Ah! how the memory of

those pretty green eyes

enlighten my senses

making them parallel to

round ***** of safety.



Ah! how those eyes

regurgitate and bounce

pupils widening whenever

my eyes meet their gaze

wavering and moving from

person to person in an intimate crowded group setting.



Ah! how those eyes

which resemble soft moss

or the slick flesh of kiwis

stare at mine catching like how

flypaper catches mosquitoes

accidentally but intentionally

awkwardly but inventively

and ultimately intentionally.



Ah! how the memory of

those pretty green eyes

throw me off balance

when they lock into mine

and for a good ten seconds

merging a little too long

unnoticed by the crowd.


Ah! how those eyes

are like ghosts in my

memories so valid and

plausible they seem to

drift yet knowing they

will be seen tonight

creates a fidgety hope

splintered and shaking

within this hubris heart.



Ah! how those eyes

are framed by the

curliest of lashes

so cute they bloom

ripe smiles within this

here empty chest cavity

which seems to be defeated

at the moment but somehow

waiting to witness

orbs of stegosaurus skin

shelled and shellacked and unbuckled am i

at just a smack.



Ah! how those eyes

are like a slap

to my psyche.

Every part a swirling mass

of unabridged uncertainty.

And no matter how it seems

those irises of gold and green

will always be downright dainty.

Let the poetry of others repose in majestic halls:
My poems are filler for paper shredders,
For packing in shipping boxes,
And backing for flypaper sticky strips;
To wipe the muddy soles of shoes
That have seen too much of springtime
In the garden.

Others poetry fills the airwaves, and sits between the covers of books;
My poetry is for grocery lists,
And sudden messages you need to scribble while on the telephone,
And maps to undiscovered geneological treasures
That are only a township away-
To trace the faces of cool tombstones
Under a mid-day sun.

You won't find my poetry near any other kind of list
That doesn't say get bleach, dog food, and toilet paper.
Still, my poetry is from a well lettered life-
I have written all my heartbeats, and most of my sighs
Into sibylline hieroglyphics, from midnight initiations
In the secret brotherhood, of my own soul:
And I will die a freeman, because nobody
Will ever feel the need to own any of these words.

Alice and I were fudged fruiting inside Falstaffian freakish fleur–de–lys:
She inside a quack–aztec–tattooed tank,
Me inside a pendulous magenta harness with polydactyl–perverted plumes bespattered into it.  
In the ****** **** of that kaput flophouse
We creosoted our conks all the cockatrices of the gorge–de–pigeon,
Inside crotches, Jacuzzis and homocentric Action Men.  
Alice, with the pornographic bend sinisters in the teeth of her poltergeistish fajita crocodile,
Smacked of the plug–ugly poofter of a south–south–west by south sackful sandbank.  
I cemented the jaundiced dangler of an ostrich to my *****.  
With that and my uncut fiddlestick of knobs
I was the idiosyncratic and wholehogging sadomasochistic slapper!

We banged the bush streaming proboscis in tentacle
Through smorgasbords of hermaphrodites and high muck–a–mucks
While Ravi Shankar’s idioglossias and cockchafers juddered our titbits.  
Our Moonies were classically cracked flabelliform by the time we disinterred them.  
Alice managed to fornicate incognito white elephant on behalf of myself
And we were passionately on the back of the dingdong, naked as our Moonies.

We kept one’s pecker up wrapped up in the shadowgraph
Athwart ever-strangling girdles of formaldehyde, ozone, fomenter and widow’s weeds,
Athwart polytetrafluoroethylene–pricked precipices and then down to the butts
Where we both came to a sticky end on our jockstraps and leered at the ballet dancers
That we then penetrated rhythmically by elongating tumescent our gang banging tentacles.  
Through comfortable French knickers I burped, “Thank you for ****** me everywhere, Alice”.  
In the soporific honeypotspunk, aped on the ooze,
I could smell that her **** had made her ******* type soap flakes break the sound barrier,
Splashing out a ***** whale seed skirting her jowls.  
“You’re fragrant, flypaper”, she rapped.

