When at first it happens I want none of it. I even say no. I discard the plane tickets, the train stamps, the envelopes of money into a safety deposit box some train station off The Embarcadero and just head East. It frightens me, I'm horrified. The potency is developing in my inner organs, I can't cough right, sleep right, I just suffer and complain. Instead of doing things differently, they've made it so you can soak right in. Just strand yourself on the side of the roadway and they've got rules for you too. The sounds are torturous, the rooms are empty, and the men grow complacent and empty. Nothing is as serious as this. Four years ago a car, three years ago a plane, now I just shuffle and complain. I search for a key to my happiness. I look for it in desktop monitors, caramel apple lollipops, new cashmere vanilla candles, consuming six or more bottles of water a day, E-Cigarettes even, even those, I use apple juice, lychee nectar, mango sorbet, and chocolate fudge sundaes. I'm 40 up on the 140 I went down with. All the miles I'd walked in a firm step, a fever, a bag full of cheap wine for a man that works the car park. 43rd between 8th and 9th. Every thing is bright lights and theater nights. More pacing, there is gum stuck to every square of sidewalk, men and women wheel around a block away selling discount drugs in the streets and outside the Subway on 44th, in the Chinese food mart on 7th. They blow blow blow in their little plastic straw tubes and for $12 a drop they ask you to reach your hands inside their pockets, "take what you like and leave the rest. No one remembers it like this, the girls laugh practically upside down, they wear sky-blue light dyed denim overalls, covering all the parts of their shoulders but exposing their ****, they have plastic bags in their boots, and cute bobby bobbing hair cuts like water crest shoots exploding in lime juice. They pace too, but their legs are shorter, their conversations longer, the horns in their heads grow slowly out from midnight. The devil put the hate on them too.

Even the children are bigoted in this bicentennial. The ******'s nook is no longer the sewing shop in the corner of the strip mall up by Deerbrook Mall. I haven't seen a fountain with change in it since the 80's. The newest thing I heard about imaginations are that, "They come out the first and last Wednesday of the month, you gotta check with Game Stop if you want to pre-order the right ones." I think we must be on number 18 by now. There were four of us riding shotgun in the boxcar up to the valley last month, now they don't even run the trains anymore. One third of everything left to go.

I'm growing quiet; if they can't tell it's not my job to teach them. If they can't spell, I ain't gotta word to word combat that's going to come down on 'em. My brain is so uptight I can't sleep before sundown or sunrise. I see legs and oil futures with every blink. I listen to the old phone messages constantly. I make up stories to go with the missed calls. Still I hope everything will work out okay, because nothing is as serious as this. It makes me sick. It makes the guy undo itself with a brass nail, the blood unclogged from the rash from last month, I find out I'm toxic to poisons, and then I'm told that they're a prescription for that too. It wasn't a ******* rumor. The time to back up or move is now. A idle figure in an orange shirt, a tapestry that moves with every hallucination, forty, fifty, sixty hours I've never slept. I may have been years. My stomach is rusting from water with nowhere to go. I feel sick. I feel woozy, but I don't believe in feelings. I sit upright because I'm uptight, I turn my head around and look over my shoulder. But I know that any friend that's worth looking at me wouldn't arouse my spirit at this hour. There is a net that they speak of when everything's gone. It's the madness that transforms nothingness when the devil's around. Whole empires are crashing. Whole bottom drawers of unworn clothing, tagged and abetted stuffed into black crape garbage bags and drove off into the moonlight. I'm sweating and soporific, living half by half two in and two out, if I had the chance I'd try to remember just which way I get out. When I check on the rumors, when I say my goodbye, I know that I'm the only one sitting in this room of cocksure spirit animals and half-plastic book casings, and that no one whispers and no one cries, not even the bereft can produce a lullaby. I am dying to figure out how to move voicemails from iPhones to iTunes, I googled it while sitting down in the city last night. Poor service. 10 months. Not even one blame the famous few.

After tired comes guilty, after guilty the shame, after that apathy, after that I'm awake. I've never been good at being better than me. But those voicemails, I want them somewhere permanently.

1909, on top of the dragon.
Marigolds whipping a tepid fug in this small room of stringy daylight.
That place where we fell in love. Where I dropped a hot cup of tea on my pants
And we ate sushi on the beach. I love the beach.

I am not ready for the ice festival or your new boyfriend.
He smells like bad disco and old people.
This piano concerto that I play before bed, before awakening,
I have your black dresser drawer in my bedroom,
It glistens of our days of Jasmine and Roses.

My mind blurs stories of you, her, and the other girl.
Rad violin songs, a friend from Argentina has introduced me to
Mystify me, I cannot hear straight or stand still. I have acquired
A gift for shivering. Still I can feel your talons raking up my spine.
*******! Where? Why? How did you do that thing with your mouth?

I count upwards from you and in my peaking hours of misfortune, I
Never come back down to earth's giant centrality of duel existence.
My gut expands into my chest, my nervous system and anxiety is
All of you, a lot of her, and none of the other girl.
I make half inch black markings on the wall, this curse of feeling and not forgetting
That never goes away.

When my heart beats black inside my chest, and the days I have are filled with death, and the girls I know won't walk with me, then I have my choice in misery. All the birds have died, and the plains are dry, the skyscrapers aren't lit up at night, and the city's sound sounds like nothing, then I have my choice in suffering. People talk a lot, but they hardly speak, all their voices creak in the summer streets, everybody walks but they're not moving, I try to only observe but then I start screaming.

I ******* hate the way that you look at me, your skin's so ******* clean that it feels *****, your eyes move around but you're not seeing, the way I hurt each day but you say nothing. If I tried to leave you might be happy, so I sit and be and go out at night and cheat. I would break your heart, but it hardly beats. You're my walking dead, my darling zombie.

