glasses with flowers curled on the sides
a hot LA summer, VCRs stacked high
brings me, according to you
to the sweltering shelter of memories lost

tuck a woman on her side and give away her liberty
she bit you, she's long bitten me
she sobs as you drive, have you ever heard a more terrible sound?
a mother lost, broken over the knee by her mind

call me

see how angry I am
left to roll, sticking talcum in between bumps of fat
while age makes me reckless and strong

try and tell me how I am
if you're gone.

smothered in a snowbank
breathing in the absence of sound
I'm caught in the grooves of ice, spinning my wheels
a hand dealt by cars and too little salt

if I hold out my hand, I can't feel my fingers
puffy and frozen
an extended hand, out on a limb

brown and barren

drink me up, me
maybe then you'll feel sober

i rub my feet to think
^a criticism he had

you small smell
tell me how i once knew you?
and then tell me why i once bent my body around you
to repair a doomed and deeper well

delight:

a secret in your pocket
of liking something you can't help to like

tucked between the stars and the skyline

I only get to pick one

the inevitable loneliness of
a) of watching a galaxy in all its splendor
b) watching everyone else at night

my grandfather has thin skin
he says
after I watched him buckle after a bunch in texture on the floor
a wire
a corner
a buckle in the universe

where man falters where he is confident to walk
and I watch the blood in a ****** mary leak into the corners of a white leather couch
a drink, spicy and cold
less orange than the purple that swells under his skin
and redder than the faded napkin I wrap around the icepack

he has eyes browner than my brothers
less brooding, more soft with an illustration,
a knowledge of all his children's lives
and I wonder, a tight cliched anxiety in my chest
would I ever be so lucky

to worry
about all my successful children?
or would it ever keep me up
to wonder
if they were happy
or after everything, all the gravel and grit
or after everything, in their lungs, in their brains, in their skin,
smoothing right, all their rigors
humming under their hearth of hearts

if I would just go to bed,
happy they would be okay
or
happy there wasn't a buckle in the universe

glass bubbles in saliva
thoughts putter on a bedroom floor
sweatshirts left on somewhere better,
and I want less of wanting more

clinking teeth and unmet gaze
staring l-shapes from feet to toes
the empty town is a soundless maze
and with all of you, the sounds impose

Someone said that having secrets was like holding an invisible box close to your chest. Nobody can get close and they can't see why.

It's in the ******* way.

I overturned my box, papers all tumbling out--you could've picked up any one and asked a question.

You said nothing, upturning like a fish. Belly-up boy.

I picked softly at your lip, finding a tattoo on the inside of your lip.
It says "*****" but it might as well have said "YOU'RE STUPID" to me.

I tried to pull any information I could about it out of you.
I got nothing, like *** from a stone.

Velvet pants that force hands up
bitten necks allow repairing enzymes supreme;
hard hips felt under broken nails
while twisting ******* never felt so serene.

soft hands run over couches, chairs
cracked voices offer a name--alcoholic
desperate and streaked with age

awkward without the wetness
that allows us to forget

instant gratification has met a wall
in hand is an absence of excuses and a wrinkled receipt

$you trash.00
$owe them.00
$owe me.00
-------------------
$a better time.00

whoever said sobriety is clarity
denied
twelve steps down the church basement
and the suddenness of a fog

I've come unglued
You said once you need me, but I need you
I had no idea and now you have no clue

You're miles ahead while seconds are lost
I'm turned over every inch
from boil to frost

but you're untouchable, at least you say
till I wander into a dark room
in some way, some day

But still I don't know if I'm on your mind
and I still can't know if you're still just mine
or if you'd say, if I could ask
you're
still
mine
but I still think of you, it still lasts.

