I tried to describe you to someone
The other day
At a loss for affectionate nouns that
Would string together adjactives
Of how much I miss you.

Words sat deep in my lungs
And puffed out squeaky and small
Smoke-tainted coughs
Laced with conversations we had
When I first put that smoke there.

Words pilled up at the base of my gut
Twisting my insides the way you said
Yours did when you thought of planets.
Words that if formulated in my mouth
Would tell you I would ****
Just to be a moon circling in your orbit
Picking up rocks of you
You thought had fallen off forever
And were meteored through the universe.

Words that you once spoke to me
At night on a bench
Carried in my moon-hard
Lungs as smoke
That when I speak of you
Heat me thaw.

And again you fall up.
Fall up into your own head.
Your tangled strings of thoughts
Slither and snake around themselves and choke
Themselves out with a pressure twisted
Tighter than boy-scout knots
Ebbing around painful snaps of rubber band nerves
Looping around the tennis ball of your brain
And as you fall your foot snags on the ringed
End of a threading needle and as you kick it deeper
Into your soft red pin cushion mind
You are hanging with your legs pointed up
With your fingers just barely *******
The edge of that whiskey bottle
The needle breaks.
And you fall down into that drink
Dousing your brain with boiling hot liquid
Hoping that your knotted thoughts will
Melt into spaghetti, soft and loose
Barely circling the fork of your brain
And finally unravel the pressure of
Being the only person who falls both ways.

A eulogy to the somebody
I claim to have used to know
It is scribbled on paper
Napkin
Receipt
Whatever
Behind my wood rotten desk
Under frost kissed drink rings and
And like all the other letters before it
Creased and folded into shoe boxes on top shelves
They all begin the same
And that part I have memorized
As I count the licks
Against the roof of my mouth
The slides of my tongue just beyond
The edge of my teeth
The drop of my head
I match with the dip of my voice
When I say, “A terrible loss”
But the words I have now bent
And smudged across one another
In the palm of my fist-formed hand
Have bled through their paper
And like no eulogy before I have
Nothing to say.
My head hung over what I know realize
Is just some body
That held somebody I used to know.

Our adult selves are so cunning
Are they not?
They hide from the child inside us
And on occasion
Play hide and go seek
With them
In the most peculiar of ways
Taunting them almost with the
Promise that one day the baby
In their hearts will outgrow the
Adult on their surface
Placing hope in snow-globes
On high shelves with grown-up arms
So that the child, if it were to
To seek more than hide still
Could not reach it
And in its seeking would bang on the shelf
That the adult knew to not do
And the snow-globe would fall and crash
On the floor
Leaking out glittered blood
And broken crown-shaped pieces of glass
That only an adult is allowed to pick up.

My sculpture artist.
My mad scientist.
The constant reader of anatomy books
Perched on paper scattered desks
Close dissection of the human
You want me to become
And I want it too.
I am tired of being a moist lump of clay
Slumping over from unmolded parts of my frame
The structure that holds promise of life
If all parts are carved in just right
Mirroring the blue vein lines
Between red masses of muscles
Printed on yellow and finger smudged paper
From your constant flipping between
The full human form and
That small pumping muscle you
Have carved into me time and time again
Only to smear with one finger tip
The dainty clay aorta
Inside my already perfect chest
I am tired of not burning hot with the
Fires of your kiln.
To be burnt so severely
That what was supposed to be skin would
Crack, break, and fall into a complete shell
Around my base.
Leaving a small pumping heart
That would finally define me as human
To an artist who plays with science.

On a Wednesday I bit down hard
Into an apple.
The red ringed hues of crimson
I thought would taste better to my mouth
Than to my eyes
Until the sweet juice dripped down
Onto my chin
Leaving a sticky residue that ******
On my fingers when I wiped it away.
The one bite of flesh I held in my open mouth
Less open than my eyes
That first saw that thing.
That half of a worm that
Still wriggled for life
Hung half out a hole in my apple
Like a drowning man hanging out of a
Bouie waving his arms franticly for help
But underneath the water his
Legs still and deader than what
I can either assume to be the head or end
Of the worm still in my mouth.

