The chemo makes you tired at first,
So you tend to sleep the day of treatment.

But throughout the week,
The radiation takes its toll.
I watch it slowly unfurl inside of you.

Your joints ache like there are embers between the bones,
And your belly fills with hot, heavy lead,
And your tonsils swell with fluid,
And your *******, traitorous with tumors, are sore and bruised.

This is a pain that eats at you:
Your nerves, your patience, your kind words.

You’re a *****. Vicious and unrepentant. It hurts.

I become petty and spiteful,
Convinced you are determined to make me suffer with you.

You tell me that I don’t care about you anymore.
And I ask you why you can’t appreciate the things I do for you more.

But today,
You showed me how your hair had lost most of its ***** curls,
The follicles soft and preparing for departure,
And you cried because your wig, while pretty, didn’t look like you.

I can only hold your swollen hand
And promise to draw your eyebrows for you.

As long as it doesn't affect me;
as long as it's not immediately relevant
and something I have to immediately worry about;
as long as it doesn't **** up
my credit score
or my
shiny
new
house
then,
**** it.

And
*******,
for bringing it to my attention.

how dare you.

this was promised to me,
it's predestined,
my two-story, three bedroom, two bath; the foreign workmanship and american artifice; the creamy halo of vinyl in the sun; the wrath of windexed windows and their hard missiles of bright, reflected sunlight; the soft lips of my children; my wife's pillowy, warm stomach and scratchy *****; our retriever that eats his own ****, picking apart tiny specks of feces from the sun-pricked tips of our rug of fescue; these are the works of God, this is the land of God. You are marring this flat earth

I’m  at work
Buzzing to get out of there
Out of the fluorescence
And the din of screaming children
As it downplays the howling heads
Of their mothers who
Dream of their children’s exposed
Necks and getting out of the grocery store
Before it starts to rain.

I am Bobcat Goldthwait
underneath
The large hanging lamps,
pale green as barge lights
I make little sounds with my lips
And tongue, little incoherent sounds
To push the time forward .

A man comes through
My line holding a beige patch
Of cloth
Over his exposed trachea beneath,

with a voice like he crushes cement
puts it in his coffee
and ***** it up through a fiberglass straw.,
He drops some
Toothpaste and a brush on the counter
And says to me with that mutilated
Voice:
“there are only two types of *****,
Big old *****,
And old big *****.”

His skin is blotchy in the cheeks
like the husks of craters seen from the sky,
and the corners of his mouth
are dry and cracked
snaking and splitting outward like dry riverbeds.

For a second I want to laugh so hard,
That people will think I’m crazy, and
Maybe one of the twitchy managers will have
Me committed.

If he says any more, it’s this:
“You’re young, enjoy it,
if you worry
About the fuckups now,
you’ll Be worrying
until you’re an old ******
and that doesn’t do you any good,
***** hates the old **** ups.”

Walking home,
a girl in an orange
of a shirt and long
bell-bottoms
with a small protuberant
***
turned around to look at me.

Her eyes were large,
and the way she looked at me
was a question almost:

Are you dangerous?

Maybe, she wasn't looking at me,
maybe the breeze kicked up,
and she just wanted to shield herself.

But I don't know,
something in the way
she looked at me,


The quick stoicism
of her large blue eyes,
shocked into a quick
heavy moment of recognition:

black guy.
hoodie.
black baggy pants.
the scowl.


I knew that soon her eyes
would wiggle out of there sockets
and dangle behind her
always looking back
even as she kept moving forward.

The illusion of moving forward.

I felt like the black guy
the news tells you about,
the one that's dangerous
to all lonely white females
at 9:00 at night,
as his tongue lolls
and his head wags.

Maybe,
I'm being too sensitive.

Maybe,
I'm being hypersensitive.

Why is it
that whenever I see a white female
walking towards me at night
I cross the street?

you smell the same way i always remembered you


like a sweet musk musty with sweat and heartache
every crinkle on your face
every single pore

was almost forgotten


but honey,
i will keep your lips from getting chapped ever again

just wait wait wait.
wait just a little longer

i know it's hard

but when we wrap ourselves in each other

and the skin of my hands
is your skin on your face
and the freckles on my knees
are your freckles on your shoulders

and the light that shines in my eyes is a greyblueblack

happiness
will evade us
we won't apologize to anyone

for the grains of sand under our fingernails

i will sigh every winter
deep, just like you

and we will breathe the same air

like we share the same lungs
same heart
same eyes
same face


same hands

My words, defiant, deny me;
they speak in low voices
on dark porches, lose me
in strange cities;

they forget the warmth
of my mouth.

Eyeing me suspiciously,
smug with voweled virtue,
they dismiss my attempts
at reconciliation, saying only

We don't even know who you are *anymore.