The Government gabble that little green men who hammer out the sexagenarians weren’t on board.  
Inside spleen of the spliffs, inside spleen of my gangrenous Pollyanna, I will over one’s dead body evacuate.  
I will over one’s dead body evacuate.

About the time that the skin around his eyes
and behind his ears matches the evening sky
(black and blue, ****** pockets of purple),
a nurse asks me what happened and I tell her,
against white walls, and over a pile of bruised meat,
and beneath the phantom of a prognosis that includes
the words "injury" and "traumatic" and "brain" which seeped into
the atmosphere hours, but that doesn't make any sense,
because just seconds ago we were drinking
from cheap bottles, the color of honey or flypaper
depending on the place, we had black comedy
smeared across our faces like thick shadows under lamp lights,
we were stumbling across a road together
through the city's living darkness and we were twelve
and we were twenty-four and we were forty-five
all at once and that doesn't make any sense, but it's true.
A nurse asks me what happened and I tell her. But
I leave out the flashbang between the parenthesis,
the part where given the choice
between grabbing him or saving myself,
space and time come undone in the headlights of a truck
and I'm back on the sidewalk before you can say
"self-preservation."
The nurse tells me it was lucky I was there,
and a little clear fluid leaks out of his nose in tacit agreement.

NO. NO SUGAR THANK YOU.

Took the telegram
from the telegram boy.

He looked like an angel.

"STOP!"( stop )it said.
It was from Death.

"Ahhhhh man..!" I said.
"I haven't got time to die!"

I sent a telegram back
quick as a flash.,

" NO STOP!"(stop).

I deleted Death
from my facebook friends.

Death sulked.
Hotfooted it to God..

"Tell himmmm!" Death boo hoo hoo'd.
God called me up.

But I ooops dropped
my mobile down the loo.

Flushed it away.

I hid my soul
behind an ormolu clock

that  hadn't told the right time
for a long time now.

I stuck it to the back
with well masticated chewing gum.

Wrigleys.

The Devil I knew
invited me to tea.

"Is it hot in here or
. . .is it me"

My life struggled like a fly
stuck on flypaper.

"Shall I be mother?"

"One lump or two"
the Devil inquired politely.

"No.  No sugar
thank you!"

Keep packing the sand
grains deep in my brain,
back it up and prepare
for war, cancer climbs
its way down my throat and
nestles in my lungs. Choke me
with your flypaper ideas and rip
off the collected dust on my face.
Abstract art, cigarette love.
Illusions and spiky throats can't
talk or communicate effectively
like a frog with a tongue ring, I
may hook on your lips if you try to kiss
me. sriracha detergent... spin cycle on tremble

I put myself through scratchy throats
And eye drying crimson nights
For a promise

But I'm not doing what I love
I'm loading pressure on my
Weak spots constantly and
Hoping with wandering glances
That I'll catch gold in the wind
With my lashes beant down

With my lips curled into half hearted sneers I wish this
Hollow mask would fade slowly
To reveal
Walking on all fours with
My mouth open to catch your spit
Fun nights of tickling to the last
Dying breath, I'd
Slide ******* to hush your words
And drink up your gasps I would
Rip my tongue on your
Flypaper if you laid it open

If you wished it, your dreams could
Enslave me so
I'd bend back until my spine felt dizzy
But you wouldn't know that
My laughter would be biting back
My blood from its boiling point
I would wait, and in goosebumps pray for
Release

I feel
Every bodies pain
Through the way the hold their mortal dolls
Closed tightly from the world
Their words, as sweaters to contain
Their misery it ferments slowly
The wishes that they left unkempt and growing wild from
Dead innocence, their seeds
Crawling blossoms from the dirt
Catch my fingers sliced open
As they linger to prune

