If I come
to rule a small kingdom
and should be so picky as
to have you live inside
you’d only have to knit
for me a pair
of socks and hold
my heels
In your soft cloth.
I'll give you money and keys,
ensure
you won't be killed.
Or hurt.
I’ll learn what you need
when you are shy
or expect something in kind
for your time.
My ringed fingers fancy
walking up your legs. My tongue,
running between your thighs,
delighted.
But, when your toes curl, I don’t
know.
And you've removed yourself
by inches, from the ground which,
like me, bounds after you
desperate
to replace itself beneath your
lovely form.
I’d fall out of exhaustion
onto that throne, imagining your face
and your thin ankles midair.
But you’d soar on
past Evening
making the moon your own,
me your last planet
you my new star.
Take cash,
for these socks
which warm my mind.
These thoughts
climb into open doors
in my kingdom's only car
then drive away with you
on unbuilt roads
with plans appropriated
from taxes
on socks you knit.

Her profile reads “I dance for tips,
                                downtown in Portland.”
Most are looking for the next pair of lips
to kiss
between their legs.
But I'd like to hold
                                her hands
                                behind her back
as she bends over
                                realizes I don't drip ink,
or cash,
                                and wimpers.
A sugar-daddy?
With tattoos? No,
you might get an insurance salesman,
                          or occasional sports equipment re-saler
a single father or two
                         to pay for your tired, old
opinions.
Or you might stop dancing,
                          sell real-estate
your creativity decaying inside a white,
metal box
                         like those bloodied
tampons         janitors were
embarrassed--
ashamed-- to pick up
in junior high bathrooms.
                          She might move back in with her parents
and fly
             like some silken night-robe flapping on a clothesline all day Friday,
all day Saturday. Until lunch on Sunday,
when she pulls it down.
Or she'll flap that way
              for years, on a line in Portland.
Until one day,
                         one day,
that man who won't hold her
                          in the shadows
                          will
                          come
with money,
                     tattoos abounding
and watch her dance
with tears
                  streaming
into the sheath of her time-worn robe
in afternoon sun.

Other worlds have hopes,
for plants, for trees and
dogs walking by, panting
soaking in humidity like carp
above water.
Not ours.
Dead ends, parked cars supplanting
serenity with passion, desire
crammed into
row upon row of heartless
dwellings expunging sunglass-wearing
**** suckers
blocking their emptiness from the world
with reverse blindfolds.
I know their eyes still glare at me, scoffing at
them. Walking, I
walk past
their barricaded kennels, under-
construction housing
impersonating natural climes
with sushi and slushy shops.
People like them have admiss-
able drives, hankering after
freedom; they're indoctrinated
to believe admission is
monthly cable bills
wired in beneath concrete slabs
maintained compliance
through lines painted on grass
where overlords can tell livestock
what to do.
Bus chutes form
hillsides, beside lines of
trees which perfume these
feedlots
we call
cities.
**** oozes below streets
walked on, they stared at me
like cows, watching a ranch-hand
suspicion toward anything
beyond bistro fences.
"What the **** are you looking at,
you filthy animal?
Have you no idea which species your greed
feeds?
Do you know where this ends
for you?
Who's tazing your ***,
who's making you sit there?"
Moo, mooo.
Mooooooooooooooooooo.
Receipts, a cudgel on each table,
more cudgels ring
from pockets
telling them what time it is,
where they're to be.
Sunday's almost over,
back to blocks of houses!
Graze on painted grass,
then die,
but not before you stare at me
with empty eyes,
you pathetic, miserable
creatures.

The children of this town speak of vacation and travel.
Worrying about the summer before it's even Spring.
I tell them, "why, why, why are you
LEAVING here before you've fulfilled your night-
time fantasy?"
They board a train or ship uncoothed and begging for more time.
I tell them "the ones you want are here already, in your being. They are
present and ready to be called out of the closets and crawlspaces of your dwellings,
looking for the belongings
you forwarded them in the shape of skin and grain and blood."
I tell them "Alone you leave this city and your self returns with you,
empty, even emptier than at birth. This city is your womb,
you can't escape the placental waters of your home,
the umbilical rail, the breathing air."
But when it is summer, they go. To be gone, to starve
the children in the closets clawing at
the fastened latch and watching time escape their follicles.
While they are sitting in darkness, we tell them we left to get away, to catch a sky
that crashes into distant lands or hold up
stars with out bare hands.
We say "bless this city and the state of our birth."
We stand, alive, unconquered and surprised that closet children are dead when we get back
it's just us in this city
                                      With all stars surrounding
                                      Unseen with the same lights
                                      We saw out there which blot them out
                                      The sky has fallen and our hands are cleaned
                                      By the starving blood of closet children
                                      Whom we refused to feed
                                      Dried up under the moon.

Even the words now are pictures, or
fixtures holding light, illuminating oil-stained paintings that darkness had drowned.
Exclusion of meaning was power, but all it destroyed now is found.
Meaning in words forms a tower, buckling with pressure it waves.
I hold my breath as it wobbles, as structure feigns to degrade.
I watch every shaking beam-length tremble then snap under invisible weight of doubt.
Like rays of our sun are your eyes furthermore, their radiance only temporarily put out.
Centuries of planning united, now threaten to sunder apart
the lifetimes we both used to build mortal city, formed with material from our own hearts.
I wanted to be certain I’m seeing what my eyes refuse to believe.
A city felled as a tree, lined by satin and your skin perfumed with dew.
Your three names were “I Love You,” bundled and thrown into a Spring grave.
Before, your mouth directed sailors to a shoreline without destroying their boats,
floatation swept from your eyes left every tired vessel afloat.
But now that your guiding-light is burned out, and our city is flat and deserted,
flotsam washes up on the shore, in the form of your words which I pass onward, evermore.

You read a poem and think about your life.

The words spill over the dam of your reservoir and seep into the soil of your brain.

Why do you hide yourself from this fact?

The writer couldn’t have known any other reality than your own when they wrote this piece.

