With all the love ive given
You'd think I'd save some
For myself

I smoke marijuana
to reason with my head
drink a quart of liquor
to get me in bed
yet thru the miasma
a drunkard's word is true
so believe it when I'm slurring
the vowels in "I love you"

I want to be eaten by bliss.
I want to feel the grind of its teeth
crushing my bones to dust.

drunk on townshend and happiness
I don't know if I will ever stop dancing

I remember thinking I couldn't listen to Led Zeppelin anymore
when I discovered punk rock.
I'm glad I was wrong.
I used to worship Eddie Vedder
before I met Odin
(he's still a hero tho)
I used to not be a feminist.
I used to think I wasn't free to kiss whoever I wanted.
but I am.
I remember picking up the guitar the first time
totally ******* confused.
I wrote a song in a week and even then I thought it was crap.
now I'm three instruments and two hands deep in the
ocean of stringed music.
there's a moral to this
and it's easy to find.
but even if you can't
that's all right.

I hang on that eldest birch
last leaf of autumn asleep thru the winter
stuck with the spear of my stem in the branch
my root weakens
wind howl deafens
I will awaken dead in the spring

Rosenfeld locked the door
And Richards angled a
Lamp to burn fluorescence
Thru my retinas.
"Here" says Rose "a poem
About car parts rusting
Thru the apocalypse"
"Too abstract" a Richie
Retort, "keep it to the
Real. Write about berries"
"No no no, that's *******
Ridiculous" cried Rosen.
I could feel a pen
In palsied hand.
They wanted ink
On paper.
So I wrote words I
Couldn't see,
Etching adverbs
On a neon sheet
Before an electric
Sun.


They had me in that room
For 48 hours
To write the poem in
Front of you.
Surely they could've
Arrested a better
Poet.

let me thaw in this new season.
let me contain what contains me.
dump me out of this bucket room
and let me crash against the slippery
crags of the west.
let me flow quietly, gently
let the tongues
of every creature on my path
tickle my face
and belly as I sink by.
let the sun **** me up into
the sky and let me fall
back down as a green glass bottle.
pack me tight, hurl me when the leaves
drip into the soil once again
let me bust apart on your face.
let me be soaked into the ground
let me soak the seed
so he may grow.
let him thrive higher
let me dry slowly.

I am a waxwing
feathered in snow
fat on juniper
with a wingspan 6 months long in either direction.
I sing the hollow bone electric
above the din of coyote
wolf pack on the hunt
... winter's whispers to bare branches.
there's no sun to sing to.
there never has been.
I will take flight, I will find it
6 months long
in either direction.

A toast to vulnerability.
To tying ventricles and fingers
To the bravery of fear and being braver still to face it.
To romance, to ***, to sweat beads sticking hair to skin and tongues to lips.
May love be bolder in the arms of our lovers
than our blood brothers.

when he says he wants to put you
in a poem, don't believe he'll
put your petals to his nose, inhale gently,
and enumerate the tickling scents
waltzing in his nostrils.
believe he'll put your stem to his tongue
lick the thorns slowly
to open his masochistic
metallic blood.
believe that he'll spit
that blood on the floor
or in a teacup to
sit out for hummingbirds.
believe he'll paint you
naked in verse
clothe you in meter
and strip you once more.
believe that no poem
is refuge
and that your ugliness
and his ugliness
will not make a poem
beautiful.

this is the black that I cloaked myself in,
my father's inheritance,
cold blanket of blindness.
that is the crescent slipper I wore
on my feet.
I was Hermes,
coal, jet, fresh leather,
I was a ****** of crows:
a carrion cluster feasting on white
dwarfs and other dead things
that hang by this stellar roadside.
I was alone
and I thought it was magic.
I was alone
and I prayed for magic.
when I sealed that spell
the words made me jump,
I wasn't expecting
to see you here.

I work with a guy a year younger than me
got two kids
and two jobs.
meanwhile all my money goes to
whitewater rafting and books
and ****
and paying for school.
one of them is two years old
the other four months
and he doesn't read.
probably doesn't go whitewater rafting
either.

I've held on to you
for too long.
I won't write another
poem about
it.

gourd bellied black boy
in front of the camera is
a calf facing a tentative ax.
the hands are motionless.
dropping quarters into an envelope
stamped for africa
will buy him a pack of ramen
but it wont' turn of the cameras.
sunlight doesn't reach him anymore
only sharp electricity.
I see this gourd bellied black boy
on my tv.


I turn it off
pitilessly.

mosquitoes never
quit - find another sweatsoaked
armpit to slurp from