My mother enters the kitchen, says that her hands
are dripping, begs my father to finish his work
at the sink.  I observe, for a moment, the expression
upon her face which seems conflicted between
a desire to laugh and a need
                                               to feel clean.
I interject that clearly her fate is to have
dog placenta on her hands for all eternity.
Her disgust and amusement seem equally to rise.
After she has washed herself, she speaks of
Ponyo's last intermission between long
intervals of birthing to nap three fleeting minutes;
another contraction gave way to a wriggling
new mole who squeaked and groaned with
bizarre endearment, seizing my heart and causing
its mother's head, after jolting awake,
                                                          ­     to go limp.
Mom says it's sad-but-sweet.  Dear dog
has spent herself six times already in increments
which, as they increase, draw her spirit still closer
to a totally inevitable chasm of fled energy;
as soon as she falls asleep, yet a new indignant mass
of living parts swaddled in loose skin and wet fur
shoves its way outward, forward, world-ward.
Ponyo is not selfish.  Immediately after birth seven,
she begins to lick her offspring clean and nudge it
towards her belly, where it may feed itself.
"Only just got a break, and already she's
                                                           ­         back to work."
I'm one of five children my mother has carried
and raised--and for a human, five are many!
I'm afraid to give birth even once, despite
that a greater want of mine is to hold
my own child someday.  I wonder if that
is motherhood: discomfort and indecision
concerning the worth of the effort in labor,
in birth, in the weak moments thereafter--
stroking one's child's downy, collapsible head
and feeling a need to protect her, to nurture her,
that is more pressing even than the so-
alluring whispers which Sleep may breathe--
and even beyond these moments, when I have said
to my mother that I hate her (because
to me, it was obvious that I did not,
and was too callous, obtuse, and insensitive
to think that she might just believe it)
and then missed church the next day to stay
with her when she felt ill and tired--if this
is motherhood, I wonder.  It must be more even
than I could ever have thought like wanting
to laugh and to wring one's hands
(and even just to go to sleep)
                                                all at once.

Love only knocks once.
Maybe she can be scouted-
out thereafter, sought and
captured tearfully, like a dog
reunited with the master
whom he'd thought was dead--but
she only knocks once, and then,
I think, gives up.  The universe
gives up.  I cannot will love back to me.

as o'ergrown with lust
my childish spirit yet
has been naively quick to trust
and slow to feel regret...

Today, I ashed my cigarette
on the ground, but it kept
burning, and there was an
ant
when I went to squelch the embers
with the heel of my boot.

As my foot passed over it
like God's hand over man,
I had a distinct impulse
to **** it.

--but nothing else, no reason;
so I didn't.  In fact,
it would have been just
as justified, just as
reasonable to have said
Good morning
and just as nonsensical.

And though he likely isn't
a listener of music, and
though he is not
likely to spend his days
studying the works
of Yeats or Whitman,
or to ponder spirituality
or philosophy, as men do,

I think he may have even
more of the Lord's favor upon him
than I.

Stop arbitrarily replacing commas with semicolons.  Stop it.

Thanks everybody!

I placed my bread to heat for just five seconds--
behold: when I came for it, it wasn't alone.
A mayfly had set up camp (so to speak)
with my wheat bread, my most favored
Amish-baked, sliced-before-my-own eyes bread;
and when I say it "set up camp," I do not
mean anything pleasant.  I do mean six thin legs
sprawled long and broken when discovered
and perhaps some melted insides; who's to say?
Something turned inside of me and I'm certain
I grimaced at least a little, and took my plate back,
thinking, disturbed just slightly.  How had I not
seen the fly?  It couldn't have touched the bread--poor thing--
just rested there, unknowing, to be slaughtered.

"Mom...Mom...Ahh, uhh, Mom!  Mom?"
(mother assesses circumstances, unceremoniously takes a napkin
to my victim, and introduces his corpse to the garbage)
"He probably wasn't in there when I...right?"
--"It probably was."
"But five seconds couldn't have killed him."
I know I am wrong
as I feel the warm grains of my prize.
(mother gives a long look and says...)
--"If it heated the bread, I'm sure it heated the bug."

I took my bounty anyway--the bread, that is, mind you--
and went to eat it absentmindedly, but found that
now impossible.  Sigh.  I also found myself
staring, long and hard, then, at half of a piece
of glorious, Heaven-breathed wheat bread,
and suddenly realized that I could not discern
whether or not I was enjoying it.  ******.
And then I tried to reassure myself by chiding
inwardly, "You're just afraid of insects
irrationally," but maybe I actually
felt that the blood of an
innocent life was on
my hands.

