Oh Jesus time by the pink and purple sunset
Thinking of a traveling guitar boy,
of chai sleep broken by dying beggars
all trying to tell me something.
If the ocean lights don't call us home
we could backpack to the crocodile places
eat thirteen camels with the people
smoke tea and rainy day cigarettes.
Heartache sits like snow on the roof
of the hollow hut Connecticut.
The kids tried too many times for nothing.
Mom dream better for me
Wear your peace face
I'm trying to change

You're talking France nostalgia while upstairs
the weaver makes seven-dollar laments
for international slum chickens.
We can't do better than the break-bone average
reading scorched Chalbi newspapers
hacking coughs and statii soup for company.
Bukowski's in Mumbai eating cheddar
My siblings are in cages down in Egypt
The Spanish Communist cowboys
spill Turkana survivors on the floor of the Greyhound bus

Is there a hood idealist, ghetto healer?
My Sacramento roommate's drinking skeleton coffee
in the bathtub, she's got the Arab fever, so have I,
and not much else but these crazy plague jackets
this hungry smoking December
and Rumi's kids in cold-bread streets with protest signs.
We're easier taught the panic than the magic or the save,
There's too much strange and midnight waste.
You didn't know I needed you but you came through.
You're shimmering in clothes of saxaphone

I don't brush my hair or eat my vegetables.

Really, that's who I am. The tall girl
with the little cousins splashing careless
in the tissue paper leaves of fall
who climbs trees and scratches her bug bites until
they bleed and comes home giggling
with grass-stained knees and dirt in her pockets.
Mom would smile at dinner and say I smell like
Outside.

The compliment of compliments, untouchable with
innocence revered.

Somehow, with a little west coast living and
men under my belt, I've changed. With pressure to
be domestic and beautiful, ****** and *****,
flourish professional and more successful
than my mother's mother who mothered 6,  
I have forgotten this. I fall short.

I fall
in love with men who quell Outside joys and bike rides
with money and ******* and touch me in the dark,
cooing and cawing and convincing me
I'm happier to throw a pretty penny
around, and here, take this pill, smoke this dope,
to not remember the smells and scabs and stories from
when you gave a **** that made you who you are.

I'm getting my hair done today at some high end place.
I'm waiting for blonde dye to set, reading about
world hunger in my National Geographic. Wait,
that's probably not acceptable.

Okay, I'm reading
about J.Lo's *** in US Weekly, talking numbly to the stylist
about I-can't-believe-they-wore-that, while some yuppie
next to me with her face stretched too tight
is reading something ****** in Vanity Fair and
won't shut up about the Kardashian divorce.
"I mean, not like I know her or anything, but it seems
SO like her to..."

I'm surrounded by flourescent lights and floor length
mirrors and ******* with their caked on makeup
whispering of affairs and debt the way
you inexplicably can to your hairdresser alone.

I look at my face in the mirror,
framed in foil, pop music pounding overhead.
I mean, I'm not as bad off as the rest of them, right?
I couldn't be. I
remember the bug bites, piles of old leaves,
pink-cheeked simple childhood, and I can't
breathe all the sudden.

I
click my designer heels to the counter
throw my credit card at the $144 bill and
leave, speeding, to get away, don't know where
to go, I just end up at a ritzy bar where I stumble in
and, out of habit, order a martini, clean, straight up with
a twist.

Then I look down and burst into tears because
really, I'm no different from them and
truly, growing up in this town is
such a cruel, long hurricane of loss
that you can try to flee, past tangled hair and untouched
vegetables, all across the great Outside but you
just can't outlast in hide and go seek.

Fridays eyes are peeled for bait.
Ready to chomp its magnificent jaw down onto the night, sinking its every wish into milky moon covered driveways.
Driveways covered in Hondas and future footsteps.

Friday wags its skirt up a little too high; reaching for Saturday.
12am; they dance a very large dance together.
They fill the future footsteps to a Honda song and wait to illuminate another dance; another week.

the leaves are the same color
as the paper in my pocket
the paper in my pocket
is ready to scatter all over
the big round things that
are bouncing on the pole

Lunacy is freedom.

Solo, burnt, boundlessness.

Run crazy, run

far away and don’t look back

or their claws will sink right through

and capture you.


Cry crazy, cry

louder and harder

so that you pierce their ears

with the sound of your soul.


And laugh crazy, ******* laugh

at their frozen, populated boundaries.


Run lunatic,

Cry lunatic,

Laugh lunatic,

Run, Cry, and Laugh crazy,

because where you’re free they’re not.

I once stumbled upon a great beast of a tree
And I thought how like it is a man in this world.
From a seed this great tree grew from the ground
And his arms stretched where they once timidly curled.
I thought to myself how man is strong when storms blow his way
But, without nourishment, would shrivel to no more.
Like this great beast Man stands strong, protects and shades
Even when Man knows not what for.
Man's roots, his core, rely on the soil from which he grew
And to these things Man clings for life
A good man finds love in his mother and father
Or, if he's lucky, in the woman he calls wife.
A man is like a tree in the way that he stands tall
Even when everything around him slowly dies one-by-one
The might of a man can bring some to their knees
To some, he shines brighter than the summer sun.
A man is like a tree in the way that he is strong when he needs to be
Yet he knows when life is trying to make him drown
But often, though he stands and withers away
A man will not fall down.

i'll be your beer-soaked, ashed on bar,
i'll be your cloudless night sky
in january, baby.
so cold it burns.
i'll be your pirate ship
and your shores,
your weapon of mass destruction
and all the mountains i could level,
i'll be the pack of cards
we lost
under your bed.
i will be your final resting spot,
your casket and your headstone.
"Here lies someone who was
torn by love
so many times
it's a miracle we could bury his body."
honey i tried so hard to be your
candle in the sun.
light against light.
something so clean about it.
but i just got turned into
the north wind that
caresses your shoulders
on the walk to class.
not even noticeable
anymore.
not even raising goosebumps
on your
spine.

I was the child with the coral painted brown on my head.
I was his fawn. I was his lost death.
I feel this buzzing in my bones.
I think I'm dumb.
I was just as bored as him.
I was his polly. I was his kin.
I think I'm dumb.