Inscrutable/Irresistable Forces

inscrutable/irresistible forces pushed the anasazi
northward, away from their cliff fortresses
they turned me left for some reason
to drift to some burnt-coffee town

to become really properly alcoholic takes practice
and of course careful study of the masters
that said my own small contributions
had begun to show potential

i did about as much damage to your oceanic heart
as wingtips knifing the surf along highway 1
most nights i felt a canyon in my chest
but some i felt alright

a plane passing in front of the moon over oakland
would just like to please remind all passengers
california can be a paradise on earth
if only you'll have her

i put more effort into falling asleep than the precision with which i smear eyeliner
over circles every morning to look as effortless as possible
at night i count carefully, one two three, through hundreds and hundreds
and sometimes manage to keep away the most intrusive of thoughts

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzKnAshv96g

spindled deer legs kicking
thrashing death metal
youtube videos about
spitting up and
spilling all the blood on the
grass frozen in the tundra
the sun sets more than it
rises in the east, toward the sea
foam washing up on the shore
rabies makes the ocean's
scary depths that cannot be
quantified all that more
terrifying creatures rise
from her murky bottom
the geometry is all wrong

then and now

I remember when
music playing and looking at
you was
something I wanted to do for
all time

I thought love
was like a mountain
unchanging
snow accumulating
and melting and sliding almost unnoticed
off its back

now I sit making your birthday card
my hands cold in my freezing room with
the broken window
the love of two people is nothing to
a mountain--
weather and the flow of
water is perhaps life herself

terminal and white and quietly parallel (at least one line taken from every poet on the site)

i hope i wounded you. i hope
under sickly corals scraping how the fluids pumped,
all broken down inside.
I'll lug the guts into the neighborhood--stray them
where all the buildings look the same and the
clammy night not so bad when i try to think of reading your mind:
the little tears collecting like stamps in the corners of my eyes,
tiny indignities and filthy,
turning into a weird scab on the side of my mouth.

realistic responses to your touch
made me feel my blood again.
surely a 5"x5"x5" tank cannot be so comfortable.
i thought it was lonely without the sun .

i hope i wounded you. i hope
you miss me and i hope it hurts so bad to see
old friends who don't love you anymore.
this sick satisfaction is worth
seeing your face again

proposal to NASA:

I.
fill satellite with Hall & Oates entire discography
and also a photograph of Hall & Oates
as an illustration on the best of our kind

And they say ''Hi, how you doing'', but is it really me, or you,

II.
launch Rich Girl I and await first contact with
various alien life-forms
that have come in hopes of grooving

Is it a star?

III.
watch as your family is enslaved by
the aliens that have begun to worship
Hall & Oates as gods. we are not worthy we are slaves to Hall & Oates

all broken down inside.

we're the most magnificent species in the known universe
though we have stated the tapeworm is pretty cool too

we can take bottles of whatever from anywhere and
slide them into secret pockets of our messenger bags

when sam 'short dawg' ODs on heroin atop his mom's
grave we leave candles with labels of saints or Christ

when spirituality is left hollow from drugs or money
or fucking we fuck or take drugs or spend money and

wait for a time when our watch again strikes the 1/5th
hour to kiss a chronically imploding sense of the 'self'

I'll lug the guts into the neighborhood--stray them in the
tired old asphalt along with all these crinkled ole receipts

it only rains up

here are the things Sparks says he likes
about the world from the monkey-bars:
Upside-down sky means if you grow too
tall you hit your head on the floor.
 It only rains up. The short guys always win.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Sparks is short. he keeps his arms crossed like laces
when he hangs from the bars by his knees, his face red pizza,
he says, I heard girls keep food for later inside of their bras.
I kick the gravel.
I'm too tall for the monkey bars. I saw Sparks' older
sister's underwear once--she changed, unzipped her jeans,
didn't close the bathroom door the whole way, I didn't look away
not even when she saw me--but I won't tell him.
he says, I touched a girl's bra before. I say, Let's go to the river.
-----------------------------------------------------
the bottoms of rivers look like tea cups, mud swirl
mocha. my mother let me taste her coffee before and I
hated it. grown-ups only like things that taste bad. frogs
jump, skitter. a half-chewed bird flows downstream
in a dead way. the dark things in the woods would
eat us but Sparks won't let them. Come and get us,
he says. he waves a stick. Sparks always cries when he
scrapes his knees--he turns away his face, but I still see them,
the little tears collecting like stamps in the corners of his eyes.