Brown bottles of cold beer
with a short walk up the street

my feet, they meet
absolutely absentmindedly

It costly exactly ten dollars, thirteen cents
for a glass pack of this beer
and yet you've cost
four years to present
in presence

you're a whole lot more intoxicating
for a shorter time, much more than this pack
much more dreaming
without the fun
without the end
to this long held
hang
over

silk slip, kimono
washed the worries, permanent press
standing naked, very unimpressed

can you? will you?
swill me?
why?

who's heart breaks
in the ache
between the "hi" and "why"?

when I recoiled from your kiss
I only knew why
it's because my bed and I we were amiss

why I last told the other goodbye

plastic casing of grubby cash
avoiding the truth of my priviledge and circumstance
thirteen bruises and grabbing some ***
and here I am drunk, doing a dance

walk around
turn around

pop the lid off a beer with a fork
and remember, so sweet, and so cold,
how young you were fourteen hours ago

trudge in the mud of sculpted strip mall gardens
hedge around a wedge of forgotten iceburg lettuce

and let me know between the waves of coffee and Lexipro
what it must've meant
to turn twenty-two, a month ago

I say, I say in a tortured tone.
For while a pitter and patter of idle time streams between your feet you forget,
ever so cruelly, that the starch of the sun that saturates your being waits for no man
no man
and that here you clasp some life in your being and it moves like a coward in a silence, escape.


So soak. Soak up every spot of sun with your hips, swiveling to face the new and the truth that lies wavering between the touchable and intangible.

For now, you soak up the sun, but more importantly...taste the night.
Taste the crispness in a colder and indifferent world that reminds you with a bleak search for darkness that by God, you have explored truly nothing of this world and that all you can see is the stars.

You have yet to explore this world and yet all you can see from whence you came when you yawn at the night is the tiny lights of the worlds unknown.

By God,
what are you still doing standing still?
Taste the night.

A little bit of death will occur in two days,
between enough hours to tell me that after
three nights (maybe even four)
I found a clasped hand and the grace of a man
who knew me not
merely a week ago

and one who will survive, a little death while longer,
beyond a great veil
of a sea, a prairie, and a prayer.

a burned chair
six cigarettes stubbed out
an empty bottle of champagne; absinthe

"If only."

a long whistling breath precedes a long draught of red wine.
a long day.
a longer remembering.

"If only I weren't stupid."

I rub my feet in silence.

Deep as the motives of an empire,
his chest rises and falls
as quickly as kings through centuries.

---

You may be marooned in my bed,
     but of all the boys that have been lost
in the blueish depths left on my neck,
     I'm glad you lingered there

I did not hesitate when I boarded the train,
caught between the salt and German time;
with fingernails yellowed with cigarette grime,
to come to Paris for it's tepid, sweet rain.
Nor I did tremble with with fear and strain,
flexing my pride in Prague with the prime
that only is granted to the young, at nighttime.
I left nothing back by or in home, but I feign--
for crookedly placed by the cold Danube,
I felt a finger of hurt despite my endeavors;
for as water pooled in those iron shoes,
I felt everything that I didn't wish to remember.

replacing white lines with gray ash and sleeping in beds for sleeping in bathrooms and you wonder if you had any self respect in the first place because this afternoon you tried to think of your happiest memories in the past year and it wasn't when you were in someone's arms or thinking of your successes in the mirror while you flexed your kickass young *** it was when you were smoking bummed menthols and your friend commandeered a miniature tractor in the tenderloin and conducted two drug deals in less than 30 minutes and you watched her disdainfully with her girlfriend and wondered where on ******* earth you could get a three dollar old fashioned and let a forty year old flirt with you for coke and you wouldn't even have to do anything for it wouldn't life be nice like that

do you become a bad person when you start snuffing out half a pack of cigarettes in your daily six pack of beer

While dragging a green lighter through a damp parks,
I've learned an empty beer can is universal and a cigarette is the shortest measure of time for a conversation.

You get lost on trains that you pay too much for,
you feel cramped on planes you pay too little for,
and burnt barley smell like cat food.

Bridges in the rain
are more beautiful than the destination you're on them for.

You can spend years, tears, and fights in unmatched white sheets of your dreams. Or rattle in an train to Istanbul, under their arm.

