after julio cortázar*

my bourbon

i drink it at a bar, alone

its translucent honey-color is an axolotl's eye
looking into me

and, like a cortázar story,
little by little,
my bourbon axolotl steals my body,
its soul stealing through my eyes to evict me from this
honestly-not-that-well-kept apart
ment

and i feel my bourbon axolotl eye replacing me
as i am drawn out into its glass prison

and i stare up as my bourbon turns me
gently in my glass
as my bourbon raises me to its lips
sips me
no longer winces
or even registers any emotion on a calm-liquid-surface face
eyes wet and flat and blank as a tumbler ******* deep

and i don't know where i'm going or what i'm becoming but
this feeling of spiraling and draining and emptying
is everything that i know

and there is less and less of me as bourbon stares down
cold
unsmiling
neat
and silently consumes me
and i am disappearing
and i am gone

and bourbon stands,
calm, but not serene,
and bourbon walks to my car, each step carefully measured,
and bourbon drives my car to my apartment
and bourbon sleeps in my bed and goes to my job and collects my paycheck
and bourbon falls into habit and routine
and bourbon feels my
empty.

but having a body, a life, is better than being trapped in bottles and glasses
it's probably better, anyway

and bourbon won't go back, won't trade flesh back for silica,
will keep living unfeeling behind glass-eye walls until skin and sinew unknit

and bourbon is so alien and content that
it never wonders if there is anything more,
never despairs for its ending road,
treasures every drop

bourbon calls this body, this life
top shelf

bourbon knows that **** ain't cheap

If I were a peacock,
I would blue-green iridescent burst beauty
pretty would not mean strange or weak
brightness would be bravery, screaming LOOKING THIS GOOD IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN SAFETY FROM PREDATORS
I would love my women drab, concealable, nearly invisible
... maybe some of us are already part peacock

If I were a leopard slug,
I would never worry if I was man enough
I would love all of my hermaphroditic glands equally
or, more realistically, I would be ashamed of all of them equally,
never sure if my gonopore was symmetric enough,
if my translucent blue-white ***** was beautiful enough to ever intertwine and bloom with another's
there would be no gay bars or marriage equality movements or swallowed-wink "no ****"s
no one would tap around your abdomen in search of the right organs before declaring your birthright aptitude in cooking or car repair
you and I, we would follow each other around all night, exchanging playful licks, before impregnating each other, circus-suspended from a tree branch
... I guess that part would be the same

If I were cricket or frog or songbird, my music would be my perfect gift to you.
I would learn guitar and start a band and
everyone would love me
(way more than the bass player)

But I am a man.
I don't know what that means yet.

some nights, it's raining
to the smell of decomposing leaves and wood smoke
and the stars have taken the night off

and i'm the full moon,
all rock powder and collision,
and nights like this, my dust stirs
and my craters ache

i look up,
wash the shadowed earth in my reflected starlight,
try to taste her clouds

i miss the rain

i never met her, but i miss the rain
i don't know why my craters ache but it's because i miss the rain

i don't know what rain does to a body,
the way she washes dust to deltas and floodplains,
the way she makes you grow in ways you never thought you could,
turns grey to green and growing.

i need that.

i don't know that i need that, only that my craters ache, that
my dust stirs, dry and restless...

my life is grand and complex:
i, a cosmic ballerina, engaged in elaborate
planetary dance: turn, pull, reflect,
I look for solace in the sunlight and the shadow,
find joy in the warming and the cooling,

ignorantly lack.


I do not know the shape of you.
I don't know how to look for you.
I don't know that I need to look for you.

If we meet, I will not recognize you.

Soon, the first flower would bloom from my lips.
We would smile at each other.
My dust would feed your clouds and your clouds would feed my skin.
We would be grateful.

I am already grateful.
I do not know the lack of you.
My dust and my craters are enough


except
sometimes, in late Autumn,
when the smell of leaves and wood smoke remind me of
nothing
and my craters start to ache...

male blanket octopus:
size of a thumbnail, you peel off
your wriggling *****-filled
hectocotylus, cut your own arm
as a gift of love to a female
the size of kobe bryant
i imagine you van-gogh,
whispering "keep this object
like a treasure" as your unbloody
*** arm curls up in the safety of her
mantle, as you slink away to quiet
obscurity, as you find somewhere
dark and alone to finally die, giving
up your body as food, giving everything,
and i envy you your unobtrusiveness, wish
i could be free of ego and gregariousness, and
i envy your pure dedication to purpose, wish
i knew so firmly my life's end, wish
i knew anything

on a wednesday night,
two days after the new moon,
the sky bare of clouds,

i almost called you -
i even dialed your number -
but that longing's gone.

i looked at the stars
and realized i don't want
to share them with you.

there is a cat that sits on my driveway
it has green eyes and black stripes
and you wouldn't know from looking at it, but that cat is an angel

the cat stares, unmoving, as i pull up the driveway toward it
because it knows that i won't cause it harm,

or if it is further down the driveway when i return home,
it bounds off into the brush, having spotted a demon wrapped in bluebird feathers or groundhog fur

i do not know if the cat is male or female, so i have decided the cat is neither --
*** is an attribute of animals born haphazardly from evolution.
but angels don't grow organic and messy:
angels are each lovingly hand built from the embers of stars that burnt out before earth formed
when you peer upward through your million dollar observatory, into the far depths of distant galaxies, your eye
is kissed by the light that was shed by the cat
before it was given to protect this domain

in a world of seven billion humans, one-in-a-million miracles happen seven thousand times a day

once, on the subway, a woman smiled at me
a stranger
smiled at me like i mattered
and i didn't realize this at the time
but that woman is god
and that smile was given to me as a gift because
she knew the way it would echo in my memory,
spill from my lips like tea sloshing from a full cup as i hurry from day to day

i have been in churches and prayer circles, but that smile is the closest i've ever come to the divine

these stories
these holy, sacred, special, set-apart,  made up
stories
are the only skin i have left
against the cold fact that we are all atoms,
that atoms are indifferent,
that we are indifferent,
that we are drops of water on a bit of star-**** at the edge of one of a hundred billion somewheres.


when i die, wait.
in a few billion years, the Sun will swallow my ashes
she will grow small and dark, fade out in dusty death

we will all be angels.

enough time
turns lost love
into a cicada shell

a hollow melange of
lust and nostalgia
left abandoned under a tree

the ley lines and star alignments that drew us together
have all lock-tumbler shifted
and the combination is in a notebook
in a cobwebbed and dusty box
that i left on the curb for recycling
on some unspecified thursday in 2012
or 11, or 13
something a little unlucky

i miss you
in the same way that i miss
a dream, upon waking:
a sandcastle, built under the wrong moon, described to a stranger
shapes so thick with water that they can't hold,
but it was good, wasn't it?
it was probably good.
it must have been good.
i think i remember smiling.