i have perfected the pretend people
and their way of speaking
watching youtube videos
on faking a foreign accent
and practicing on the 9

do you see how i can be
just as obnoxious as the meth addicts
messily making out and groping each other
as i say in my new zealand accent
some people will do anything for love

Attention Ladies!

now available: one (1) caucasian male
weight 70 kilograms
gently used

• can follow simple instructions
• realistic responses to your touch

There are many people to meet--the years to forget that you do not need them at all until the very end right before you:

a frog pool is very confusing in the toilet 

5 minutes to tell the child that the frog is not swimming

however, in my head i did not know at the time

i thought it was lonely without the sun 

why would i lie about it until all the way to the top frogs were stacked 

nobody belonged there and neither did you

remember when we were a little more
stupid and a little more thin, when we fought over
who would be the least likely to
work in a cubicle and who would
marry last and who hated the most
people in the realest way and
 who would die first due
to the poorest lifestyle choice?

everyone wanted the title of Craziest Aunt.
we all settled for I Hate Kids, I'd Never Have Them
Anyway, They Just Poop and Sleep, Don't People Know
We Have an Overpopulation Problem. we had malthus fever.

we stripped headphones, shirts, pants in public parks
 and read our classic novels on benches, always with
 the title visible to passerby--
gum bubble nabokov cut-denimed summer,
men looked at my naked legs and i looked at the
page without reading it.

we laughed about it later like, What a creeper.
nine someones said that summer, I guess you could
say I'm old for my age, blew smoke rings in parents'
backyards, we were ancient, we were fossils. we imagined
 ourselves ruins of fallen shopping malls, It's weird, right, people
think I'm in college but I'm only seventeen--
we broke into swimming pools and someone always
 slept next to the toilet when we drank.

feel nostalgia for a chain coffeeshop, summer
specialty iced mochas they sell in every town.
 none of this ever belonged to you in the first place.

folk punk song

i'll write a list of charges and read them over the phone, if you ask me
you can admit to all of them if you want and apologize, i suppose
i'll check them off one by one and try to keep my voice steady
you might check the sincerity of your tone and i'll hang up eventually
and we'll both soon find that neither of us feels better, and never will

love poem about the musician from New York who asked for my number today

your apparently once-gaged ear scars
match that pimple I keep picking at that's
turning into a weird scab on the side of my mouth

poem about love i think

humans in the aboriginal stages
they accept this blazon fervently
if the ache aboriginal develops, that is,
there may be no affection at all

when her blight advances
the affection may become apparent
if that affection is empiric

the alone should argue with her physician
the alone should again backpack outdoors
and proctor tests to acquire or abide there

whether she, alone, accepts breast blight or doesn't

clear browser history

all day i wake up to the
fecal familiarities
of shared living space

tiny indignities and filthy
little sins you can't
use my car you can't
shit right now i'm shaving and
the dishes, always

always
always
the dishes

i feed my fish four times a week
four orange pellets and watch
it swim and ambush and float
through murky, low waters

i feel guilty for not giving it a proper home
surely a 5"x5"x5" tank cannot be so comfortable

everyone was real emotional at 5pm on a sunday drinking their unfinished shower beers 

cause no one could get what they wanted and now i guess they wouldn't try anyway

but even if that sounds like giving up it can also be seen as living in paradox 

which is a complex and difficult thing to do. so don't be so harsh to those people

when they are trying to find a better way to look at whatever thing is right in front of

them. plz include your comments below because that is a thing right in front of me. 

wow oh boy lets keep going, can i keep going on you? can we all keep it to 

ourselves in our time of need. a time that is better for the duration of (it will end 

soon! so laugh and cry while you can) a place that we could invent together

between the aisles six and seven. i think walking will be our form of running away. 