Sometimes I feel
Like a tethered titian
Of sorts
Tied to and underneath the
Footsteps of morals
Above me on earth
Angry with no shoes
I stomp around with my thunderous feet
Because no tailor would tie
String around my arches and leather beneath my soles
To protect me from the hot coals that line
The carpet of my cage.
A mythological beast of old is what I feel like
Some days
And in many ways
I feel like
A god of flight
Not confined to the barriers of night
But to the endless blue hued sky
That my golden wings contrast against
So sharply they cut through the air
Propelling me in circles around a bigger circle
That the mortals below me still think to be flat
My heels clasped with wings confining me
To the jail of myself where I am
The warden of one and exact my
Revenge on my prisoner daily
With the force of a titans foot
Tricked into thinking wings could
Be shoes.

Time does not heal all wounds,
Cannot make everything right.
All time is—Is future and
All the future does is leave you with
Immeasurable space filled with ****** earth
And the promise of fresh crops
That could be your thriving life
But for your need to think,
To ponder ,
To wonder,
To mull over every decision
Rake over every choice
Picking up and turning over
Every hard as rock thought.
Planting new bulbs tainted with old ideas
As you purge out all of your memories
Just to sift through each one
with your ***** hands—naked without gloves
The muddied clumps of soil riddled with the worms
Of things you used to know
Slipping through your fingers
As you pull them apart and leave them,
The tufts of unfermented soil
There on the ground.
More broken up than they were in your own head.

A lesson I learned in school
From the boys I have only known
Through sharpies on bathroom stalls
Mike who broke Kim’s heart
And G who would love S forever
Even though the arrow pointing away
From it in a different color
Said otherwise
I learned on painting wood
Suspended by nailed in hinges
That love was more temporary than
Permanent marker
And could be erased by a janitor with
Clorox and even the
Girls who were so motivated to hang onto
Their love that they carved instead of drew
Hearts around their lover’s names
But found they could just as easily be painted over
By pink stained brushes
The lesson I learned in college
Eventually replaced the one before
The first day
In between classes and cups of coffee
When I saw the stalls
Were covered by doors made of
Marble.
Without a scratch of temporary.

The trees are stricken with a terrible illness
a certain shrillness that permeates
their perpetual stillness.
And I have seen them.
Their pitch dripped hearts buried underneath
Their brown and rough bark, our version of skin.
And I have cut them.
Looking for their sap, their form of our blood
Hoping to find it still sticky sweet with life,
Hoping it has not succumb to their illness
That is our men.
Men, with burly beards and chainsaws
That are the trees versions of sterile masks
And metal toothed needles
Chainsaw needles that pump poison into
The trees’ version of our arms
Their form of cancer that
Ravishes through what would be our
Organs.
Men with saws that are our version of chemo
Shaking off the leafs that would be
What we call hair
And I have seen them.
They fall down the same way we would
And are covered by our same dirt earth.

If I were a man
I would ask out a girl just for the hell of it
Because either way ive been waiting far too
Long to try that restaurants grilled halibut
I would sag my pants down low
In any given social situation
I would wake up in the middle of the night with a cold sweat
Fearing that doctors castration
And in the same situation I would burp real loud
Because I drank too much beer
Or ate too many chips
And what is a man to do
other than flip his own scripts
and rip on other men’s trips
and say, “dude you’re so gay”
if I were a man
I’d probably put bumpin’ speakers in
My Honda civic
And id bust out loud rap as I turned and whipped it
In front of all the pretty girls
The ones with hair curled and necklaces made of my pearls
Ones I wouldn’t call back because I paid attention in math
And knew the male to female ratio was 1 to 4
And that left me with 3 other girls to score
But sense I am not a man
And according to them I am some-what less than
I’ll belt my pants suffer your ****** glance
Deny you a dance and instead of implants
I will wish for a transplant.

