my mind is cyclical,
Battle Bot on Hamster Wheel
installation art soon to be in
Tokyo, San Francisco, New
York, Chicago: every city
I had the languorous pleasure of
kissing You in.
being unkind to me is terrible and
yet I love being able to vent
my emotions like so much
sulfurous smoke. [redacted]'s in
his bunk bed, 30,000 feet up and
only 1 girl is invited;
****** brain frizzed out, wasted
girls coughing kush while we
contemplate wasted opportunities.

we had potential,
-kx, and with respect to
x, *******.
we could've been
a masterwork,
Fields of Rapeseed, 1883, painted
in Prague, oil on
canvas.
but no,
you had to be
Mr. ******* Fantastic,
stretching yourself thin and
stretching my patience
again and again like
so much taffy to be made
palatable.
I have always been
difficult to stomach, even
at the best of times,
and you thought you could be the
Zeus to my Europa, whisk me
away and act like it'd all be okay.
but you didn't understand,
I was Europa, but
not the myth, the moon,
and I desired nothing more than to
drag you into my orbit and
drag you down to your demise.

you *******, with your
smirk and your bow tying fingers and your
****** classic fu-cking rock music:
who let you in here, to lumber
about the lambs like
Putin and Crimea ??
why do you bother
introducing sophomores to
Oedipus and pronouncing the
center O (like it
******* matters; linguistics are
more organic than
carbon-based chemistry) or
teaching seniors of
Two Vast & Trunkless Legs of Stone
standing alone in the desert,
artifice of arrogance just as
graduation and self-congratulatory
partying and revelry and diploma-framing.

I think I know:
masochism is your middle name, and
maybe, after all, it is worth it,
when a collegiate who barely remembers
your face and never remembered
the color of your eyes, or his homework,
name drops Hemingway and Faulkner
to a college professor, blossoming an
argument, and later, a companionship.

maybe, after all, it is worth it.

women swilling white white in glasses;
remember when you took me
out to dinner with your parents?
your father peppered the
salmon to excess and the
sommelier to exhaustion:
what year? where were the
grapes grown? what would you pair
with this? what about with that?
your mother gave me a
knowing glance as he prattled on,
and you shook your head in bemusement.

I wonder what
looks she gave
you while I was distracted.

put your hands on me:
I'm squirming, *******
enamored with the thought of
your hands on my stomach,
my wrists bound to your bed,
my toes acurl in the sheets.
I love being naked for you but
I get so cold; you laugh at my
complaints, lay yourself
atop me,
whisper, "is this
better kitten?"
in my ear before letting your tongue
lap at my earlobe and your teeth
clamp down in their place.

Let's run away together
and buy a cramped, one bedroom apartment
in New York or Prague or San Fran or Bristol
wherever you like
(I could never begrudge you anything)
I'd sleep so much better
with you in my arms
(I wouldn't be scared
that you would **** yourself
in the night)
I'd learn to cook
vegitarian
just for you
and
I'd make you tea
when you were sick;
You'd tell me
"You're pretty"
every morning
and mean it
and
You'd read me
Nabokov and Ginsburg and Shakespeare
over breakfast on the weekend.
We'd go to the museum
and discuss
artistic movements
and painting techniques;
We'd go to concerts
and dance (though
neither of us
can)
We'd lie in the grass
under the stars
naming off constellation
basking in each others' proximity.
In short, we would
love each other;
*** each other;
make each other happy.
Let's run away.
let's run away together.

I only love you when I'm sober,
so I've been high for, about, I'd say
2.27 weeks?? wild, I know. what
can I say? I just
hate being alone with
the mere thought of you,
cloying and *******, ecstasy
in my endorphins. Newport on my lips
and nicotine in my system; emotions
encased in agar, Petri dish replicants.
sugar skulls crushed beneath timbs and
honey beneath my cuticles and
white wine in the freezer frosting up.
chocolate ganache sealing my tongue
like a sarcophagus and I'm daydreaming
about halcyon days gone by
screaming along to the radio in
your sunsoaked two-seater.

you
subjugated me,
doing me as
Pizarro did the Incans,
plundering my heart and
ravaging the remainder.
that's probably why I love you so,
because
nothing
feels so good as
being subsumed,
breathless held under
kicking but only
languorously,
like swimming on a Sunday afternoon.