kite

my father says you died when he
was 17. you were his closest friend. you fell from the

 edge of a canyon, hang-gliding. your head cracked
open on a rock just like eggs against the counter.

your obituary was the kind of joke he thinks you
would have liked. you pissed him off, he says:

you were too nice to his mother, you combed
your hair always the right way, you were always
over for dinner when he wanted most to be alone.
“What can I do to help, Miz Reichelt—“ that’s what you
always said. you had too gummy of a smile.

my father says all these things on the way to
another funeral of another friend, this time
a math teacher with bone cancer. he looks
so tired. he says, Every funeral is that
first funeral. he says, Stupid prick.

my yearly phoenix death poem

this place
where all the buildings look the same and the
grid system is like counting blessings
43 44 45th avenue
the gender roles locked in tight and
the sexual energy as dull
as the dead air and as authentic as
the palm trees imported from
who-knows-where somewhere maybe
perhaps they gave shade there instead of
a complimentary view
included with the air conditioning and football
games

millions of people live here and yet
I've never heard of a single one of them

Sagas of rapture and loathing

he masons his sword of molybdenum
and shatters his garment of rock,
his owls and peacocks are all at the ready
beards drawn long and fewer atop.

his threadbare financials are void of an ending
the boundaries volunteer themselves thin.
dusty dim-witted advice vies attention
but the elephant fits cozily within.

colleagues collectively file coffins
and carve the soap into walls
his masons forgo his swords of molybdenum
and go swimming all through the halls.

maybe i could end up in central california

by my favorite venue and the ocean,

and we'd be three-quarters complete

tomorrow i'll wake up and contemplate it further

clammy night not so bad when i try to think of reading your mind

walk the streets to see you come and go, whoever you were

you didn't turn around but i caught a glimpse of your head

walking past my fence. the reason wants to be found out

these days. even sitting in here i have to put my spoon down

when i catch the fading light playing on your hair like a memory

out -- of -- place. try to order it but give up too soon.

horoscope poem, pt. 2

leo
the universe isn't listening to you, so why
keep roaring about it? the streets outside your bedroom
fill with too much traffic for the sky to hear about you
and your infinite stubbed toes,  lover with halitosis,
aging parents, favorite shirts grayed in the wash. if you
 still want the world to listen to you, why don't you try
 opening your own pickle jars for once.

virgo
there is a steep fall coming for you. avoid
the panes of windows, the cracks between blinds.
this fall will find you: you know this, awake
sweaty some nights from the spill and sharp of it.
tie your shoes carefully, but don't fright.
the ground doesn't hurt you as much as it ought.

libra
toss out the nostalgia with the garbage, libra, is the past really as
clean as you remember it? your mother still keeps boxes
of your baby teeth. you feel trapped-- the secret
lies in your own adult molars, those silver cavity plugs.
your twin daughters pierce their navels this week. look
every gift horse in the mouth and you may find the voice
you've been searching for.


scorpio
that nickel scent you've been smelling but can't place?
it's no jar of quarters, no grandmother's perfume. potpourri
and pumpkin pie won't cover it. scorpion, your barbed tail
and easy-edged words mean you never look for pain in your own
scraped knees. find the source of the bleeding and apply pressure.
tourniquets will come in unexpected places-- the neighbor girl
with her nervous smile and soft cheeks.

Sacramento class struggle

deadbolt lock
flourescent buzz on linoleum floor
dinner is beer and box of blueberries
fold-out brokeback futon

let the freeway be your ocean

from the family desk

well, it was my duty
   I must have put it behind something
hey, you're taller than me

um a box of
   I have been a heck of a house guest
is that box one or two

don't let it get too dry
   located the decadent stuff here

at the end of the day it is what
   it is what it is thinking about what
it is going to eat

   oh look there's steak

are you against the idea that single amputees are always pirates?

i wouldn't

my legs turn purple and orange when I take showers
my face turns red when I'm drunk or laugh too hard or
randomly when I speak out in class
my hands are slightly more yellow than
my arms and
I get a dark crease on my stomach
when I lean forward in my chair