Daughter’s of eve.
I have looked and I have seen
The breakfast you have brought to your men
The ugly millionaires you have married
the married business man you met on the ferry
The sad younger man at the bar
The customer whose eyes you couldn’t see though his cigar
I saw you trying to fit into his house
But the door was so small
So small
And you couldn’t fit.
Not with you and what he called, “big-*** hips”
So you go in the French doors in the back
That makes you feel like the eggs you brought him in the morning
Weak and runnier than their yolk sac
The men that first held you like the last orange on the
Last tree in the last garden of the world
Then slowly squeezed out all your juice
Right onto his lapping tongue
Because it turns out he wasn’t hungry just thirsty
And your skin was just a cup that held some juice
To quench his thirst
And wasn’t it worst when you first burst
Into tears over than man
Tears too heavy too many and too hot
To see anything else
To parallel park to leave your mark
On something new to write or speak
To dream or to think
To work out math problems on the board
To not question your man as your lord
I still I hope that your words will carry more weight than
Than number between your feet on the scale
That you will not let your grades drop lower
Than the ******* on your chest
Held high in cups you wish were
higher up in the alphabet than the letter
C.
So why can’t you see.
Why can’t you be
An A.
An a women student mother mentor
A daughter of eve
Who shouldn’t still have to pay
For the way the garden ended but in a pear-shape

The anvil sky—
The sky that presses its weight down
Heavy against the earth
Compacting the old snow of winter
Dense and thick and complete
So tight the snow warms against itself
It melts.
Only for the anvil’s cold metal to
Freeze the snow to ice.
Locking in the roots of spring
Behind dirt cast bars under
Ice clear windows.
Far up in the anvil sky
There are tiny lights like nails
Hotter than the icy metal
Burning through and warming up—
Small spots like holes in snow
Where daises will surely grow.

A thin black eye lash on my sweater
One of the dark cloaked guardians
That stand so close together in line
and puff out their thickened chests
To guard my fragile blue eyes.
Their bodies drawn in tight like curtains.
But it seems the weakest
Link has fallen off its post
Not as mighty, or as fit as the other
Bristles that still remain.
Why is this the one I am to wish on?
The feeble pray of the huffing wind.
The unfit shepherd who let my
Sheepish eyes be eaten by wolfs
I pick it up between my thumb and finger
Place it in my palm and
I would tell it, but in a whisper
My wish
And I would latch it on tight
And as I blew it away with
Pursed lips and eyes closed shut
And I think that perhaps a lighter
Lash will carry my wish further to you
Than the stronger ones I have plucked out
And wished on Before.
That it will not be weighed down
By its own girth as my wish is already heavy
Enough to hold
And then perhaps my wish on a lash
Will find its way to your lap
And it will sit there in my place
And tell you in the things that my voice
Cannot scream from here that
No one has ever wanted anything more than
I want you.

We were planets that collided
In a perfect black sky
Searching for similar skin to share.

Like i am not who i am.

Sometimes I think
That I eat grapes too much.
I eat them so much,
And so many that
Some fall into the fissures
Of my mind.
They burry themselves there
And there I let
Them sit.
For days,
months,
For years.
until they ferment,
Until they make me drunk
So mind drunk I think of you.
Of you and your
Intoxicating voice
One I that I can’t make out
Completely  until
I eat more grapes that
Fill my mind so full
Some slip down into my throat
And mute my voice
So that yours is the only
One I can speak in
And you always talk of making more
Wine.

I believe you should suffer in life.
To solidify it, make it solid,
Real.
Even in your sleep.
And even in your dreams
You should dream of knifes and of guns
Pointed square at your heart
The sound of the gun clocking back
The rush of the knife slicing your skin
Should be as painful and drawn out
As when you awake in the morning,
Patting your bed for liquids
Checking your sheets for the blood stains
You could have sworn would be there and
Are bewildered they aren’t.
Even in the sleep where
Your body and mind
Still let you act like a child
With your puckering lips,
Grasping fingers,
Inaudible grumbles,  
Droll dripping onto your pillow,
Should then be invaded by
Dreams of that knife and of that gun
That makes you wet the bed
Where there should be blood.

Why did you leave me here?
In a wool coat with
Wheat straws still in my hair
To fight,
To be captured,
To be captured, and
To contract the fate
Of most
Who find themselves
In the same
imprisoned war
But for you it was
Far too soon for
Both mine and
Your liking.  
And it was far too
Inglorious to die
With your heart in
An angry fist.