I AM WOMAN, HEAR ME ROAR
is what your eyes are screaming at me,
pencil scratching across page as
fingers stampede, stationary upon
your desk. don't you
know what you're doing to me,
with your Catholic faith and
artesian frame?? I swear
to your god (for I am
Protestant and yes they are different)
that you will ruin me and I swear
to my god that I would

love nothing better for in
your unmaking of me there is
a subtle art,
not an artifice, and it is
this which I adore, possibly
even more than I adore thee.

hit my cellphone in the morning
and tell me you love me;
who else will love my
frozen skin at 6:15 AM,
my eyes glittering, awash in
LED bliss.

oh
honey, with your
butter cup smile and your
butter pecan hair, you're
bound to make me fall
in love with you sometime.
too bad, because it's
evident that would be awful
on both sides. for me,
because you would not
reciprocate; for you,
because you could not
reciprocate; c'est
la vie, ma chérie, trop méchant
et n'est pas sympa
mais Dieu t'aide, tu
l'adore.

you've been derisively labelled
"basic" before, but they had it
all wrong your acid tongue could
eat away at the
solid steel of the most
guarded hearts end
my solitude devour me
please oh god devour
me I'm so pathetic and
unworthy why are you still here
you should have left me
months ago and now months
have passed yet you remain,
unmoving, though not unchanging,
and I am unsure what to do.

you are a child
opening presents at 6:34 PST on a
Sunny Christmas morn in PASADENA, CA
while her parents look on in
feigned interest
razor scooter abandoned amid
crushed scrunched wrapping paper as you
tear apart a box of Legos
for the plasticky viscera contained therein.

you are a teen,
finding marijuana at 15:34 CST under a
bed in BOULDER, CO
while your parents shout at your brother
feigning sympathy
simply to ****** it back
and you are wrenching open ziplock
to swallow a chunk of his stash
and you find yourself
enamored with the aroma.

you are a woman,
fighting for equality at 10:26 EST wielding
picket sign (paint and sharpie on cardboard) and megaphone in
MANHATTAN, NY
while your parents
turn over in their graves,
uncertain what you are
fighting for.

in time, you will come to learn that
you can remake God in your own image,
if only you are bold enough to do so.
this power is frightening. it suggests that
maybe divinity is
overrated,
that there are no answers.
in time, you will come to learn that
there usually are not, and that this is
okay, if discomfiting.
you will write treatises in your head about
everything: the meaning of an emoji,
what your outfit says about you,
what you'll do when you're rich and have
forgotten all about where we come from.
we forget our past because the present
is much sweeter fruit to partake of;
we forget our past is the only reason
there are sweeter fruits to partake of.
you'll learn to stop looking for love
because you don't think you deserve it, or
because you don't think it'll happen
to you; when you stop, you will be
happier, and love will flow freely from you,
and to you. you will drink too much
***** late Tuesday night; your
roommate will hold your hair back while you
*****; you'll awake on the floor with
chunks of food in the sink.
eventually, you will realize: this is love.

I don't think you know
how madly in love
I am
with you;
I can imagine you clearly
in a ****** white tee
smiling in the sunlight
compelling me to you
like you are the earth
and I am the moon.
(but the moon will never
touch the earth,
as I will never
touch you)

reading ****** erotica at the
dinner table, dim lit,
dusk dreaming of you far too late
in the evening for thoughts
to remain chaste.
Drake's voice laps at my ears,
waves beating upon shore, pulsing:
it's your's.
my chapped lips pressed against
the base of your palm;
the gesture is
comforting, a reminder I
can absolve myself when
I am with you,
that I do not belong to myself:
it's your's.
I awake alone,
snared in sweat-soaked sheets; you are
long gone, not even bothering to
leave a note;
you know I'll be back.
after all,
it's your's.

