need  to believe in it so
I don’t have to fake my suicide

Love,
You know what

White hot homeless men
with crossed fingers in the lost
barrios of Barcelona
make chills in the shadows
and
In the red  air
with the salty blows
of sea chant

I kiss your wet forehead

Well-liquored in broken languages
Giants all of us
Dancing in the wasted ashes
of whatever rosy bars

This must be where the homesick find
warm corners

and
Sleep.

This must be where sad lovers
touch hands and sing
each others names
inside
the skylines of stone angels

This is where your
vanishing heart fell on the floor
and you blushing
had to watch me hold it

This must be where I die in the slowly somedays

Something will change
or I’ll sell my blue veins
and last teeth
for a castle carved in
the hills
and let your cool snake tongue
slip in my American ****** mouth

Then
All the slow tortured deaths
in the world
will seem like tickle fights
between dumb children

Take me through the streets
poor streets
Spanish angel
I taste history in your
wine breath

I promise in blood never
to promise again
if we bury each other
in the used sand
and never set foot in the
cities
again

This will be where I die
feeling the
heavy of your
eyes
burning my chest
the same someday
slowly.

Then all the slow
tortured deaths
of the world will
seem like a lost lustful trick
played on strange strangers.

Fill me up with hot air
and hope for
Fill me up with hot air
and hope to

god
I don't fall

Time is a walking shadow
Time is up, yo

Time on the roof of the mouth like stalactites
Like an ice monster

Time singing to the audience
Hitting all the wrong notes
All the notes really
But in the wrong order

Time is an hour glass
Shot through with arrows of time

Your time against my time

Time is money
Time is wartime in war

Time like mold grown on the inside of our arms
Time like water stains on the ceiling
Time like stains in general

More than you more than me
Time
Time like a dress on the floor
Time like suicide mission in the name of time

Time like a poem abandoned in the abandoned candlelight
Time like nothing we care about
Time like popsicles never going away

Time going back
The light going back inside the body
The body blocking out the shadow

Time like tombs like time like catacombs
Like reading slow and dumb
Time like you and me at gun point with a decision
About time

Aborted time and poor time
**** time and serious time

Time like names we can’t remember
Won’t remember
Time like a memory that hasn’t come into being
Time like a broken mic
Rophone

Time like the echo
Time like ******* in the dark

Time like no one’s ******* business
Time like the ****** in your shower scene

Time like god’s angels
Time like a broken record

Time wasted when you’re done with this
I apologize for wasting your time
Time like a band-aid coming undone
Time like a cherry bomb inside our homes

Time slipping out the smashed clocks

Time and time a
Gain

It’s that time again when the
Kids you know
Die of overdoses
******
Bad hearts
Drunk falling down a spiral staircase

Everyone’s a golden color
Splitting their minds with legs
Sharing dreams filled with red, skin, x-ray imagery,
Stuff upon stuff
Women losing their husbands in the clutter
In the crosseyed legends of love
Where the world doubles onto itself
One half inside the other. Slow in motion.
It’s hard to be an anti-movement movement
Unto yourself so we materialize the most terrible-
Well I can’t really say it- the sensation that does not ground in you but flees back out-
And so with the dead boy tucked under the bed
And so with the sweetheart refusing to spread her blood
And with the fall and the car crash

Build something out of this I dare you to,
Try not to make it a tomb.