I wish those were the colors they meant
those people that said
'wait until she shows her true colors'

a horoscope poem, pt. 1

aries:
look for hope in the space beneath your bed,
next to the pairs of socks you wore long after dirty.
ram of mine, stay angry or the world will dissolve
into shades of medication, dramamine for the plane and
advil for  your frequent migraines, hard consonants that
sound too much of alien planets. fix your troubles: set your
thermostat to 73 and flip a coin.

taurus:
grip the wheel and lean your body into gravity's arms
when driving around steep curves. the weather this week
will be teenaged car accidents and death that skids out
of control. let your bull-hands hold too hard on the
things you love and don't be afraid to strangle.
if you clean the moldy food out of your fridge
you won't feel your own mortality so much.

gemini:
your hardwood floors are killing your softness,
darling twin, carpet your world! men with binoculars
watch through your keyhole. lock the doors.
keep them out. the only hardness that belongs
in your heart is a whiskey miniature; the only man,
a moon in a dream you had once.

cancer:
sing songs of longing to your showerhead when
the bards aren't looking. there is only so much birdsong
 you can see before you die-- don't stay inside long, little crab,
 the walls will keep you like formaldehyde. pretty girls
with painted toes and short smiling fingers wait for you
at the stop sign between here and nowhere.  find them. smell
in their skin every flower they've ever picked.

We Are Not In A Bar

But if this were a Contemporary American Poem
There would be a bird or a ghost
Passing through you like music through a stained
Glass window or a newspaper
Through the street.

No, it would definitely be a bird,
A hummingbird to be exact
And you would be cupping it
Like it was the last snowflake

And its heart would be beating
or not beating.

But this is not a Contemporary American Poem.
There is definitely not a bird,
And if there were, it would definitely not be a
Hummingbird. And there is
Not a ghost.

You thought there was a
ghost, But it was

Just R-Kelly's Memoir, Soulacoaster
Which is like a ghost because
They are both transparent.

No, this is not a Contemporary
American Poem. This is a party.
And you're here, and you're enjoying yourself.

wearing the same pair of underwear for 48 hours

aloneness is something

to be held close to the chest

and cradled: the only prayer

i've ever known. my housemates

have all flown back to their families.
i must be the last november goose 

left in iowa and i like

things to be just so:

ceilings and joints sounding of settling in unison, 

peeing with the door open, salsa and tortilla

 chips for thanksgiving dinner

junta

writing a poem now because later I will be drunk and hopefully the last thing on my mind will be poems and how they need to be written.

I read a book that told me to start writing short sentences in order to become a better writer but I don't have any short sentences yet.
I am stringing together a long complex idea and I do
n't know where it begins and where it ends yet, there are some shaky
transitions. There are some grandiose, triple-letter score words in there
that I really have no business using. There Is The Pretentious Usage of Capitalization
and lots of excess modifiers, conjunctions, and other words that I don't know how to label.

tonight I am going to drink wine and probably say things that are half-calculated half-geniune
I will hope to sound smart, well-read, politically moderate, and highly independent given my socially embedded gender/sex/sexuality. I will hope not to spill any wine on my white shirt.
I Will Be Thankful for The Things and Feelings That I Have and Try Not to Cry So Much.

watching every wes anderson movie I remember
when owen tried to kill himself

when he did it I wonder if
his brother's acting came to mind

did he think of how romantic it seemed on screen

or how there is nothing beautiful about
carefully composing it
when there are no cameras

turkey day musings

it is interesting to
be a different person to everyone I meet
my mother's daughter is not
my father's daughter and
the girl so serious in class is
also the one who shrieks like a
child in her bedroom
and the feminist is also
the woman who helps cook thanksgiving dinner
clucking like a hen
sometimes the steamy image in the post-shower mirror
sometimes the disembodied thoughts of no one
--

every time I brush my teeth my gums bleed
maybe I am trying too hard

i am in my house of dawn
molten light streaming across
the arches of my feet
a thick, curved hip

i have seen myself as
the queen of wands
trapped in the hard amber
savoring the weight of a staff

at my right,
the stag is large
heavy in his own crowned way
shaking off the dew of every morning after

what i touch
turns to sour wood
liquid sap running slow
filling up every insect that dares to

slip inside

talkin 'bout my generation

watching people age
age comfortably
in arm chairs
god I hope
to never be comfortable
in my life
I hope my creaking bones
move as constantly as
my anxious heart

trailer

a driveway island
blankets and propane
stolen sparkling in the fridge
amy winehouse and a certain
peculiar odor leaking from vents
the closet bathroom, a good place
to hide the thanksgiving turkey, yeah?

