It's like this, and then there was total recall. Fast like a safety plan made wrong and then bouncing in and out all the way down the hall. Up through cable cars, Korean fast food market, wet fish, soupy street, concrete cracks filled with crab meat and **** heads. Just a square, a five block, two street, sideways quadrangle, beat of the Tenderloin, hour of the dove. Every one's dead on these loose ends. Hills of the back of her backside, skin of the back of her neck. Rapture is the grave of the sunset, memory is that thing that I said.

No one cans in carnivores, no one runs moves like a shepherd. Sunday, daft as candy, luck in the ways of the prophet. Canon of the blaze of every woman that died today. The sleep setting, the motorcycle bending the hollow, the ravines noisy interlude, up through the rough and the tangles, huddles in a six pack, three or four walking up the block to meet the rest of them.

The skin doesn't fit right, it wears wrong, the shoulders stiff, the masseuse excuses himself. Buckets of flowers hang from the ceiling like stripped cat christmas decorations in suburban mastermind serial killer resort town. Everyone is quiet because they gotta. They move their feet like they were hurrying death into a red volcano, like they were the errand of red from the top bell to the bottom of the town.

I sit on a roof top, baking in the noon day sun. Stripping sticks and stems off the side to sideways, just roasting away, laying, low in the afternoon light. I see a girl with her hands on her skirt, wobbling, scooting a priest card on a periwinkle terra-cotta.  I move my head, turn it upside round to take a better look. No one counts to ten when they see me. The gangster that woke up isn't the gangster that went to sleep last night. My wickedness ended my words mean your bright decay. So I ride the pavement exhausted, burying my coughs in an L-shaped arm

Memory

     is  the birth of cool, it is rapture and ignominious spokesmanship unearthed. Packed into a slatted-wood crate, milking the obsession from cash-toting hands. Freeing itself from your bottom lip while life ticks itself away on a digital stock-exchange display. I am down and you are up, and you save pennies while I search for Chrysanthemums and vanilla-scented candles. Scent is my fifth grade spaceship,
     I hide it in my pocket and take it into the forest when the week is over. Adventure is the part of our story that's caught in between complaining about money and having clean sheets. Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Sunday my hands mend themselves back from bleach, their crevices cave under bright lights, I go to the garden strip and put dirt on my face, over my shoulders, and on my back. I make a altimeter from an alarm clock, and worry what will happen if your feet should ever touch the ground.
Relief
     is a sarcophagus, the satiny silk chrysalis I weave into invincibility. I make myself a small child with a demon-proof lair, no one comes in, not even you.  I see

     how drugs take out your heart and put you anew, fresh: orange, pink, ultramarine. A wave is a soft gesture for twilight, a slow walk among the greying statue towers, bliss extracted from person to person tedium. How you exclaim about **** music as if your temple home was unfocused by jazz or synth-electro.
     I forgot your room of quiet had no bells, no hope, and no notes of resolve. Tragedy was the desert of your six to sixteen, while I made an opus out of crystal glasses and Cran-Raspberry jars. Then it was the relief, Neptune's hands on your *******, red dots of ecstasy connecting you to a higher vibration. You felt it was time to start exercising. I didn't **** you for modifying your perception of color, degrading in a salt pool- I didn't own your ****** it was just a place I went into to write.
    
    Three years later. I was growing backward, I was sixteen, making you the muse in my doorway, a James Bond goddess unraveling my fingers on her silky skin, except your golden crown was really a turban of snakes, and instead of silk I was groveling underneath you. That was the sweat that Ryan Shultz said I garbled up into two pedestal doves, I aimed by eyes straight at the city of gold, and then inside me shucked out every piece of self-respect and vitrified my spirit, castrating my lips and my tongue for something to come to or come at, he said I lived under pointed stars and that lying isn't a good way to get over past phases of silence.

     A few days ago, it all game back to me, in a random series of songs on an iTunes playlist. One memory from an isolated beach outside a strawberry patch near Santa Cruz, a second, two hands cupped over the ears, my face closing in on her smoothed-out pink bottom lip on an over-exagerated car ride to the San Francisco airport, and the third was the mention of non-vegan banana cupcakes with cream cheese frosting, a birthday I celebrated several years earlier. All of them in the coda.
    