“I accept chaos, I am not sure whether it accepts me”- Bob Dylan

We look for a red mark
Drawn into the center of our world
We wish for very touching and touched
Whispering of orders and sweet nothings
We ask god or purchase a life which
Will have enough heart-beats
We see the line and feel like following
Because things have fallen short
Sometimes you and I,
We want limbs to break-off of tree break-off of birds fall off
Our bodies, then we will fall in
Love with transparency
We are sick and weak with difficulty
With hiding and seeking and finding
The mouse-hole of meaning
We are stuffed to death with the icing
Of the cakes- with the must-be-of
Music- the formulation and onetwothree
Of music
We don’t know **** about music but we love it
We know that all these words and all this knowing is like laying down in the train tracks
We are scared to see god and **** in the same car trunk in the same heartcage
I would fall into the love with you
But that would mean too much
We would take up air that does not belong to us
I would **** myself with you
Shoot you through my brain
*
Maybe, we are born so well
Into this age
That we settle into misunderstanding
I am sorry love
I have been speaking for you
Our eyes don’t see red
But we don’t miss the spectrum
Our ears don’t hear the sirens
But we don’t need that type of hope

We are full on yellow air
Dangerous and territorial
A black flag of our disposition
Stabbed into the sappy Styrofoam Earth
I will be able
I will love you when words
Are as beautiful as poledancers
As drugged up and crystal like you daisy baby
As zipped open like zero-sized jeans.

I have a fever
And you came to me
Understood in a bubble
Of thought
In high heels and horns
You brought medicine
Made of
Hell water, burning cars,
Lipstick and the old feeling of butterflies
You really ****** me
I feel so much better but at what price?

You had a fever
And I had nothing to do with it

(Go to sleep lover)
(I’m not talking to anyone)
(or about anyone, no, no one’s on the phone)

Everything will mean as much as dreams

(we won’t make it)
(I love Barbie dolls)
(I love candy-truth)

You were intrigued
Tried me out like a riddle,
Read me like a magical spell
Gave up
And left me in the bottom of a plastic bag
With all the trash on the ocean floor of your car

You see spots of blood while you sleep
I diagnose you
But I never tell you how much
It breaks me.

My brain is a wheelchair
And people think I am flying
Over cities and wastelands
Jungle gyms and green public pools
I assume the role of deformity
I am my very best Judas
Because I am lazy and can walk with the rest of them

My heart is deformed and dumb
And perfect people pity it
They hold it tight and translate
Its mumblings and tantrums
Into innocent sermons
I feel bad for my heart too
It should have been thrown off a cliff
Like the ancients used to do

My hands are plastic machines
And I fear them more than God
They scratch me in my sleep
They poke holes in my stomach and my faces
But worst of all
They write letters that show people
places I’ve never dared to be.

Singing one time like all
Clothed eyed people
Rolling their own cigarettes (that’s important)
Shawls and things that only
You know
Certain types of people wear
And the uniforms here are backwards
And you win only if
You stand out, but it’s just running away with people not chasing
Haircuts
Those are important too
Guys pretend not to have one but they let the faces get rough
And forest like
And girls act like caring isn’t a type of flightless bird but
It’s more of a statement maybe

And I thought I couldn’t be a banker because of the
Way I acted
And the way I felt about things like the weather and prostitution
But really
I can’t be a poet
Least of all I can’t be a poet

I must be wrapped swimming in clouds backwards, or something poetic like that
I can’t tell
The difference between
Being a doctor, teacher
A healer, a man that crucifies himself on Wall Street
A serial killer
A starving child
And a fashion guru

Earlier I said this out loud and
Now it’s a poem

( and the words go **** me **** me **** me
and the pages sing **** me **** me **** me)

You tracked it down
          Watched the water go light pink
Watched the light go in and out
     You’ve been shaded
You dragged it a mile down the river
               With your bare
                                          Hands
The sun left and you saw
The moon
            Shoot up just for you
With its drugged-up glow

You should have done this long ago
            Screamed and smeared
Danced with guts still warm

Elbow deep in the heart of it.

You think about getting an apple
                           For the mouth
But that’s been done so many times
                           It wouldn’t mean anything
Your stomach turns
       Hunger you guess

You have to bleed it dry
                Just to eat

It beats cleaning dead bugs
              Out of the sink
Its beats loneliness
It beats until the heart’s left out of this and the rest of it

There won’t be any leftovers
             No flowers
No ceremony
It’s not that type of ending

Your hands are stained for days
Your thoughts too

Keep waiting for your pulse and things to quiet down

Sure, it’s comforting
Sure, it’s been like thing forever
But you’ve thrown away so much of it

You could have kept some of the insides
But you were afraid
-scared shitless-
you wouldn’t know
what to do with it.