"that's beyond the scope of my
project"--watch the philosophy TA's
little mice hands scrabble her glasses

back up her nose when you ask her
questions for which she doesn't have
an answer. make it a game to research

philosophers she probably hasn't studied
just for the satisfaction of her easy
mechanical reaction, her sick little palsied

blink, the "that's beyond the scope of
my project" and then the round glasses--
like Sisyphus' boulder, you watch them

again and again slip back to base and wonder
what kind of masochism it implies that she
hasn't gotten contacts already

like visiting a zoo you only feel bad once -- warn me in colorful flowers placed on my windowsill 

slowly gluing some thing back together, a specifically meaningful action seems so  

unbelievable in the face of what i understand - are animals specifically more aware of certain information? 

how many times you stubbed your toe today vs how many people smiled at you today 

unfortunately that's enough reason for why you always fake leaving

i finally heard a one direction song
and i don't get it
i just don't
get it

and since moving to a city
i have been able to find music
in the sounds of buses stopping
and swerving around other motorists

there is a song in putting your life
into a grumpy bus driver's hands
and the notes all sound garbled through
the speaker

teAARRGEESSSSs
and university
next stop

san francisco (words+inspiration from Max's Urbanism IV)

I think of years later,
like that day on the subway
when rain crept across the rubber mats
passengers stepped on
pushing wet hair out of their eyes

This commute is routine now,
crossing the water and admiring
nametags on roofs and tunnels
your encouraging words still
ring with the sound of train brakes

With spilt coffee, the rush to exit,
and the sharp burn of ocean wind
or maybe the lack of service this
route maintains its reputation for,
I missed your call, again

Urbanism IV

Years later by coincidence
unexpected layover strands me
once more in your city

Here, winter sounds are rubber
the hiss of tires through slush
squeaking wet soles

It was cold then too, but
you of the starbucks eyes
made me feel my blood again

The espresso machine shrieks
somewhere out there in the grey
my train replies

Snow falls, I'm flipping my phone
open and shut, open and shut
I seem to have lost your number

This Body Made Of Wind Chimes

Sleep with me, asleep. Hold my hands,
with your hands or inside
your mouth.

There aren't any tea leaves to read.
There aren't any poems worth reading.
There aren't any novels left unread.

I am sad and all the words are red
and white and quietly parallel

Parking between other words.

Let's get up.
Let's do something.

Let's just put on Queen. No one can
sleep with Freddie Mercury
screaming in their ear.

It's too windy and everything is
smashing into something else.

haiku 'bout missin' you

someday I'd like to
whisper that I love you in
your ear and mean it

so home sick, sick, so sick of home so
tired i could sleep for daze and days
and dream of all the ways i could leave i
wanna leave gotta leave gotta leave

talking to yourself in public (for m.)

I used to have a therapist
with a tray, a kindness
what did we speak of?
were there solutions?
but I remember sticking toybox fodder
and statuettes into sand

sometimes you don't have to look
for blueteeth, you know? you know
especially when aggravated
maws flex and teeth grit like
there's sand in a crevasse
unreachable by fluoride

when you look at your watch tomorrow
if it makes you happy or sad or anxious
or tired or hungry or startled or excited
or sedate or bored or resentful or wtv.
just, like, you know,
              don't panic.