     Verse four unbelievable. It caught me straying from the next stressor at hand. What's next? I move my cold hands from a keyboard versing strange relapse of mind, or I tear out another page, whip across town, and peel stamps onto a postcard to send.
     They were all tails from a memory. A slowing ghost that cooed at me from far away, beating me up and down, pulling my eyes away from a scent I continually tried to remember.

They told me the only thing that could cure heartache was war, and since the war wouldn't take me I figure the only thing to do now is take up a life of crime. Gabriel Garcia Marquez says in Love in the Time of Cholera that the only cure for heartache is to find other hearts to break. Five years have passed and I still remember without fail the flint of a lighter, the squint of an eye, and the bell of your dress. I dream a dream each night, sweet variation of the story of you. It comes down to a letter sometimes, I go to the window well with a notebook and a pencil and I draft a sonnet, sometimes a verse, any form of an expression to idle the time it takes for me to find you. I know stars that haven't lived as long. The way I cupped my hands over your ears, the way rapture lived and loved, you kissing me in the shade of the palm trees up their on Notre Damen Ave. I know the curve of the Earth wrapped in the shades of the skin on your body. I live every day for the chance that I will meet you again.

The clock gets me.
It comes to me in the middle of the night
Pulls back the sheets and says, "Hey fucko."
Then it lifts open my sobby wet sand-encrusted lids,
It knows when I'm trying at sleep, pumping quarters
Like I was swallowing yawns, sometimes I try to squint
Harder and take a dream to the next level, whatever
The next level is. It's like Friday night when I wanted to go
Out to do something, whatever something is.
Because I know that if I don't I'll miss that thing that's so
Important that if I were to miss it the clock wouldn't come for me

Again.
And on Tuesday's when I'm knotting a dream around 2 o' clock
In the morning, my web-footed adventure, say, killing your

Boyfriend, say
Fighting the Nazis, say,
Rediscovering that you sent nudie pics to
That rando guy we met in that club that lives
in Prague-
I throw the clock at the ******* wall.

Because who knows, I make the bed wrong
Or maybe I don't cook right, or look right, or
Smile the right way at the right

Time. And you start thinking that I have to die.
The bane of my existence is an imagined feat in your
Walnut-sized brain, slowly numbing us while we're
Supposed to be, say

Listening to the rich, Oxford voice of
David Attenborough.

Instead you're thumbing through that index
of CVS cashiers, just trying to find a scruffy face
To flip your digits to, your homemade justification. It becomes
A feat, an unjust cause of mine to

Get it right, that imaginative and artificial bit you've
Been sewing up Monday twilight.

That's when I go out and jaw your sister, somewhere between
A smirk on your face and a bit of anger at the end of your sentences.

We know you, and your little dark colors too. A picture book in your purse penned in mustaches on the full faces of your fare. We call you from bed, 8 o' clock in the morning, dog-light you slow wander the Peruvian darkness making jellyfish tentacles with your hands while you feel your way through Salem. We're colder than night and we wake thrice the bits of your day gig. You collapse in a green field of dandelion where thrushes drown you in Brown. We gorge ourselves on mango slivers, pineapple yolks, a half of grapefruit. We know you are close to your end.

On the tops of the cities you call to your lycan friends, the half-sick and muted bray allures them to you, from Bratislava and Mimon, the thoroughfare through the suq. We wait. The foregone untold, the beep beep jug jug swoop sound of the nightingale, in all her dun glory, we wait. Then, as if descending through the moor-lounging silver smoke, the cool stickiness to your fingertips; the fog.

We are there when the blue-less and smoky screen surrounds you, when you shank the auburn Scot hair of the sly fox that stalks, say, a cigarette from your lips. When you take the corners swiftly, gadding the streets. The prize king of vulpicide. You rub its matte fur against your bristly gray beard. And while you lay in your lumps of twelve carat flesh you bleat and you nag. One day you will never come home.