Why are they so stupid? I ask
no one really, fighting revulsion,
grasping for blame.

Alas, I finished eating but felt rightly robbed
of some essential part of the experience.
Yet, such is life.

This isn't a poem.  Seriously, where'd he go?

The vibrant blue paint on the walls seems
almost like that emblematic Technicolor
blue.  I've had the blues, but they didn't
look like these.  The house constricts--
the ceiling seems to dip towards my head
closing in on me.  I fly.  Back in Jazzy's room,
I notice, with humor, a label on the spice:
"Not intended for human consumption."

Insistent I can be as they
("She'll never take a rest," they say);
indignant in my restless way,
I put this thing to bed today.

"She'll never take a rest," they say.
I laid it in the ground today!
What first was bright grew tired and gray;
I laid it in the ground today.

Majestic is the scarab,
whose beauty persists
in the favor of people;
we behold it and say,
"How creative is God."
Mesmerized, I forget
how literally today
becomes yesterday--I forget
how potent a drug
beauty is.

One potted plant perched here; and there, a fern hung;
and by the bed, one skinny rose.  Tenant bathes
in lavender oil, feels mundane regardless, feels little,

thinks nothing.  Later she will cause herself to rise,
commanding apathetic muscles to take up boxes
of things never alive and, to her, meaningless,

close her eyes and remember soil wet and moving
on her hands.  In truth she should not be, was never meant
to be a croon--a simple prole--but this is what

she is today, and this is what she does
today, and if it were still yesterday,
the gardener'd be finger-deep in speckled dirt

and water and pots and all things colorful and living
most of all.  But her boxes make her money and her
boxes are her duty and her duty is her labor and

her labor is her strife.  Her meaning lies in what she does
today, and if it were still yesterday, the gardener'd
be finger-deep in speckled earth and oily mirth,

and spirit-filled with joyous song, and working
every moment, and gut awash with overwhelming
fantasy-belief that her work might be immortal,

but her meaning lies in what she does today, and
if it were still yesterday, she may as well not be a human,
for none can be so unyielding to the authority of time

or else a hypocrite.

A tiny devil lands
on my shoulder;
having no counter-
part, she stands

                               and, as I walk
                               at rabbit's pace
                               to the old place
                               where we used to talk,

                                                          ­          she drags from
                                                            ­        her cigarette,
                                                      ­              flicking it,
                                                             ­       hum-drum.

"He ain't comin',"
she says,
and ashes
on my neck.

                               "Don't need him,"
                               I lie--should lie
                               down to die,
                               but light up instead.

Unconvinced,
she scoffs at me.
"Then what do you need?"
And a dreadful wind

                                             slithers through
                                             the fissure,
                                             icy, bitter.
                                             "I don't need you."

                                                          ­                      The woods, too
                                                             ­                   are dead, like us--
                                                            ­                    a Winter-sheared husk
                                                            ­                    through and through.

You'll come, I hope,
leaning over
the grove, or
maybe I don't.

                                      You'll come, I hope,
                                       leaning over
                                       the grove, or
                                       maybe you won't.

How dreary is the moment
when one soul looks upon another
and in realization, says to himself,
"I do not want you anymore,"

and how much worse the moment
when the second sees the first
and with recognition, says to herself,
"You do not want me anymore."

A fiery one accosts me today, as most days.
I feel she has been following me for much of my life.
She is my teacher.  She draws the reigns of my body,
showing me how to surrender, that I might gain control.
But control I do not find.  Rather, my indignation grows
from so oft' being reprimanded.  But she reminds me
that I truly have never possessed any choice.
She reminds me to slide off peacefully, like water,
with grace, with dignity--of which I'm certain
I've none left.  I have been taken when I did not want to give;
I have tried to give and found that none would take.
Now I'm certain the dregs of my purity have eaten through my stomach
just as acid.  My flower withers without care.  It is like
some vile disease.  I waited too long, and now nobody wants it--
this thing that I forever saved.  Neither does anyone want a child.
They only wish that I'd shut up.  (She reminds me.  I already know.)
And so I fall asleep--or fall apart--or fall into my grave.

Look at those
downcast cheekbones,
upturned eyes.
Look at the cloak
of hair that curls
around her face
like climbing vines
about a fence.
Look at her
neck like a vase
and a fanciful
silhouette thereof.
See how it all
gives way to flushed
skin and those
eyes light up with
demure appreciation
for everything
you do
and everything
you say, it seems.
How can you
forget her
even for  a night?
Every move
she makes
engenders
a shudder
in you because
you always think
she might just
touch you.  And oh,
look again upon that
countenance--
there is just
something
about a beautiful woman
that begs
to be loved.

