So often I feel like you are fruit
Placed gently on me, a sandpaper offering plate.
I do not want to hold you so roughly,
But there are things I am still learning

Placed gently on me, a sandpaper offering plate
My rough rubs you slowly,
But there are things I am still learning.
How we are unto diamonds.

My rough rubs you slowly,
Until we are evenly raw.
How we are unto diamonds;
I wish I was that soft.

Until we are evenly raw,
This feels like the devolution of beauty.
I wish I was that soft.
Something similar to dying fruit.

This feels like the devolution of beauty.
Soon you will no longer be sweet.
Something similar to dying fruit.
And I am a sandpaper monster still learning,

And so often I feel like you are fruit.

Death cures all sickness.
Freud said the goal of all living things is death.
Can I get a witness?

So then it is slow torture for us to do things,
Like keep houseplants and goldfish alive.
Death cures all sickness.

It makes the will to live seem pretentious
When we make it point to continue on, survive.
Can I get a witness?

But I don’t believe in cheating.
Not all living things understand suicide.
Death cures all sickness.

Drunk at night I bear my heart repeating,
That I not go gently into the night.
Death cures all illness.

No, I am bone and breath
And will not strive for death.
Death cures all sickness.
Can I get a witness?

Where did the circus go?

Not like the Del Mar fair
Or the Barnum and Bailey skinny cow version

I want someplace nasty
A bit sticky
Someplace that picks up and leaves
before you have time to go get your watch back

All that’s left is a lot
Full of trash and ride screws
Because the rush to leave was more important
than safety

It’s a place most days now
I wish I could run away to

Slap on fake **** and be the bearded lady
Or warts and green paint and be frog man

Be something along the lines of
Homemade make believe

Be happy believing that
This other place doesn’t have things
Like rent
And car payments
And work that ***** you harder than your own girlfriend will

And don’t tell me cirque de solei is hiring
That’s not a circus
That’s people in costumes dancing and flying around on stages
They had to go to school to do that

You don’t need school to join the circus

You just need the desire to leave
Before anyone notices you’re gone
Maybe leave behind a sticky mess
And take with you something valuable
Like a watch
Or money from the purse on the counter
Or someone’s heart

Maybe I could be tattoo man
Or the ***** Mouthed Poet
And freestyle psalms that ache behind a glass window
That you have to pay a quarter to see through
And another quarter to listen
Or I could be a wax statue of Jesus
The one that if you stare at long enough
You see him breathing

Enough to restore faith in the make believe
That keeps us going

Let me be your side show
Let me be your fortune teller
Let me be the dark room in that back
Only the men are allowed into

Women and children this way

Let me be the ***** talk of town
And leave before the lynching

Let me leave in the night like a piper
With the promise
That I will give you the life you’ve always wanted
If you leave behind all you’ve ever been

Remember him?
He joined the circus?

Where’d the circus go?

When you live with someone who has Alzheimer’s
your house feels haunted

Mostly at night

Only ghosts wander like that

            So aimlessly

It is metal pounding in the garage
a knife in my hand
and the deep breathed fear of

         What’s behind door number 2

It is him halfway inside a dryer

             Trying to get out

I sleep with my door open
listen carefully like a ghost hunter
for the way he haunts the halls
for the soft pat of skin on tile collapse
fnd the moaning

I carry him to the bathroom

He is the heaviest ghost ever

              A different kind of dead weight

I light him a cigarette
The cherry glows red in the dark
The tobacco crackles with each puff

He calls me nurse
calls me some other name
one I’ve never heard before

He is just practicing

                  It is hard to be good at being so lost

Even now that I am a man
he still scares me
scares me differently

Startles me in the dark
comes around corners
crawls on the floor towards me

              I am not always ready for that

Before

He scared me
the way a feral dog scares living food
A certain kind of animal inside of him

Now he isn’t so wild

           Taming takes so much away

He is dark spots on tan paper
crusted blood on nose and head
yellow ET cigarette stained fingertips

                He is me in thirty years

He is barbiturate slack jaw
Forward lean balance struggle

And at night he is so much a ghost
I forget about his good days and wonder

               What’s the point?