He weeps his heart, and hangs his head,
He doubles back, and follows her back to bed,
She says, " Some homes are towns and lives, while others wear their homes inside." And he keeps up though he's kept out, the volatile, the sudden frown.
She makes up the cupcakes but they're never vegan are they? No they're never vegan are they?

He makes a gift, and wrings his thumbs, the bubble bath, the tepid tub,
Outside where the rains have gone long, something gives him something strong,
And he picks up where he had left off, the trouble is he doesn't know when to back off, and the cupcakes aren't vegan, sweet and such spectacular, but they really aren't eaten, now that they've been made with eggs. No the cupcakes aren't vegan, though they are quite delicious. And he loves her forever, though he never eats again. No he never eats again. No he never eats again.

The plane is emotion.
The form is a gentle rider,
she pushes bullets off cliffs, she hugs the stars.
Catches the moon eyeing her with one
great big hand wrapped on its ****;
spins the bell of her dress
round and round.

Sifted from the Earth, man moody
cleft in heaps of his entrails,

no progress has been made.

My metal mother pulls hula hoops for zulu,
she rips down the shelves and pulls
Bobby Dylan from the wall. She says,
"grrrplleeopzhrka." And the smoke gets into
my eyes and burns my nostrils too.

In the great wind screen, footprints of man,
Native American blood weeps on my bright
Summer burning, no regency cleared. The
outlook denied. It sits stagnant, maddening
with its blockhead on sideways. Heavy, old
mutter hubbard wilting gold in her stare.

Mess comes. She spoils, her skin is loud
and anointed, her fecund white placard
is thinner than air. People look at each other,
a goblin, two trollops, the green woolen winter-wear
of a soldier in despair. Only a putrid noon, escaping,
cuts the flesh from the garden. Cuts out all the weakness,
the hope, the love, every thing owned, every one cleared.

The skin trap and oyster flap. The rich mixture of voices,
nothing holds common that bond, that few could look upon,
that youth could-

none of the old things work anymore.

Just a wicked boredom trickling in blood down her legs, just
the lust trickling down her legs, dear mommy, I obey.
And when the summer months set in mahogany, and the icicle
feat swallows us up, dear-
death
Winter
lips
moths buzzing
mouths
fuzzz
your sweet bomb
bon bon

She had stopped crying.
All evening in her black-mesh coup de voodoo.
On the plane she had been crying
For her Summer pal. Yesterday she had been to market
Big brown bags and white bags, little pink bags filled with crimsony scents,
Capricornia, looseleaf newsprint, postcards, and colored pencils,
She had hands full of handles, bags bundled, stitched in strict Saturday fashion.
He could barely break a step, he could fake dance with her feet on his tip toes.
She was only three quarters the perfect size to fit inside his frame.
The grand disappearing act. And she was only ifs and suicides.
A stranded ray of sun-draped hair on a cooly porcelain forehead, the segments were all just wrong,
Something so wrong, trembling heart cries over a mute coo through a flattened tongue.
The sickle tongue, dodgy on Tuesday's, She had a simple mug, oh! But so cute and soothing, the nape
That wrapped around, my arm lapped its hands in a clapping ginormous duck's bill!
Lapping rhythmically. Thwack! Thwack!
Like no crying I had ever heard. Nor Earthen beauty I had never seen.
Her little lamb legs lumbered over, her awkward thinness and long limbs spilt on top of her,
Her tiny shoulders searching for support from her hips. White aurulent doll head on a stick,
She had sad defeated eyes, whimpering, pathetic,
Too small, and she shuttered and she shook,
And she shivered out every teardrop her body ever made. And she fell back on her bottom, and looked
Up as if to see a white steed standing with her guy striking a poised hand down to her,
He split down the middle, stammering, broken pieces of words crumbling out of his mouth
With eager intentions. He was too weak
To give her his feet, or pull her up in, he hadn't the gumption. He was fully occupied standing,
He wept too; then shuffled a little
Towards where she had fallen. He knew she wasn't right
She couldn't get the devil out of her piercing blue pupils, she couldn't
She lied.
Then she just piled on top of her knees and fumbled as if to rise like a demure lamb trying to rise off its Newborn legs, she just curled her legs,
So stiffly built, and narrow footed, built with such inequality to her siblings,
She got in the way of herself, a little lamb that could not manage.
Too whittled for him, he tried, he really tried, but three years had drained his strength, no real help.
When he sat her upright on her bottom, she opened her eyes, and for a moment smiled, grabbed for His hand but then after awhile she was lost, she lost interest, her pupils wandered.
He was orchestrating everything.
A real project, much more urgent and important. By nightfall she could not stand. It was not
That she couldn't smile or laugh or love, she was born
With everything but the will to live -
That cannot be destroyed, just like a love.
Melancholy was more important to her.
Life could not get her attention.
So she died, with her handles still in her hands, green grass stains her legs.
She did not survive another warm summer night.
And then he wept uncontrollably again.
"The wind is oceanic in the elms
And the blossom is all set."