Nothing here
and nothing there;
nothing then
and nothing now.

Should I return
or should I stay,
bleakness prevails.
And so I say,

"I am embodiment
of will;
I am alive;
I cannot be still.

Everything here,
everything now!
I am I,"
and hear it resound.

The odors of an open landfill rise up from my gaping mouth.
If fifty miles out, you smell it, stinking as it will,
one hundred lie that you must drive before, beyond the fetid
tickle of a foul doubt, your nausea will settle and will die
in shrinking throes. And then another one, and still
another comes and goes.  I sense the every stinking swath of bile
and swarming offering tossed into me from such passers-by--
but I feel nothing satisfy (ironically or otherwise)
the open landfill of my gut.  A hole no less am I when stuffed.

My teacher gave me a piece
by Hindemith
when I was newly a freshman
in her studio
and she told me to study it
and play it.

I took it from her
warily
and dissected the thing
until
I thought I might die
but didn't.

Yet today
as I was weary,
I spent a long time
simply playing intervals
until they were perfect and then
playing them until they were even more perfect
and made myself breathe all of my life into them until it felt utterly natural,

and then I thought that maybe I could
actually stand to have another look at this at this awful, bizarre,
beautiful music of mourning; after all, it doesn't sound so bad these days...

That is when I understood
why my teacher, in her wisdom,
had forced me to undertake this foreign,
fragmented funeral suite in the first place.  For she knew then

what I see now
when I remember
and what I hear
when I practice
and what is like the ecstacy
of laying down a finally completed task--
with a secretive knowing that you'll return to it again by choice one day--
when I perform:

At the outset,
I was not good enough
to play it,
but I was good enough
to learn it.

Character development
is truly an undertaking.
Perhaps an incomplete
person cannot develop
another, after all--even
one who is not real.

As

the strings
of a viola,
I am

like an
oscillator,
resonant

with
nervous
energy:

do...

te-- le--

so fa me re do--;

As

a marble
dropped
onto

a piano's
keys, my
pulse, with

anxious
accelerando
strikes:

pitch...

pitch, pitch

now, now

now now now

Stop.

Human Love,
When you come to eat the rations of my heart,
remember, then, that starving is an art;
that to consume would be to ****--a crime;
that to exhume this cherry seed of mine
will drain me of a blood as thin as grape juice;
that in time, I will mourn my stolen-***** fruit.
-Ocean

            ------

Ocean,
You speak unto your seedling self, child.
You are weak--we are weak.  No mild
measure of halfway self-control can live
in mental habitat which exists to give
and only to give.  Your fluids will seep
and you'll be unable even to weep.
-Earth
            ---
Obtuse Earth,
Stop your assaulting me with these words.
Stop your quiet screaming, this dirge
which comes under guise of gentility--
insufferably loud, however creatively.
I never addressed you, ugly whisperer.
I never addressed you, nuissance, stranger.
-Ocean
            ---
Stubborn Ocean,
Do not be foolish!  Listen, girl.
Spurn him now with resolve; lest how
can dignity you preserve in any small
amount?  He doesn't love you at all.
And knowing that, you gave me address:
indeed, you have addressed yourself.
-Earth

            ------

Love,
Were that I could say it's so,
I would not give this room to grow.
But oh, if I do hold it back
then infinitely I should retract
into myself.  So speak or speak not,
but if so, speak now, for I am distraught.
-Ocean

Receive it, my impatient heart--
receive it as it comes.
Do not worry, pulsing thing,
straining against that chest
you inhabit.  Incubate;
let the body prepare you:
Beat calmly where you lie.
Be comfortable, my eager heart,
my vibrating, warm little heart.

After much evaluation,
I do not think
this place to be the trouble
or to warrant change.
I am the trouble, and I am
indelible from it.

Guilt inundates the mind
as a byproduct:
nausea and exhaustion are an
ungodly synthesis
indicative of something--
something...

And if I were given a dollar
at each instance,
I could buy a carton
of cigarettes.

At first, I thought that
funny.

Now I think I should not think
at all.

Little mouse shakes erratically;
spasms and quakes under the butcher's knife;
comprehends, for a moment, finality;
becomes nauseated with fear.

Today I watched my cigarette
as it shook between my fingers
as I drew one harsh inhale straight
from the the thing, and could not tell
whether it was for the force
of my breath or that my fingers
were trembling, and I laughed.

