I will get to the bottom of this and by that I do mean the bottle.
I will go until my bellies full of venom and like cement,
It will churn in my stomach all night.
My head is always spinning like a washing machine.
No one ever hits on you if your drinking straight whiskey.

1.He’d say anything to get me out of my shell.
2. His pupils are hard, black marbles and I want to flick him off of me.
3. He is always shuffling through women like they are a deck of cards.
4. It’s just how the dice rolls.
5. I was afraid of falling, of my arms snapping like wishbones.
6. He waits until I’m swaying like a door hinge.
7. My eyes are wide like 8 ***** and he hits me with that same click, roll, thunk of a pool ball table.
8. You are cursing me. When you yell, you are cursing me.
9. “Come out, come out, wherever you are…”
10. I hope the bruises on your legs turn into birds. I hope you get out of here.

Cool black night thru redwoods
cars parked outside in shade
behind the gate, stars dim above
the ravine, a fire burning by the side
porch and a few tired souls hunched over
in black leather jackets.  In the huge
wooden house, a yellow chandelier
at 3 A.M. the blast of loudspeakers
hi-fi Rolling Stones Ray Charles Beatles
Jumping Joe Jackson and twenty youths
dancing to the vibration thru the floor,
a little **** in the bathroom, girls in scarlet
tights, one muscular smooth skinned man
sweating dancing for hours, beer cans
bent littering the yard, a hanged man
sculpture dangling from a high creek branch,
children sleeping softly in their bedroom bunks.
And 4 police cars parked outside the painted
gate, red lights revolving in the leaves.

                                        December 1965

I keep having dreams that I'm in prison, whats the worst thing you've ever done?

I had a bowling ball in my stomach and everybody looked like pins! I wanted more limbs. I n3eded a labotomy! I needed a power outage. In all my reacurring nightmares I look like a natural disaster.
Which would you rather do: implode, erode, dissolve, evolve, disintegrate, collapse, or dissapear?
There is always so much false hope here
It feels like im going to rip like wet paper. Believing in something is like drawing angel wings on the back of a white tshirt.

Is he real? I want to know
I think I'll ask my magic 8ball...

I
There is a 3% chance I'll find you here. But if in each pair of eyes I dip, I find 1/8 of you; I'll be there soon.

II
I didn't crawl here; I took a plane. I spent six hours tracing the Atlantic from my window and you rose from the sea, dry and unsalted, twice each nautical mile. I would say it was my imagination, or the California wine, but I wear glasses now and never lie about what I see. It was you. And you and you and you.


III
Stealing is easier here. Maybe it's the crowds or the way the men smile at me like I'm harmless, but my hands move without question. They don't fumble or miss pockets, my heartbeat doesn't even protest. In prayer beads, silkworm cocoons, oils and sea rings, I am in debt to a city who doesn't know it.


IV
I have no ethnicity. Deep in bone coils the apathy and flight of someone's non-heritage. But I am forgiven; in a world of paranoia, brown eyes are always trusted and the way my hair falls reminds them that I'm on their side. Even my name curls within itself, folded flat and dead before it's over. It's better this way; no allegiance, no responsibility.

V
From a curb in district nine, I see your star. It's hanging where you said it would be but I can't see god in it the way you promised.

VI
On the other side of the world you told me about a quad of green. You waxed flowers of every color, the sky I've only ever painted and the people, beautiful and dark, who will save me. I found it. In broken French and broken sandals I found it and the sun was setting and you had just left. So now we both know you won't be the one to save me.

VII
With one foot in the slanting gutter I walk until the city circles and I'm back where I started. In a daydream I found you. I smiled and quoted your book, the part that said 'When we heard the guidance, we believed in it' and you looked at me in a way that scared me. A way that translated your face into thousands of alphabets, ancient and invented. And I knew none of them. Suddenly I'm illiterate to you. Suddenly I'm gone.

VIII
I'm with a man who's made of smoke and each strawberry ring that escapes my lips is dedicated to someone that I’ve laughed with.

IX
With the intensity of archives on fire, I withdraw. You are still a body; a few hundred bones calcified and aging, a mind of words streaming like spider webs, blood you never shed, and  muscles that cross in blinding precision, but you are not who you used to be. You bound to me in a way that's irreversible and now we're both stitching. Awkward and broken we pull at flesh to remove each other. We have scars now, like stickers ripped from wallpaper. The outline of a palm stains my shoulder, a thumb the size of yours in the crook of my elbow. Small, white fingerprints tattoo your neck.


X
I might be free. Over cobble stones with broken sandals I don't trip until I realize that a city where I loved is now part of me. I can get as far away from her as the modern map allows but the red and gold bangles that crowd my wrists are not to be taken off. They're a part of me too. Like blood spilled on a cobble stone, you will walk over us every day of your life.

I like boys who look like deer in the headlights. Shy. Startled by the movement of clouds.
He looked like a cherub. I miss the callouses on his hands. Everything he says sounds like rain water on the outside of a window! I shoved his love letters into beer bottles and threw them into the sea! It's the ven diagram of our bodies overlapping.
I spell it all out in refrigerator magnets.
I wanted someone I could make snow angles with...
He tied balloons to my wrists and I got carried away.
I've had butterflies in my stomach for weeks and I can't swallow and I can't sleep.

Wolves stopped whistling when I put the invisibility cloak on. I guess you don't need magic to dissapear. It's just all black always. Black jacket, black jeans, black shoes. I keep my head down and my mouth shut and it's no wonder.