The first time I saw her, her body looked like an exit wound, not physically and now sometime later in my memory I think it was maybe the way she said certain words. Words like “hollow” and “soundless” the combination of these two words strung together with other smaller and slightly weaker ones in between made me think of a match hitting gasoline or of a bullet being loaded into a gun.

My mother is getting ready for work. And I a child of about 9 years old sitting on her bedroom floor watching her get dressed the same as I would for the next 9 or so years in this house. This house, I remember, that shook violently from the train a block away and was so fragile and damp that its walls warped and swelled making the house look like someone had once blown up a large balloon inside and the walls still held its shape. My mother who never complained about the state of our house ans instead would tell me, “Isn’t it cozy living in a snow-globe house?” So on the damp floor I would sit and I would watch my mother go through the motions, the same motions she went through every night and every night in the same order, she did this so often and religiously she had it down to an art, a methodical art that at this age seemed to me more like dancing. She started her dance by thumbing over the light pale and pink lip paint she saved for weekday afternoons and Sunday mornings , reaching instead for the bright Chinese red stick she painted onto her perfectly pursed lips, next pressing down wrinkles smooth as the backs of thumb-tacks -on her black tight dress, pressing over her hips, her thighs. She next sashays over to her vanity and picks up a small black container to paint over her eyelids a bright but dusty blue shadow, then gently sweeps me up and sets me on her bed as she kneels down and tells me to sprinkle her face with a shimmery clear powder, giving her the look she always said made her stand out, made her look “unique”. Her next step was then slipping her dainty and fragile size 7 feet into heels that I knew would be both black and invisible in the dark night outside our front door. That I often thought would hurt her feet as she walked the long stretch of street outside our house.  Her then, grasping with both hands a purple and gold glass bottle of perfume on her dresser, which then to me looked like a curious crystal globe of sweet-smelling water, that sparkled like a snow-globe when she shook it. This is my mother’s last step, she presses down the sponge-like pump. The only magical part of my mother’s evening- the part I always thought would make her realize she should stay. As she presses down on the pump I see the shiny and clear purple hued liquid release and bubble out into tiny specks of oxygen atoms, I see watch them as they swirl up the golden bottle-the snow-globe holding them in, controlling them, allowing them to eddy and ebb around themselves, to tango around each other within the safety of its glass. They are dancing, writhing around in their own world, free from the terrors of the outside air, these atoms they embrace the chaos and they wallow in the pressure that perpetuates them in an endless looping of rhythmic motion. They enjoy it. They bask in the comfort of the fluid that holds them tight together safe in their glass house, keeping them untouched. I, sitting there eye level to this bottle watching ever so closely as the air bubbles swim closer and closer to the surface. Until they slowly start to realize that they are being expelled from their bottle. They then stop dancing and move franticly in a tornado-like motion, they scream and they fight their way back down towards the others like them, wishing to not be pushed up and out into the bigger pool of air they know will surely render them invisible. They wish so strongly to be kept inside their bottle, to always be safe and visible in the enwombing liquid that circles around them in their bottle, that reassures them of their existence as a single being and not as a part of a whole, to be separate from the mass of air that awaits them, the air that only yearns to add to its girth, by swallowing the tiny air-bubbles. I want them to stay. Stay in their snow-globe to live forever as air bubbles safe and few, to not swim to the world that will gulp them down whole. I know they are dainty and fragile and I want to keep them safe. I want to always see them dancing separate and unique and never leaving, yet they do. I want them to stay, yet they do not. All in an instant, faster than the blink of an eye, the once dancing bubbles are gone and are now sprinkled sweet across my mother’s neck. The only evidence of their existence- a lingering scent flowing out of my mother’s bedroom as she grabs her purse on the couch. I want her to stay. And as she grabs her purse and slams the front door it shakes our house like glass around me. Me, left here feeling liquid and weak in a snow-globe house now void of air.

