The fever took her - quietly, suddenly.  
One moment she was lying still,
the next her blood had been boiled and her hair was burning
so that there was a constant glow about her face.

In moments like these,
where her body and her brain were two separate entities,
she could think only of the way her skin joined
in perfect harmony
behind her ears.

inlove with a girl who breathes like
snow so light, it is almost
nothing, nothing at all

inlove with a girl whose skin rubs against mine as
a tongue fondles peaches(cling)

inlove with a girl who sighs like the crest of a wave, falling
to meet the rest of it's body(russsshh)

inlove with a girl whose move-
ments collect eyes like her hair collects
rain or her toes collect sand

inlove like I am
inlove, like I am
inlove

I am
    busy
      busy
        busy
being busy being
left right left right
         - left
           alone.

I want you to see the hole in my shirt
where your heart went through like a Colt 45,
and opened a dream at the back of the neck.

Here,
let me unbutton it for you.

there is no blood rush in this, there is no
heel-over-*** worship, waiting like
an obedient dog

we are getting old, coma-
tose, we are getting more
lace-like and fragile as we
go
go
go

races and
heavy everyday footfalls, good
practice for when we
lose our
legs

your hips are
sinking ships,
floating along my
jawline, my lips,
take trips along
southern
borders

and you smile like
I wanted you to

better a truck stop
waitress
with platinum
hair and
pineapple earrings
than living with a
corpse.

maybe you're right
maybe I was afraid
maybe.

but you were so afraid
of being
wrong
that you didn't
make a
choice.

we were twelve and we packed thirteen passion-fruit juice boxes,
crackers and peanut butter because who can survive without peanut butter?
the three long hours we were
walking then
running then catching our breath at the corner of
Kennedy and Lincoln.

having lunch in a ditch and rolling down hills and
I can remember everything.
I bet you can too, the

cars screaming past us on the highway and the
darker it got the faster we scrambled and we ended up
exactly where we started but

we tried to run away and we returned
not with our tails drooping between our legs but
stick-straight and in the air because
we'd had adventure for the first time,
we'd crossed the street holding each-
other's hands, not
our mother's anymore.

and I wish I was
in that ditch again,
with you sticking your fingers in the peanut butter because we forgot a knife

not with you, "dead in a ditch somewhere"
like they say you are.

legs stick-straight
my hips don't gyrate
my hair's not well-trained
and my ******* aren't the same
size

my eyes
aren't bambi-watching-his-mother-get-strapped-to-the-back-of-a-van-BIG
they're not blue like the atlantic, but grey like
cigarette ashes.

my eye-lashes aren't a foot in length,
they don't billow when I blink
and I've lost so many, a ton,
ones that I didn't even
get to
wish
on.

this is the place where wires tangle
the birthplace of sneezes
a home for desperate coins,
two balled up tissues, a
****** wrapper (yippee)
a note with handwriting that fingers the page with it's curly tentacles
and a packet of
matches
to start
the fire.

everytime our eyes meet it is
Anthony and Cleopatra,
it is ee cummings and his
dark-haired mistress, it is
every love affair that has ever been
lived again and
again and
again

in those brief seconds
when our eyes meet, in those
I can feel you
looking for a reason
to kiss me
forever
searching
me

tell me when you find it,
and let me hold it in my lips
for the next time
our eyes
meet

This sleep does not suit me,
this sleep without youth.

Heavy lids and heavy lies the body but
my mind takes shape reminiscent of
waves and the mermaid fins, dreams of
glittering beaches to wake up sweating
mid-winter.

Why is it that I putter and sink into crevices deep, still?
Why is it that I cannot share the moon? Her piercing
brilliance has endured eons alone, and
I feel a comrade in her shivering ripples.

This sleep, my darling,
I will not allow it.

Layer upon layer upon layer,  it is too cold for skin
and my sunkist days pull away, while I reach and grab for a hand to hold.  

Missouri is a surprise party for someone who hates surprises.
Missouri is a cruel joke, handing you the ripe-to-the-very-second
sweetness of a strawberry summer and snatching it away at the
last second to watch you fall to your knees and beg for mercy from the
biting wind and your stinging lips, no chapstick to be found.

Layer upon layer, sweater under coat,
socks over socks under boots made of steel.

