i am so disgusting and fat and ugly. i am a pig and a fat ******* waste of space.

i am bulbous and horrendous and vile. i am a massive mistake. my future will be nothing but pain. that is all i am made for. that is all i am born beneath. burn me in smoldering smoke. scar me in shallow deeps.

i am built for nothing but struggle.
that's my design.
i wonder how much i dream
up and how much is real.

i am nothing and so much skin.
pull it off me please

i have come to discern
a great breach
a chasm that stands
between
apprehension of the world
and the world
itself

like some character
in a play by Chekhov,
perpetually seeking answers
yet, offering no
truths...
as an eternal madness, a seeking,
ever seeking, yet
accomplishing neither end nor
resolution

a tune, played almost to
conclusion,
missing that final chord,
so that we see, that life has,
tampered...

(as grief enters, stage right)
"line please..."

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

i once knew a girl who liked to get ****** hard
during rainstorms wearing striped purple socks
she liked to have her face bounce off the wooden head-board
while her hungry teeth tried to grab at it
something about the thunder and lightning finger-banging heaven outside really got her juices flowing she said

so i'm out on my front porch naked again
unadorned except for flowers pasted on my eyes
and a small burnt-black buddha dangling around my neck
not meditating or peacefully practicing yoga
just jacking off alone
small white *** clenched tight
legs bent at the knee thigh muscles quivering
against the shadows and the weight of my glistening body
fist wrapped hard around inflamed ****
mimicking the hot friction of the sky

i am a pure creature with potent armpits freebasing a rainbow
as the birds grow loud in the trees and two
paper tabs soak into the flesh of my tongue
grunting and swatting at oversized mosquitoes
my size twelves with unclipped toenails grip and rake
the edge porch concrete underneath as thunder hovers
over my jungle and lightning beats the humid air
sending gooseflesh tingling up my spine
i'm standing in subtropical light casting
a big silhouette against the sky and treetops

the garden of eden is my most sensitive memory
and i am a piece of well-oiled machinery
brushed with gold a brave slender boy
simple and greased with a glowing soul and
***** ******* gesturing in the direction of the stars
fingertips tickling the steepest part of the curve
i am screaming my testimony shattering the
skylight and any remaining windows voice warped
into hook-shaped echoes like a wood pole trembling and chanting in the pre-tornado wind

the rain will start to come just as soon as i do
i can smell it on the wind so i reach around and press the tip of my littlest finger into my own tender ******* like they do in *****-tonk saloons because ******* i'm feeling frisky
pulse swelling in my throat face growing flush
temples and nostrils flaring in a state of mindless joy
and sure enough as the hanging fern sweats the first drops
of sugar-rain onto my chest i'm drifting through heaven backward
reeking with attitude squeezing thick fluid out
of a flexible container aiming it at the desert rose colored
sun stained and loyal to the very end
as sweat and rain collect in puddles
at the back of my skinny knees
i'm paralyzed with clarity and
blinking under pre-hypnotic
eyebrows

it’s interesting to think about all the right people who might’ve come into your life at the wrong time.
but then again,
i often wonder if time could’ve saved or wrecked us at all.
maybe from the start, we were destined to be nothing more than strangers.
even if i had been weighed down, glued to one spot,
nomadic tensions silenced,
it seems likely that, still, our friendly smiles and cordial jokes would’ve been
limited, somehow,
by unseen barriers,
by the cruel overseer that is fate.

i think i meant something to you, once.
not a lot, but something.
and now,
now i’m just there.
a solid. something that takes up space.
you still sit close to me,
but not as close as you did when we first met.

and i wonder, sometimes, if i did something wrong,
if there was something i could’ve done, or not done, to change things,
to make things better,
to stop us from drifting silently onto the end of the growing list of tragedies my life’s friendships have been.

but maybe there was nothing i could do.
that thought, while terrifying, is perhaps the most comforting one.
after all, it is better to be left helpless from the start than to be burdened with the knowledge that the stones you threw became part of the landslide.

i hope, maybe, that we can salvage what’s left,
perhaps even grow it into something better.
but somewhere inside, i know that’s fool’s talk.
i doubt i ever meant much to you, anyway.
i always was, and always will be, just another shadow,
another stranger,
another change of season.
i suppose i was your winter —
a barrage of snow and ice that danced in clumsily,
not bothering to think about what would happen once spring came.

i hope you’ll remember me when i’m gone.
even now, it’s nice to think that i cross your mind as much as you cross mine.
but my hopes seldom match my reality.

so, still, i am just another.
watching.
waiting.
being.
i am nothing, and in being nothing i suppose that i, too, am everything.

but i will never be your everything.

and i could say that i regret that,
but perhaps i’m still holding onto that last bit of hope.

always the optimist,
and yet even more so the pessimist.

i thought you might be both, too.
i thought we might find a way to complete one another,
much like how the land completes the sea.

but i suppose i am left the earth without its ocean,
the ground without its rain.

it’s a horrible thing, detachment.
my roots never quite find what they’re looking for in the soil.

i had just hoped you would be different.

(a.m.)