They could not have anticipated the oneness you two now share.

If you hadn’t let their words into your spine, tingling through the vertebrae,

touching the synapses with fluttering hands, gentle and soft,

wouldn’t they have known their failure to reach their destination?

The tuba player in a park walking, shouting through an amplified medium of open air.
You are the park, I am the tuba.
Who is the author?
I ask this not to pander or to interest you, but because I honestly do not know.
Why are there so many questions asked these days without the realization that the answer is unobtainable.
Why do we think that by putting a curved line over a period we’ll find the truth.
I am tired of asking and expecting a reply?
I am tired of telling others what I want to hear back “that’s what everybody wants.”
If that’s what you want so much, then stop going to malls.
Stop pumping fossilized plant life into your gas tank.
Stop buying new clothes and cell phones and computers.
Stop telling your parents you love them just because they’re the easy ones to love.
If god so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, then who's our ******* father?

What
          can be said
in eight words
alone?

I made eye
contact with a woman
carrying turquois around.
Her pale neck, warm and slender,
contrasted softly, calf-length
shorn cotton colored by
the night. Her heaving blonde
strokes of hair brushed the skin
lovingly and shaded each cheek bone
with dynamic pulsation,
rivaling the fluttering
eyelids beneath my forehead.
I could easily recognize her
before
she told me I could
take an empty seat
facing her
away
to my table, alone.
But then
she held out her hand
gently petting the chest
of another man-- and I was silent.
Wrapping her ankle around his shin
she seemed to stare at me
through the back of his head, but
I was sure I would slide out of my chair
if she saw me watching.
I sat there, feeling her
rough tongue and brittle fingers
from around the world
pry into my mouth and glance my chin,
smiling with teeth
partially inside his skull.
Cooing,
as I had been,
she reached into
my chest
without knowing.

Every day is
Going to be different
But also the same

Poems fill themselves
With images of fruit flies
Cunvulsed, dead--unloved?

I watch stymied
laughters of the world.
They are momentary tragedies.
Halting
Hindi laugh,
silent
Asian laugh.
Poking each other in ribs
infused with ****** morrow.
Why do I surreptitiously laugh, aloud on paper?

Each diseased curtain
of sawed-pulp wafts gently on
my breath, through ink, away--
contained in incense clouds
from sandalwood shrubs
which rustled once
beside a child
whose mother
dipped in Ganges
her ceremonial robe
whet, with tears,
the appetite you have
tonight
from laughing.

Downtown, outside
my cordoned hallway,
other people cackle;
they laugh like Sheikhs.
They laugh like Mullahs,
                                           rolling copies of Qur'ans
held next to black cloth,
who ask us
"Have you heard the one?"

The bishops,
priests and
generals
lean over their broaching bellies
to hear described:

Crackling yellow flames cast shadows
on maps for weary pilgrims
with questions inside their heads
suspended on the moon-tides.
They sang in a circle, one.
Motives for allegiance
unraveled on the ground of man's
passion, now rotting, beside the
carcasses of camels
too meatless to eat.

In the once cloudless sky,
separated from the stars eternally,
they conceived of
pangs as great as loneliness
which laughter disguises.

Love, a painful, confusing torment.
of which
laughter never inquires
"Have you the time for me?"
although, every few days,
it should.
Running fingers through our lover's hair,
laughter tempts the intellect eternity to
conceive.
Constant fascination is
more bearable than death,
we dream.

We all need more
persuasion
to let go,
let leather reins pulled
taut behind vocal chords
snap free from our hands
in empathy for what
can't be said
and move our tongues aside
to shout
"Again! Again!"
through laughter.

No need.
It repeats, despite encouragement.
Arriving in self-addressed envelopes in your receptacle
                                                      ­ each year
                                                            ­                                                  
              ­                                                                 ­                                 on your birthday
waiting in the dark, crying:
“Open up!
                   Climb down
out of your body.
                                          Come laugh with me,
                                                             ­               between the stars."

Abandoned baseball fields
and feedlots in my mind'
span the distance between
pastures and filling stations.
Games from childhood,
those small-town diamond-gatherings with pizza-
joint sponsored jerseys
and open outfields where
the ball could roll
                                forever
if you really got a hold of it.

Here, in this other steer-city', once more I play
Though my back is sore, my mind
remembers pushing through an inside-the park
run home.
It rolled and rolled while I tripped on each corner
of those three plastic safe squares.
I saw the tom-boy with short hair behind the dugout
and asked her if she saw--
that night I thought she came to see me--
perhaps she might have known.
I have, not since then.

Shoeless, I meander on this base-path
holding my hands on my sides
to feel the parts my neighbor girl had
told me made the other boys
men; this distinction
what is good and what is not
was presented to me by foolish children, still
trying to become women-- AM I NOT A MAN!

I scream.

Somehow, these parts hang from my body,
supported by my well-toned calves--
My ankles, *****! My ankles are fine with
and without shoes.
Are the friendship bracelets from boys
that you got at camp in Colorado
not tattered by time now?
I have that trim abdomen you asked for
that triangle where my thighs converge with
torso, like you imagined theirs did
in the dark
while they were tasting all the
nothingness
inside you.

I can be like them, in my fantasy
of hitting the ball that rolls out toward yellow, singeing tallgrass
relieved by Summer evening thunderstorms which let me
ride quietly with my parents
in the backseat of our mom's pewter suburban,
with a box of kleenex always part-empty
crumpled beneath the passenger seat I sat behind.
My younger sister looked at the floor
while I saw
through our countryside with clear-gray
thoughtfulness and ease.

Instead of leaving from home, today,
I started on first base, in the park,
where I walked through
the right-field boundary without
consternation.
Look at strangers on the sidewalk,
and call my shot were they to take my things.
I feel my toes dig into dirt where no holes or even
placeholders were left to chance
vandalism or theft, I suppose.
I'm a thief, stealing seconds with my
piroueting-silence--
punctuated by mindless cylinders, pulsating.
Motorcycles are what they have; men.
Now, what she’s looking for, that girl which is
every woman.