You know
When I tell you
Calm your
Head
I’m not telling you to
Let go
I’m telling you to not grip
So tight
To stop clawing
So hard
You have life’s thread
Under your nails
Along with centuries of dirt
Blood from the Great
Wars
And you sit
Thinking
You are alone

When you wake up
Soon
And realize the things
I told you about the
Past
And you send me a post card
With a modest, honest
Un-artistic picture of a
Snow bird
Signed sincerely
With love

You know I will write you
A small letter
And I will fill it
With some kind of
Stuffy intellectualism
Something that starts
Slowly like
As
Heidegger said or
Derrida shows us about writing
Or
Emerson told us we don’t miss out because of this and this
or
Even worse
It was Nietzsche
Who told us
About how to treat criminals
And you will grip
And claw
And chew
Those words
In your cage of a home
And staring through
The bars
You will know
That
All that
Heavy literature
And all this talk about
Freedom
Time
And killing
Can be known so simply
In a wink
Or the flash of
An eye.
That’s why we are criminals.

The city and the buildings
determine
being in love.
Drag her by the hair,
cut flowers in the desert

Without books about love
you wouldn't know how to do it
or make it, or feel it
The funny
Sad-funny thing is
Poets only pretend to be in love.

I puke love blood
ha
ha
on the off-white rug
I carve your face only in mirrors

I set dolls of
you on fire
watch the pink dust
of your lips make
patterns of impossible density

You have to be well-versed in
insanity
to know you're insane.

Drinking vials of your
pitch black
I turn it red to decorate
my squirming

I've read the rules
I know how to be in love
I’ve seen the healthy city
The building of love.

Big Blue empires of love,
A king and a half to every throne.

Some of them full of
bones like the old day
(Who's gonna sort you out?)

Strand up straight
as to not fall over
every time I see an eye
that could match your left one

I shrink in my shirt
and climb out the
head hole
and look for my brain in
broken jars
wadding around in anyone's soul.

The tale of common things,
my savage tooth on your rich arm
Whoever showed us the methods of in love
(you taste like cracked glass
to coat my stomach)

Whoever showed us the methods
of in love
like accidental ****.

Come out, come out
I'm ****** lands
and a naked flag

And the straight lines, sticking up
Soul-sick too...
Read it in the windows
and hanging signs
"You Are To Be In Love"

Come out, come out
I'm ****** lands
Smooth flat
an almost naked flag

and
the lizard-landscape
of you
here
in the
flat
anti-city
lands
here
we
keep quiet
on sins

(crawl into my mouth, the sun
isn't out anymore)

Big blue queens
are out
reigning around me

and you don't think I'm lonely
(?)

No friendship is worth your marriage

Talking about the future with a stranger
Giving them your address

No friendship
is worth it

You do it
I do it
We all do it

The conversation
the future

Taking the dog out
in the garbage

Greasy hair

Inside other people's homes
Inside dresses
and churches

You do it
I do it

****** relationships with God
Weddings with too much champagne

cleaning up

Christian music and soap operas

where the **** have you been?
you do it too you know?

Chemistry and chemistry
aqueduct eyes
Watching midnight become noon
I don't think I have anything here
No leads.

The dropped out moan
before you sleep
Take a piece of the moon
in our sheets

close them tightly

We are standard-issued clowns
with Picasso painted hearts

With all the fine measurements

We both do it, under neon signs and
plastic candy stars

I'm just tired,

There is no doubt in my mind
That the poet is the perfect
Idiot-child
So blinded and thunderheaded by seeing
And misunderstanding
That he acts amazed when a black cloud
Appears from a truck
When a flower dances shyly with an insect

When he gets to the page
There is no order or sense
Just heart and mechanic
Bleeding ink
With no sense of order or sense.
He fingerpaints over reality.
Of course no one listens to him
-the babbling- the stupidity- the sordid excellence-

would you?