I wish I could write a poem about
how clever and interesting and utterly
human you are; alas, I cannot.
all I can think about is your
******* hair, an entropic tangle of
dying cells and pigment catching solar
rays and background radiation in
every ******* selfy you take and
I am sorry that is what I fixate upon
but how could I not?

my apologies, for usually I am
a far better man than this, yet
even then you are
a far better man than I and
I commend you for it.

stay tubular, young lad.

stay ******* tubular.

burnett's in the bloodstream now,
his cheap strawberry liquor
cheapening my strawberry kisses by
increasing supply in the absence of
appreciable increase in demand;
Economics 101, taught by the
professor in the tweed jacket
with the leather elbows.
you say you want to
practice black magic, and I'm
so down; god you're so hot.
I just want you to kiss my back and
cast a spell on me,
but you've already done the
latter, and you will
never do the first.

they lost an airplane.
(imagine that!)
it's 2014 and we just up and lost
an entire airplane.
Barack can tell you
what your best friend said
behind your back
on Facebook,
but we can't find
a ******* plane.
my father, man
that he is,
was all bluster
and thunder, righteous
fury, real Sinners in The Hand of an
Angry God
diatribe;
I stayed quiet through dinner because
I Knew
what it was like to lose something
huge and monumental and beautiful
in flight to behold.
I swear I'll never love again.

I can still taste
oranges on my tongue,
tropicana from tampa,
extra extra pulp in my mouth.
The orange groves are
dying, frost encroaching, and I
can do little; I'm at the
supermarket searching for
coconut oil and lavishing
honey straight from the bottle
onto my tongue; empty
bears litter the linoleum and
the taste of your ***** still
evades my fractitious memory.

merlot gnat bite
quivering at my collarbone; can
hear kids screaming across the
intersection, me in my towel and
ankles still dripping with showerwater
upon plush carpet, crickets chirping
just out of view and fan humming
just overhead.

pity you aren't here with me.

leaves self-immolate,
red orange yellow --- this is
How I Fell In Love

window frost, hand on
thigh --- our abandoned clothing
littering the floor

a bud, poking from
fresh-thawed earth --- I am trying
to forget your laugh

sun, high; so is she,
blunt 'tween her lips, my tongue 'twixt
her thighs --- I Miss You

S-P-A-R-T-A-N-S
this chant has been
emblazoned on your prefrontal cortex for
years yet, and you'll bear it
upon your chest for years yet and
yet: you aren't certain
what it's all meant, whether it's been
Worth Your Time
and in this way, cheerleading has become
stand-in for
every boy who's let you down
month after month after month.

too bad you can't
unlearn their habits or
unfire the synapses they triggered;
too bad you can't
hop in a delorean to
unwind the time you spent with them.

but if you could:
would you?

merlot gnat bites
quivering from collar to
coccyx, a carapace of
swollen skin.
I rub myself
raw, aching for release;
is this
how it's meant
to be?
être, pas être,
it's all the same:
I am; you are
under my skin.

the forest beckons, eddies of
wind rustling leaves, whispering
"welcome, welcome."
(a kilometre away,
there's a lumber yard)
the branches are blown about by
the wind, a come-hither
I am loathe to resist,
and I am struck with memory:
you,
naked,
standing shyly at the foot of your bed
one hand upon your
thigh, the other
crooking a solitary
finger, allowing me approach
as you look at the floor, hair
burqaing your face.