(My bike is still there, I notice, taking an imaginary lead.)

A man with work and maybe a sense
of humor
that makes me roll my eyes.
But she thinks he's funny,
because she's simple, and-- after all-- she knows
those knees won't bend that way
                                       forever.
My adult work is walking, haggard, toward third
watching the adolescent couple running scared
from one another, when
minutes before they kissed; I laughed more loudly at them
than the garbage-fed birds who did roughly the same thing.

I walk toward home, where last Fall’s leaves
still loiter on the ground
that’s dug in
the way a timid batter would scrape earth,
cover his feet and wait to walk.
As a catcher, crouching behind a different kind
that afternoon, those older boys, with triangle-
torso-thighs and muscular limbs
came charging through me
and took my place
beside my girlfriend in the stands.

It was his motorbike that got there faster.

This is how home becomes crusted with dirt,
alternating apprehension and collision
must be wiped from the strike zone
Before I can wag fingers between
the legs to show exactly where to put it
in the top half of the ninth.
Those motorcycle-men don't get a whiff
of any pitch
or breezy desert air from down the chalky bluffs. In my hometown,
they may have felt a part in her that I could never be.
Dark drops beneath her sooty tail pipe
shades and forms are all I see.
But when I go inside, I still hear the echo
of car doors from my sister, mom and dad:

--thwack, Thwack. Thwack!

Each strike reverberating in the glove of our garage.
Every flimsy-ankled batter dispersed,
just like the infrequent pinging of our cooling engine
after the key has been removed. Lowering
a barrier, between the boys and men,
I watch wet cement like a warning track
backed by a white,
metal-reinforced plywood fence.
Through plexi-glass, I see that it came down
from the ceiling
the ordering presence of separation
suspended from my father's ceiling beams.
Solitary base-runner, stranded in this
half of the inning;
                            the home team
doesn't need to bat.
Still, she's rolling past me through thick, tall grass,
well-watered by a wetter climate,
in the empty fields at
Elmwood park this Spring.

She tells me I have
Beautiful veins for needles
Too much heroine

There is a certain moment
in a man’s life
when the *****
of ladies
around him suddenly
and irrevocably
evoke the image of
a stray feline
from his childhood.
Rigid, near the bushes
with a sharply arching back,
engorged ****
and ***** tail.

Their watchful eyes, playfully intent,
reflect
the drops of rain
falling from the naive face
of an eager boy approaching
too close.
Paws haltingly skitter-gone.

Since this observation,
the hallways of our campus
tend to sway,
like the leaves beside
my grandma’s house
with the plastic window-well covers
not yet shattered by the hail
on that spring evening
after the little league
when I nearly had one.

The windsock next door
on my father’s farm
let each subsequent summer pass,
undetected on the heals
of a breezy, desert thunderstorm.
Before it was so tattered by time
unreplaced and frayed
next to the yellow, coregated shed
where you can still see the dent
from my sister crashing that old golf cart.

Years from then, she did her small, black
Honda in Colorado
with a T-Bone
on a U-Turn.

And my dad was in the hospital that winter
but all I remember is a pointless half-time
football toss sponsored by a cola-
company during a Nebraska game.
The people, trained like chimpanzees,
to test their skill one time
and get that life-sized check.
I remember thinking
"What sunken imprint on a folding bed
does it refill?"
After Dr. Pepper's rotation had
ended.

And these books I read
are shaken branches
behind the fleeting beauty.
Their words, silent admonitions for
desire.
The invitations
from those inky bodies,
their full form and sharp curves,
are not meant for my eye.
Momentarily,
their presence ***** my head and purses
my lips,
beckoning
another species--
a life-form
less aware.

I am glad each cat slipped past that
unread sign-post
and made it to the horse pasture.
Unlike those three moldered fur puffs
each bunny became
beneath my bed.

I hope they had their litters--
and their offspring had their litters.
And the nation of cats had its litters.
And the world of cats had its litters.
And the universe of cats had its litters.

But it must stop somewhere,
with cats.

I was moving out
Parked my bike down the street
With a cart hinged on the bolt beneath the rusty pole
connected to my seat.
The yard was steep, and the stairs leading down
the front
Vanished each car-
go carrying trip
of dictionaries and travel guides that
could have been lumped together in boxes
separately tossed into the neon
green
synthetic fiber
rain-proof buggy
Connected to my seat.
I ran across the lawn, one last time
Buckling the watch I found from high school
remembering it’s broken and not caring
then I saw men wearing polos beneath
Greek symbols beneath a doorway
and held my breath as they stared at me.
This vacant lot held something which I carried back
to find
my bike was gone, replaced
by a life-sized depiction of a bike saying
“no bikes--” A girl inside, explaining where I could find mine
I walked down the grey spiral of handicapped access ramps
surrounded by aquariums or tvs
which comprised the store's interior.
The last ramp faced an exit and went straight past
refrigerators next to vending machines
In the alley behind this office supply store were two old men
Roasting my bike on a chain beside the others
Disconnected, hung
its tires lying on the ground beside their feet
and the carriage slung aside like a bloodied gazelle's neck.
“What the ****!”
A woman got into my face “don’t use that word”
“****’s a perfectly good word, after all, it’s how we
got here”
One man smiled.
He felt bad.
They helped me put the bike together and I walked it back to my house.
I saw my car down the street.
I thought about the long trip to the interstate and wondered why I’d
rode my bike
Then I went back up the stairs of the blue sided hill,
to see the roommate I hated
and thought about stealing his SNES and stereo
but took only my one possession
and walked past rotting turkey bacon in a plastic pouch
on the top of a table
beside some legos
and left.

