The clock gets me.
It comes to me in the middle of the night
Pulls back the sheets and says, "Hey fucko."
Then it lifts open my sobby wet sand-encrusted lids,
It knows when I'm trying at sleep, pumping quarters
Like I was swallowing yawns, sometimes I try to squint
Harder and take a dream to the next level, whatever
The next level is. It's like Friday night when I wanted to go
Out to do something, whatever something is.
Because I know that if I don't I'll miss that thing that's so
Important that if I were to miss it the clock wouldn't come for me

Again.
And on Tuesday's when I'm knotting a dream around 2 o' clock
In the morning, my web-footed adventure, say, killing your

Boyfriend, say
Fighting the Nazis, say,
Rediscovering that you sent nudie pics to
That rando guy we met in that club that lives
in Prague-
I throw the clock at the ******* wall.

Because who knows, I make the bed wrong
Or maybe I don't cook right, or look right, or
Smile the right way at the right

Time. And you start thinking that I have to die.
The bane of my existence is an imagined feat in your
Walnut-sized brain, slowly numbing us while we're
Supposed to be, say

Listening to the rich, Oxford voice of
David Attenborough.

Instead you're thumbing through that index
of CVS cashiers, just trying to find a scruffy face
To flip your digits to, your homemade justification. It becomes
A feat, an unjust cause of mine to

Get it right, that imaginative and artificial bit you've
Been sewing up Monday twilight.

That's when I go out and jaw your sister, somewhere between
A smirk on your face and a bit of anger at the end of your sentences.

We know you, and your little dark colors too. A picture book in your purse penned in mustaches on the full faces of your fare. We call you from bed, 8 o' clock in the morning, dog-light you slow wander the Peruvian darkness making jellyfish tentacles with your hands while you feel your way through Salem. We're colder than night and we wake thrice the bits of your day gig. You collapse in a green field of dandelion where thrushes drown you in Brown. We gorge ourselves on mango slivers, pineapple yolks, a half of grapefruit. We know you are close to your end.

On the tops of the cities you call to your lycan friends, the half-sick and muted bray allures them to you, from Bratislava and Mimon, the thoroughfare through the suq. We wait. The foregone untold, the beep beep jug jug swoop sound of the nightingale, in all her dun glory, we wait. Then, as if descending through the moor-lounging silver smoke, the cool stickiness to your fingertips; the fog.

We are there when the blue-less and smoky screen surrounds you, when you shank the auburn Scot hair of the sly fox that stalks, say, a cigarette from your lips. When you take the corners swiftly, gadding the streets. The prize king of vulpicide. You rub its matte fur against your bristly gray beard. And while you lay in your lumps of twelve carat flesh you bleat and you nag. One day you will never come home.

Ashley,

     Your blues inspire me, insipid triangles, walking cold, sweating more and wetting the bed your lips the sizes of gods that I married through hidden video cameras, I caught bias in bliss, racism in slow disasters, tornado sirens and just sirens, and justice on the horizon. My eyelids the sizes of your little *******, the party of tomorrow, the starting sounds of scarred and stripped *** sounds. Caught in a drift, my bottom lip stuffed with lift-lust and jolting up and down your porcelain rift. Messed up and round the back to the buttons, the clasp too heavy to drop your ego down, the cold too swift to catch me as I fell. The heavens too burdened to beat me with your god. I just wanted to me smacked in the face with your flaws. Hips the sizes of doorknobs, hurdles that I caught one weekend sipping slow gin with granddad and papa and Tootsie, your evils carnivorous, your mess much more than your message. Your koo-koo voodoo and big bad red frock. Tuesday's made me the man I am today. The Slayer made me the hate I stuffed into my **** ****-strap to puff out my chest and make prisms in kitten litters and furrow the night clauses to match stick the pumped-up bypass of hazmat and heroism, I was won and didn't know it, you were one and now you're all one.
She,
     came to me in French class holding straws. I picked swiftly and came, all staled and stiff, lock-jaw and threesomes one moonlit night the fourth of July.

He weeps his heart, and hangs his head,
He doubles back, and follows her back to bed,
She says, " Some homes are towns and lives, while others wear their homes inside." And he keeps up though he's kept out, the volatile, the sudden frown.
She makes up the cupcakes but they're never vegan are they? No they're never vegan are they?

He makes a gift, and wrings his thumbs, the bubble bath, the tepid tub,
Outside where the rains have gone long, something gives him something strong,
And he picks up where he had left off, the trouble is he doesn't know when to back off, and the cupcakes aren't vegan, sweet and such spectacular, but they really aren't eaten, now that they've been made with eggs. No the cupcakes aren't vegan, though they are quite delicious. And he loves her forever, though he never eats again. No he never eats again. No he never eats again.

angry men who do not know I do not have a dollar or a cig to spare. Ugly irrefutable contagion-handed howlers. Angry mischievous heathens that pantomime on 6:00a.m. sidewalk, Wicker Park gallow stop-sign, choreographed gutter-punk drunk walk. And of all he wants and could ever want splits down his gooey membrane brain in the outline of a noun shaped fragment of a clause, "Couldja spare 80¢ for the train," but of course I don't spare on the ellipsis or the period. Semi-colons I won't! My rubber-bottomed leather boots lash out, heavy scraping sounds trail this mirrored shadow half an angle behind me.