Addicted to doing this, thanks Chloe + Max for inspiration

concrete streams bisect distant lawns crossed by foot

under endless faintly sprinkled constellations.

warm, this lost in passing.

your face, never seen - nor felt by

our passengers, a chirpy rasp

of a jet emerging - this of crickets,

this of directions to the lilac street lamp.

prozac

gotta try somethin new
gotta try somethin new
gotta try somethin new
make my blues go away

writing letters to a daughter I might have someday
gotta try somethin new
make my blue goes away

drinkin all night and moping all day
gotta try somethin new
make my blues go away

I put on some makeup
made my face into clay
kissed some new lips
that had nothing to say

took a multi-vitamin
stalked some new prey
gotta try something new
make my blues go away

our town (max redux, masha tribute, new mexico homesick)

chirp on, sprinklers.

the faintly-lawns see you, you lost passenger-foot:
your face warms to a lilac felt by
 passing jets. constellations of Corona
on the sidewalk rasp underfoot.

have you listened to the distant
crickets? endless in both directions.
a streetlamp, heard.

Urbanism III

this chirp of crickets
lilacs lawns, sidewalk endless
in both directions
faintly-seen jet stream
bisects the emerging constellations
lost passengers

they have never heard of our town
nor seen your face by streetlamp corona
felt the warm concrete underfoot
listened to a distant raspy sprinkler
this chirp of crickets

we listened to that macklemore song already

you're the most interesting you can be at
11pm on a saturday when you apologize for
ignoring me so unsurreptitiously

we're lukewarm and not-
quite-the-same as we once were

like left overs

those shit parties

shit those parties that
are so crowded but you are
the only one there
you drink out of a red solo and wonder
why the fuck am I here
why does anyone come to these
and you weep a little
for all those
who ever lived
and got drunk 4 nothing

Gold and Blue

every contour of your muddied pants appears

at the overlaps of shadows formed from colored 

glass slides layered over each other. 

have you laid down in the mud by choice?

fingers digging at it through your hair in thick 

greasy strands the glue that makes up the frame 

sucking and pulling in a private shame.

a fistful of c-47s, we're a stack of sheets
blowing around in the dusty grey highway
--and you trace a line 6 hours long
on the palm of your hand--

this chained line signifies but points only to another signifier
which signifies another signifier--a great boring
chain of being who strangled a toddler in Tucson in 1996

and your little horizontal lines--
indicate you build
things--

we don't remember--
facts, facts, everywhere
but not a drop to drink

we are not tied
by strings or
fate

we are not tied
by anything but

maybe the will to put effort into this

girls with naturally straight teeth

I'd give you a soft push
off a flight of hard stairs
just for all the things
your dentist doesn't say to you

grounded

a painting is on the wall

you can see it while you wait in the security line

tampa international airport

terminal

there’s a woman and a man hugging in front of a plane while another woman

watches and cries.

you can tell he’s leaving

not arriving

you can see the sinking feeling in their stomachs

that we all get as we drive up to an airport because

it’s not natural to be in the sky.

think of all the people

that miss other people

that wouldn’t be missing other people

if we all just stayed on the ground.

literally sick as fuck and haven't had caffeine or dairy in 2.2 dayz

I would go vegan but I think about
the way the half&half enters my coffee in the morning
and it reminds me of lipstick and pianos and
every tear I've ever cried and all the times
I've been up in the middle of the night
my heart racing and how skin feels and the hundreds
of turns my life could take and
how much better I'll feel when I've
poured that light brown goodness into my throat
no
I will not take it black

perhaps you are an anomaly
a systematic operation performed daily
like computer programs that can read
each other so well it's like they are
speaking in a secret language

i have noticed the way that animals speak
to one another too
the way the cats chatter when they are
hunting flies in the bedroom or
hissing in the angriest ways

explicit is the word i would use
to describe the things i want to say
to you
or maybe i would prefer to chatter
and hunt

on turning twenty

the world divides itself into the blankets you

haven’t seen and the blankets you will.

---------------------------------------------------------

your father leaves your old bed unmade

like you left it, a museum artifact to mourn.

in your absence he stands in the doorway

of the room you used to live in, fingers

 the scars you left in the doorframe from

furious gunfire doorslams--the time a fourteen

year old you screamed “leave me alone” so loud

 a painting fell off the wall. your keen adolescent

sense of injustice was prone to scraped knees.

he wonders whose bed you sleep in now

and how many apologies they write you,

whether they bounce like bad checks.

-------------------------------------------------------

your father stands in your doorway; thinks

about calling you; doesn’t. he misses

you and your wars.

