I.

I'm a growing polliwog,
not a butterfly--

pickled legs hang off of my fish body
and gills close off so rapidly.
A minute ago I could caress the water
and make oxygen bubble in my throat. Now

beating,

pulsing

lungs intrude
like pink bubble gum ready to pop.


What a sadistic word,

oxygen.


II.

After a little nap in a sleeping bag
butterflies are monarchs,
stained glass fluttering perfection,

symbols of luck,

symbols of
beauty,
Their wired bodies are scribbled together
like starving supermodels.


III.

And my seams are

!slowly!  

pinching themselves open,
a la Frankenstein.

I want to think these body parts are mine:

A tentative nose,

very green pointillism eyes
with lashes like brittle grass or bent nails,

These white playdough thighs,
and stretchmarks like remnants of lace
chewed up by my insane canine.

Pink.
Dainty and tangled on my legs,
I think they look like jet-streams lit by sunset.

Good evening, lettuce.

You are not long
for this world.

I want to stumble into you
Like the locked door at the end of the hallway
The one with the sign that doesn’t say
DO NOT ENTER
As much as it says
I ****** DARE YOU

And I dare
I dare to devour your deviance
Like a grungy punk rocker on a microphone

Head shake tongue wag cartoon coyote horn howl

What?
I have no discretion
Leave the lights on
I want us both to see why we taste so bad

I mean
Let’s pound like pistons
Until the oil dries up
And our engines seize

I have nowhere to go

I do not want to go home tonight
I want to sloppy seconds myself
Before passing out
With my head in the crook of your neck

Even drenched in sweat
You smell so sweet

I want to kiss you
I want to taste your body’s attempt
To cool what I do to you

I want to heat you up again

I bought the clapper and unplugged everything else
Just so you could tell me to ******* like a strobe light

Well
Gorgeous
Now I can

Come place your lips on my throat
And I will sing for you

You are so much more beautiful than I could ever be
Let me know what that feels like
By wanting me back

This gentle ache
Of dancing
And drying joints

I wonder if you’ll still be this **** when you’re old

I ask because I have lost any desire for grace

I have fallen from it

And want to stumble into you like a locked door

Fumble for the house keys

Might actually make it inside

If you took your hands off me

His finger fidgeted with the small hole in his jeans
Right above the left knee
It caressed the rust of a healing scab

He knew boyhood was sitting at the tense end of a slingshot
While balancing on a thin branch
Creeping in through the window
Of his tree house

His shins were permanently bruised
From hitting the edge of the bed
After jumping and missing
In order to avoid whatever may be living underneath it

Ten years from now he will regret
Not being in enough family photos
And for placing too many boxes full of old clothes
Underneath his bed
For anything to truly live there

He will know manhood sitting at a red light
Begging the breaks to go out
So his only option will be
To go

When he is old
And so much a baby again
He will beg time to be patient
Long enough to understand

Why when he was a boy
The slingshot band never broke from the tension
Before releasing rocks to break windows
He had to spend the summers working off

But as a man
Trapped at a red light
Why not once
The breaks ever went out
So that he might have an excuse
To go

Set the mood: Can you feel the bitter? Taste it, drink it, **** it, love him. That is life and if these are the best years of it…then I’m not sure we want to see the worst. It’s called an epiphany…a warm rush of ice, slitting my lips. ****** as they are, these lips are open for you. So speak. I am here for your assumptions, so assume. Please, good friend, assume. Right here, write this down:

I need a voice to speak into. Ears to teach me to listen, because either I'm deaf or God's mute. Cause I've spent too many hours branding paper with my pen in these half-hearted prayers they call poems.

I need true empathy, not the GreatValue knockoff from a dimly lit aisle or Made-in-China substitutes worn around my friends' necks. Empathize with our loss. The traditions you and I will never know. The traditions we both know we’re going to miss.

I need a way into your mind, a shortcut through the jokes and labels. Ask your heart to crack its wary shell open just enough for me to slip my secrets inside, cause I know you're just as lonely as I pretend not to be. And I know you have secrets, too. Whispers are like questions begging not to be known, but I'll whisper to you anyways and beg you have the answers.