2

The boy has come back
From the seashore, and atop the plateau.
The woes of women are like a genocide
In the morning, when the killing is over,
And the heat begins, and the bodies lie,
And stark life moves for its sobbing bones,
The curved women move with fire.
Father Father Father the girls
Are weeping, and crying and I cannot resist that gentle frailty
They are shucked in their skin suits rising from their soporific slumbers
In decadent leathers and frou frou dresses. They cling to bold faces,
Nothing can escape that cold crying of women weeping for their princes.
Blood-letting rage cannot overthrow the meadow from the pebble brook,
As a laden head bleats its tarnished tongue across a milky breast, it cannot
Escape the sounds of blue-stained teardrops cascading across the plains,
The sounds of woolbirds braying while their skins are sheared against the
Sluicing sound of water rushing through the flume.
All summer they have lamented, gorging on melancholy, tottering their cotton pyramid heads,
Shaking their cries in deliberation, bald skinny victim women screaming out!
Cotton-mouthed clams yaffing, hearts in panic, wholes of bodies clambering in a *** of woe.
They roost useless, pollard and wethered, jealous
Squinting out the last droplets of desperation from their eyes, screaming their mouths in awful
Togetherness, this cacophony of tortured tongue-song
They curdle the last notes of despair out under knotted breaths
With every inch of strength left inside them, they bray this way and that.
Their mothers scream out in wretched despair, ahhh!
On distant cliffs, on scrawny legs
Their stiff pain goes on and on in the September heat.
"Only slowly their hurt dies, cry by cry,"
Whipped bodies toting wergeld on a shore.

The Day She Died

Was the gloomiest day of the new century,
The first of calamitous, unfortunate autumns to come,
The first dying breath from piceous lungs.

That was yesterday. Early morning, soft rime droplets
Frosted to every blade of grass, not like any other
Earlier June day we've ever had. In the deep twilight
The syzygy announced the moon and demoted the sun.

The Earth-crisp frost nuzzled snow droplets.
Black bands of ravens whipping. Martens littering
Fresh kills of red-eyed rabbits on stark white stale
Summer lawns. A fox grayed, its cold bones
Mapped by ravaged feasts. A possum prowling
In a spot of tawny light.

The concrete spread into a maze
Of black veins ripening in the acute niello
Destitution of its widening cracks,

And when the summer left
It left without her. It will have to accept,
In the paley dim light of this vengeful wilderness -
She is gone.
But for now the warmth has not returned but a naked, half-pomegranate
Rotten moon for us two.
And a great vacancy in our memory.

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.

Let me know the sweetness of the canopy. The gentle cygnet garden you express in rows. I drift upon the aching embers of the bark of midnight's supper, its kingdom of darkness that I lay upon. Suspended in the air, rocking steadily on a distant plateau, tilling the granules of the earth in my map-lined hands; I pinch the rocks and sand kernels naming places as I snap my fingers. I go to the top of the city I know, a small yellow house in a crowd of tall aspens- and the Catholic church sends me soda and small biscuits, and the Hebrews help me be a better man.

I go to a place which has very small rooms. My legs are like a giant world-sized forklifts that carry the heirlooms of my parents in and out of this universe into another. I make a stride to catch a glimpse of you in passing. I tilt my eyes. I hope that I can see how beautiful you are, once more, if only I lift my head  towards the way in which I know you, or the way in which I once had.