I am watching trees
blur by train windows,
and I'm reminded of
the green of your eyes,
and the woodgrain veins just
barely visible on your arms.

please shut up and let me pretend
that the streetlight shining through the
***** window is moonlight glittering
across my angel face, because
it is 3 in the morning and everything is
poised to break apart like
the ice on the Iowa River.

you've always been
"rough around the edges,"
seeing lines in coloring books as
suggestions and
scribbling wherever you **** pleased
(your handiwork adorns
countless bibles in two churches,
innumerable physics worksheets,
and the walls of
one bathroom stall in your high school,
which has probably been
repainted
by now)
I'm sorry I couldn't smooth your edges,
but I'm glad I did not.

strawberry vines are
creeping over my memories of
you, rose stained glass and jasmine
in my hair. I'm trying to
numb my thoughts of you,
but the pain of the needle buried
deep in my gums keeps me
******* crying, and I can still
feel my ******* face. no one
ever tells you,
falling in love is easy. loving
someone else is the hard part.

shuddering: throbbing head
mirroring throbbing sonics, floor
ashudder with stampede of
après-teen feet.
tonight you are
out of your depth,
not a fish out of water or a
drowning man, rather
an exercise-averse astronaut,
muscles atrophied upon return homeward;
you knew this was imminent, yet-
yet.
you weren't ready for
this, and there is sweat upon your skin and
tequila upon your tongue:
you have attained nirvana, and
a huge ******* to the Dalai Lama.
you are
self-immolating in your sorrow,
and no one can help you
because you won't let them.

do you think
that when the leaves
selfimmolate
in amber and scarlet and sienna
it's their equivalent of blushing?
and when they are
coerced earthward by
the insistence of gravity
it's how they fall
in love?
if these are true
do you think
that the leaves
are as enamored with each other
as I am with you?

your love is so...
clinical.
when your hands are on me
I feel like you're palpating my lymph nodes,
checking my inguinal area for swelling.
as if
I'm diseased
and you know exactly how to heal me;
as if
I'm broken
and you know exactly how to fix me;
but
I'm not broken
and you don't know how to **** me.

my *****-drenched Valkyrie,
you're a star, pirouetting around
Pluto, gamboling amongst galaxies, you are
terrible to behold, awe-inspiring in your
beauty and petrifying in the same.
a mouthful of liquor, and eyes
near-translucent; I can see your
soul, and I have never loved you
more. you are
silly when sober and
downright derelict when drunk,
a crumbling monument to
late nights and
later trysts; railed out
lines of Xanax
internalized through paper money:
this is the life.
this is what we wanted?
we aspired to more than we were, we
flew too close to the
moon, our wax wings
held up to solar scrutiny, but our
intentions
did not; we were
only kids, but that's
no excuse. just because you've
reached the
Age of Majority
doesn't make you any less of a child
of the universe,
scrabbling in the dust for a
semblance of meaning:
I am Sorry, you were Right, but
it doesn't matter now.
hold my hand.
please. I am
afraid to die
without you by my side.
with your fingers
clenched around mine,
I feel less alone.

naked, sprawled across my bed,
flaccid ***** out of view, obscured by
flaccid technology, this impotent
old thing, 4 years old and
working perfectly fine for me;
lighting strikes.

there is magic, isn't there, in
the way she says your name
not unkindly when she is
with her friends and
without pre-alcohol inhibition;
lightning strikes.

I've been here for
hours, I fly out to
FRANKFURT in the morning,
routing through CHARLOTTE, NC,
cool, isn't it? how we conquered the world with
a pair of wings and some landing gear;
lightning strikes.

let me first
apologize; it is neither
fair nor right, that I have placed
you, human that you are,
upon a pedestal, made you
object of my affection,
concurrently greater and baser than
all of your peerage.
second,
let me apologize again.
I've been ****** up for
a while now, mentally and
blood alcohol levelly, and it is
not fair
that you have to deal with me at my worst.
third,
let me
apologize
once more,
because even at my best I was not
worth your time, yet I persisted
insinuating myself into your life when I
had no right to and that,
that was my cardinal sin, was it
not?
that I had the audacity to
love you, and then
to demand you
love me back.