My house is haunted
by a man who has never not gone
Bump in the night

Kelsey Martinez visits the glory hole at the local Vons
Every afternoon at 3:00
He fills holes in attempts to fill his holes
And walks away a little more empty
With a sharpie on the inside of the stall door he writes
This is The John Wilkes Booth

The ways we **** sometimes kills us inside

Moriah Carter lost her virginity hesitantly
like a semi heterosexual cowboy
Riding *******
Because sometimes we just can’t look our lovers in the face
She knows how sometimes we are objects
Just a means to an end

Amanda Lee Van Zetten thinks about the day she was conceived
How if her parents had done anything besides missionary
Might she have been born differently
How passion might be lost in translation

Do not lose us in translation
We are not math or language
Not some secret cuneiform
We are simple structures of bone and breath

Just ask Kacie Brumley
Who lays awake some nights
Translating her body like braille
The Kafka transformation into blindness
Fingers like antennae
Response like music

We moan like music
We **** like music

I **** like music
There is ***** soul in these *****

If you don’t **** like music
Go to your nearest guitar center
Plug yourself into the nearest distortion pedal
And
Rrrrrrrreeeeeeevvvvive yourself

Remember Janelle Gibson
Who dances like a slow hurricane
Whipping sweat like beach water
To wash away sandy rough places
She knows how to spread the wet

Or Jennifer Smith
Whose body is a fire most days
And she wants someone to kiss her
On the blue part of the flame
She knows how it’s hard to find someone
Willing to touch you like they won’t be burned

Touch us like you know how to put out our fires
But won’t
All this flame is show
All this fire is just some unrequited glow
So you can still see us against a dying sunset

Jaimee Sanders
Is fine ******* in the dark
Knows that we really are like insects
How we feel passionate and blind while the lights are out
But the minute the sun breaks the blinds
We scatter to some new dark space in shame

Forget having perfect bodies
And ******* with the lights out
We are sunsets
That don’t sit well
Like bedrooms in the dark
We are shameful passion

Just don’t regret me in the morning

Toffer doesn’t regret me
After that one night so many years ago
He knows as well as we do
How often we are just fleshy strands of light
Flayed down to some simple structure
Of bone and breath
And the need
To be needed

I want to want someone so badly
Thinking about them helps me sleep at night
He said

So know this
We are fire
And we **** like music
And we **** like shame
And we **** like insects in a dark room

This is how we ****
And it feels good

Our bodies are dumb
but we use them well
Like last legged engines
Like ugly cars you drive into the ground

This is how we live

Moriah Carter dances diligently
A body of prayer
Til all she has are heavy heaves
And the choreography of a long lost language
Leaving the speakers speechless

Kelsey Martinez is a ball of energy building
And he’s begging some beautiful woman
for an angel fist of light
Punched right into his dark side
An eye bulge duet of disgusting duality
But this **** feels good

We just wanna feel good

Janelle Gibson ***** like music
***** like a jazzy slap bass in a dark room
Like gritty distortion during a slow jam
Like this has the potential to be so much harder
But it won’t be
Even if you want it to

Kacie Brumley knows how ******* our bodies can get
She never forgets the importance of her own breath
Even when she’s holding it
Here
Hold her breath she’ll be right back
She is gasp and knee buckle praise for
Awkward types of beauty

Jennifer Smith is embracing fragile
The fragile ties that link lives to other lives
As if she were a knife
Sharp enough to sever
But patient and still enough not too
It takes patience to stand that still
And she wants you to know
She doesn’t have to

Amanda Lee Van Zatten wears her rose colored glasses backwards
Because she’d rather be naïve beauty
than see naïve beauty
So she dresses up in childhood
And still does things
Like wish on wells
And stars
And people that break

Tim Pagaard teaches English
Respects the breath that speaks like it has something to say
Knows that all this poetry and language is just practice for our mouths
So when it comes time to actually speak for something
We can
He believes we can

We’re all in this process of becoming broken
And in the short time interim
Are learning how to live
It takes a long time to learn to live
And I feel like I’ve been here for that long

I think you should live like you’ve got aids
Not so much that you are going to die tomorrow
But you might
But you don’t have to feel so bad if you like rest a day
But then you gotta get back out there

I fall asleep in other people’s beds
So often I am too drunk to go home
Not that I’d want to
I am clumsy bear hug boney
Begging my roughness to rub people the right way
Am broken and fake toothed smiling
Because I believe even when you are unattractive
Smiling is beautiful

And Christoffer Jones is man still finding ways to fit in his own skin
Not that he feels he doesn’t
But there are more ways to fit than one
Is obnoxious in the mornings after
He lives
He lives

Life isn’t short
Seventy some odd years is a long time
It’s just not long enough

We know this
And this is how we live

She is the ocean

               when I can't swim. The truth is

                                                     I'm fine with drowning