A little passion-- A loss
A little belief-- An unbelief
A little love-- Unloving
A little slack-- left
and unstaying

Alone, no small amount alone
Alone, outrun, outrun, outrun, ALONE
and I jump into the depth without meaning
and opinion
                  and a little belief
resulted in nothing, and nowhere
                   Found I meaning
and nowhere found I
                   Hope
and nowhere found I despair

I lost loss
Loved unloving
Believed hopelessness
Read, left
Alone

What for? For what am I waiting so long?
It makes absolutely no sense. Without you I felt
the walls built out of plaster and tasted
coffee from countries that I haven’t visited, with soft hands
I am planted in the earth on the edge of your river.
Yes, so even, yet outflown as I am, degraded and unnecessary.
A thousand thorn centered tributaries.
I would like to feel your thoughts on me and
mys-- “mys,” what does it mean to adhere?

Yes, I know you have them still, these whispered thoughts
they are the seams that hold my feathers beneath your head.
You can lie the same way as yesterday, but without follow up.
“I am not flying toward you!” I call. But it’s no use
You escape me. Shame, Sweet, that we
are together so short.

If you were here
--as I would like that you were
we’d take this bath
that I've prepared
you'd wash my genitals, which
need soap and soft moisture
from your sponge and dimpled
thighs
I hold apart

Yes, when you're not here
I’m a bit putrid
The water is cold
and I'm afraid to go in
thinking of the black ocean
bottom
that's as many miles away
as you

I passed the homeless man again today
in the university library

He walked past me, and I
stood there, clutching myself

He wore a green striped shirt I wore the
other day, but it was wrinkled

I stared at the muted wall of foreign
television channels
you need headphones to feign comprehension
or imagine travel

I saw...
The Indians dance in brightly colored clothes
The South Americans advertise libido enhancers
and Europeans replay explosions in South-Western Asia
or watch soccer
Africa was just a dusty road with jeeps and pickups
and guns

I wore that wrinkled shirt I wore the other day
to the library

I walked past the 24 year old
watching the world go by
hugging himself
in this way that assures me
he, too,
knows loneliness

Uniform- Bloc Party
"There was a sinking disappointment as we left the mall-- all the young people looked the same"

Bought for a Song

All we could ever buy was bought by someone from something
An apparatus of production so maniacal; how could we know
what made our fingers bleed?
It was the sewing and the apprehension our hands holding string
we sat down in the factory but shortly stood up to sing
something forced us, past the window, it was still early
our minds returned to our benches our selves were in the seams
and we laughed, when we died, but it was all in jest
we knew someday we'd give our lives so your dog could own a sequined vest.

The Dog

Your dog's a personality, it's so lovely I'm impressed
It looks so jaunty prancing there, alive its sparkling vest.
Now tell me Baps, who made it? However did you find a sequined silver vest to fit on your canine?

It's really rather simple--it's not even that smart
I bought my dog this lovely vest at the giant mart.

The giant mart? How daring! How intriguing, I declare!
It contrasts very vibrantly with his top hat and black hair.
I tell you Baps, he's precious, look at him standing there!
I can imagine him singing show tunes like the late great
Fred Astaire!

"Yeah, you're right" Baps said, the conversation lingered there.

And I'd like to say what else was said, but frankly I don't care.
I hate these *******' feelings, I don't resemble Fred Astaire.
I wish they take these things off of me.
Dogs don't wear underwear.

Ja, er hat dich gekuesst-- aber ich auch
wenn er nicht da waere-- wer sonst?
Ich bin ohne dich geflogen, und wohin?
Keine Frage der Zeit, Schlampe
ich bin's

Ich bin's der bei dir sonst waere-- ich bin's, bist du wirklich so bloed?
Wieso fragst du >>WER?<<
Du bist ne Schlampe, und das erkenn' ich schon
aber das macht mir nichts, ich bin alleine geflogen

Und all die Menschen die ueber mich sassen
haben es gewusst und wollten mich kaum antasten
Sie sind ohnehin weiter-- immer weiter-- gegangen
und, ohne dich, Schlampe, bin ich heruntergefangen

Mit den Hunden und Paeckchen diese Leute staendig nach- duersten und mitbring'
Lag ich
Bin ich auch zu ueberfluessig um oben drinzusitzen?
Schlampe, willst du dass ich wein', so ohne Wasser
im Dunkel, in Einsamkeit, im Gefaengniss der Lust?

Am Kartenkasse drueckte ich 'eins-Plus!'

Vergiss dich, Schlampe-- ich hab' fuer dich kein Benutz
Du bist nicht wer ist, das bin ich
Tschuess.
---------------------------------------
Yes, he has kissed you-- but I too
if he weren't there-- who else?
I have flown without you, and where to?
No question of time, *****
I am the one

I am the one that would be by you otherwise-- I am the one, are you really so stupid?
Why do you ask "WHO?"
You are a *****, and I recognize that already
But that doesn't make a difference to me, I have flown by myself

And all the humans that sat over me
have known it and hardly wanted to touch me
they have regardless further-- always further-- gone
and, without you, *****, am I caught under here

With the dogs and little packages these people constantly thirst after and bring with
I lay
Am I indeed too superfluous to sit inside, above?
*****, do you want for me to cry, this way without water
in the dark, in isolation, in the prison of passion?

At the ticket counter I pressed "one-Plus!"

Forget you, *****-- for you have I no use
You are not he who is, that is I.
Goodbye.

Walking past the playground at the park
in the center of my grown up city

I hear children, but do not look at them,
their parents’ eyes seem to glare at me.

As I carry on, earbuds infecting my head
their vibrant laughter derides my shady afternoons indoors,
the things my mother said.

Once I wanted to drink grape Kool-Aid, but my mother wasn’t home
and even though she’d told me not to, I decided to make myself some.

I climbed up in the cupboard and took the faded pitcher
then I took the translucent canister below, in which my mother stored her sugar.

I mixed the sugar and synthetic flavor with a knife
a cloud of purple powder rising up.

Despite the fragrant odor, I couldn't be sure I’d added enough.

After the ingredients dissolved, I was ready to drink.
I took a big boy, breakable glass cup from the counter and washed it in the sink.

I dried the cup and set it there, beside the pitcher on the table
But when I raised the pitcher up to pour juice in the glass,

my little arms were just too feeble.

