you read those books where they build girl angels in laboratories
who fall in love with lonely boys.

you like hearing your poems
read back to you in english accents
and you like your accents
licking on your poems
because, if I recall,  you’re heart-broken
--no I haven’t forgotten,
yes I remember, you were the
curvaceous queen of unskinned knees;
I was ****** in jeans.
you got partway through Swann’s Way,
but gave up last November,
when I was hitting walls hard.
the last words  you read were the last
on your mind, “Happiness is beneficial for the body--”
and you stopped, that was fine enough
for a tattoo. (happy needle,
breast imbrue)
Well grief taught me, grief bought me,
and I was hitting walls hard.
But straight back  for you,  to boys kissing boys
and  you’re too old for toys  and
you think it’s pathetic
how girls go to get it
with silicon and plastic
oh go on, tell me how
you’re a heart-breaker, ha,
because you showed them
your *******, like an angel.

you like to remind me how skinny you are now,
and you still love to dance.

There is no equivalent factory making boy angels.

Her name was this unforgettable charm
I was overwhelmed
By her sky like beauty
Ever widening
Into separate heavens,
Her voice
Will promise you
The song of forever
She is enigmatic,
Pressing into my ribs
Like a ghost does
When it flies back home,
She was firm
As two cantaloupes
Dripping and dripping
I love her;
Her core to her sky
Once, twice, into eternity
There’s a crater
That matches her hand
Scarred into my heart
Maybe and often entangled together
She appear as daydreams
But she is real,
I feel it more
Then I care to admit,
Like a Plath’s poem
She pinches the heart
Of her reader,
She can lick the truth
From your false face
O’ her eyes,
Can start a drama,
As her friend Isabelle says,
She reads books
Of only dead people,
So does she talks to their ghosts,
Slowly she moves
Like a never fading colour,
Filling up your tea cup
Maybe with something more than tea,
You’ll know her more
When her honey dripping voice fills your ears,
Nothing is new
Nothing is mystery
Apparently
She is
Fragile
Fervent
She is unskinned
And
Red

Sing forth the treasons,
the seasons have been sung
long before revolting - D minored
the winter, G majored the spring...
Bah, the seasons never heard
these grovelling breaths,
but ****** them deaf up.

Give lung to the unbreathed
rumors squat below the bridge,
that the tumors unskinned,
revealed pulsing on our red,
white - blue tunneled drums -
these cancers defiling the myth of us.

The fall does not applaud
the clapping of leaves, but
strips us to bone, and the
blown away come to us cardboard,
cornered in the cold sun, unsung,
mocking the radio comforts of disdain.

Our own unmaking, unmasked
and riven with lies - lies and all lies
reinforced with steel and striped beams,
stiff on a pole, snapping as whips
on a cotton bent back - crowed
as every patriot hymn
fades in a grumble.

Such joyful music this treason,
this treason not treason,
this discomfiting strained ensemble
sparing neither breath nor ear
the true screech of anthems -
beat, immobile chords,
chained and ghetto thirds,
cast-off tritones, contrapuntal,
scraped on gut and strung up,
and over the laminate woods of us.