Centipede

peel back the bark to find the rotten core
wood glistening with chitinous leg-segments
black slithery little backs

there's hope, in these children
of lightless wet places
here the other world burps forth
smelling like mushrooms

decay and new life but
she perceives this only distantly
somewhere
in those misted corridors of forest passing
800/km per hour beneath the cityship

through doubled-paned transparent aluminum
windows of her private bathing chamber
as I pull the robe down over her shoulders
to kiss her breasts and
smooth belly

Sonic reply to gerard manley hopkins lost the game by JMBG below

form and fall
for nothing it's
a way of be-eng

we see what's inside
of old un-distinctive
in all events it

rots from egality
and it takes another
mundanity

drifting would prevent
a normal answer

gerard manley hopkins lost the game

44.9 minutes of agon
eeee, we see what's
inside a frog and
vibe distinctively
in corners and spit

rocks from our
cavities--dingbat
takes hazmat with
non dairy creams

drift inward then vent
anonymously

it's easy to live in a sentimental reality

assuming that everyone else is in love

with their significant other to the point

that even when they are acting

they are harboring a secret 

not-so-secret love for their spouse

little things tattooed on their fourth finger

airbrushed away when the curtain rises

back to thinking constantly
of coastlines and lights and a place
i’ve romanticized so much it hurts me
carves tunnels through me, drives
narrow roads with sharp turns

a warehouse i want
so badly to call a home

Call

I won't answer.
But call.

"college activism at a school that is 30% Jewish"

sometimes most times things
happen so far away and they are
so important and you hear about them
all the way over here and really I hear the word
Zionist and it makes my bones shake but
today I am sick and my body is
achey from some virus instead of an
injustice and I want to care about my
own body for once

early worm birds, the get

once you start not sleeping,

you’ll never sleep again. night

feeds that hungry “I” in you.

take a walk sometime at three

in the morning, let yourself believe

you are the only person left living

in the whole still world, allow your 

reflection to fill up every night-blacked

window like a giant or maybe even a god, 

because every streetlamp you pass under is just

another empty canvas waiting for your shadow,

and your cigarette is the last fire burning

before we all go out.

the funeral planner

Cover every mirror in the house. Tear one (1) garment.

Jewish ritual mourning is seven days of riding bareback

in the saddle of grief. 

I’ve spent 19 years sitting shiva for everyone not yet dead.

I grieve for
men on the street who haven’t already picked out
their shrouds, children walking dogs that will become
dog-faced Have you seen me? posters, the future lost
balloons that will break themselves from skinny-boned wrists.
The car keys I don’t yet own that I already plan on losing.

 I ask you,  Have you ever mourned your parents

 before they’ve even died? You say, No,

 no, smile at me like I’m telling you jokes.

I’m here to tell you I have, imagined already the poem
I’ll write for my father’s funeral, a broken-winged
pigeon of a thing. It’s why I can’t smile back at you when

you hint you’d like this friendship to go someplace 

warm for the winter-- you haven’t even begun reading, 

but I’ve already flipped to the last page of our book, 

and trust me, soft thing, you don’t

want to know how this one ends.

RESIN, a slightly revised erasure poem from a wikipedia article about asphalt

bitumen or similar black
produced by the destructive distillation
gas, tar, the binder, the addition

macadam roads completely overtaken
Brea Tar Pit sand mistakenly trinidads The Dead sand
these dump trucks route the hot engine warm.
The back of tippers commonly used as a release

microscoping algae, once-living things, mud on the bottom of the ocean or lake
the heat and pressure of burial deep in the earth. The remains were transformed meteorites.

detailed studies have shown
waterproofing of the baskets in the ancient Middle East.
In the Book of Genesis, the name of the substance used to bind the bricks:
(This must be regarded as legendary)
moom.
mummy embalms mummies

Herotodus said it slowly boiled,
leaving a material of asscabbards.
Statuettes of household deities
indicated a naptha seeping,
the bottom occasionally to surface more than 99.99% pure

which doth shine like purple,
being of strong scent adulterated with Pitch
which they use for lamps instead of oyle for it is a kind of moyst.