The pitcher slipped, as I lost grip and everything got wet.
As I took white cloths to sop up what I'd done,

the Kool-Aid fell in torrid sheets from the table's edge into my mouth
as warm Summer rain did years later, inhibiting a game I didn't want to play.

The water falling was relaxing and sweet for me both times.
Each accident was my momental, purple rain delay.

Tomorrow is St. Patrick's Day, again,
and I'm wearing green shoes, green shirt--
overeager as usual. I've never really enjoyed St. Patrick's Day, or any other holiday, for that matter, and I find
it ironic that the more significance we give to a person or
event the more their meaning is deluded. But it's good to have something to look forward to.

Today, in America,
St. Patrick may as well be a naked, red-headed lepperchaun.
People don't care about him as much as me; they don't get out of bed
each day that week wearing green and scoffing at
the timid early-spring sun gazing at the short-sleeved men and
brown-thighed women.
Maybe it matters to them that suntans at the beginning
are only de-tubed relics of an ancient, burning photosynthesis
relinquished to the ground. It matters to me more that
these women think-- even more, know!--
that it is too late in the early spring to cover their legs and
allow the pale, unready skin lie in hibernation.
They want to show the men their defined calves and
undefined dreams. They fain naivety with bright hues, such as Kelly.
And I frown, because I know they have to do this, or
I wouldn't notice them. Waking up and putting green shirts on
the whole week leading up to St. Patrick's day.
Anticipating the Spring, which is already here, they raise their glistening
arms in the air and lean back, smiling, to sing a toast to the short, Irish martyr.
Who wouldn't rub their flesh with dripping tongues for fingers?

I want you
                  to know that I forgot
the memory I wanted to expound upon here,
                  the tears I never cried make it difficult to dryly
blot the pages.
                  I suppose you know I never loved you, but
more meaningfully, I hope you now see how trifling and hollow
love is. Like a warm Spring day, love means nothing but the
nearing embrace of a dying star.
                   I want you to know what I'm referring to
in this line. It's called "astronomy." It seems to hold the
attention of other mystics, such as her.
                   But I want you
to know
                    that it's just about gravity and
luminosity and
                    what our star hasn't got, but
others have.
                    The wind blows my page as I'm writing this standing on
my porch, and I fail to
                    Look up. My hand holds down the dry, decaying
tree pulp in an attempt to stabilize the
                    metaphor for
Life
                    your absence has become.
When the dead leaves of last Fall rattle, I can see you there,
running past the chain-link fence containing me and the
tennis surface.
                     It would be weeks before sweat dripped from my nervous
head as we jumped up and down while others slow danced.
                     And then I wake up in my new apartment in a city
you've never been to and remember jumping was only me. It's been seven years, but
I still have my diploma from that early graduation--
it's above my fridge so I can ignore it every time I
reach inside
                      To drink the cool water and
remember the things I should have learned
and the time I ran fast, back
                       to your host parents' so I could use the bathroom
without you knowing, because my stomach was convulsing.
                        And maybe what I meant to say is that the earth's on
its yearly sojourn which brings me to that place-- that group of folding chairs
and the endless line of cows dancing slowly past the podium with nothing
but a piece of paper that tells them "you were once here."
                        It takes me on the highway, past my father's farms to that
man-made reservoir that irrigates them. It amuses Nebraskan farm boys
that the girls that ride along seem to know the way
                        better.
                        But you weren't from Nebraska, and you only knew the way
in water, in the bikini I helped you choose at target-- I don't remember the hue.
                         Your skin looked amazing and warm
                         transplanted, prairie-grass nestled gently on your supple thighs
under my grasping hands which held on firmly yet
were knocked off with the jolt as you spurred our gas-powered sea-horse, laughing
as we both sped off from our island rendezvous and
became oblivious of my self.

I sit in the open, waiting
            like Earth,
for Apophis to near me
                     and near me
                     and near me
                                 again                 leaving...
What
          *******
                       difference
does it make?

           Each time it passes our compact
dust clod in space
           I will be rooting for it
and that says more about humanity
than I ever could.

             Yep, today
was a good day.
              What the sun hath
wrought!

If naming is to ****, you remain a rose to me, or consciousness of Spring and thunderstorms with lightning strikes on green hills sporting tiny, yellow triangles on poles.
They pulsate in windy gusts of hail. The others would **** you out of the short grass, just to play on.
You have no value to them in their minute, diesel-powered, plastic cages.
Mowed shortly, rose, is the grass, so that their ***** can roll, unimpeded by friction with you-- your shape
and your form.
Your red, in the aftermath of a gray cloud is pernicious and sodry.

They don't want you, rose. They value you less than the sand they fall into. You are something outside of their game and they don't smell your odor at all. You could be the shortest tree, they'd chip away from you, regardless.
Why, rose, do you insist on planting yourself on their putridly pristine links?
Why not, rather, lie beside me, unraveled and plucked, on my bed? I get more pleasure from your dissection and thorny vulnerability.
I will cut your stem, yet feed you in a vase;
You'll grow before I take you apart.
Rose, we're all going to unravel-- some with fewer petals, some with fewer strokes.
But why be decimated by those who swing aimlessly the metal rod?
My lips, rose, and my tongue, don't play golf.
And aren't you glad?
When the thunder clashes and the rain comes, they can't play
but we can.

"Do you two know each other? Well, then get to know each other."

I, with my skin around the neck, your hands on my blue dress-shirt.

Yes, it's no regular dress-shirt; it's really a v-neck t-shirt.

But, girl, you don't actually have hands either.

In the normal sense, that is, you do-- of course. But not around me, or my dress-shirt
or v-neck t-shirt.

They are on your arms, by your sides and, without love, you carry them through the desert each day.

And your feet ply my shoulders-- because I am sand beneath clouds.

I am sand beneath hate, under t-shirts and under blue dress-shirts which are actually v-neck t-shirts.

I am sand, with your hands on my surface and my skin around the neck.

And sand does not find itself in the desert-- it just is.

Two shards of the same stone, eternally separated, though resting on each other.

