It's taken me three years to grow.

It will take me three years to grow more.

I look to both with despair

and dried, thorny branches.

Save me.



Coat me in chocolate and sell me for a price

unlike most products,

Sell me to my soul so that she may taste

What I've become

(Or what I will be,

I do not know which.)



And let her know that the juice of this bruise-purple thing

was hatched from the eggs of

Hot

Blood,

burning as limes do.

Tell my soul to ready her buds for a special meeting.



Teach her to chew fire just so

when the two of us collide, soul and berry,

she won't burn to death

Starting at the gums. Ending with the heart.



We'll meet, finally, in three years long as a field,

at a warehouse store.

We'll come together on the way home.

Something original. Of newer words, that originate from the pleasure and happiest of timeless incidents. The happenings, back of the park, near a set of restrooms, a pool of clear sea water and a purplish-red starfish. A sea cucumber. Trailing sea lions diving off of a cliff, a vertical display of rocks, moving a millionth of an inch each year. You caught me.  --------

I can't nail it. It happens to me when I sleep, it comes around me, over my shoulders and latches onto my breaths. I'm breathing and it creeps inside of me like a mealworm, I turn to look for it and it disappears again. It lives in a shadow but it is also a shadow of itself. An anomaly, a space for time and the tell of time, its hidden agenda, its positive nature, how it yields itself to prey, how it coos for a sweet smile, runs up to me in mid-day traffic, and kisses me, noon at military time.  ------  

The blessings come. All of them. Laid out on a table in red and white checkerboard, making the eggplant parm and the homemade vinaigrette. Peanut butter chocolate chip vegan cookies. A dandelion necklace that only fits around my wrist. It makes me weep some twenty years ago on a Playskool slide, orange, red, bright. I'm looking around my neck and still it's not there. Every where I want to be, every where I've gone and could go. I should go to California too but all of this...stuff, everywhere, under my legs, in my pockets, the closets tumbling high and low, I haven't had enough to change, and still I am wanting something else. You the same, my shoulders tell me stories, I listen and I fall asleep.  -----  

Sometimes my nerves grow quiet, my words grow- but then they just fall again, skittering in a lull plash of blue-green pond water. The bench I sewed to the ground. A tale of mirth and woe. I cannot call on you, you will not come. Sleeping beauty, blue eyes, blonde hair. I wrestle you in the day to day, the hour to hour. Minutes cannot go by. Pages that turn but I remember everything. My mind will never go.  -----  

Two pink letters in the post today. Maybe neatly placed for you. A fake-tattoo puffin, upper-left hand corner. My hands are empty, they have indecent memories, they write indelible superpowers. I can't go on. I run lake water over my ankles, slowly drift beneath arcing waves and cold grey skies. Half a day blue goes black, night comes and I whisper when the sky goes quiet. Nothing is as serious as this.   ------    


In a white box there are two pairs of shoes and a soft bear. The bear without the name. He doesn't speak to me so I leave him with the sea birds. Put them in a push cart and show them off, I take them here, I take them there. No one asks his name, where he's going, what he's going to do. ------------


Tuesday's are the worst. I count and count and count. I will never forget Tuesday's, twisting like a cuneiform jelly, fingernails spoiling me-meat, breaking the Styx crossing the river Rhine, there is nowhere that I will not go, only for me to cross time. To wait, I really hate waiting. Nothing comes between, I lie to a stranger and they fall in love instantly. I see you on Monday evenings and I want to kiss you gently, the sides of your neck, on the inside of your hand. Where do you go when all the shadows go? ----

Some of me is backwards. The waves shape the sky. A rabbit goes with a fire truck, a blueberry with a cephalopod. Back to the soft wood walls of the cotton luxe room. My legs have never felt so safe, you have never made my teeth so happy. In Russia you touch my face, I see you, a picture of you, any part of your eyes or the things you draw upon and I am instantly in love. I love you, a part of you, all of the parts of you, your soul is the only part of me disconnected. You are the happiest moments of my pleasure. You taste like Tahitian Vanilla and Acai berries. Gold grains hit our shins as we go like great wild horses through the alluvial plains. -----

I cannot count to you. There are no goddesses in numbers. I only have sleep, for you to look me square away into a bliss I have in a picture of the two of us, lost in our faces, our hands wandering each others knees. I sit across from you and I am not close enough. I go closer and I want to be inside of you, all across my limbs expanding our spiritual forms, intertwining in our skins. So I speak, I lay my words gently in front of you so you cross them as you walk our path, back from the sea into a narrow slumber. Sleep is the only place we all can play. You, me, her, her, and I.

rich in calories
the tree high as sixty feet
the acai palm tree