I.  I am the reason I never had more than a minute’s chances with anything.  Sitting on steps with you became the same thing as being in love, because we were together--you, me, and cigarettes.  Strange became anything, holding court in a playground planetarium and I took closer to be a state of mind.

II.  Nothing ever dies, and I have beautiful sore spots that flower like fields in blood and lymph and bruises.  Your fingerprints were black on my neck and it was nothing short of spectacular that heavy silence and the same song on endless repeat even failed to slow you down.

III.  My greatest love is the possibility and words that mean nothing to anybody except someone I used to be.  I was the stranger and I shot myself four times to spend eternity in purgatory here with you.

There was nothing plastic
About the way your smile showed
Or about the way your arms felt
But a voice in the back of my head told me so
And last weekend
I melted a carpet I thought was wool
You could have fooled me
Except now there is a hard, shiny, iron-shaped mark
Plastered into the carpet's soft mat
To be honest, I was a little disgusted
When I pulled the iron away and found
Strings of green and red clinging to it like bubblegum
And to be honest, I felt a little disgusted with myself
Not to mention you
When I left a handprint in your soft back
And strings of skin still sticking to my palm
Prove you, my little plastic boy, are just a doll
By all the tests that matter
A human illusion too easily destroyed
By an excess of warmth

i will wade out
                        till my thighs are steeped in burning flowers
I will take the sun in my mouth
and leap into the ripe air
                                       Alive
                                                 with closed eyes
to dash against darkness
                                       in the sleeping curves of my body
Shall enter fingers of smooth mastery
with chasteness of sea-girls
                                            Will i complete the mystery
                                            of my flesh
I will rise
               After a thousand years
lipping
flowers
             And set my teeth in the silver of the moon

It's late autumn but the colors
simply aren't there for me. Leaves, trees,
the sky, my face, my hair, my mood,
everything has become pall and gray.
Everywhere that color should abound
there is only lack of color. This canvas
remains indifferent to me - staring
blankly at me. My brushes sit unused
and rotting in solvent, the colors grimy
and dry on my palette, a spider has pulled
its hairy carcass through black oil and
then white and died gray upon the
edge of my painting table - its web strung
at the bottom of my easel. I feel no more,
paint no more, sell no more, I'm used up.
"Colorless, odorless" reads this can of
brush solvent - it's what I've become!
I have become nothing, even without odor.
I'm completely gray, insensitive, consumed.
Looking into the broken studio mirror,
I confront the artist I used to be. My image
grows diffuse, without form, then dissipates.

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