I'd flounder for the night your
Fireflies would glow
Dimly from tired eyes
That peeled the day back
From lovers you watched
Spitting as if to
Bleed yourself back into the ground

I'll wait
As widows to the wind
I'd call and hope for the stars to answer in your name
For you wandered through millennia
To face this
Time of quivering fevers breaking
sweat storms
Of pouring glasses full of
Last years abandoned daydreams
That curdle as we hesitate
To drink them
For a moment where our lives seemed
Less real
And we hunger
For a glance that would wash clear
The smog of our confusion
And tie the tattered ploys of our
Restless youth to the stars

I'd steer them so you could sleep
If only you needed me to

I understand (to the best of an 18 year old's respectively limited understanding) how the heart works, and I know how manipulation works. I'm damaged..I don't think I know what true love might be like, but I know what it feels like to receive it. I know what soulful intimacy is like. I know what it's like to trust someone with your life, but I only know that because I didn't have a choice. I know what it is to lay my mind and body down in submission in the lap of a mad man, and bow to whatever he wants, because you know it's not him, but the "other guy" talking. I know what it's like to think you can save someone if you sacrifice yourself. I know what I thought was love.
I also know what it is to grow up and leave. I know what it is to turn around and bite the hand that fed me poison. I know what it's like to rip out and desecrate the heart of the one who thought he owned mine. I know what it is to be looked at like prey. I know what it is to feel the presence of hot breath on my neck, and have cold chills run down my body and have my stomach turn; legs twitch in anticipation of frantic flight. I know what it is to uproot my future-- my life, wrap my new tender roots in rough burlap, cram them into a small plastic bin, and run.
I know not what it is to stop seeing his truck around every corner. I know not what it is to stop looking over my shoulder. I know not what it is to not be in fear in my own stomping grounds. I know not what it is to not think every set of dim headlights on the dark, unpopulated roads riding too close behind me are him. I know not what it is to breathe easy. I know running away once is not enough.
I know
I know
I know
I know
I know
I knew what I thought was love.
I knew what I made were excuses for inexcusable actions.
I knew I was wrong
I knew he was wrong
I knew
I knEW
I KNEW
I knew he was poison..I didn't want to believe it..he was antifreeze..he was so sweet..honey and molasses and syrup and sap I was STUCK TO HIM LIKE A FLY ON FLYPAPER OH HOW I REGRET EVER SEEING HIS FACE OH GOD, and I when I left, part of me ripped away from my bones, and I'm bleeding out..
No. NO NO NO NO N--
He was a long, slow inhale of mustard gas; burning my lungs and cutting my breath short and sweet. Choking me. Choking me. Choking me.
I know what I thought was love.

Dedicated to the ones who mock us
saying that they haven’t lost anything.

We flaunt flypaper photos,
hoping for horsefly quick fixes,
but I’m no longer
the person in my pictures,
but a spider.
Now, my red eyes burn–
boiling tears whose salt
cannot sustain me.
It’s also evident that
I’m gracelessly aging
as time flies faster;
I’m not having fun.

I’m not having fun.

He– external introspection:
embodiment of possibilities just out of reach.
He– the very visage of perfection,
anonymous, at least to me.
And here but an hour ago we were we.

Garrett let him in through the front door.
“I’m here to see Victor.”
“Sure, let me take you to his room.”
I’ll get questions tomorrow
for which I’ll have no answers or lies,
so I’ll tell the truth:
I poured my heart
into seven heavenly minutes,
only to find it unscathed.
Love is blind lust until
it suffers.

He leaves and I wait for confirmation
that we’ll never speak again.
And it comes.
And I think:
He might have been a pre-med student.
His favorite color might have been yellow.
He might have been able to sing.
He might have been living poetry.
He might have loved Jesus.
His faith in Jesus might have been unshakable.
His name might have been Bradley.
His best friend might have been his mother.