*****!! Blonde framed sunglasses from American Apparel, a gift from my sister in a folded Ray-Ban case is scattered on last nights bedroom floor, my girlfriend has certainly not noticed, the gloom-coated morning sun spray has not noticed; but I have unzipped a fissure in the ocular lens. My heart skips a beat. Her bedroom might as well have swallowed them whole. Now the house can halt and have the shade, swaying in Spring air in 10:22a.m. shadows. The aviator himself Howard Hughes would strike me with his 488 aircraft. Edwin Starr in his invincible sinister calypso of War would turn me round. I was sturdy as a rock until I began to forget my forgottens. These unknown unknowns I knew I needed. I'm over a quarter-century on to noon going nowhere- and quite blindly.

But then, still she could stand upright and find me. Her neck crooked, looking onward through the East, the gristly roots of rhubarb buried in her searching fingernails. She's threaded worse, and of course if I could just tell her- this is the kind of nursing which requires acute temperament and flexibility. I am thus on a journey to strike nonsense and fear from the idiotic vocabulary that put this nonsense in my head. Split through me like a butter knife into my apotropaic. Perhaps tar water could cure my ails. If not, certainly a sliver of vanilla would set me straight. Or if could just rain rain rain all day, then I'd make do without, but she is at school. My pistons are racked and nervous, and I'm not going anywhere but my rucksack stoop. I am camped in midwestern Spring soup. Fog, rain, and shade. The nightmare of day.

Can I show you how beautiful you are? Can I take out the old photo albums and push my index finger into the faces, the places, and seas? I want to peel back the plastic and remove the square photographs from their sticky setting. I'm alluding to ideas that exist more formidably on the internet- there are no paper photographs, no sticky settings, there aren't even faces in the numbers; it's only ever been you or me.

Some of my things are crooked. The strings don't work, the wires are twisted and make the sounds all come out funny. There's a strange buzzing everywhere, it's like Mickey's gray cloud, a cloud Koopa throwing spiked shells from Park Avenue beach to Montrose street. Everything is quiet, consuming, unassuming and still recalcitrant. I'm showing nothing to nobody. Coaxing storm systems and netting foul play and ***** tricks, with my pants around my ankles or my fly unzipped.

I'm stinking of this stuff. These sudorific crevices on the insides of my thighs. I'm more or less always pacing. Rocking. Rolling. Small room I'm living room, cadavers I stuff my skinny fingers inside of- cold, wet hollow places I'm seeking skin covered gods in. I'm craving tastes and flavors. I'm looking at these pictures of me, of my face and the clothes I wore, the people that knew me. Where have I disappeared to? Every place that I went, every condition of my humanness has gone. Five minutes past my certainty, squirting hot molten magma from my ****, my lips, and my fingertips. Hysterical thoughts and homily. I want just a hello. I want just a hello.

It's just that. Thirty pounds of weakness. A hard-sided steel briefcase with the black leather-strapped handle. It's that reiki healer I don't believe in, and the rocks that have names. I don't believe it anymore. I am stranded on a pylon, the world spinning beside me, the palm trees gushing blood onto the oedipal sand beaches. It's your brother Thomas ******* the curls in my chest hair while I'm walking to get a glass of tap water, we're face to face and he's touching my wiry curls and your juices and kisses are still on face. I don't believe him. The porch door is open, I can see halfway around the city from here, the lemon tree is serving ugly fruit, I turn off the hallway light and shuffle my feet like a child, never taking them off of the white curd carpet while I head back to the bedroom. I don't believe it, you told me I had the voice of your Uncle who touched you, who you blew when you were two. You said you could feel my shadow coming up the hallway but were too afraid to lock the door. I made whispers loud enough for you to hear about all the hole love I had for you. I don't believe it's been five years and I'm still typing and timing my meals to schedules in sentiment that haven't existed for months upon months over months.

I was in the bathroom, serrating my skin with a nail file. Sneaking phone numbers from the Holz-licker's phone. He's quieter than normal. I sent threats abroad, Europe first, the Eastern block, then Russia, two to New Zealand, one to South Africa, I met you in the car and asked about Nick and the swing set. No one could give me a straight ******* answer. I don't believe it, it's 12 hours later, and even Princess ****** can't put me to sleep, I know nighttime like I was studying it, hitchhiking the darkness with my thumb turned outward. I hate every part of what I have become. I could drown myself in the shower, breathe in the water and feel as it sharply shoots through my lungs, my tummy, and through the ventricles of my heart. I don't believe how much I've written and the hell I've written about. I should **** him, just for his indifference, just to rule out a single number. A prime number. The uneven oddity about it, slovenly and chaotic. I made a silver drop for your sister and one for you too. Nothing came of it, nothing comes. 30 pounds I wait, I'm weighted down to my trunk. I want coffee, I want tea, I want biscuits for breakfast, I want certainty. I make the wolves that follow, you're the chase that I'm running in. You are the footsteps and deep breaths I don't believe in, I am unsettled by us standing still. And while you usher my standard bones. And while you curtail my excellent surprise. I will be the one disbelieving your appeal, the one peeling back your eyeballs dry. Not that I wanted, I waned, I wooed each every other fellow through- but inside my needle, heaped atop my bed, are the locks of gold I entombed you in. I drank the black dragon blood of the heavy metal christ. I still don't believe that just because I killed you it means that you've died.