Sometimes I think that the wind
might tip me over, swift, with ease,
as my face vibrates, as I melt,
as my hollow space grows and complains.
When I look upon myself,
it is too comical in all;
I tremble as I laugh.

I could have stayed out and talked to you,
but I swooned for the comfort of my bed.  Oh,

I wish you and I could share words sometimes,
but you're drinking again or sleeping instead.  Now

there's a sound coming from the utility closet,
like God's blowing a giant hair dryer: a furious whir.  So

cold, so cold, we complain--and stay wet.  It's so,
so cold; I'm going to bed.

Great hawk enshrouds tiny ring;
swallowing silence in the reflection of spring;
Your shadow bemoans my gentle home;
where wax wings and iron legs of sternness roam.
Between shattered glass and petal's dance
whose schadenfreude--makes you sound like an ***?
Oh, what a ******* intellectual chore
when even poetry doesn't make sense anymore.

As trite and gray as words
become with time, my heart
becomes an ashen leaf
in fall; or kitschy art;

or something even deader,
as old coals, so far abstract
from life that words should give
them meaning; In fact,

that I might be troubled
to convey this worthless stuff,
I find the lackingness of language
barely dead enough.

My mouse curls up to sleep within me
nestling into soft cedar a cold and tiny nose.
A struggle transpires predictably there
between two old forces: rain torrents
against my walls; deeper she burrows,
harder she squirms.  Away from the nonsense
of loving or unloving--away from
the question.  Now it has been years,
and I can no longer say where she is.
I think she has long forgotten
the way back.

He materializes in white, as though from cloud
out of petals and vines--bright ferns whose arms
flower and wrap as though silken angel's yarn
breathing a sheer and layered freckle-shroud

about the capacious canvas of his back
in an uncharacteristic ceremony of purity or bliss.
So capricious a beloved yet elicits a dual image
in the mind of her who's also seen him black.

It was exactly the moment in which I awoke
and saw you, then, concealed by a dream:
none could behold you; nobody saw you
but I.  I felt the wicked shame which came
as sleep's veil fell, slipped yonder, was gone;
and your face only confronted mine,
seizing the heart from mind's eye, reminding the conscience,
forcing the inadmissible.  It was exactly that moment--
the moment in which I saw the veil removed,
and was helpless to stop or reverse that unveiling--
that I became awash with a long-suffering guilt,
because I knew then that I loved you.

I feel there is something to say
about the wind around my neck today.
I feel there is something to say,
but I cannot find a way.

I feel there is something to note
about this air around my throat--
Capricious and shy-natured,
it grips me, then slithers away.

When first I loved,
I listened to myself.
I heard it from
within my gut
that I should tell:
I loved.  I loved!
Oh, why did I listen
to myself?  Yet
how I loved!

First I loved, then
reasoned with myself,
and this I heard:
I love!  I love!
Oh, why did I not
listen to myself
when I did love?

Oh, why is there
another me
inside myself?
And how she loves!

The way in which
my stomach stirs
is just as when
I touched your face
where you lay
while you slept
with your head
tilted back
and your eyes
closed-skyward--
where were you looking?
what did you see?
did you behold me?
Oh, something
has touched me--
reached inside
with fingertip
and touched the surface
of my waters;
they spin there,
stirring, stirring,
waking.  Oh,
what is happening?

An old friend sleeps
somewhere you've not been.
He may be seeing
awful things
or lovely ones.  Of course,
you've no discernment,
for you dwell outside
his sphere now and outside
his dreams; for that matter,
you cannot sleep at all.

When his body gives
the sudden ****
you tiredly await--
when he falls
from the hammock
and breaks his arm,
will you reprimand him
for his fault?

Yet, could not you have told him
when he asked
for your advice
those years ago
that you doubted him
in the first place? that
his ambition frightened
you? that high-up hammocks
are beds for the foolish
more often than not?

Through the pain
of malbent joint and forced
awakening next to you
where you've watched
from the ground,
will he learn only then?
What if he reprimands
you, then, upon consciousness--
what then?  Or what if it's his spine
he damages, and Something Goes
Very Wrong, and he cannot speak,
but it is in the misery of his eyes
that you can hear him declaring,
"You could have spared me this!"
--what then?

Or what will you say
if he never comes down
at all?  And when?  How, even,
will you know that he has woken?
--that he's happy? --that he wishes
you had come with him,
hopes that you might yet?

An old friend sleeps--
or seems to sleep--
somewhere you've not been,
and as you ask yourself,
"What became of him?"
he looks to you
from his high perch
and also aches to know--
as someone below you
asks of you;
and someone beneath him
and someone beneath him
and someone beneath him...