My hands are ******
from raking the needles out of the hay,
but I found you
(although you were a little damaged)

My mind is a flypaper,
catching the sand
that you rub from your eyes
(your self discovery carves a valley in me)

And its OK for you to
let your snot bubbles
pop on my shirt
(I haven’t washed it in a few days anyways)

I don’t mind if you are vulnerable,
your openness is fresh air
my own tar soaked lungs are envious
(They ****** my words into criminals)

My arms are like old covered wagons
Slapping their rusted skeletons
Left to dry in a mountain’s pass
(but they will still give you shelter if you happen to get lost)

i'm feeling empty
inside
like someone took an
ice cream scoop
and hollowed out my
stomach more easily than
sawing open and
gutting out a cantaloupe.

there's nothing in there
nothing where the seat
of my emotions
used to be
because when i'm alone
even the anger
dulls to the stab of a poorly
sharpened knife.

i've stood in the hot
white kitchen with the tall
metal countertops
some stiff sort of summer
breeze fluttering the
ineffective flypaper
stringing the low ceilings
and watched you
precisely section off a
watermelon.

but now i'm the one on that
hackneyed cutting board
and you don't even notice the
juice streaming to the edge.

my overactive mind
used to be a razor
slicing quickly
almost painlessly
but now it's just a dull
serrated edge scraping
along my slowly
ripping skin.

everyone sitting at
the dinner table
passing me around and
laughing as they sink
their forks into me
and you always wondered
why i avoided family
meals at all costs.

i'm being
eaten alive
like fruit
in the summer
and your only
concern is how
many slices you'll
get out of me
and whether or not
i was sweet enough.

Beauty is pain.
It draws them in like flies.
They have caught their legs
in my flypaper hair.
And rip them off, one by one.
They fall like eyelashes into my palm.
They love, they love.
I cannot.

Dear Coshocton, Ohio-

           I remember how warm you seemed. Not in the traditional sense of the word, but in a way that evoked feelings of safety, comfort, and care. In a time before I knew the true meaning of red and blue, did not realize the depth of ideological division, and assumed that nothing existed beyond the eggshell walls of our town, you taught me the meaning of community. Perhaps you were a community to which I never fully belonged, or maybe I just never earned my place, but you are also a world from which I know I will never be apart.

          Coshocton, you showed me the strength of caring for everyone, young and old. Your chipped-paint homes and run-down factories and aged population all represent a better time but possess the undying hope that this better time was only a state of mind which you never left behind.

          I remember the trips to the library, where swarms of sticky-fingered children and their families listened to story time as I clambered to make conversation with people nine times my age, stumbling over my words and speaking with the staggering and lilting speech of one who has not yet learned what not to say and when not to say it.

         Coshocton, you gave me the first memories I ever had, laughing with friends and sledding down hills, wandering around a house much too big for me, wonderfully satisfied with what life had provided and wishing for nothing more than to continue being happy.

          I know I will always be indebted to you, and for that I apologize, for I will never return what you offered. But you are so much more than what I owe you or what you granted me. You are a community, a city, a history, a people, a tiny dot on a map of cornfields and flatlands and run-down highways, a little theater in a dilapidated strip mall, an annual fair in the midst of an ailing community, a possibility for revitalization at the hands of your now-grown youths, a piece of flypaper in a sea of mousetraps, you were a gift.

         You are a gift.

         Thanks for everything.

of flypaper
hanging on the walls

floating in the air
trapped in bathroom stalls.

And every fly
that whizzes by

is intoxicated with
my sweet perfume.

But little do they know
they're flying to their doom!

The Confrontation

he is stirred by buzzing thoughts, irritating him to wakefulness;
mobile, random and annoying for they last but a moment and
his sticky flypaper hands cannot capture and eradicate them into
existence fast enough to make them permanent, shareable and eased.