Each day is second rate, I bore so easily. It's like the day we met ended your pleasantry. I startle all the time, you seem so unaware. I chose you number one, you chose to not even care.

I caressed you once, and undressed you thrice, you abandoned me in the middle of the night. All the time I halved, you had your own account, of every thing we did, it wasn't the right amount. Now I hardly care about the drugs you're on. I'm quoting blasphemy out of every psalm. Even the words I write don't tell half of the truth, about the way I felt chasing after you.

Yesterday she was nowhere to be found
In the earth or under the earth.


Suddenly she is all here - a bright soon
Of a tomorrow in earnest and potluck joy, embers and pyres, iris and the merriment of ochre.


A star groomed by outer space - spilling wet ash
And fissured out by the tailored saw of the wood.
Now something is stirring in the smolder.
We call it a girl.


Still wowed.
She has no idea where she is.


Her eyes, chalcedony stones, explore ripening doomsday and an ivory moon rock.
Is this the world?
It confuses her. It is a great numbness.


She pulls herself together, rousing to the new weight of things
And to that maternal figure nuzzling her, and to her down burrow.


She rests
From the first infinite shock of light, the empty laze
Of the curious and their curious questions -
What has happened? What am I?


Her ears keep on inquiring, blissfully.


But her legs are impatient,
Mending from so long nothingnesses
Her tiny hands are restless with ideas, they start to try a few out,
Swaying this way and that,
Grasping for balance, learning fast -


And she's suddenly upright


And stretching - a giant hand
Strokes her from top to toe
Perfecting her outline, as she tightens
The knot of herself.
Now she comes to -
Bold, beautiful - Argentina
Over the weird world. Her nose
crimson and magnetic, draws her, consciously sounding,
A petite yaff, aimed towards her mother. And the world is warm
And gentle and softens her daze. Touch by touch
Everything fits her together.


Soon she'll almost be a woman.
She wants to be a Woman,
Pretending each day more and more Woman
Till she's the perfect Woman. The immortal Woman
Will surge through her, weightless, unbound, a twirling flame
Beneath silver gusts,


It will coil her eyeballs and her heels
In a single outlaw fright - like the awe
Between mortar and firework.


And curve her neck, like a crocodile emerging from the placid pond
Among lilies,
And fling the new moons over her shimmery banner,
All the full moons and the dark moons.
Booming, ineffable delight.

Your colors are so heavy, how dare I, I cannot sleep. Years inundated under, through skin coils, marigold fields. Yellow crocuses, orange California poppies. Moors of cattle ranchers, yokes of oxen. Plasticine uber-confidence, silky white-skinned testubular thrice people harmonies. Blisses of contagion, contagious bliss. Wrists and incisors, tying down in a bedroom, waking up to live harps and choruses. You dance like you're so alive, but I'm so alive I can't dance. Or breathe. Or knead my fists of earthen wears, or sell my soul completely. I drove off a cliff last night, but the four foot fall ended neatly. The plateau authors my chance to sew my bright, beyond- my fortunes. But the hour before I fall asleep, seems to be the greatest torture.

Oakes-photo, hypocrisy and flagrant mirky plateau. Brimming celestial warrants overcrowding public housing systems. North-South lights, sell costly iPhone Apps; and then there are Social Societies of non-verbal delight. Password protected non-profitable and over-costly educations of no reward or biblical synonyms. Catastrophizing hash-tag dot.com. Weary party going poster children with glowing anemone guts, fruity looped cantlings, ravenous scattered supper clubbed coughing up ******* on their strange and central affairs unit. Overcome the candisation and sugary affairs of any of the ***** and pops that erstwhile matter less and less. We are speaking of nomenclatures that don't arise. Promises and by which confession aloof romanticizes every Tom dicking Mary that carries the theory of sustainable energy, prussian blue, and irregular browsing.

Wicked nether-land. Nether world, white, askance. Capitulating mangroves, verdant trees spliced with hyperbole, onomatopoeia, and manilla envelopes; her world is stuffed with secrets, she listens to gorillas cracking mussels a kilometer away, near a rill. Never she thought. Nothing that could provide....providence. Mangled heliographs  sprayed all over the everywhereworld.

"Don't be S.A.F.E.," she whispered. A bouquet of gorse, cistus, and pimpernels squished in her small fingers. She climbed her way through the pedimented stairway, then collapsing on the porch. Legs spent, and spread out upon the desiccate grayed four by four planks of the portico.

And as time elapses, the shuttering shake of the hemlock, which writhes through her skinny nimble dactyls, upwards straining the heart as its toxic bends appendages- crisp cerise lumens bend on the Titanium White walls, where only shadows bend time. The hour, still nine. Every adornment, furnished with red and its hues. Not purple, periwinkle, or any masked enhancement.

These are the symbols that reticulate splines, that curve temperatures, perverse hemispheres and debunk worlds. Upped antes, verbs that terns flirt worth, birth words. Ooh. Aah. Camera. The forest wraps her in its verdant pasture, where at last the moribund tamarisks disperse.

While at the plateau she is quiet and longing. Arms astride, dangling. Vaunt with highs and bliss- a kiss of withstanding pleasure serves her the cure for a lifetime of whining. This, yesterday where her body rattled through crooked vines. Square ships toasting her vocal melancholy in the sweet-waters of Time. So that all of her ripened limbs could grow, no more sheepishly than the magic she knew as a child. Stress free. First among the Earth-words, verbed-up and made jealous by pronouns that encompassed her joy-brimming hide. Closing down her voice and hugging her from behind.