Remember walking the railroad track?
the tunnel looked like the devil's mouth
is what we said
It wasn't cold or warm
there was a wind that didn't show up
we took those pills that made our eyes
like cartoons in love
made the stars fall like ice cubes
into the cool water of our stomach
You said you remember
how your father scared to death for his life
sang you rainstorm melodies
that were not beautiful at all
but it made you sleep at night
you are still terrified of soft lullabies

you told me about the night
that strange kid became a thief from inside you
remember that's the night I tried to kiss you
the claw marks left a clean impression

remember remember
even though I know you won't
your eyes of glass tell me everything
about your need for transparency
and for your lack of memory

The things have passed
And silent hangovers
And anti-freeze cocktails

I want to keep it in
But there are too many things
Dehydrating  
And the milky sun

And we pass each other around
Like wet cigarettes
And the milky sun
Drips on us

And we say
“uneasy”
because we have no time
to think of anything better

and the silent hangovers
and the anti-freeze cocktails

and women fishing
and kings dying
daughters abandoning
sons stabbing stabbing stabbing

and it will all pass
and we only say that
because we need to fill up
the land
the hearts
the souls
the mouth
the body
the genitals
the claws

and then the cat and mouse games
and the secret meetings

lack.

I guess these are the good years
Style booming up the hallway
Watching
Girls
Morph into women
Licking up cement
In sideways jungle gyms

Seeing the sun upside down for the first time
Crackling body parts
On its bald face
Sacrificing only disgust

Jumping from shape
To shape into
Laundry baskets
Losing the whole wide
******* world inside
Of an ice cube
Or inside
the couch, next to the lint

Watching hungry flowers
Latch on to the sky
helping
Twisting your hair in my fingers
Smelling animal fears

Thinking so far out loud
Beetles bleed out your yellow ears

Watching boys
Sawed into men

Placing indigo scales onto skin
Changing the heat up and down
Melting ice cream
On your *******

Kids playing forced warfare
Inventing purple clouds and bullet holes
and
Somewhere inside the bloodshed,

Making love just enough to
Make you drool enough to feast,
It’s the only time you know hunger.

The shaking syllables of innocence.

It’s
Seeing something so beautiful
You dismiss it as commonplace,
Misplace it even.

I guess good is good.

You’ll sit around with your girls
Drinking cheap wine
You never open the blinds
Leave the light out
What you think doesn’t move me
I’ve almost starved trying to feed myself on you
I hope you call me crazy and laugh at my words

I burn bridges to create
I can’t get inside of you without tension
Without some form of heartbreak
Imagined or created by fire

If we had stayed clean, unstained
Unmoved, unexcited
I would have stayed that lovely catatonic color.

I filled myself to excess on your beauty
Your cool-head lack of insanity
The way you clung to my neck
Pecked
At my bones
The quiet mornings with your body arching
Your fingers in my hair

I burn bridges
Because they are practical and boring
You meet on the bridge
You don’t scream from your gut from the river bank

I can’t say I haven’t tasted sweetness
Like a syrup in my filthy mouth
Fruits turn gray
Fingers scratch the skin after the collapse.

I burn bridges because of my obsession with fire
With devouring,
With the passions that destroy

You lay in bed scared of Death
And jealousy is all I’ve got left
You wake up and you go to work
And your co-workers smile
And you smile and you mean it, the smile.

I can’t fit that anywhere.

I scratched out the names but let me tell you about them

He sits in the sun talks of life
as a passion, he’s tried to **** himself twice
once in a car, once with pills and cheap *****
now he jumps off tall things like cliffs and
antennas and people’s shallowness but he uses a parachute
which seems necessary
he jumps and the blood forgetting it is blood
nothing matters
he tells me it’s the closest humans will ever get to
flying.

