My mother should be an author
She carves her soul into millions of pieces
Leaving it behind all of the family photos
When I see my mother
I see a woman
Who wants to hide her soul in a needle
Just so the screaming can stop in her mind,
These bottles are rattling in the living room
You see they have put shackles on her heart,
She can't love anymore
Without having ***** in her water bottle.

Where is she hiding her beer?
I feel like my mother is giving me a scavenger hunt
From the shards of glass that were left on the baseball fields
My mother used to take me to.

You know she always wasn't like this
She was strong minded and had a big heart
Tonight I will tell you the story of a woman
Who lost her soul to the Keystones to the Miller Lites
To the ****** Mary’s.
Let's rewind time
See ******* the soul in ten years

10- I look into my mother's eyes and I start to cry
Because I'm looking at a woman who I don't know anymore

9- I refused to bail her out of jail again
Because I'm afraid her kidney will fail if she drinks again

8- My mother staggered into the theater and disrupted the whole play,
My cast mates turned to me and asked, isn't that your mother?

7- I had to hold my mothers hand
Because she was throwing up the cocktail of drugs and alcohol

6- Daddy had to get mom out of jail she was drinking again

5- My mother throws the bottle across the room
And told me the reason why she drinks is because I'm Autistic

4- My mother overslept for my piano recital,
I didn't think it was a big deal
But I remember she spent the whole night crying
With a wine glass in her hand.

3- Mommy I didn't know your prescription came in a needle

2- Mommy the prescription say 2 pills a day
why are you taking 6?

1- My mother went to the doctor
Found out that she has Rheumatoid Arthritis
I don't know what that means,
But I know she will still be strong right?

0- She took me to a Dodger game for my birthday.
I remember Sammy Sosa hitting a home run that game
She told me that the only person that can **** your soul is yourself

I can remember starving in a
small room in a strange city
shades pulled down, listening to
classical music
I was young I was so young it hurt like a knife
inside
because there was no alternative except to hide as long
as possible--
not in self-pity but with dismay at my limited chance:
trying to connect.

the old composers -- Mozart, Bach, Beethoven,
Brahms were the only ones who spoke to me and
they were dead.

finally, starved and beaten, I had to go into
the streets to be interviewed for low-paying and
monotonous
jobs
by strange men behind desks
men without eyes men without faces
who would take away my hours
break them
**** on them.

now I work for the editors the readers the
critics

but still hang around and drink with
Mozart, Bach, Brahms and the
Bee
some buddies
some men
sometimes all we need to be able to continue alone
are the dead
rattling the walls
that close us in.

Look in the mirror. Let us both look.
Here is my naked body.
Apparently you like it,
I have no reason to.
Who bound us, me and my body?
Why must I die
together with it?
I have the right to know where the borderline  
between us is drawn.
Where am I, I, I myself.

Belly, am I in the belly? In the intestines?  
In the hollow of the ***? In a toe?
Apparently in the brain. I do not see it.
Take my brain out of my skull. I have the right  
to see myself. Don’t laugh.
That’s macabre, you say.

It’s not me who made
my body.
I wear the used rags of my family,  
an alien brain, fruit of chance, hair  
after my grandmother, the nose
glued together from a few dead noses.  
What do I have in common with all that?  
What do I have in common with you, who like  
my knee, what is my knee to me?

Surely
I would have chosen a different model.

I will leave both of you here,
my knee and you.
Don’t make a wry face, I will leave you all my body  
to play with.
And I will go.
There is no place for me here,
in this blind darkness waiting for
corruption.
I will run out, I will race
away from myself.
I will look for myself  
running
like crazy
till my last breath.

One must hurry
before death comes. For by then  
like a dog ****** by its chain
I will have to return
into this stridently suffering body.  
To go through the last
most strident ceremony of the body.

Defeated by the body,
slowly annihilated because of the body

I will become kidney failure
or the gangrene of the large intestine.  
And I will expire in shame.

And the universe will expire with me,  
reduced as it is
to a kidney failure
and the gangrene of the large intestine.

No, you're wrong.

