we stand in stagnant shades of grey
with dark blue, for a change
and positioned between us is a
series of pregnant pauses
giving birth to discomfort
more common than our common conversation.
i am suspended between the metal spring
the dust, the cushion,
and the stone fall.
i admit to you: in my daydreams,
though i bump my head and kick the cat
and wake up too late for coffee,
have to write on my palms to remember your name
in my dreams
the writing rubs away off the skin on my hands from holding.
and the people smile under their hats at me
though it snows so hard it’s swept under the couch
and in my daydreams: i can finally hold
all the warmth in the world effusing from bodies
i cannot feel, will never touch
and when the temperature rises, i go outside after the rain
again but
the rain doesn't culminate on the evergreens;
i shook the branches to feel the balm on my shoulders
but the dryness overhead displaced me
in the absence of water.
don’t you stare at me
i am not great now; i am lying with the insects
to come up with more eyes to see with
i, this great essence of grotesque
but i must compromise my greatness for ever
dancing, eating, loving, finding some reason to pray
prey upon the bliss so truant from my mind.
i feel i am some monstrous vermin,
nameless and defiled, simply tossed among the files,
which has absconded, so punished,
from the living room floor
to under the couch.
i admit to you now, though you look at me
with vacuous acuity:
for all i know, my life was accidentally
whispered on a freudian slip
of paper from God’s pile of post-it notes
and carelessly tossed into the
eternal blue flame.
but i am no fragment
i am no flea nor tick nor
scorched typo
i am less monstrous than the universes between your eyes
which will never shine on me
we guess, we categorize, we think,
we sweat beads to make a necklace of labor
and pass it down the generations
as an embellishment of humanity
and with hallowed bird’s bones do we rip apart our wishes.

wrapped in a blanket
a cold, insidious pig
trying to stay warm.

a play on words
set on a stage
held up by paucity of meaning.

walk, don't run
remember when we were young?
the days were marked with our
own personal nuance in our
transparent and unbreakable plans,
and the hours by childish boredom and
evanescent impulse to break them.
we settled into each our own,
that we shared because we thought
we had each other right,
and when we were wrong
we served to one another our
indentured solitude.
the seconds were my friends and the minutes
broke their promises never to be long;
i won't belong without you and your scent.
i am afraid to be
a guest in my childhood home and a
passing tourist in my former dreams
which include you
remember how we ran?
early in the morning
we were scientists of the mind and body
and questioners and beholders
we tried the position of inquisition
of feet upon the dashboard and trash about the floor
and cigarettes and something remembered
not as potent anymore.
walk, don't run.
remember how we tripped over each other?
impregnable intensity drained us of our reason;
control became an asset of the controlled
but now i stand by the flank of the
ranks of real people,
and they teach me how to walk away.  
we ran too much, i think.

i have too many things.  these things keep me here.  for how would i move my amniotic items, who would want these things, who could need and buy my broken miscellany?  rather these things be burned.  but i couldn't throw that away, it was a gift.  how better to show ungratefulness in the faces of the fantastic people who once wanted things for me.  and the structure of these things, created by people; the destruction in the smolder makes me sick.  i think of teddy bears rotting in a dump.  baby birds from islands far away, across the planet, in the most isolated areas on earth, are still found with plastic trash in their downy bodies.  no, i couldn't throw these things away.  i am an empty space among things.  i am this amount of money, i am this collection of sculpted granite, plastic, glass elephants.  i am made of candle wax and useless, synthetic material, all new.  my utility stretches the length of the unused rulers in my several drawers.  these things make me.  i am this much, and not much more.  engulfed by these things in a sac, here i am, curled up in my small breathing room, darkened.  and ibuprofen taken in fours.  i wake up with headaches that won't go away with coffee, water, peace, exercise, ingenuity, grace, forgiveness.  they will not go away.  after sleeping ten, twelve hours, they will not go away.  i cannot forgive them.  no bids on eBay.  so the truth comes out:  nobody buys me.  i used to get so angry.  i would throw things, see.  i destroyed things that were beautiful and hurt the people who wanted me.  and now nobody wants my things, though they must all go away.  i must destroy them all again, to make more space for the waning disposition in the back of my brain.  the gray matter, that's what matters.  that's what creates me, and it controls how i create.  i cannot travel outside of my mind meat.  i cannot create to make up for these things i destroyed, and i cannot be forgiven.  i am this much.  an inch or two of room for me to exist.  and is the soul made out of dust and rubber?  if so, it must be sold.  given away, maybe.  it is a part of these things, though i do not know where i would go if i were freed of this caveman accumulation.  perhaps to dresden, i speak the language.  to know and not be known.  the strangers are much more strange to me when they have never known small-town america, and have never even conceived of this hollow, cluttered room.  so stuffed to the point of utter uselessness.  ah, so the utilitarians might say that i am not even human, i suppose.  my cup has not been imbued with all the functionality of humanity, and remains half empty.  half human, stretching out a day-by-day half life, getting longer by the foot.  and what of these books?  mostly read, and some looked at, a few skimmed, a few only here for a once in a lifetime reference (perhaps for a school project or a stint of curiosity long since vanished from my gray matter), several collections of my childhood fancy.  mystery and adventure.  this mantle of knick knacks and paraphernalia hails from my past and the pasts before mine.  with such an archive, i may accurately be considered a historian (with or without the halitosis…i couldn't tell you for lack of third party noses).  lately i haven't spoken in my sleep, though i couldn't say for certainly; there's no one there to talk to.  these things are tinted white and gray in the fashion of the silent film.  they act out the motions and emotions from their conceptions in my peripheral vision, sensational ****** expressions and dramatic gestures from the old south. waking and sleeping, they breathe in opposing time with me.  these things, they bury me.

file, new
scroll down a little more
i haven't seen them run enough
the pictures and the colors
a little faster, now
so as to see the dye run out in photo streams  
instant flashes
in shades of **** skin
in the dead
back from the flesh
they come streaking through the screen
instances from the past
in the pigment of a presumed memory
not entirely recalled
pickled here with rainbow hue
scroll faster
i want to see the images
blur into pixel.

