I remember the smell of air conditioning as a child
shocking cucumber skin with rolled up children
in sleeping bags on bear cave floor
I could giggle and even pretend
And now I sit here indifferent
teeth drying
cactus smile
I resign my eyes
lick my listless lips
re-
focus
Try to force a gleam up through
cochleas
into tear ducts-
a genuine sheen
land me on the same plane
But behind my water-melon rind
is plastered strain
a painting you can't look at-
Look away-
Look at me-
You were good- real good-
You had heart.
I just can't feel it anymore
and the bubbles-
I put a lid on them in my sleep.

with salt sprinkled so that she could take it-
he never asks questions-
she always unsure-
“mustard?”
“yes”- a practiced-egg-flipping ****
spurs a continuance of motion,
an un-thought,
a silent presentation-
then swallowing:
an un-thank you,
quick like horse pill one-hundred,
a you-got-it-pre-made,
articulate, deliberate, unimpeded,
like the supreme court.
They go home and sleep in the same bed-
under same blankets-
wrapped in same blackness-
you swallow- on average- eight spiders in your lifetime-
sixty-four funny feelings
under-impressing a supposed truth.

Breath slipping gratefully away I slip out of the day my pen glides like I have some swaggering tail ends to my means figured out I'm sand box plotting the little league games- vindictive and victorious, a competitive brute. Bruised daisies sniffing underneath nose tips like itching dresses in white floral lace I wait for myself to pass into a new realm of closed mouths and legs. I snake sneer at the bedside table adorned with rose book red and green, yellow print, fatigued and sweating answers out of my palms fingernails claw at the truth- I’ll stay twirling inside teacups for days, then peer out realizing nuts bolts soldered plates, a small world contained thank you orange vest like yellow jacket concerto under some candy man who shocks me out of my hole. I’ll run through the **** stained grass like an ungrateful child to the white fence caging the Ferris wheel another attraction buttery and cotton soft I lie down under stars feel something unfamiliar and incommunicable open mouth push out a short breath- wuh- feels like bathing in invisible truth certain for mystery and then it dissipates and I jump back into the prize box widening and shrinking at the semi-conscious crane. Place my cavernous eye against the glass and everyone hides. Maybe one day I’ll taste the rain acid-less in a dream and awake in damp grass our hair intermingling and find some constancy in the crease of your eyelid, eyelashes brushing I want to believe we can make love sparks that never die pierce the belly of Cetus exploding Zeta and dusting the Earthlings tingling necklines pull us all gently inward into each other into ourselves into a new plane of existing where we don’t long for slumber and sweet plum trees because we taste the spirit’s tongue in every waking hour.

A morning distilled into solemnity
I sit here waiting for something
a bird of ether
to remind me:
quintessentially
I am Asterope
a rock
one of the
Magellanic Clouds
I am eating my dust
everythingandnothing

Rockskipping
lipstickingnothing

To think is to pretend

Fantasizing being
shall we
waltz in whimsy?
Methinks ‘twould be lovely
cradling stars
for a moment
fickle and breathless
(see how easy it is...
and then death comes

and

death is
( )

I tried to act confidently,
but it came up like a faux bouquet,
presented steadily with bowtie fixed,
yet shoving,
“here!”
“take them- what are you waiting for?”
And no reply.
(And no reply).
And-
Why is it so difficult to be myself?
Do I not love myself?
Is this some sort of congenital disease-
some inertly cyclopean phenomenon-
where I am victim to my own constant surveillance?
Hyper vigilance- or vanity?
Which is worse?
Would that I could break all of the mirrors hanging on all of the walls-
all of the windows with all of their reflecting-
Would that I could kiss myself, feel myself, touch myself, know myself,
then maybe I could know you how to love me.
How to love me?
With that inquiry left unsatisfied,
am I left flitting from void to void?
Though in some spaces I stare into the Quantum Sea and say,
It is but the stuff of me!
And,
I shall never die!
But that is not the same-
it is not the same
to know thyself in a flower
as to know thy hand-
one is weightless,
the other is responsible.

I fear the mirrors.
I want to fluctuate invisible.