Yes, I am closing your eyes for you.
It's good that way. What is wrong with not seeing?
Can't you still hear and touch or feel?
I would gladly describe for you what runs crookedly before my face:
Thousands of trumpets without whispers or meaning.

Yes, and it tastes so rich, like plaster-- white, average plaster.
Your songs, your opinions and meaning are, without vision,
pale, cool and evaporous, as April rainbows.
Therefore you all want to de-color them and call such rainbows
black-and-white compositions.

Well then, sweetheart, why are you sad? Have you not slept with your dreams of neutral rainbows?
Twice--
Eaten, your plaster-filled silence?
Four times--

And been drunk with the aroma of moist soil?           ONCE.
.Lewd.
"Ego cogito nihil"
Can you, after all, read?
Never, without the eyes--

You hold my hand at a distance by grasping my wrist in two fists
and I swing my arm with determination, to swat the fly
that circles beneath your pupils
but it dips and swerves and palpitates in anticipation,
causing you to blink--
I wish your eyes stayed open
“slowly”
you said
“slowly”
I laughed and gave up
then sleep overtook me
and whatfor? a brief intermission
I was only really scratching an itch
for you.

A wasp flew in when I left my screen-door ajar, and I blew on it, saying
"go away."
It's clinging to my balcony.
Now, in agitation, knows I hold nothing for it.
And the dogs bark, confused by entwined seasons.
Wind shouts with orders “Combat your deaths!"--
but I acquiesce to darkness in my mind; waiting for the summer
to submerge this springtime
which has momentarily come and outdone
winter.
Breeze carries, or generates, the wings, of my living
solace in the stinging tip of malice on that minute body
--ignoring tendrils which voice gratitude to day--
supplanting laughter with its ***** on down the road.
I want to see the child's face cry as it is initiated into suffering,
smile breaking as he comes to see its transience.
Then slowly I will look down. In shame, walking past this station
toward my exit
and
the street which bears your name.

We’re tying our shoes-- as we think about the day's gifts
          Holding strings-- curling ribbons with latent sweat
"I’'ve heard they’ll pull us through-- we tie around each box
          eyelets, through tunnels and catacombs."-- a shimmering luster abetting
beyond the sky.

Today we mourn those drained sausage-limbs at noon-time
     --(Sallow-cheeked mistresses and fortunes abounding
        for those who have time for such things.)

With tears
     --hiding the feelings of those who have none

                  slapping the ground.
We see
           every unfurling light
combine with blots of pity
                                                 to fortify prairie grass.

And I remember an old gravel highway that separates my family and church from geologic
build-up which the wind is slowly chewing.

I can't be with them-- like the western, sandy steppes of Nebraska,
     I can't hold water, and their loving nourishment sinks through me.
     My arms won't be like ribbons, in an embrace of the
dead’s remitting tendrils.
     As I lay outstretched on the Sand Hills, shielding my belly from the desert sun;
     boring water trapped in caverns under neatly wound sweat-bows and boxes
I, one day, too, cry emaciated tears.

     Surely, we are tethered firmly to the spool, dangling with
tensity on the tines of breath, shimmering, aloft-- but also, don’t forget:

We are fastened by a knot above our leather casing
     holding the body in-piece and being manipulated at once.
     We decorate the boxes, in which we are to lie
with wet, green ribbon, pulled through rocky soil by course, chapped hands.

The torrid slushing slosh and evening moondown temperature of green-boiled cauldrons
We drove—not we, just I
And, branches falling, found my way
Blind and in a roundabout
I removed my sheathened corpuscle
My metal encasement and violated the elements of fire
Sorrowful electricity and fate blots out all headlights
Those cares—those cars!
SORGESORGESORGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG
You hold on, now
You keep trying
And I’ll be back

I
kept saying “I’m just glad no one got hurt,” last night when
I crushed a car driving a semi.
Just about to sleep
on the road by the sugar factory in my hometown
when I heard a horn honking and people yelling at me.
Before I heard aluminum bend at once.
I recounted it to spectators after the fact--

IN MY DREAM--
it was this
yelling, this
honking
inDICTED the victims in my
mind.

That road was endlessly wide.

Their car could have moved enough to miss me;  they wanted to
get hit.

For the insurance, maybe.
Who knows?

IN MY DREAM
people get right out of smashed cars.
Below your driver’s side door giving silent, dis-
approving glances within seconds of your palm-
shielded face;

After it had started to get dark
I remember how my dad had
our truck down filling up
on the corner with
scraps of steaming
food.

I noticed potatoes
cut into halves and
fourths piling in and flowing through the broken
tailgate. I knew
where that truck was going:
back to the country.

Where I was told to park my truck and RUN. in-
stead of
crash into the city. Then I saw the insurance adjuster, ask-
ing him,
“hey,
how much will it cost.”

“Some

number that doesn’t surprise me.”

I walked to the corner, past a car
dealership which doubled as a
firework
stand
in the summer
when I was young
and still does.

Not every word is a masterpiece--
nor every strand
of beach.
alone a cabana-
canopy of sky
surrounding earth:
the atmosphere breeeeeeeeeeeeeeathes
our names into
ocean
and ******
on the ground, as
well.
with dangling-*******
clouds
brimming on the horizon;
what a glorious day!
what a shining moon-shine
standard evening
shining!
wonderment of wonders
shone a seat by flashlight
to the theater alone
alone
alone
the stars are laughing as
we point above
our cabana
and salivate.
without knowing
it
the beach shudders its
******
and we catch *******
with our eyes.

You are such a nothing
a blank canvas
an etching
i squeezed onto my fantasy shelves
gutting the plans
to posses your Rorschach
ethereal squalor of meaning
and threw the world's paint
on top of you
absent,
transparent draw cloth
translucent and opaque at once
femme fatale, bejeweled betokened
breath
and plaything
i want to whack
a mole

Self-righteous being

Why had Andy chose to quit smoking?
He had no job,
                        no ambitions,
                                              no passions.
No reason for salient speculation on the beaming waters
of the immaculate Pacific horizon from those unaffordable balconies
you see in movies, with sports cars rushing toward them on
that unnamed California byway.