His curls smell like sweat and he tastes like sweet, touched with hair and a scruff of a beard. He mingles Arabic, English, and French and you feel obsolete.

But do not fall in love with a boy from Lebanon
because sooner or later he will me gone.

I dreamt, curled in the thick cut lines of "The Starry Night"
and I forgot what an old city feels like when I look out at the streetlights with neon flickering glasses

I forgot how to feel somewhere in September;
my lips pressed on a boy's from the Ivory Coast.

Face blistering on the Champs-Élysées, thinking of nostalgic songs I should be too young to feel

-

I remember how it feels to rub my hands into redwood bark
and how I wished for something real.

I don't love you
or you
or you
or you
or you
or you
or you
or them
or them  or them  or them  or them  or them  or them  or them  or them  or      them  or them  or them  or them



where's the intimacy gone when I **** nowadays?

cat-eye flick
and that tongue's quick

but not as quick as
the quick death that comes

from burning at both ends (ha)

I lie awake on two trazodones, a cup of neighborly sugar, and NyQuil,
remembering moaning your name with my fingers in your sweaty curls

and how I am only allowed a single Vonnegut novel on my birthday
and how I can't ever see your furrowed brow without consequence.

I wonder if you have realized
it's close to a year since I've knelt down for you

and that I am nothing you'd admire now.

little creature
little creature
little creature

You talk the talk, all sunken-eyed from a not-so-scant dilaudid habit
but you are a dilettante and can't straight walk the walk
compared to she and I, the comparable brunettes.

You go to the bathroom and snort drugs off your lap b/c    u     r     v   sick.

When your girlfriend goes to rehab, don't call me to *******.

You want to **** me because you like the idea of being loved
and you are two-years-too-late out of touch with being a scene queen,
draghino druggies into bathtubs and baking with Lil B.

You're slipping
and I know that, for sure,
because you tried to kiss *me

writing for an audience pushes me more than a nothing
art for art's sake?

ask Hume who remains the longest

shedding hair
everywhere

and having no qualms, a masterful alchemist, when it comes to mixing medications and liquids with no fear of death.

clicking

quiet glow

slipping into a world of silver and green screens
to know the more interesting people than I know

I forget that my brain does not do __ when it should do __ and I slip under the coat of choking mustard gas that ***** the moisture from my lungs and eyes. A mustard seed of effort, small and yellow, cracked with no seeming dreaming thing of an eye has fallen like Hansel's crumbs from my hand and is buried with all my ambitions and dead dogs in the cold ground.

I hope it grows a kingdom of heaven, but prayers are wasted when they come from the wonton--and wayward kin of sinners who lead false farces and bring gluttony to dinner. I waste and want and cannot speak the language of those around me while we all whine and dine and **** and cackle

oh god
trite *******
*******
******* ******* ******* *******

I am not tired, I am bored, I am bored of lying and trying. Trying is the worst, and there is little reward for the cost of my dismemberment of ego.

Where is a pre-made empire for me when I need it? I should be handed down something, I cannot earn it on my own. I am a ruler, not a conquerer. I am a spectator, not an athlete. My narcissism cannot take the trying effort of building something of my own with feeble rewards and now I will die alone. Maybe. Maybe it's all hyperbolic.

I'm gonna say it. *******, I'll say it.
"**** it, how will I ever get out of this labyrinth?"

an anesthesia as quiet as

mustard gas
with it's creeping cloud passing through barbed wire with a magnificent yellow intangibility;
slow-moving and inevitable, unavoidable, and deathly--
--it's silent stalking is the breath of the Holy Ghost.

an anesthesia as visible as*

a mute scream
from the cracked beaks of all-black birds as they *croak outside the thin, thin, thin, panes;
birds ruffling and rustling like reptiles that knew better
and beat the game that the mammals never tried.

Pressing, muffling, a heat so harsh and deep I wake from my sleep, running away from the pull of a endless dark tide. So dark the breaks cannot be seen in the black gulf. I am haunted.

I am haunted.
I am haunted.