If there is one upside to this brutal chill, if there is
it would be peeling back this extra skin, this shield of
fabric, to reveal steaming pink underneath.

It would be that
cold weather
makes ***
even better.

days are full of tulip lipping, like easy slipping of the
fingers through theory strands, soft-soiled land
    dip      yourself in

nights are littlesilver
slivers of one another, getting smaller and then larger
and then smaller again

yesterday I fell in love a million times -
with an old man who ate lunch by himself but
smiled and called me 'little daisy' whenever I
refilled his coffee, with my coworker who has three kids
and pretty eyes even when they are tired, my yoga instructor,
the man on the bus with a large coffee stain on his starched collar,
my neighbor who was out mowing his lawn in the dead of winter, and
Kurt Cobain - but today I didn't fall in love at all.

tomorrow I plan to take a walk, eat something for once and
sit next to the man with the stain on my way to work.

perhaps I'll fall in love again.

I watched them
swaying
hip to hip
in time to
the
music.

And what was the picture above the door?
A cupid or an angel,
pointing his bow and arrow
and I was so jealous
of him.

I was so jealous that there wasn't
a picture of me

any
where.

I don't want your
soul-*******, your
pick-me-up lines.

I just want enough air in this room
and enough space in this town and
enough corners in my brain
to hide in.

I just want a bed at night to lie in,
I just want an atmosphere without holes in it,
I just want you to stop
looking at me
like that,

and I just want to give you this
hole in my stomach
where food used to flourish,
the people used to live forever and
the point of everything was that
it made us happy.

I don't want to settle for
the background of a chagall.
I want the lovers, too.

I will not end for you, no.
I will begin, and I will keep
on beginning.

I will lick peach juices from
my fingertips like mama's milk
dripping from the ****. I will wrap myself in
silk sarongs and stay that way for days,
marveling at the texture of my own skin.
I will run naked through the rain and
liberate myself in knowing that
what will happen will happen and
there is no safe way out. I will sit close
and listen. I will breathe water lying still
in a stream. I will eat poems for
breakfast and I
will slowly learn
how to die.

there's a picture of sunflowers, my favorite
by far. one
leans apart from the congregation, rests
it's head on a wooden fence.
a visible sigh in it's face

it's posture affects --
and though time accelerates,
there is still gold in the lines of my face,
some days    the light catches

and warmth Ihold in my pockets
for days like today, I drizzle it on my tongue.

&my; insides are wrapped in dusty glow
from eons before
I began to wilt

I'm up in knots again, today like
tug-of-war inside my chest like
little kids at recess - pulling, pull
ing but it never breaks because
who has upper body strength at age eight?

and tears like ringing a rag, can
never get every drop out.

and every day a bucket of water over my head,
head's so full my eyes could fall out, draw
out my sentences to fill the space between me
(at the top of the lungs like a
yawn perched, but it never rises)
and the space between you (I couldn't
ever fill it.)

the feeling builds and any way I lay
there's a pocket of my body to fill.

so I tuck my knees to my chest,
stretch my chin over top,
no escape, no empty space
curled up

like a newborn baby
so in the morning I
can re-learn how to breathe,
to speak and speak my mind

I can re-trust,
re-hope and re-
care.

breathe new air, just
one day's worth. so I can
re-position myself on the map,
point and say, "I am here!"

and feel it, too.

I won't understand why
saving a thought or an
inspiration for myself
causes it to be all the more vibrant and I
live vicariously through what people
would think of me if they knew
my secret.

Sometimes I feel as if
cigarette butts are
bread crumbs
for grown ups.

your voice a sweet
          ripe
          be-
          cause
every morning in my
          stomach left
          gravel-
          like
coffee-stained tongues,
          rolling from tips  
          like peach pits -
          devoured
slowstickysweet, the
          center
          of each
          earthy
          peach.

new day,
old men and

every hour
retains their listless exhaustion;
half-hearts beat in their chests.


"The sky is bright today," I say, making
small talk.