“**** them all,” he thinks, crinkling the now emptied package.
He'd rather be reformed and forgiven
            or punished for what he‘s done.

Not both.

Stretched on the rack for his failure.
To acquire a Malibu suite.
To cup silicone *******.

To fix the loose handle on their porch‘s door,
              and smile while reciting, “I do.”

“One more won’t hurt,” says Andy,
as the woman in his shirt wraps her hands
around the shoulders.
The cloud circles his head, as they laugh about the sunset.

I’ve ordered and carried my steaming cup of brown to my table to ignore the falling snow beyond the walls of this box.
My clothes are wrong, my hair as well.
I just cut it, and everyone knows which mistakes I made.
A man sneezes and the song changes.
Better not make eye contact with anyone; I am not in their league, here at the muddy spoon cafe.
Chewing so loudly in the de-creeping silence,
these safe, polite, quiet ones.
I am the creep here. I am different.
My thighs are tense.
Hunching over the paper, arms tense and clutching  a gnarled red pen--
It’s probably self-indulgent to even sign my name.
Someone’s shuffling cards.
I almost forgot.
The awkwardness I’m filled with breathes out a short sigh when I realize
--my part’s over.
“Do you know Sanskrit? Do you know what that is?”
A woman asks another.
I want to choke on the pretension
The tenseness, I adjust my leg to relieve pressure on my ankle.
Why can’t I just enjoy the snow? That’s all I really came here for-- well, and the coffee.
I hear a woman cough with an unaffected tenor, which would convey her gender to an interested party but to me carries no intonation.
I wonder if the girl I recognize from class thinks I’m following her.
I came here for coffee, sweetheart!
Is it yet too hot for me to dare a drink?
I can see it, the steam, rising out of the corner of my eye.
I haven’t looked away from my hand in twenty minutes.
“Who am I?” they may be asking myself for me.
I don’t have a clue.
They can think about that problem
for themselves
while they’re lonely
in their forties.
I’m lonely now and I hope not to live
that long.
Here, we pretend not to see each other’s faces
in the gleaming presence of steaming cups.
“I don’t want to wonder about that.”
I realize there’s nothing I even deem worth writing down.

Staring at Space
Touching Time
Miraculous Confection
Absorbed in Soil           and
Water                    and
Gas              and Daylight

Rusted, thrown
                          Brown
onto the walls of
                          Subsequent
                         ­ Possession
We feel, blindly
Our tips rubbing plaster
and soliloquy. Dodging             meandering
                          despair from
torridly ambitioningly mild forms
of lower-
                          Back
                          A­rch.
You scallion, you
                          You
and yours.
                          Those shoes

There's a *** on the windowsill behind my eye window.
                                                                                              It gets no sunlight these days, in the Winter.
I need you to open the blinds of my eyelids and kiss me,
                                                                                              burning your image into my retina and
feeding that plant with energy.

I hold your hand, young one,
you are torn apart.
I am the beating spirit inside us all;
I am the earth, the air, the heart.
Take time, youth is fleeting and
tempered by flames.
Your breath escapes ears through misheard rumors
and your claims go unfelt.
Shush.
Be calm, I promise someday to leave you
torn by others and scarred.
But for now you are handsome, young--
I hold your hand.
Telling you I love you is my charm,
my piercing beauty is forged by your ***** gaze.
It’s ok, young man. I hold your hand,
and leave you,
returning with fire, soldering the wound.
Taking you into the earth, the air, the heart.

I woke up an hour ago and repeatedly said 'hello' to increasingly disheartening silence I expected to be your voice.
I got so scared I thought I was going insane. It made me think I had imagined you and had always been in this bad place, deluded into thinking I was with you that whole time. It seems saying thank you for the break will make it real again and telling you I need to say it makes me weak. I feel I might throw up and telling you is selfish. So much for convenience and light-heartedness-- if those are things people want from this experience. I think people want to know it mattered.. But maybe I've made this point too clear.

Why scream in darkness,
everybody screams there;
It is for cowards and idiots
thinking they can change.

I tell her I need her and I want
her
compass, her train pass, her
watch-
ful eye directed toward my city.

She tells me that she loves me,
and cries.

It was the first time. It was in the dark
night. Then I realized:

Crying is like screaming
in the day.

ashtrays, mugs and
moments: rattle within, outside their place.
our brittle, needy bones
support head,
appetite-shorn body: Bouldering.
Walking. |Wicking. Mushing bridges
churning-over water, tide.
High-regard neighbor’s children re-
move plastic decorations while that grandpa
hangs-- alive,
stayed-- in unused gutters, -o! Wind and
snow-flaked, grassy yardstomps lead us
with body-**** coats to-
doors, somedays-ies and happenstance
below mortuaries, toe-
tags, dangling shoe-string,
draping clothes'-
line our spindly, warrowed hallways
between blankets, sweaty
feelers lie, their
harrowed, heaving trunks hold night-trees/
palms aloft and hopeful.

a glint, a chance, a something.
wicker furniture, lace.
a bed, a "yes." Please,
a you.

i’m sleeping on a pillow of doubt
every feather pressing through the seams
hours closing in on the moment i’ll awake
and remember what it means to think i see

When I was younger, and chat rooms were relatively new
I would bring up the topic of suicide. Sometimes,
contemplating the reaction my death would get from others
I would lie on my bed, sobbing.
It was just a mental exercise
to soothe myself
with the thought of my own death.
I saw this internalization of conflicts as the ideal approach--
mortality, akin to a train-line I could exit at any stop.
Where you pull the chord determines context for your plot.
I try not to romanticize suicide or see it as a solution; suicide is simply a neutral alternative to life, which is full of painful and pleasurable experiences.