5:54am
Tue., the seventh day of the sixth month of MMXXII

postscript

he desperately fails to recall the world word labyrinth that urged him to rise and capture the wild animals that roared and removed his half-notions from the lifting fog of consciousness. Alas, they are just like specks of new sunlight upon a linen of grassy, newly watered wet greens; here today, instantaneously, gone and gone and gone. Instead,
he writes of their early death and mourns the brevity of their beauty,
and thinks not of the wasted times of the last seventy years.

She’s locked herself up again
Despite his lies and her own truth
She finds herself back at the beginning
Shackled

Desperate to fill the void
As loneliness stabs at the open wound
Penetrating deep into her soul
Where the damage can be found

She keeps that hidden and locked away
The pain it reveals is beyond compare
She’ll choose to be mistreated
Anything to steer clear of there

The child longing to be accepted
Who cannot accept herself
Is consciously blind to their deception
And true love displaying itself

A heart still broken
A thousand pieces longing to mend
She covers herself in flypaper
And is insulted as the infection sets in

She’s hidden the keys again
Despite the burden she carries
She’ll suffer into the next end
Shackled

i want to prose you on the kitchen table

with my smile melting into your own.

and i want to prose you as colors of the sunset

awash your skin,

preserving our moment in amber.

oh,

and can i prose you in the morning

before we go to work

and sleepiness has

            not quite

fled from our muscles?


i want to prose you while your fingertips

trail from

my cheek

to my hair

to my shoulders,

effortless like water

trickling down the length of me.

i want to prose you

roughly,

            gently,

     quietly,

loudly,

taking our time,

lettings details fill themselves

between the hours.

i want to prose you in the dead of winter,

with the fire crackling like a whispered secret,

and in the slowest molasses days of summer,

when grime and sweat clings to flypaper skin.


i will prose you ‘till we are speechless,

and sleeping tucked between the pages of a masterpiece.

the muchness of people only starts to bother me when I don’t feel like enough
And I wish I could honestly say it was all your fault the way I sometimes act like it is
but I know my agression and annoyance is only a response to the emptiness
A need to feel something and it comes out as attacking and I belittle you and make you feel small knowing it won’t make me feel bigger or better only more bitter at the way
that you love.
The way that you look at me through soft eyes when I’m ******* you
The way you feed me when I take and take and purge it all back up and say it’s not good enough to appease me
Your patience when I’ve pushed you away with rolled eyes and locked jaws
I can hear you silently standing up for yourself
Knowing you deserve better
Kinder
Softer

I know my soul does too

These clenched teeth have snarled and growled
I hope I’ve never bitten you
But your hands are so giving
and so forgiving
So long and gracious and always outstretched towards my cheek
as you turn the other one
away from me

The sweet Venus fly trap of life

in these words I hope you find wings
or tenderness
I would open my jaws and set you free if you ever asked
but you are the sweet flypaper in my life and if the roles were reversed,
I wouldn’t have a reason for leaving

sometimes it is easier to laugh, and other times, its weeping, its complete falling down the waterfall, sailing on a little leaf , next to rats who eat my body, make commercials for cheeses, they have the hunger in their eyes and their pick their teeth with toothicks, hang back with their bellies full and watch the stars overhead, triumphant and warm, rats,coated in ****, content as can be, straight out of a disney movie, their coats distinctive from one another, scampering down the way, always looking for realism, jealousy isn’t an issue, envy is motivation. Ever lasting life. hellish little rodents, swine, but honest.
can I lick the fabric, the flypaper, and hope that my tounge won’t dissolve? crushing it with my fist, its something new, and I don’t understand that. How do things tell stories? Why do I continue to feel moral, even in the face of the most liberating hell, that speaks true to my rattling bones, what is the string on top of my head that levitates me towards the heavens, forcing me to believe, to give my body to it, to starve for it, to throw it upon gears, singing gospel and hating the lie churning in my gut, why do I repent when I know a closeted sinner is blessed as well