Perhaps the only people
Capable of true togetherness
Are the ones that are still alone.
Still sitting on park benches
Ease dropping on other peoples
Lives
Waiting to begin their own.
Knowing that they have to wait
For someone else
Who also ease drops by themselves

Because in my dreams we dance
Light as feathers
Across tight ropes
And balance beams
Catching one another as we fell
Into arms stronger than nets
And heavier than the elephants
I stood atop
and I,
With my red jeweled dress
Swaying short around my thighs,
I could see
You looking up at me
And you
Smiling, knowing,
Feeling-
The water
Wet
As you dived into that
Bucket down below.
Splashing out across my sheets
When I awoke.

meet someone you want to write poems about
and instead sit at your computer for hours
taunting yourself with their voice?
feeling it warm the back of your head as their
words flows through your ears?
even now I can taste them sweet
as they drip down into my mouth.

I am at my best in my madness.
The monsters of my mania are too sly
To let me think anything other than-

I am sitting here
Penniless and alone.
Waiting for you
And your bended ear
And your thousand questions
And your mouth full of pennies
Asking for my thoughts.

I’ll rewrite my words
Hundreds,
Thousands of times.
Erasing periods
Commas and uncommon verbs
So my style will mimic yours.
I’ll speak my words
Hundreds,
Thousands of times
In a voice in my head that mimics yours
Hoping they will sound like yours
Hoping they, like yours, will
Will sit at the foot of my bed at night
And seep into my clothes the next morning
Like yours, eddy inside my ears
Hundreds,
Thousands of times.

I cannot breathe with these words in my mouth.
So long they have lived in my thoughts and too
Long perhaps have I ignored their cries for release,
Too long have they had nothing other to do than to multiply
To feed off one another creating sentences and paragraphs and
Books of their anguish, of their hate for their keeper,
They have swelled too big for my heavy head to hold
These words, they seek room, they seek open air, to breathe free.
They look for it everywhere.
They seep into my eyes pushing out buckets
Of water, eddying around themselves, elbowing at
Themselves for space to be spoken, and I their master
Hold tight the dam they push at.
They drip defeated down my throat as I swallow
The lump they’ve shaped
And in attempts to follow the air they yearn for
They sit at the base of my lungs.
Spawning bigger with time they push their
Way up again my throat, they spill out into
My mouth as I try to hinge shut my lips
They gag and choke my lungs wetting my eyes
Blushing my face. And with irony they fill my mouth so
Fully, I cannot release them.
These words that were so
Simple and few at first, now only spawn
my strong undying feeling of regret, the regret
Of never saying the words I’d always felt.

Monsters are real, though they are not adorned with red eyes
Not seen with curled upper lips, with giant claws
They are under your mind’s cache appearing only when
Your world goes dark, when they feel safe under blanketed
Eyes and pursed lips covering and concealing
Their tainted dark intentions
They hide under your bones, they sharpen
Their teeth
And the tips of your ribs
Swapping shoulders  
You can’t tell which from which
They encase your heart, no they
Pierce through your chest
They hide in the dip of your voice
When you say things like “love” or “hate”
Dropping syllables of doubt in words
You realize are no longer your own.

Still after 22 years I’m not used to the spin
I still sway with the torpid orbit of this earth
I still feel more like ripples in the ocean
Billowing out helplessly by forceful winds
Than like the fish that swim solid beneath its gale
My legs still ache to move backwards as
The ground below me charges itself
Further and further forward, still, into
It’s circular rhythm, perpetual and exhausting
What I’ve always seemed to think was
Its true underlying intentions
To drown me.
To never stop ringing around itself
To never lull in its constant wind-blown vim
Created by its imposing movements
To never let me parity my body above sea-level
Never letting me know of or be thrown off balance, me without
Any knowledge of or way to grasp a steady pole.
This swirling pool of motion with each tick and tock right,
It engulfs me with waves of pressure, its crests crashing
Heavy on my attempts to stand beneath it.
It renders me dizzy without senses.
The blood-thirsty rocking of this earth
Whips hair feverously across my eyes
Blinding me to the ground I would grasp to steady my body
If not for the winds ebbing across the planes I struggle to stand atop
Winds, rubbing my hands red and raw and unable to feel
Slashing my fingers with invisible knifes
I would catch my breath, find strength to stand, if only these winds
Would slow with the stall of the earth’s movement, if its swirl
So constant, did not weigh so heavy and hot around me
Burning with tropical heat, thickening the air, heavy as water
And me, wishing for gills.