The next
He sits in the shades of his four walls.
He can drink a bottle of gin and still drive
To his ex-girlfriend’s house and break his teeth
against the window. He takes pictures of alley ways
and flatlands which make up all the tiny pieces of
America. He screams at night, plays golf and tells me
simple things that make more sense than theology and philosophy,
things like Be Cool and Life Takes Time. Billboard truths.

She presses her lips against a strong sky,
a thing she hopes to believe in. she meditates daily and swears
she’s seen her soul make breakfast and burn the toast.
She floats so well people call her a Queen. If I could be level
headed she’d be my wife. She’s been hiding her perfection
and she knows it, it might be why nervous breakdowns are part
of her diet. She has made meaning out of thin air, I’ve seen it done.

Opens with some lucidity
after the world has gone limp
                           like marionettes
slides up to a good posture
and the everything rises
                            and blooms

All is well-enough
Not to do any-thing
Sit back a relax

People crave the expected,
Give em' the song and dance act:

Unseal her, let the air out
Pretend her hair is different
Let the left-over shape mean something
Make it the secret of Life

Cue the yellow hue
live your memories in a fuzzy lens
Slow the images, it's raining sunshine
Demi-god celebrities play your part
you're the star
be able to keep your heart
                                                 in one place
                                                          l­ock it up

Take a pause. . . . . .

Hit the spotlight, change the focus, transfer the weight
                shift
                      the  
                          burden
Wide     eyed     shot
dark shadows back alleys open veins
american pulp love with an insanity twist

Make the events your life
dislocate the easiness
                     Cut to the bed
                                torn to shreds
Blood slow on the back, warm wine on the wrist
all reddened by friction

Drop
          Strange the angle change
dunce cap and a corner prayer
                        the catharsis framework

Go back to the clear cut beginning-end
               crawl through the webbed nothingness
                            the vapor of conversation
                                  reality pushed upon
                                                   the drooling stranger through the
bedroom window
              eyes like a bone-saw, artificial
Pity
him
Become
him
Time has been extended over the back-lit stage
         a lucky break waking up with an adrenaline needle in your chest
         a resuscitation
                 Take the life from the shelf
              Contradict yourself, very well, Contradict yourself
    Make the impossible concrete, the unreal cities grow like roses
              Cut to Black
rip a hole for light, you're gonna need it
                     Role the credits, see the forgotten names which mean forgotten faces
you've hung on
sit in the dark
clap to yourself
        to this far away distraction
you're the hero and you've made it make sense in the rearrangement
                              of
                                               blood
                                               love
                                       and voyeurism

While we talk over wine
(I am scared to Death
to step in
I figure it will be a vacant lot
A breathable desert or
A shallow green pool)
You take time with quick smiles
To fill the room with short stories
Your eyes roll in and out
Left then right
Your hair goes along with the rhythm of your words
(And I of course have to stop at the sound
I can’t get any further
You won’t let me
Or
I won’t let me)
And there are moments where we laugh
And moments we could
Have found to cry at
(we are such sensitive creatures
and somewhere in the world
people are at war
or eating
sleeping entangled
or killing out of fun)
And it’s a nice story
Mostly it’s a real story
And those are very hard to find today
(And I think your blood
is a much much much
lighter shade of blue,
mine barely moves anymore)
And it’s a story about the past
Which is convenient
Because you can’t talk about yourself in the present
(And I want to laugh the whole time
but I can’t
but I am thinking:
“Why the **** would anyone want to keep a vulture as a pet?
Do they even make birdcages that strong?”)
Your lips move fast
Then slow
Depending on your words
(And I want to touch them
We are good at the touching)
Then the words stop
And we get along just fine.
(And no one else in the world cares
which is the closest we can get to bliss)