I cannot sleep, I cannot dream. There is no rub--all folly and hubris brings the death knell.

Where is the source?
To whom must I kneel?

I can feel are my bruised knees from falling prey to false idols,
                   but all I can hear are the creaking ropes of hung robbers.

***

half here in a 1.5x body
six inches above the national average height
I didn't notice when I was marooned in the clouds

now a pariah afraid of birds (SQUAWK)  

(CAWING)

"It's too foggy to notice much here"
"Too bad I didn't pay attention"

(RIBBING)

too b a d
so   s a d

That nobody sad I was sick till it was too late…

…now I've got smack on the brain, nothing in my ****, and empty pockets for innumerable bills

except I always find money for *****, whose blurry touch tells me not to feel, too feel, and to speak.
I wonder when I became ******** and when I stopped being exceptional.
Maybe they're synonymous?

IDK **** K I L L ME, maYBE
This is too long of a poem for anyone to read it

You've got brown eyes
Oh,
You've got grey eyes
Oh,
You've got blue eyes

and I'll watch you go

I don't make eye contact or say hello with the cute, talented boy in my class.
He's weird, but I know I could take it. But.
It's because I'm tired of being cut on the way up to the way down.

I hope that I can see him again when someone with more courage stands in these shoes,
that knows what to say and how not to use--
--to use and use these spots of mine
that shed with touch and the setting sun.

Spaces where the taxidermied remnants of partners lie bare
from the times I lacked the effort, or time, or was too scared

to ask them not to go, or ask them their name, or, "I'm sorry, forgive me?"

I let a hand go
I pull away from a kiss.

I don't know what's wrong with me
or who I do or do not miss.

rainbows of oil
where your f ingers t ouch
leave mar ks on marble
leave ma rks on slate
leave waves in wa ter

and I know you can touch the surface bec
ause I pulled you back from goi
ng deep
before you fell too hard to rea
ch the bottom

--
--
--
--

I imagined your fingers reaching up

I knock my head against my head
in the grey hole with my head in a wall

and then I remember steve roggenbuck telling me to market the moon
and that walt whitman existed and he smelled his armpits and rejoiced
and then I have to say I am a poet, I am not bound

to be a poetto be a poetto be a poetto be a poetto be a poetto be a poetto be a poetto be a poetto be a poetto be a poetto be a poetto be a poetto be a poetto be a poetto be a poetto be a poetto be a poetto be a poetto be a poetto be a poetto be a poetto be a poetto be a poetto be a poetto be a poetto be a poet

"MAN WALT WHITMAN WOULD APPRECIATE THIS"

to
that
head against head

you-blunt-smoking-instaweed-post-on-facebook-****-smoker
you-blon­de-at-the-cvs-pharmacy-that-had-a-high-school-abortion-and-was-os­tricized
you-proud-and-sober-born-again-praise-the-lord-believer
­
that posts
pixilated baby photos
peach-flavored blunt wrappers
a bad picture of a lonely flower

who are you

you are looking more aged every year
I don't know who is sadder.

I am sorry I speak poorly of you

I do not know what happened to me
I do not know what happened to you

sorry for nothing-
---you stupidshit
sorry for nothing-
tightfisted-----kid
sorry for nothing-
for nothing, at all
sorry for nothing-
now---don't---call

Aspirin sticks deep, hot in my throat
while I choke it down, up I cough,
speedily burning up all my thoughts
into the power of steam and smoke!

Pulling at hair, I must retract all I wrote,
all these scowls, and these scoffs,
the running, the running, and pushing off,
that came with the want to sow my oats

The pain, oh the burn that taunts my head--
for I took my trust from your hand,
now I am awake, with regrets, in bed,
for not seeing you--at once--as an awful man.

I may not be all contented
but at least I can be alone

not roasted with my skin crackling by boredom
in the presence of a long-winded nerd who's cringing over enthusiasm brings out
the mildly grey abuse of power in me.