Tress grow slower than we do, she says,
They gestate longer in the soil than we do in our mothers
True, we were both at one time seeds, she says,
But trees grew out, while we grew up
By the time we learned to walk
A tree will have only fastened its branches
It will have rooted its self in a home
That, like us, was not self-elected but while
We are constantly trying to walk from our home
A tree is rooting itself in theirs.
We grow up and walk around our parent’s house
Then our neighborhood, our city, our country, our world
Glimpsing only meager morsels of other beings homes
It’s difficult to pinpoint our own, to know it wholly
But a tree, she says, a tree never walks from its home
And through this it knows it so absolutely, so entirely.
A tree grows slowly, gazing at its environment for years
Far past when our timeline has expired
It watches as its atmosphere changes, even in the slightest
It still grows higher and higher at a pace that allows
It to view every intimate detail of the world it resides in
Never failing to notice every leaf, twig, branch
We don't know our homes like that and
It’s a shame, she says,
That we grow a lot faster than trees do,
Perhaps this is why we get home-sick.

My breathing is heavy.
A force straddles my body, it pushes and thrusts over my chest
It starts to apply pressure to invisible heart wounds
I would not have known were their but for
The crushing weight intended to stop their bleeding.
Now feeling dry of blood I wait for the elephantine like force
To retreat, to allow my breathe back into my chest,
But as I look down at my chest I don't see wounds
Just you. I ask please get off.
And your weight still sits unapologetic-ally over my body
My breathing has slowed now.
Your pressure reacts and heightens as it moves higher up my form
Now it is perched atop of my neck
Now I can’t speak, can’t tell you to move, can’t vocalize
How your weight aches.
How I would ask you to please get off
My breathing is undetectable.
Bricks of your flesh rest atop of my head, now you've moved higher
The weight of you ebbs into my pores
Travels through my veins and pours into my thoughts
You and your crushing pressure have been absorbed
And now weigh on my mind
And to be frank you are quite heavy
So please get off.

Dear One, I am sorry to have to appear before you like this.
Dressed in my Sunday’s best, a modest green tie, black coat, black shoes
With silver bracelets clasped around my feet.
I would have liked for you to see me differently
Or perhaps just the same but in a time after this
In a place that is not this, where it is not needed
To have these strong bars and glass not keeping me in
But keeping you out. If only to impede you
From telling me of how much you want for me
Of how your pain parallels my time away
Of how you fear your arms will weaken without my chest
But One, if you have to express this, that which
I already know, when I appear before you I would ask you to
Cover your mouth and to strap your arms at your side
Such formalities necessary to hold in feelings that with-
Would fill my heart too heavy, you see.
Without you it is light and light is how I would like it kept
For when I appear before you like this
I cannot have that weight in my heart collapse me
In arms I won’t feel for years.

I love you in ways immeasurable
On timelines that have no end
In cups that aren’t marked
And on rulers that aren’t straight
In some ways I love you like a child
Who never learns that the stove is hot
And in some ways like a student
Reading and studying you all night  
Always I love you but sometimes
In ways I don’t understand
Like how I love you like I love
Salt, and water, and sand
Though the ocean still seems too deep
Like how I love you in my dreams
But not always when you steal covers in my sleep
I love you in strange ways that I fear
Will never be truly known
Like how I love you for years
In one day that you’re not home
Or like how my love for you
Is a poem always writing about itself,
Folding up its words and placing them on the very top shelf.