With the folded nights
And the light-hearted howls
There is nothing to do
Really
But dive into nightmares
Or swan fly
Into oceans of cool clean
Or slow locomotive stares

Or when tired eyes
Of pink tell of sordid images
Smokey feelings into small places
Tight skins
The
Click
Clack
Of crowded hearts

Under electric lights
And perfect ballrooms

Shivers run
Up and
Down
And never stop
Because we haven’t found
A middle

I think of your everything
And think it’s all dirt
Under fingernails

Crawling inside
Your tiny mouth
Where I could go insane
And break my face against
The walls

Everything is so
Beautifully open sometimes
It’s hard to make sense

And yes, I mean this
And all that goes after it

People’s plastic toys get *****
People’s veins bleed dry every night
People’s kids disappear
People’s wives and husbands eat each other
People’s noses press against the cold glass

The dogs bark in the fast morning
               And I dare not miss
                              Those types of things

The cities change faster than my mortal heart
Without something melting
Over our poorly lit souls
We forget the words growing on our teeth

In all the clusters of the shiny people
Where you and I lose our own concepts
Change and slide into new skins
Trying to adapt the last centuries into this one

We are idolized and hover in our moth costumes
Around street lights sticking out our rich tongues
Without the poetry of death and taking lives
We can fly around at all speeds. Free.

The veins of the city pump underground
And I see nothing but what’s in front of me.

I mean it
this will be clear, no poetry or sparkles
no birthday candles on the cake
there are
a few ways to serve truth and
I am not familiar with any of them;
I am glad you don't hide in the bathroom to eat your lunch anymore
I am glad when you found love you pushed it away because it wanted more
than you ever had in your organs
I am glad you fight the diseases you've invented
I am glad that over the phone angels drop out of your mouth
and fight the monsters in my stomach
there is such a thing as good violence
no one has won yet
but
the fight is
pure

Life is a thing to drag around
The same one that sticks in your throat
Let’s you spend the night in jail
Sometimes life wakes you in the night
And let’s you know you were dreaming
The crooked smiling moon too
The bottle emptied
Life is roaring inside you
It is painting your inside
Cutthroat colors
It’s telling you to fear the shade
It’s telling you to be light-obsessed
Scared of substance

Life is that balloon tied to your wrist
It stays in abeyance
It floats, but never away, it’s yours and red
And shows itself in transparency
Life changes with the wind
It lives through
Even shot through with bullets
The inside leaves
But the skin remains

In the veins of all
It is found in tiny portions
You can't see, hear, feel, taste, smell it
But ******* you know it.

Allowed to fit and feel into whatever I want
But some strange academy or death judge
Opens the
Yes-door
Or the other
The words have to hit so hard people feel they gotta hit back
Swing around the baseball bat
Breath the teeth of truth
The words have to love so strong no one feels like porcelaine
“No,” we feel like flesh in the sun

“Language can be wounded”
                          so can your toxic throat
                          so can your hollow chest
                          so can your background brain
                          so can your “every-thang”

Allowed to say and scream whatever I want
But some stiff men with long fingers
Split their mouth as to say “hush”
The words have to spill off the page but can’t stain
Cannot infiltrate
Cannot get into your veins for too long
The words have to mean so much people nod in unison
Clap one two clap one two clap one two clap
“This stuff’s in our bones”

but I have nothing to say

The red spider eats
her mate during ***
It makes him last longer
It makes him more potent
It’s a willing act
Suicide for a good time

Look at the light outside
That means the morning is starting
That means we will wear black
That means tonight your legs will wrap around
And rest on the small of my back

In this hotel room where
His hand held the romantic gun
It means we will have to forget about this
All of it
His face was buried in light
Virginal and scarred and quiet

Things get stuck in the corners
Along with the fruit flies and the dust
Sometimes you forget which part of you stayed in the trap
And which part was eating you alive.