I was afraid to walk outside in case the rain would catch me standing as I am and was; alone, unrequited, an apple-pitted girl against whatever comes to mind.  Say it, anything, dance damply under the unmoving ceiling fan and move like falling wind in summer.  The only time I feel like me, summer.  The only time to stop and not feel immobile; the only time to move and not feel pushed.  The only happy time.  Have an apple, feel it to the core.  Wear a dress, and let the rain fall through it and the wind soak it so the clinging mocks your need to hold on, but still let go, and watch it tumble down your legs and mouth; cling to something far away, through dreams.  Like flimsy cloth, you and I, like warmth and wind and rain, we can be.  You and me.  Or just me alone.  Unrequited, clinging to the edge of the line where the rain starts, racing hearts, which will cross the line first? Who will win?  It's the decision of my life, whether to walk into the rain or not.  But it's the time that catches me against my watch, and so embarrassed, I let my hand catch the rain until it stops suddenly.

As I will
As I like it
As my will
As it gives recursive themes of
Strength and fancy
Weakened by the real
It subsists;
It is
Cannot not be:
As they loathe it.
As I was:
My sunlit energy precedes, preceded me
Some life in me that speeds towards
Metabolism that speeds towards
Eventual cell death
Respiration--
Deeply respirating
I halt for no respite
Despite the leaning apprehension
Towering over what Is in me;
The roaming imposition
Of what there will be—
It seeks me
It wanders and stops occasionally
And devours something imagined
That heaven I had made
That Will that I had suffered
As it will.

leave on your light for me
i can feel the veins in my hands pushing
for me
leave open the door for me and
i can come closed to you
the veins in my hands cheer for me
in their spindliness and apparent strength
they adore me.
stay closed those eyes for me
my hands are trained enough
for full of fluid in motion
they pound out all i have created
not for you
more for the light i can feel from your doorway
not your eyes
more the callouss in my veins
leave it be
give it me
small and strong and feminine and veiny, bony,
made of need
let the veins in my hands rush for you
for me.

it rained yesterday,
and as we walk today onto
the soaking track,
the long and circular
spiked-rubber
track, ***** puddles
assault us,
bearing the floating,
struggling corpses of
worms that escaped
the drowning underworld
only to be swallowed by
the waves of the
upperworld, where we humans
run and play with each other and
with nature, but as much
as we can change in our mother,
we cannot quell her lachrymose heart,
and so we walk
gingerly among the
vain attempts
at survival which manifest
themselves as bodies laying
split and ******, pinned
to the earth by natural needles
(their fluids drying over
their skin, sticking them,
melding them,
to the ground) as
though someone has
prepared them for dissection.
but no one save i
attests to the sincerity
of ****** science;
i am the only one
to delve into their
infirm bodies
to seek their minds
and travel
down their tracts and
empty their glands
and poke at their five
or four
hearts, however many
worms have;
i am the only one
to dissect them, yet
lay one digit on them i do not.
i dare not,
for what would i discover
but wormlike attributes,
and who would ever
discover
anything
inside a worm but
defeat in its own birth,
ostracism for having
been derived from something
so lowly as a
creature without limbs,
which eats,
yes eats,
the very black vile
we stomp our mighty
feet upon.
but,
remember,
worms have many hearts
(four or five,
however many) and therefore,
more blood to spill.
and so,
from that logic springs forth
the idea
that the blood of an earthworm
(in comparison
to its body)
flows four
or five
times as heartily,
more guiltily.
but no guilt touches the ones
who scream and swerve as they run,
avoiding death scene after
death scene in the
short films of worms' lives.
it confuses me, however,
how these worms came to be
lying dead atop our
artificial turf,
for isnt it fact that
a worm comes to
the surface
when the earth floods, and
so isnt it fact
that artificial turf does not flood
(for it is solid and immovable
through and through, and
so no worm's tunnel
can penetrate the
hard rubber) and
so isnt it
mysterious
that these creatures
have risen to the surface
from a subterranean lair
that doesnt exist?
pondering this,
i stop and i let the rest
run past me,
kicking up
brown water with an odor unknowable--
the stench of death in summer.
i look down to the
ghastly sight, and
i know suddenly that
worms have hidden
and that rain has found and
injured them,
and that we have dismissed and
killed them.
and i think to myself,
i know why worms hide.  
knowing this,
i look up to continue
trampling these mockingbirds
of the dirt
(for who would take pity on a girl
taking pity on worms?) but
i stop when i see a young
boy lingering on
the side of the track,
studying the turf
i so carefully studied
moments before.  
i study him.
and i see him delicately
scoop up a worm,
wriggling at life's end,
hold it between
his fingers high in the
air
like a golden chalice
to be blessed,
and drop it whole into his open mouth.