And what of the eighth day? When did God sense the ethereal rush of completing a project was wearing off? Does God get bored? Does he, like everyone else, grow tired of the mundane and of the usual?  God projecting his own image onto his creations was not enough anymore. Too lonely was God and too curious he was to be left unattended with the power to elude the impossible. Too lonely he was, too much he wanted to be around others like himself, too much time he had spent with his own thoughts reverberating off the walls of his own making, shouting back ideas already known to him. Too curious he was to see what would happen if he could experience the company and love of others like himself, and too insightful he was to know all of these things existed in his mind but not as a firsthand account. Too self-aware he was to not understand that a genuine account of such feelings was what he wanted. He felt all the feelings we feel; curiosity, loneliness, boredom, company, and love. He understood them so completely and totally in the world he created that he grew tired. And then the only feelings God could now sense were those of loneliness and of guilt; strong undying feeling of regret of knowing things that only he has ever felt. With these thoughts encircling his heavy mind he also realized that if he were to create another like him, he could not control it. His identity would have to be shared with another complete equal. Could he have this? Too wise he was to not account for the repercussions of his artistic actions; God was still. For God like all of us God wishes to be special, to be unique, and to have control; control, the original ***** of God. God realized this at the dusk of the seventh day; he realized that now after looking at the last of all his great creations the problems with the ones before. In no measurable time he had created many planets, worlds, kingdoms, and creators, none holding his attention long enough to not create the next.  So these, he muttered in his kingdom of unshared silence, these had to be different. Not God enough to oppose him but human enough to feel him.

I love you now as only few things are to be loved
Within the secret of an untouched desire
Or in the dark esoteric of a thought
So I am further gone than you might have expected
Down your chords of tragic intonation
For it is unknown to me yet, your guile,
Behind your harmonious guise
The worm in my heart has always
Been the apple of your eye.

one of eight strapped to this tree
with threats of knifes that turn bark into skin
branches into limbs
if only the connections deep as my roots
did not entangle my own mortality if only they
could be severed easily as my leafs in fall
then perhaps my pinch dripped heart
would not punish those who hurt it
whom at first pruned with the promise of love
then betrayed with blades of unrequited rapture
those whom just did not understand the veins between
life and limb.

my spine grows further and further
up my neck it releases seeds of thought
upblooming in my very heavy head
weeds and flowers alike it drops
enwombed in my crescent head
the weeds grow right
the flowers grow left
each soil my mind with beauty and reason
the flowers they speak
of creating and love all other things ascetic
the weeds teach me logic, numbers, and phrases
they warn me of anything poetic
I am inclined to deny my bias for either
For such a balance they create
But as of late I am pruning my mind with deft
And find that I am of Ehud’s left.

I cage in God.
With glorious bars
Too small for his fingers
He releases his singers
Plucking chords made of nerves
Swelling with each note served
Undefined voices will swirl
With planetic like twirls
Filling my senses with increasingly
Distrusting incentives.

Crazy things we didn’t know were there
Without an X to mark its spot,
We shoveled and we dug over our bodies
We pillaged acres of skin, ravished even,
Our flesh fueled by the promise of glowing treasure
Wielding shovels and picks only our better natured angels
Understood, or could call “sweet intentions”
No map we possessed ended in gold
So we drew up our own tracing mountains and streams,
Upturning every rock, wading in every pool,
Our made-up languages became passcodes for secret doors
Our hair and nails became *****-traps
Like poisonous ivy and razor sharp spikes.
Perilous our hunt for heirloom, we would find.
But how could we not look?
Our compass points Northeast from down here
So as I climb towards your chest and you to mine
Our knocking proved there were unhallowed
Cavities under ribbed-caged bodies
And still we dig
Closer and closer to the treasure in our chests.

There once was a girl who now no longer exists
In a city that no longer exist, with a name
That no one in existence can pronounce
And that only inexistence can imagine.
She lay in a bed that also no longer exists
Playing a game, that only existed in nonexistence,
With a boy whose existence is, again, no longer real.
The one rule of this game that has long been lost in existence
If it ever really existed at all, the one rule of this bed game was and is,
The bed is the only thing that exists at all.
The boy and the girl who both no longer exist they,
Drew a line around the bed, rendering it their only plane of existence
Neither a toe nor a finger could touch the floor as they were sure
That that was too close to earth to not nonexistence
And touching this floor, this divider between existing and not,
Was not the point in their coexistence in their nonexistence
You see this game was not for those who exist
Because they did not exist. Not in this house,
On this street, in this city, all of which are no longer in existence.
But they exist to one another in their bed of inexistence
But to no one that now exists at all.
Centuries of existence will be worth this kind of inexistence.