This is just to say
Your porcelain blue eyes stayed with me

I’ll take nothing else
I’ll write it in blood
Never to need:

1) Your birdcage heart
2) Your warm never-ending skin stretched out over black buzzing cities
3) Your cool crawling tongue which takes apart dull sleep-walking loverboys
4) Your white bladed spider hands that have carved dangerous patterns on my new snake-skinned body
5) Your timid dancing breath which echoes through my shaky golden dreams of deadly nothings

But I have your eyes
The wide and clear unopened windows
To your thick-cut glass soul.

My mind
(that tricky grain of sand)
wants you to know this.

Sometimes in the night
            When I wake up wet
                       I want to claw against the nonsense
            When I have seen you
                                           placing kisses where they shouldn’t go

Sometimes in the breaking day
            When I come back to consciousness
                       I want to pretend you can scream
            When I snap out of it
                       I act like talking to white-washed walls is full of red passion

Sometimes in the heart-shaped almost-night
            When I am curled onto myself fighting ghosts
                      I want to wash you clean of your dreams
           When I push against you and them
                     I act like the little pieces that are left mean so much

Sometimes when I haven’t seen a clock in years or the moon
                            I want to fit my hands in your stomach
                             When you are sleeping
                            I act like I am half-doctor half lunatic
                              When you couldn’t care less about your bloodline

Whatever I find I’m keeping, even if it’s just enough to be the **** of a joke.

Today starts with a headache
The sun isn’t even warm and I feel taken apart
Women climb in and out of beds made for four
Men drink and chase and bleed strange colors
Humanity is a syntax error
And so is Truth
And so is color

Today continues with pseudo intellectualisms
With flesh friction on flesh
With lips full of blood
Eyes full of hot water
And music
But I am deaf and folded over

Today doesn’t continue, today drags

Today ends with steel and cement
Cracked from cold and letting wilting flowers wilt
It’s not even a holiday
It’s just a shadowy Sunday without church
Without school
Without landmarks or
Things to be remembered

Blame your desperation on the weather
             Match the gray with gray
Allow yourself a smile or two
Don’t overdo it
          Don’t force something like this
                             Try to make this all less crazy
Wash your face. Tighten up.
                                             Forget the blade, the poison, the stars
You overhear someone tell someone the time
              You’ve let that slip into
                                                   the background
in the spaces where the unseen meets

Blame your low-key troubles on the
                                                     T.V. shows
              Watch the skinny giants starve
   Someone’s changing the heat up and down
                                      in the pearl-sized world
And someone’s taken all the colors out for
                                    some other playground
those invisible hands, it follows, have too much
              pull and force on the everydays.
                  Keep yourself alive with twice strained coffee and sunny days
Cut your hair with the kitchen knife
                              Grow a beard, fake an accent,
                       Fake Silence.
Pretend to make it mean something, the collapse, the choking
               Clean the living
room
                                 wipe all the fingerprints
No one’s coming for you but you’d take a hug from a hired assassin
You’d sympathize with the serial killer about his sin
           You’d be impressed by his breath which smells of green mints.  

Blame the sickness in your blood
             Which warns off love with sores and fevers
                     On boredom and hunger
Make something of yourself, make yourself last
Peel off skin and let it dry like *** pourri
              Forget how to love the ones that hurt you
              Forget to how to hurt the ones that love you
Bite your lip to keep it all in
                     Bite to the bleeding, then
        Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh
Build fires out of sofas and the kitchen table, make a vacancy of home
Laugh at humanity stuffed and suffering on its stilts
           Smile at the honey moon you’ll never get to
Show your teeth at the ***** Death
             Make the damage worth the price.

Do you
have a hyphenated-identity too?
Do you make me
or is that
upside-down-backwards?

We take so many ideas back.

You lick the old scars on my arm
you let the bugs in my stomach live
live.