Everyone is as beautiful
as they can possibly be

Particularly at lunch
in a laughing restaurant

Everyone is as beautiful
as they can possibly be

And they are moved
by their own beauty

And they shed tears for it
in the back of the taxi home

My mind is racing again
At 4:37 am
I wish my grades were as heightened
As my inability to sleep

I’ve been having nightmares
But they don’t scare me anymore
Sometimes
I find a comfort in knowing
That the monsters I’ve dreamt
Are a lot more pleasant than the monsters
I have left to dream

I don’t mind it
But I mind you
Only because you’re always on my
Mind

I pretend that I’m a solipsist ,
But I could have just made it up
Your love wasn't as real in my heart
(As it was in my head)

I am a shy little flower
Somewhere behind the trees
“There’s really no way to reach me”
But there is.
No one has taken the time to
Explore

I once met a girl
A traveler in that moment
She told me a story about her grandmother
Who was shipped to a boarding school in Germany right after WWII.
At the age of three
The first sentence she ever understood was:

"Everything is broken"

And she lived a whole life
With that silly little thought
Echoing.

Someday
I will find an ocean breeze
Worth calling my home
With sand as soft
As my tinder
Beating heart

Good night
Is a formulation of words
Whose meaning I am still
Unfamiliar with

As I walked along
Your art stricken walls
I wonder if I’ve ever really been capable
Of creating

But hardly ever do I strike an inspiration
I can call entirely my own

I was looking at your chest x rays on the lighted wall

Your straight spine centered behind your rounded ribcage
Looks like busted churchgates
from all the times you let your ghosts go

And there are bees buzzing in your shoulders only
you aren't cold this time

So much faith in what I do with words
Willing to love me like a half written gospel
we are filling in as we go

And I want to write us poetry
like the first man was asked to play the first piano

Come
dance with me to my deathbed

I am afraid
That one day I might kiss you
like a deaf stethoscope
that no longer hears your heart

That this language will grow stale
Along with your faith in me

but my knees
are riverbeds for prayer

And I carry my chest heavy like a library
full of books that hate the silence

You should know that
being a poet is more than just a choice

and maybe my body is like a library
but when I pray to you
I'll never use my inside voice

Just like I know that god used nails
to make the iron in your blood stream

That you'll be strong even when you're old
and even then
I still want you to believe in me

When we are like trains that no longer run the tracks
when we've fully mapped the topography of our bodies

But some days
our engine chests come back

and I write a poem about you that is new

And you listen
To my huff and rumble
you lift your tea and saucer with shaking hands
I close my eyes
and hear our train coming

My friend has stage four Hodgkin’s Lymphoma
and is barely three decades old.

He is part of my generation.
He updates everybody about his cancer

on Facebook.
He posts pictures on his blog

of the sterile beige plastic machines
that take pictures of him

and scorch his insides with radiation
and burn all but the strongest of his cells

with chemotherapy.

I haven’t actually heard his voice in eight years
but it was just nine years ago

that he and I both sat in a booth in a ***** Greek restaurant
in Downers Grove, Illinois, just off of Ogden Avenue,

and smoked cigarette after cigarette
and talked about god knows what—

stupid ****, probably.  **** that only young, invincible people
would concern themselves with.

The truth is, I don’t know what we’d talk about if I saw him today.
Maybe we’d talk about how he is dying of cancer

and I am not, in spite of the fact
that I have smoked more than he has,

exercised less than he has,
eaten worse than he has,

and made all the wrong decisions,
while he’s made all the right ones.

We could talk about the cruel irony
or the cold indifference of life

or how plans never go according to plan,
but my guess is that he wouldn’t care.

He is in another place.  A focused place:
He is in the bottom of the ninth inning with two outs,

and is one run behind the opposition.
The treatments haven’t worked yet, but he knows the stakes of giving up.

“I am Kirk Gibson,” he writes to everybody online.
“I am Kirk Gibson.”

I hunger,
For my youth.
For those lazy,
Hazy, crazy,
*****-filled days.
When my eyes
Feasted with devilment,
Instead of mockery,
Upon the young
School of nymphs
That swam up
And down the corridors
Like silver darlings
Of the sea

The wonderment
Puzzlement
Of the flesh.
Memories of
Soft bouncy buttocks,
Budding *******,
Licentious legs,
That tormented,
Teased, pleased
That frenzied, wild
Stirrings of my *****.
How i loved life then,
With it's silent promise
Of great things to come.