You were totally something else. Like a calm respite overcoming an instance of excitement. Magic and other prime words that can dictate the inarticulate adjectives that was this afternoon. Happiness and pleasure. A coexistence. To coexist. Soy.

It's like this, and then there was total recall. Fast like a safety plan made wrong and then bouncing in and out all the way down the hall. Up through cable cars, Korean fast food market, wet fish, soupy street, concrete cracks filled with crab meat and **** heads. Just a square, a five block, two street, sideways quadrangle, beat of the Tenderloin, hour of the dove. Every one's dead on these loose ends. Hills of the back of her backside, skin of the back of her neck. Rapture is the grave of the sunset, memory is that thing that I said.

No one cans in carnivores, no one runs moves like a shepherd. Sunday, daft as candy, luck in the ways of the prophet. Canon of the blaze of every woman that died today. The sleep setting, the motorcycle bending the hollow, the ravines noisy interlude, up through the rough and the tangles, huddles in a six pack, three or four walking up the block to meet the rest of them.

The skin doesn't fit right, it wears wrong, the shoulders stiff, the masseuse excuses himself. Buckets of flowers hang from the ceiling like stripped cat christmas decorations in suburban mastermind serial killer resort town. Everyone is quiet because they gotta. They move their feet like they were hurrying death into a red volcano, like they were the errand of red from the top bell to the bottom of the town.

I sit on a roof top, baking in the noon day sun. Stripping sticks and stems off the side to sideways, just roasting away, laying, low in the afternoon light. I see a girl with her hands on her skirt, wobbling, scooting a priest card on a periwinkle terra-cotta.  I move my head, turn it upside round to take a better look. No one counts to ten when they see me. The gangster that woke up isn't the gangster that went to sleep last night. My wickedness ended my words mean your bright decay. So I ride the pavement exhausted, burying my coughs in an L-shaped arm

Memory

     is  the birth of cool, it is rapture and ignominious spokesmanship unearthed. Packed into a slatted-wood crate, milking the obsession from cash-toting hands. Freeing itself from your bottom lip while life ticks itself away on a digital stock-exchange display. I am down and you are up, and you save pennies while I search for Chrysanthemums and vanilla-scented candles. Scent is my fifth grade spaceship,
     I hide it in my pocket and take it into the forest when the week is over. Adventure is the part of our story that's caught in between complaining about money and having clean sheets. Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Sunday my hands mend themselves back from bleach, their crevices cave under bright lights, I go to the garden strip and put dirt on my face, over my shoulders, and on my back. I make a altimeter from an alarm clock, and worry what will happen if your feet should ever touch the ground.
Relief
     is a sarcophagus, the satiny silk chrysalis I weave into invincibility. I make myself a small child with a demon-proof lair, no one comes in, not even you.  I see

     how drugs take out your heart and put you anew, fresh: orange, pink, ultramarine. A wave is a soft gesture for twilight, a slow walk among the greying statue towers, bliss extracted from person to person tedium. How you exclaim about **** music as if your temple home was unfocused by jazz or synth-electro.
     I forgot your room of quiet had no bells, no hope, and no notes of resolve. Tragedy was the desert of your six to sixteen, while I made an opus out of crystal glasses and Cran-Raspberry jars. Then it was the relief, Neptune's hands on your *******, red dots of ecstasy connecting you to a higher vibration. You felt it was time to start exercising. I didn't **** you for modifying your perception of color, degrading in a salt pool- I didn't own your ****** it was just a place I went into to write.
    
    Three years later. I was growing backward, I was sixteen, making you the muse in my doorway, a James Bond goddess unraveling my fingers on her silky skin, except your golden crown was really a turban of snakes, and instead of silk I was groveling underneath you. That was the sweat that Ryan Shultz said I garbled up into two pedestal doves, I aimed by eyes straight at the city of gold, and then inside me shucked out every piece of self-respect and vitrified my spirit, castrating my lips and my tongue for something to come to or come at, he said I lived under pointed stars and that lying isn't a good way to get over past phases of silence.