Sometimes, to scream seems like the only hope i have for eternal life; to scream and have the vibrations reverberate throughout the universe until it vanishes. How terrible it is that this hope is so callously dashed in the next sentence. How terrible that the universe will end. Will humans be there in the end? I suppose not. It seem we’re not very likely to make it past another generation or so. Oh well-- it wouldn’t really matter, then, if my scream did reverberate forever and the universe never ended; there wouldn’t be any humans to recognize it, analyze it and understand what it is that I was saying. To be honest, I wouldn’t even be able to explain if someone were to hear me the second I was screaming-- they probably would’t ask me either. I’ve only screamed a few times in my life. The ones i can remember were late at night on the side of desolate roads where i wouldn’t be asked to give an explanation; which was haunting. I almost wished the moon would pivot in space, reveal a mouth, two eyes and ears then ask me “now what’s all this about?” In either instance, my answer would have been alternating uncertainty about my future and loneliness. I might have even expressed discontent in my life condition. The moon might have responded “you control your own conditions,” but that’s only becase the moon represents society and the generalized other. I’m glad the moon just stayed the moon; a lifeless, crater-riddled celestial body incapable of empathy. I was jealous of it.
But here i sit now, tense and distraught. I’m not taking initiative in my life; what makes this worse is that if i were to set any goals for myself they would be social constructions of what other people value. My entire being is dependent on these others and what I think they want from me; without them, I couldn’t conceptualize myself. But, as it is, I see myself as a lonely, scared, miserable wretch. This is because I am not living up to their expectations-- or at least I assume not. My father tells me that all he expects from me is to “be happy” and “be the best you can at whatever you are,” whatever that means. I think I’d rather be expected to become a convicted felon than a “happy” person; at least felony is a definable and achievable condition. The only word more vague and meaningless than “happiness” is “love”.
So, I’m not happy-- I’m roughly the opposite, although that is a contradiction of terms. I don’t try to be happy, because I know it’s impossible. The people looking for happiness have just transposed the term onto the concept of God and made a religion of hedonism. They give offerings to their God in the form of unrealized self-disdain and misunderstood feelings of guilt, and most of them lack so much in introspection that they still attribute this to original sin, i.e. being human. They don’t even feel foolish when they worship the old gods. They don’t realize that human existence is that of God-in-Becoming; even though they relate to themselves as such.
It is this becoming God that troubles me and makes me want to scream. It is the desire to Be and to Know. Because we are conscious we cannot escape it, but we are liable to hide ourselves from this truth. Our individual-self (the Ego) only insofar as it is experienced by others. It is their reaction to this experience which enables us to make hypotheses as to our actual existence, and our behavior is the way we test these hypotheses. We are desperate to understand how others experience us because it is the closest we can come to experiencing ourselves. The only way, however, to run a successful psychological experiment is to maintain a control group, and in our private experiment, the Other (society) is seen, contrary to nature, as such. We treat it as a static monolith from which we read our name and Being. It tells us what we are and can become, but we look to individuals in our life to refute what the Other is telling us about ourselves. This is our second misstep in our search for the the true Self (Being), because we alter the random sample, deliberately or otherwise, to demonstrate not the truth, instead merely the opposite of what the Other has said. We do this out of necessity, in order to create meaning for ourselves and the only way to create meaning is by transcending the contingencies of Being and Consciousness. We use our consciousness of the Other to create our own Being and since this Self is unconscious and mute, we ask individual others to view it. Our Being thus becomes a shrine to the Becoming-God our Consciousness wants but can never realize. It is an empty shrine, where we wander until we forget the Being’s relation to the Self.
In essence, I am at the shrine of my Becoming-God tonight. And instead of lighting candles or screaming, I am wondering why I have come because I fail to recognize my Self at its alter to destroyed contingency. In the past I’ve laid down decisions I have made, actions I have taken, as so many animal sacrifices and lit them on fire. I’ve consulted my Being as to what to do and what to think about my life. Tonight I am unconcerned with this. My notion is to burn down the temple; vanquish my Being through overwhelming Consciousness. I want to deny my Self and its inevitable destruction in an unfeeling universe by destroying it through contemplation. Why should I slowly creep toward death, when it seems the only moment in life which is coherent and understandable? Why extend life? What is worth experiencing? What drives me on? The answer, again, is the illusion that I will once and for all deduce the Self from my interactions with others and recognize in it a transcendence of Being and Consciousness. I want to profess my Godhood, and in so doing enable myself to postpone death, until the final end of the Universe. I see my death as oneness and God, the gentle ebbing of all energy in the Universe into nothing, which is the ultimate meaning of life. All meaning is destroyed in the burning out of the Universe, and in my becoming-God I witness the destruction of all meaning, the only true meaning. Until that moment, the end of my human life is simply the snuffing out of a candle, or Consciousness. Forever after, my body is a waiting room to annihilation.
To destroy the shrine is to delineate nature and its synthesis with the human mind. This is not a cognitive parlor trick, but an active acknowledgment of reality using the body. I stand beside the charred ruins of what I built in my mind and am unaware of this fact as it simultaneously ceases to exist. This forgetting is impossible in death, because death is without Consciousness and there is no sense of loss. Therefore, I can only appreciate the fact that I have destroyed my Self in becoming something new while I live; a different, untested Self. I have thus oscillated to the opposite of Consciousness and become Being. I can no longer view myself and depend on others reactions to establish my new Ego. At the same time, my Consciousness is outside my Being, gathering stones for a new temple. My Being will take on the sheath of Consciousness at the entrance and commune once more in the act of becoming-God.

each beep an hour
as i stare at this screen
the watch i forgot to deprogram tells me
what the numbers in my eyes scream
i feel my ears to listen to
the stillness between
passing cars
as the tires jolt in circles and travel
for beeps
and beeps
and it beeps
but what do we do now?
myself and who i thought i was--
unfinished projects began
to be forgotten
beep
beep-beep
beep
beep
beep
beep
beep
beep
beep
beep
­beep
beep
because the tires jolt in circles
i become impervious to beeping
******* on the carpet
is my constant state of being

She squeezed her ticket
As though it were the brake line
His blew through Fall breeze