I need someone to talk to, someone who thinks about the skies at night. Stares off into the nothingness, screams into the emptiness his whispers. Someone who can blink away all the light. I know I am young but I am a witness to the symptoms of true thought. And you? You are infected, as well. You think. You are a liar, like me, and a natural-born beauty, as we all are. I see what this world has to offer today, and it’s you.

So how much time must we take? I think about you thinking about how much world there is. Or how little there is. How little all the people are. How the people look like flowers.

But not us as we sit on the roof of some ****** car. Its walls are ridden with messages from us to God, and he wrote back in dyslexic lettering, “I lvoed yuo all alnog.” I may seem more shallow and less a witness. You may seem like little but a confused sadist, desperate for an experience. But behind your perjury, you are scared.

You need a voice to speak into. To feel your words, molested in the dark. You know more than you say. Speak to me what you speak to your mind. Watch the flowers sway as we sit, immaculate. Slip your secrets inside my heart. Speak to me. Just speak.

I don’t need to love. I need to speak. So whisper #1: Why is the sky so ******* blue?

I think often. It's a habit I can't seem to break like a gambler with his gambling and a priest with boys' knees or what brands red A's on our chest. I think we're a bit too trusting and I know we're a tad naive. I think it's best we love each other from the safety of three feet. This finite planet and our infinite greed pair up wondrously said the axeman to the tree.

The world that has made us has gone from a fine fitting coat to an ugly old shoe. We say we've outgrown, but what of the sea? Let's poison it. What of the the ice caps? Let 'em melt like a bowl of forgotten ice cream on my coffee table. I have more important things to devour. Gotta run, culture's waiting.

So I follow the rabbit down the hole wait I stop! Curiosity killed the cat I bought with a two dollar bill my grandmother gave me as payment the first time I cleaned that labyrinth of a cellar beneath her house: musty, dark, repressive I thought I was inside of my ten year old self then through the dark I can hear a rustling, "God?" I plead, my hands clutching the windex. No answer, there never is so I head into the shadows when I see the rabbit and this time I bolt for the hole but my head hits a wall. I concluded that life was a cruel joke as cynicism ensued.

I couldn't sleep, couldn't eat, couldn't dance, couldn't sing because boys like girls, and girls like boys and boys don't cry, but I cry. As does the gambler and the priest and the woman on the horizon. I could have bet it was an angel and the gambler, he did. She steps into the reef and we hear her song and I know that she's me and I'm him and he’s all of us and the reef is that cruel joke I learned in the basement chasing rabbits but it's awful pretty from here is a warning to you when you think God is dead and death is synonymous to halt:

I'll swim inside this reef 'til the day I die. Water slipping through my fists and I'm yelling no I'm whispering no one's got a verb for trying to help. Water's to my neck but I'm not stopping. The coral ends here where I can finally sink sink sink my body in the trenches, spread a dustier me across the oceans, fill Earths' blood, a mass of veins and rocks and steel blemishes with my own maze of veins and thoughts and inauthenticity…


♐ ♐ ♐


Bury me naked cause where they say we're all headed headed it's gonna be hot hot hot like a medics sweat dripping down his nose as he beat beat beats on her chest but she's too big to get through. Too big, too fat Lady Liberty's choking on fries we're the world's laughing stock, the UN's singing jest for me, jest for me, jest at Mother Nature's giving way to political pressure same as Gods giving way to backwater pleasure and curses, a moment of weakness but 14 billion years? He’s old.

It's 2011 and more people hate hate hate from pin ****** in the ocean spewing bile in the deep, now whose fault is that, really? We're all shallow like my lagoon, my tropical retreat where there's no oil. No God. No smiles or tears. Can't sing, can't dance...can only be me. Who's gonna say that they're one in the same? Heaven's not a cloud and Hell's nicer than you think and I do. I think often.

Gum is another tongue in your mouth,
taste-bud studded with sugar and pink

Hubba Bubba Double Bubble

Your jaw feels like expanding bread
when you rest from chewing
flatten it into a saucer and
let it balloon from your mouth,

it distends like an internal *****
or the full stomach of a frog
spilling from your lips

(When he stretches, you see veins
******* across his amphibian chest)

It hooks itself on your nose
and wilts into a pink tangle.