     A few days ago, it all game back to me, in a random series of songs on an iTunes playlist. One memory from an isolated beach outside a strawberry patch near Santa Cruz, a second, two hands cupped over the ears, my face closing in on her smoothed-out pink bottom lip on an over-exagerated car ride to the San Francisco airport, and the third was the mention of non-vegan banana cupcakes with cream cheese frosting, a birthday I celebrated several years earlier. All of them in the coda.
    
     Verse four unbelievable. It caught me straying from the next stressor at hand. What's next? I move my cold hands from a keyboard versing strange relapse of mind, or I tear out another page, whip across town, and peel stamps onto a postcard to send.
     They were all tails from a memory. A slowing ghost that cooed at me from far away, beating me up and down, pulling my eyes away from a scent I continually tried to remember.

At first when it happens

     it's like a spell, I cast it, it moves me, and I use it.
To the youth with it. Some hollow-gutted frogs' yolks and thrice its weight in pigeon carcass and fly.
Gruesome fruit loosies.

Then somehow the trance begins, the anecdotal watch stopes moving, to the hedge-burn up to the meadow go the witnesses, moving under the guile of fresh addiction. Wicked words, fiery,

a conflagration.

Burning us up. Two in two out.  And just as they get it right, the moon hollows itself out, the sky undergoes a change, a nuance splits open the gut of the world and comes indifference, apathy,

anxiety.

A poem comes.
     It crashes down over my head like an arrow-carved apple, from the Natives. Bending me on my side, my flat side, where I have lived one-hundred years on my side, my left leg nuzzled in between you and the blankets we bought at the thrift store on 26th and Valencia. And it worries me, now that they shift from top-floor to basement in some corner of the Salvation Army. No one owns that magic. They touch the bruised knots of its cotton fibers, and for what-

a throw blanket in a common room.

As the wet wind hums its way through our two tower six-cylinder apartment complex. Birds fall from their naked winter wept branches, braced by stiff bones, mapped out in Alexandria, carrying notes from El Salvador. The corner market is closed, never opened. A hair salon stands in its place, it wrings out the "R's" from a Philadelphia warshing.

And like every night, hot air cakes on an extra layer of indecipherable red dots up the arms and around the neck, minute pustules of hypochondria that steal my finger tips from the keyboard. I scratch and tip them, looking under their fiery scarlet caps for, I-don't-know-what disease. Paul says It's that magic school bus melanoma, typhoid drip, it comes at you from a computer screen and eats at your nervous system until you've got the wambles.

Tuesday's used to be the worst, until I OWNED THAT ****. I make a pronoun out of aluminum foil and wear it as a hat on a first date. Tinder is not bad for conceptual art projects. I carry it within me like an anodyne complex, out into the frozenness; into my mouth the air comes around my teeth, behind my uvula until winter freezes my voice and I am breathless.

I abandon my miniature house to enter the pyramidal pinetum to the North. Wild paradise shrubs gather with songless animal noises watching as I take naked photographs of my father to preserve his body from anything less than his great immortal end. He lives on black moss and water from a nearby pond,

he authors the face of Anthony Hopkins, thrown about, another casualty of fervid and blurry dreaming.

They told me the only thing that could cure heartache was war, and since the war wouldn't take me I figure the only thing to do now is take up a life of crime. Gabriel Garcia Marquez says in Love in the Time of Cholera that the only cure for heartache is to find other hearts to break. Five years have passed and I still remember without fail the flint of a lighter, the squint of an eye, and the bell of your dress. I dream a dream each night, sweet variation of the story of you. It comes down to a letter sometimes, I go to the window well with a notebook and a pencil and I draft a sonnet, sometimes a verse, any form of an expression to idle the time it takes for me to find you. I know stars that haven't lived as long. The way I cupped my hands over your ears, the way rapture lived and loved, you kissing me in the shade of the palm trees up their on Notre Damen Ave. I know the curve of the Earth wrapped in the shades of the skin on your body. I live every day for the chance that I will meet you again.

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.