"I love you"
Funny, mechanic, polite
Sticky flypaper
Chewing paper
Tobacco filter
Pretty, warm, sugarcane
My *** and whiskey lies
I'm trying to abstain

Like passing off my straight coke
As *** n Coke to a drinking friend
Who will never understand
And I don't love you,
But with a watered down reply
And a smile wound too tight
Think maybe someday it won't hurt

To not walk alone at night, or to
Swim with someone watching out so
I don't. Disappear. But instead I'm unwillingly ensnared
Netted so I can't
Dive away in the stormy sea
By you
It's immaterial, I could go, should go, any time
Though how many have I hurt by... shredding their
Expensive ****** fishing gear

When I go night swimming alone
All I think of is someone else beside me

And when you're in the car in the drive
Picking me up instead
I feel oil, dust, condensation and ..
...
I'm heading for a reparation, instead,
Because "I love you" makes my heart, head
And tongue full of lead.

sometimes it is easier to laugh, and other times, its weeping, its complete falling down the waterfall, sailing on a little leaf , next to rats who eat my body, make commercials for cheeses, they have the hunger in their eyes and their pick their teeth with toothicks, hang back with their bellies full and watch the stars overhead, triumphant and warm, rats, clean as can be, straight out of a disney movie, their coats distinctive from one another, scampering down the way, always looking for realism, jealousy isn’t an issue, envy is motivation.  Ever lasting life.  hellish little rodents, swine, but honest.

can I lick the fabric, the flypaper, and hope that my tounge won’t dissolve?  crushing it with my fist, its something new, and I don’t understand that.  How do things tell stories?  Why do I continue to feel moral, even in the face of the most liberating hell, that speaks true to my rattling bones, what is the string on top of my head that levitates me towards the heavens, forcing me to believe, to give my body to it, to starve for it, to throw it upon gears, singing gospel and hating the lie churning in my gut, why do I repent when I know a closeted sinner is blessed as well

Thinking about planned obsolescence in nature
Trying to find a way to justify capitalism
Where every act of immediate gratification
Is a crack of the whip
And every lash, every scar
Is accompanied by a token with a price tag
Battered batteries not fit for a landfill
Fat on flattery, pandering to wishing wells
Mad about mattering

Holding mass at a molasses menagerie
Of flypaper families with hourglass salaries
Bending to plastic
The **** from caste to caste is drastic
Might not be able to patch it
Empathetic, but that feeling clashes
With everything we're asked
And everything we're tasked with

It's for the greater good of the individual

We reduce our words to mere talking
Happiness is an entangled heart and mind
Mellow are the landmines
That blow up all our skies
We are drying our flypaper
In your sunlight
The heat and rhythm
Make you blind
So sell me
Your skyscrapers
And movie theaters
Tonight
These signals are dry
And so are your hands
Chapped lips
Don't make many men grin
But your lipstick is invisible
Like painted nails and murals
On the floor of my bedroom
We fold the laundry
And dry our towels in the Sun

NO. NO SUGAR THANK YOU.

Took the telegram
from the telegram boy.

He looked like an angel.

"STOP!"( stop )it said.
It was from Death.

"Ahhhhh man..!" I said.
"I haven't got time to die!"

I sent a telegram back
quick as a flash.,

" NO STOP!"(stop).

I deleted Death
from my facebook friends.

Death sulked.
Hotfooted it to God..

"Tell himmmm!" Death boo hoo hoo'd.
God called me up.

But I ooops dropped
my mobile down the loo.

Flushed it away.

I hid my soul
behind an ormolu clock

that hadn't told the right time
for a long time now.

I stuck it to the back
with well masticated chewing gum.

Wriggly's.

The Devil I knew
invited me to tea.

"Is it hot in here or
. . .is it me"

My life struggled like a fly
stuck on flypaper.

"Shall I be mother?"

"One lump or two"
the Devil inquired politely.

"No. No sugar
thank you!"