I saw you on the stage today
covering your *******.
You looked like me in some sad way,
bruised white thighs and bony chest.
I saw you on the stage today;
my belly filled with dread:
You looked like me, but gimmicky
and grimly oversexed.

I am a dry well.  Tangleweeds
grow in my gut; spin there, growing;
rise in my throat and choke me; and
spill from my mouth, stretching somewhere.
Humans pass by me, offer glances,
then rescind them.  The young ones--
the little ones--stare longest.
Though in all my imaginings
I have not quite felt like a person,
I know the question in their minds:
"Why is that thing still there?
Nobody uses it anymore."

I have beheld
the simpleminded
lark, who sings
sustained
until the very moment
he crumples against
the glass--
I have beheld
the fruitlessness
of his path.
I see now that
the sparrow is
propelled, and what
propels her:
a heedlessness
an artlessness
behind her.

I have held
the hand of a man
in tears and
pet his head.
I have walked in-
to churches one way
and expected to come out
another: naivety.

I have come
to understand why
few ever find
the tunnel's exit.
Behold: one smoker,
smoking; one sad
girl with an older
man; one blind
woman, walking;
one foolish bird
in flight
towards a window.

Listen: that is air;
                   that is birdsong;
                              the total weightlessness
of freedom without consequence
felt not even in the moment before
it flees, but once its residue breathes
a small signal, whispering, "Listen!"

Now hear: that is mind;
                            second self;
                                   the Thing that chides cautiously,
"Life is an intricate system of Dominoes,
             and you are as the first block in the series.
                        No sweet moment goes unnoticed by the universe."

--and I am eternally at the ready
to invite some awful Punishment
into my world, should I choose
this small happiness.  Ah,
is that what you'd have me believe?

The air is too cool, the birdsong
too bright, and the streets
too clean and white that I might
ere long make my leave.  Not yet,
not yet.

Listen, voice,
           Listen, psyche,
                       Listen, Thing: today, I take no heed of you!

oh, the most familiar face!
--and the rising
with no fall;

no

exhale

ah
how the chest swells
as at the first waft
of early coffee
demanding I drink.

(has anyone ever sighed and found herself shuddering?)

I grew ill
some day between first sip and now,
and that taste

--yours--

now, as much as remembered bliss,
for fear, has become no more
than imagined sickness

bowel and gut constrict--
I hold myself,
pretend not
as I'm greeted:

"Good morning!"

*please
keep that away from me.

There is no catharsis to ease
the knowledge that someone
has been purged from the Earth.
There is no consolation,
no prayer to speak or be heard,
and words only to express
the hopelessness of such a want,
but no words for the want itself.

There are questions to be asked,
but I cannot seem to form them.

geese are gorgeous
but raucous and cruel
selfish fowls
small-brained fools

grackles are ugly
but travel as friends
it wouldn't be awful
to live among them

Immediate aftermath of a storm:
dark roads marked wet;
air black, thick, stretched;
mud alive with thriving worms.

The morning next proceeding:
sky gray, fog higher;
streets appearing somehow whiter;
nature imbued with greenest green.

It was nice--
to touch you
and to have you,
whom I could touch
whenever I wanted.

It was nice--
not sleeping
alone (or very well);
it satisfied, I think,
for a time.

When you try to reason with me,
remember how I, too, have tried:
she grabbed my wrists, wrenched back my hands,
and while I whimpered, gouged my eyes--
what can I, then, but wait to die?
You simply cannot understand.

The fullness of the truth is shy;
nobody can know but I.

In a white mug, first
the water looks pure
or like nothing at all

then

I lower the bag
of tea leaves into it
observing the change:

behold.  White layers
of consciousness foam
and swirl, expanding;

outward they spin
like the proverbial
spider's web, growing.

The water turns amber
slowly.  I notice
my painted nails again.

I thought it had
some relevance--
this metamorphosis--

but

I guess I just like
to drink hot stuff.
Represses the crying.

Writing on the front page:
garbage of the new age.
Hello, Poetry.

Shaking trembling even as I write this--
is this that righteous anger of which
the pastor spoke last Sunday?  Is it
mere indignance?  It seems
as though a massive, sprawling
shadow of some unseen, overwhelming
thing.  Nakedly I hide my face,
am filled with dread in the presence
of this foreign beast, and pray it pass
by morning.

Inevitably,
I sit here, tonguing
the sore in the center
of the floor of my mouth
and think of you.