Blue-black brick buildings
and jars and jars
of green dreams you've had
about me

It's all
about me

Did you build me in your
miss-matched
reddish-green bed-
room.
Painted or maybe born out of song
so
tie your wires
build your allegiances

there's too much water in the air

You know
I'm on step three
of the grieving process now
three whole days
and like frozen cream
you roll on my teeth
my tongue

dripping

You used to be warm
and stretched over oceans
and oceans
when I used to know the bones
in your
face

it's all about me

Presence
and more narrow
you in my bubbles
and my
thoughts

click

I close the door
And leave it out there for others to pick apart
(Here I can whip up my own)
solutions
sophistry and calm potions
The sticky left over of
The night are the notes of worried lovers
Worried they are diseased by lust
By bad music
By plastic generations
(Here I don’t rely on words)
but atmosphere, feeling like the blind do
in the *******
The smell of acid-fruits in mists on skins
Flowers boiled down viciously into pheromones
(Here I can bury my face into)
Stop it all from coming into-
My ribs will break, my heart is so strong
It’s a strangler and a bone saw
(Here is the only place I let it run)
not free it cracks splatters on the thin walls
but tame enough it stays
The mixture of the past hours
Have left me
Expanded, cracked and tied tight
By dry touch
By hallucinations of burning
(Here I can leave it out there for the others)
so I can speak plainly
I want to die in your fluids
Thick waters of you
Stepped in so for, should I wade no more.

People will love it
               When and if they can relate
I wake up and force oatmeal down
Drink the bright lights and orange juice
Press my fingers in my face
Mold it into whatever I am that day
Jump of the balcony and start anew

People want to see themselves in it
Your hair is all over the pillow
You’re light years away
Your clothes hang like vultures in the morning noise
I grab the heaviness of evil deeds
And force it into your mouth
Swallow and disappear

People want it to be universal
We are giddy trapeze artists
We can burn the house down with our hearts
We can blow the candles out
Wish for a flood
Wish for rain, a baptism forced
Wish for tomorrow dressed in its best threads
Wrapped
up
lightly.

She, wild like society
And as hungry as Nature
Equally as involved and caring,
Touched
Him, as gray as Everyman,
As backwards as time
Not so wrapped up in language,
Shuddered.

She, the color of life
And wrapped up in nothingness,
Waiting for a biblical excuse
And stayed,
For him, tattooed with mathematics,
Never more than a balancing act,
Like a male Cinderella
Like a broken mirror made of steel,
Looked like looking through the ashes
Of history,
In a feverish need
To find the pendulum of
Good and Evil
With equal lust.

She says,
I know you dream
Trailing after cloud
And trying to breathe the world-

There is no such thing
Just chemical formulas

-with that she was pleased
And fell asleep
Dreaming only in pictures
With no sound
or music

And outside
Some kind of wind must have
Become real.

If it’s true that I’m stuck with my hands
Even after I’ve dumped my sadness down the drain
Then I’ll hold on to it.

If it’s true that when I kissed you I cut your lip
And tried to **** you dry
Then I wish you hadn’t stopped me.

Memories stain and it might be true that I’ve been six months clean. Give and take a few.

The mind is its own place and you left ****** finger-paintings on the walls.

There’s an old folks tale told by blind witches
And if it’s true, the myth, it goes like this:
“There once was a boy who fell in love with a plastic doll. She would stare at him and he never felt seen. So he injected that neon fluid inside his veins so she would notice him. he glowed brilliantly like a motel sign, like a phosphorous mannequin.
All for nothing”

I had replaced the blood I ****** out
With mine
Well whoever put that blood in me, in there,
That blood I put in you

If I did dump my sadness it would go to the river
In the big fish tales, in the sirens, in the spoiling
River bed

And after rolling off of you, stiffened by some ***** of pleasure
                 It’s the only time you feel real
I would go to the sink, dip my head under
The rushing water
Fill myself up on it
Feel it fill my stomach and my eyes

What have I fallen for?
What have I taken in?
People have survived on sadness and emptiness
                                   on stories and truth
                                            forever

    Who am I to refuse that?