I curl up in the dark, alone.
But I will find contentment sometime within me.

curled up with La Dolce Vita
and all I'll admit to is how I missed holding your hand at night
and your seeming naive affection for Tarantino.

And how you got offended that you weren't my muse,
baby (not baby) you rocked my world.

I came from your mouth and you inspired jealousy
we can be friends that **** but by God,

we are both too stupid to do as much
because I want to snort coke off your massive ****
and remember that you know nothing about Kantian ethics
from what I said
and what you did

and how I felt

from breaking up with my boyfriend'
to *******

and your expression
when you found out you were no longer my muse

lamenting an absence of absolutes
I am standing
        no I am sitting
              no I am laying

with a cold one in hand next to a cold nothing in bed
thinking when was the last time I didn't **** up and get ******
and

**** with others' heads
   instead of just
fixing up my own

I lean against the rail, to hold steady as Royal Gate reins.
I lean eyefucking a stranger, trying to remember the last time I felt a **** rub against my legs.

I lean on unanswered messages and unanswered calls as the sticky *** that holds this ******* social life together doesn't show it's protein background,

and I ******* own ***, trying to forget why it take me a half an hour to rub a half one out

thinking of their names.

thinking

those kids aren't worth it
while I hang up my *******
in the shower

to dry.

Call me Bukshittski

For I am no Vonnegut
For I am no Burroughs
For I am no Kerouac

and I am no good man
I am abusedive, corrosive

and hold all the talent in a rotten teaspoon of a dead, dear friend.

tell me the color of your *******

tell me the length of your ****

tell me the way your **** tastes
and if your legs shake around  my head

tell me if you're circumcised or not

tell me if you like pain

tell me if you're wet

tell me if you're *******

you're *******
you're *******

and I've got my tongue licking like a dagger up your walls, finger scraping
and I've got my legs wrapped around you while I'm rubbing your *****

cosmo never told you how I like the face you make when you say my name

and I'll tell you if
I'll put my tongue where you want
so long as you say my name

Girl
while you
were sitting
shattered
I was
depressed as hell
drinking to death
over being a mirror
for you
for you for your
ego


while I remembered why
I didn't go to therapy
with a case of misanthropy

and a bucket of wine

because of your name on it

remember next time I tuck your hair back
remember next time you tell me

that you want to **** some other girl

Baby,
I'll hang out with the Dharma Bums in the Tropic of Cancer for you
if you'll hold your promise to snort coke off my ****,

while Marvin Gaye tells us how to give it up
while you put your **** in my ***

and we shake our tail feathers to Royal Gate
and the symbols of our names clash

as we whisper our names to each other while I'm bent on the bed
and I say yours as I nibble your ear after.

Baby,
you got a girlfriend.
Why do you have a girl when there are girls like me?

where is the happy ending when it comes to mental illness?

I don't (love) (touch) (be with) you
You are (a terrible person) (boring).

I will heal with (time) (opiates) (*** with others) and it'll be okay, really sir.
I hope (you die) (you go **** yourself) (be well) (think of me) (die in a fire).

You are boring.
G-o-o-d-b-y-e

broken glass embedded in backs
causing blood stains on crisp Calvin Klein shirts
from wrestling limbs on kitchen floors

licking ears as sassy retribution
for passive agression
and acts of contrition

greasy hair
unshaved legs

fur
on fur

mouth
on mouth

on moleskin
on holographic jewelry owned by us

bougie bohemians
highbrow artists
     --with--
low-maintenance interests that include

blow, opiates, fringed scarves, "velvety",
all the pills you can fist into your mouth,
a wannabe lou reed, your friends' band,
and **** **** ****** **** gallery openings.

Take a picture, it won't last as long as this work day
but we have to have our money for the water--after the eight ball and taxi, of course.

I need to stop thinking
                     about the way you tasted when
                     I kissed you

gripping your hair
gripping your ***

tracing an outline in your pants

while I quietly moaned

up against a wall

                this ***** is making me

thirsty

and there is something
insatiable

biting it's lips

in the

dark
        dark
dark

corners
of my bed