"Don't worry, " he says through a concrete smile,
"we're tinting the windows tomorrow"

it seemed when the air was thick with heat the streets were
seething like the sweat on my back as I'd climb each
minuscule lump in the earth as if it were a mighty mountain -
ten thousand feet tall. hair
stuck to my neck the way
kisses stick to your lips when
you want more than a kiss -
I'd pull it up and away from my face.

it has been
it has been
a lifetime and a half between the cold that was and
the cold that is - now, here, in my bones and holding down
the pavement with frigid arms, stubborn. my hair is
longer now, growing out and it curls like a cat at my
neck to rest, spreading like hot soup spreading
down my
chest.

your yawns stretch
their fragile morning limbs to
the top of your lungs:

breathe in -- quick quick,
don't let your breath stick
to the bottom of your
throat -- breathe out.

hips are farther apart when I sit, hands are toes are
spread fingers like spindles like broken into minute portions of
matter, moving about in this



                                
                            ­             big                            &                        empty




                                                       not mov
                                                              ing but
                                                              breath
                                                                   ing and
                                                                   tingl
                                                                        ing, too

At first it was bare and ripe for the picking -
my chest was pulsating under your weight you
stripped my heart like an exotic dancer would:
all eyes and no hands.

After the initial grasp, the puff puff pass and the
smiles exchanged between our legsarmslimbs and the
time it took to be rid of the excess skin crowding us in,
we breathed in sweet, sweet fumes of spring and said
things kept in our mouths, light like ecstasy but
heavier than the average promise.

But the hours it took to argue the hunger away made our
heads ache and eventually our jaws could clench no longer,
our eyes could see no more of each other - just smoke and
******* clouding our way - it was lost,
whatever it was, it

was lost.

where will your eyes lay me ?
on the edge of our bed, where years have folded our skin together
in a filter of light

or in some dark place that has yet to find us
in the damp afterplace of things unresolved--



I picture you turning,
my transgressions braided, trailing behind as your steps grow more and more    sure.


               --last

We were statues in the sky.
We were up there where the air is clean and
too high for airplanes to come muck it all
up. Too high for the kites to tangle in our hair,
too high for the gunshots.

We were birds who flew only up,
forever up.

Though I was more of a rotisserie chicken,
laying on one side for too long,
always burning my own wings.

And you were always saving me from myself.

Plucking tall glasses from their perch above the sink and
letting loose the dark that wiggled, relentless, inside it's bottle.
Gold was chipping from my mother's cheap wine glasses,
creating the sort of sad ambiance that you, unexpectedly,
find yourself craving.

There, in the belly of it - flavor resembling nothing of the puckering and
rambunctious cranberry and pomegranate that **** my insides with
summer-tainted sweetness - lurked a hazy glow, too often
over-romanticized, I think.

And I,
haphazardly stealing from the bottle's mouth,
didn't realize what was stolen
from my own.

coming upon this photo of us I hadn't seen
(pre-mortem, my blind happiness)
my breathing stops, my uncle in the other room stops yelling about the VCR
appropriately. I can hear him bounding down the steps,
leaving the upstairs for me alone, a place to sit and stare at this.

I am standing behind Spencer and you are beside me
but you look more as if the slushie in your hand could bring you more excitement.
you look blank and I look blind and everyone else is background to
my realization and your arrogance in everything from your
dead-pan eyes to your arm lingering at your side, not holding
mine.

I can see the tops of your stupid shoes that I told you to throw out
and I would pay for another pair. I can see all of the things I ate that day
heaved into a toilet later that night and you
were gone by the 18th of October.

It's funny how I can tell we are not puzzle pieces and we do not fit.
Sure there are crooks and crannies where an elbow can rest
and a head may lay but

most of the time arms will fit around you only

if you want
them
to.

I want to lay blankets over your head,
Hold a flashlight while you read my palm, my wrist my elbowmybreasts
I want to pay homage to your chest and
It's many rhythms, 3/4, 4/4, 5/4
Whatever, I don't know anything about timing,
Or I would have met you 6 years ago,
Before she broke your heart so that by now perhaps it may have grown
The size of this room we share
Instead, for now I'll hear you out in whispers

and in quiet
     morning conversations

there is a constant ache behind the eyes - dim,
like the dying embers of a fire. my stomach
is always too full of everything I didn't eat, the
foreignness spread like black mold beneath the
surface of everything.

picking at hangnails, picking at chapped lips, picking
the scabs that scabbed over my spirit.

my tongue is scratched like a scratched cd,
I have only one or two things that I keep
repreprepeating.

there is a build-up in my throat of apologies,
lingering on my breath and the truth I have been
keeping in my belly, the truth I have swallowed so
greedily, the truth is I haven't
much

truth.

like  
      want                   
                       feel  
        just things  

the time
      make              eyes  
little              girl  
      ­                              way  
         talk  

love
  
                               she

             he

beige sits in your skin, layers in
various shades. sometimes I mistake it for
pink, in the shadows

but no
mostly just
beige

--void

I looked too far to the left and
it hurt my head to see that
I couldn't easily see
past my own
proximity
past your head and
past my own
past.

