i was beneath the bed
listening to the in-out
thinking about how we
all take the air differently
when josh came with the cold
outside and drunkenly mistook
me for Christina, found his unusual
place and passed out  in stiff shadows,
smelling faintly of fireball cinnamon whisky--

plenty of moments reserved for sinking
or abandoning ship, receding into that quiet
place, hungry for a will and a way

when matthias finds me ransacking the
kitchen cabinets, i am rattling the underground
Seattle with a clorox induced vengeance
because i only seem to find peace in leaving
an old place clean, running my fingers through
jello shots that have disintegrated sometime in
the 3 am when for a few minutes we must
have all been asleep.

( all            the             while              Adele   )
hums in the background--a languid Hello
solemnly stitching itself into my memory
something to later hold dear, some fragment
of an adolescence that was realized on this
night, when I was removed from the place
beneath the bed, stolen from the house
dreaming that I was found inside
the mouths of strangers that
passed alongside Boylston
with their misshapen bodies
coiled in streamers and
various liquors

so when i return at 7 am
still wide awake and waiting
I examine my ******* in the
foggy mirror of the bathroom
before taking what I would
endearingly refer to as the
dirtiest shower off my life---
how could such a thing
be so? I'm curious myself.

I've spent two weeks cleaning an old place.

do your hair up all pretty like
for those of us that are sure the world
can see our fly-aways, just fly away
our cuticles aren't healed enough
from nights spent jamming our
hands in between the rough *****
and city junctions, telephone wires
hooked to our skin because we're
just fish to greater demons

but

when you hear your old selves
discuss their polarities and crack
the mirror with spiritual hits it's
best to talk them off the ledge
that faint precipice in the distance
where they linger and stare too
long at the other sides, the other wheres
otherwhys and othertheres
see the green grass in other hells
but you tell them that
there's no place like
the here and
now

the here
and now.

When I read about the brachial plexus,
a spaghetti junction of nerves webbed
behind the clavicle, I am d  i  s  t  a  n  t
half awake and dreaming about lovers
caught up in the mystics of medulla,
gingerly pinching the tendons and
sinewy muscle--

I consider the thick arteries (perhaps not
so thick) (not like other trunks, cords and
red threads) and how easily I could die,
how swollen 'tunnels' and blocked interstate
highways seem not so far fetched according to
medical terminology and the number of things
that could go wrong ( will ) as Murphy warned.

yet here I am, alive and well, a celestial giant
housing stars and all a manner of great, lumbering
structures, pith, and blood.