I am drunk and ensconced in
layers of
bedsheets and blankets,
delirious, dreaming of
You. if only-
if only You were here, to be
entangled in my
arms, constricted under the
comforter, searching your feelings for
love for me while we
use ectodetectors to
search for the ghost in the
machine.

I hate waiting
but I wait for you.
I'm staring out of the glass pane
into the night
hoping that each set of taillights
maybe belong to you?
(I'm silly)
I know if you were going to be here,
you would have done so ten minutes ago
but it's 10:25
and I don't want to go to bed
quite yet;
I keep hoping you'll show up,
breathless with apologies.
(silly)
It's 10:30; I'm in bed.

light of my life, fire of my *****,
you deceiver of women and
seducer of the same.
you have
never
made a wise choice when you
followed your instincts,
yet, god help me, I find you
adorable lovely handsome.
Queens is your origin and
Manhattan your playground;
isn't it crazy that in a city of
eight million people
I can't seem to escape you?

I woke up this morning,
- well, last night, it's 4:30 AM so
where does that count - phone
on the floor where it rolled from my
sleep-slackened grip right off the bed,
sheets drowning in sweat; they smell like
me, and I am feeling nauseous.
my spine is curved around a
particular puddle of sweat, the
one I awoke in; it's still wet,
but it'll dry out; I have to
put these bedsheets in the wash,
use three times as much detergent,
maybe spray em with Lysol first.

but getting rid of the sweat-soak
won't get rid of the
nightmares of you.

god you look so good.
it's taking every shard of
Decency I have
(and they are shards; I dropped
Decency a long time ago)
not to shove you up against a wall
and press my mouth oh-so-insistently
against yours,
hands rough, partitioned from your skin
by that ******* dress
(god, how I hate that dress)
(god, how I love that dress)
your nails clawing at my back
in feline fury, gasping for breath
as my thigh nestles between yours.
(we're just getting started)

you're
sitting on a ledge,
feet dangling in the fall air
and you won't ******* shut up
because you're with Her
and you feel like a
star:
consuming hydrogen,
creating helium.
no one ever
warned you about how
others would
step into your heart
like they owned the place
(and now she did)
looking around, nodding,
"yes yes, this'll do, but
what's the rent like?"
no one ever warned you
that you'd let them stay for free.

I remember,
stretching out,
the whole expanse of
the universe naked and bare
for you and me;
still,

still, still
as the night, though all I remember
is nothing, as if there was no you and no me.
turned inside-out,
my sins laid bare
for public consumption. Love of

my life, Helen of
my Troy, still
I adore thee. the little bear
to my Ursa Major, remember,
remember, do not forget! that without
You I am not me.

For me,
you would do anything, you son of
Adam, you would never turn me out,
despite my myriad disappointments, still
you love me, remember?
(please don't let this come to bear)

Bare,
if you would be so kind, your soul for me;
I want to see you bleed and remember
days long past, bygone eras of
stillness, still, oh so still
before Pandora let all but Hope out.

Out! Out!
you let slip the dogs of war, and they mean to lay us bare.
They destroyed the water still:
we die of dehydration, you and me,
in this desert of
our own avarice ----- remember

me, I implore you, out and out,
days of old when our skin was bare
and our sins still clothed. please. remember.

these fluorescent lights and
LCD screens are keeping me awake.
it's not the
thoughts of you; those are
just a byproduct,
because when I'm
awake, you're
asleep, and
on my mind.
my skin is so dry it might
crack in two when my lips meet yours but
I'd hazard the risk just like
I have so many times before.
so many girls and
so many boys,
like you and unlike you and
I like you a
little too much to retain both
my senses and my sanity.
I crave the
tsunami of sensations
only you
can drown me in,
******* my throat with sentiment as I
silently cry.

Ashes 2 Ashes

such an inane phrase.
combustion is an irreversible process,
and you can't burn ashes for a
second time like you did to me.
you razed me like I was
aught but another Carthage in the
Punic Wars of your myriad
romances and affairs and dalliances and
flings;
why can't I stop wondering
which I was??

dust to dust