----------------------------------------------------------------­----------
I passed by a little old lady
and her grocery bags, heavy,
passing out fliers for a cause
too
heavy
for
me.

----------------------------------------------------------------­--------
The ads on tv speak
of cancer and her trip up the creek with
eyes that said
she never got to see
the sea, not even
in her sleep.

the air isn't pinching, it nibbles my skin as I catch the scent of
remorse and a hint of peanutbutter and honey,
tangy and sweet I wish I weren't that way sometimes,
I wish I could see the worm in an apple instead of
the seeds

the heat between my hands as I clench
them, between me and this
seat as I writhe against it, the ache
in my spine from sitting up
straight, the purse of my
lips and the
sting of my
eyeswide
dry
eyes.

no breath and then one deep
one. two, three. fourfivesixseven - !

slowbreathing.
no heaving sighs.
no looking left,
no looking
right.

all the razors and rough edges and
clean teeth as well as
***** socks and
shoulders all shoulders,
be they scrawny or broad, be they above or below
eye-
level.

some have ****** hair and books
some bring me hats and framed vinyl
some have early mornings and
most have late nights.

they all have futures
many have fantastic
dreams and the others have their work
instead, but most just want a place to lay down for awhile.

all sweatshirts and quiet words and the ability to
stop my mind from blistering in the warmth of them.
then in cars, screaming at other cars and anger
that I won't admit
frightens me.

the different walls and the posters
and paintings plastered
on them in an effort to
belong,

eyes that tell me not to look too far into them
for fear of growing down. for fear of
becoming a bore.

those closed eyes and sleep talk
to open minds and cheap dates and hands that are
larger than mine.

I know them to be true those
eyes those chins
those men those boys

those
hearts.

it is hard to describe quite
the feeling I feel when I see
what I see what I see when
I tiptoe to the waters edge -

bare quiet witness to the highly mannered,
manifold expressions of life that
grace this place - some things so
light and bright and
weird and delicate
as to stupefy
the senses -

language often
founders in
such
seas.

better to picture it in your head if you wish to
feel it.

Today, though it is warm
I can smell the
bitter *****
that winter
is.

last night I had a poem inside me, I lost it on the highway
in the Christmas of red and white continuous light
on either side

there were other thoughts, in other cars - their webs spun & ready

the wind beat against my window, holding the tail of it --
"there's still time"  

but I just looked back at you, driving.
hands sure, your unsmiling lips somehow
still holding,
kind.

and remembered this sizzling, poppin' n' fizzing
feeling

and could have written
pages and pages and instead
just

burned

One can't stop oneself from wondering.
At least I can't, or won't.



I see one singular thing while I feel everyone else is seeing everything in
panoramic vision.

and I focus on that one thing for about sixty seconds,
long enough for babies to be born and countries destroyed and I
have nothing to do with any of it.






You use the word 'beautiful' too often
and whatever it is that was
isn't anymore.

You say you love someone too often
and they don't anymore.

I have a theory that is the reason behind language always changing and rearranging:
and if we didn't change
things would be the same and we'd die
of boredom and
lack of interest etc..

the impression of everything
finally fit into the impression left by the first (as it always does) but

it was only the shallow end, and wonder goes
deeper, at least to the 6ft that goes over my head
(as it always does) and now

I am chopped into several different
pieces like the syllables in a word -- you've gotta
            
              sound
    
                me
            
               out!


you've gotta get me out
of the brain to the tongue to your
lips and teeth -- so sweet! the satisfying end to
one
big
word,



isn't it?

Constant
inople.

Raspberry pie
in bed.

These are the dreams
of you I have
in my heavy
little head.

there wasn't much of a struggle, only
a few words exchanged, one
shot fired      and

no one died.

my body remains, but I lost
my dominant hand, my left
foot

I learn to write again --
my hand grows steadier
with practice each
day

I lean
a little more to the right
than I used to

& the view from my window has changed.