The Greek fire contained, among other things, a pamphlet dated 1621, by a certain Monsieur.
Existence, by means of the arches, the courses in the city of Paris,
The intrusion of dirt and filth,

He expatiates this material for terraces
the notion of terraces in the streets
to cross the brain of a Parisian neglected
until the revolution, a surge

three strands of hair pushed into a shoulder of bodily warmth

when thoughts grow in complexity the foundation fades
into a distance that may as well be considered disappeared

feed me i can't eat on my own, the simplest things resist any
formulaic approach

it seems the smallest thing again unnerves me

find a thing to eat
kick it to show how violence is so nice
so nice to fight and kick at a simple thing
so bad go your nerves otherwise resistance has a limit before the tear

buckets of trout from which steam rises
inside of us a storm rises
the physical remains inconsolable

YOU ONLY YOLO ONCE

Chapter 1
it can be a model for change, provided
you keep translating when the book
turns out to be gibberish
after all

nonsense marks

so much sunlight, caught in cobwebs
reeds blown to kowtow
by the blades of a helicopter gunship

Chapter 2
no room for cream
the guy grins, rips open
a sugar packet with his teeth
he was in Vietnam but he's okay

Chapter 3
later at the party you meet
such fine juicy people
lovers of music and clothes, you hate
to validate awful Vronsky but
he still deserved Anna

Chapter 4
sip sip stained teeth stained tongue
reflecting on land wars in asia
and your own opus of wasted life
apparently hoping

Chapter 5
for the Alfred Nobel Prize in Reasonable-ness

experience being trapped in an architecture of nothing

the narcissistic narrator may have come after the
beginning to walk a linear maze that i can desire
to prepare a promise to complete what may unfold
after the plan, walking until i find out what is that
happening outside me, and i can picture myself as

on the bus a man curls his fingers
into the soft, plush fur of a stuffed animal
dirty nails stark contrast

i named him tag
tag-along

he smiles with only a handful
of yellow teeth, the most
genuine smile i've ever seen

are hedgehogs indigenous
to this area?

no they would be
very, very
out of place

uno, dos, tre

it's two of three now
your motives are still unclear
and i'd like to know

----------------

tell me, billie joe
what was in your head other
than those prescriptions?

----------------

'cause disappointment
was the last thing i ever
wanted from you, dear

hand sanitizer, antibacterial, 99.2% of germs killed

There are some places I have been:
a Laundromat at midnight on a Sunday,
the spin cycles turning precise,
cleaner than the hands of a clock.

That was the first time I knew I would
grow old.

I die more and cleaner every day. My
husband says, You worry too much. I wash
my hands in the sink and say, There’s no
such thing as worrying too much.

I have been to a children’s soccer game when it

rained. All the jerseyed children stopped kicking
soft-skulled balls to tilt their heads back, yawn their

mouths wide, eyes shut and baby-bird throats

opening to catch the water.

I was too afraid of lightning to move.

The truth is

tally lines grow on my face, not wrinkles.
Relatives die. My husband leaves the house

each morning. I say, Drive safe. He says,
Yeah, yeah. I wash my hands in the sink. There’s

no such thing as worrying too much.

the walks alone
the ones I take down main street the
wet leaves all
different colors
dead hooker pond
smelling like shit
no running water and the
biker chick diner
Worcester baby you gotta hold on me
killed me
and brought me back to life

trombone men and no-toothed women
dumpster diving and African hair braiding
running through puddles that men created with their spit telling
me I was their property I am
an intruder in your streets but you
are now mine to be had
when mountains are replaced by humanity's rot
that is when
something can truly be owned look up at
what your people have done

limerick

demon devil darkness slope
big satan's no misanthrope
give him yr soul and plastic
don't get ecclesiastic
we got love, it ain't called hope.

For my laptop, "Snowflake," 2007-2012

Your face now flecked
by nameless precipitates
Eyelashes fallen, unwished upon,
between your keys

Old war elephant! Traveler!
Yellowed ivory and joints
creaking like timber --
how loyalty outlasts usefulness

Dionaea is a good way to

describe a relationship

Venus with her mouth open wide

beckoning us to climb inside

little butterfly lashes

on either side of us

my friend

I think of you in
your house in the woods
reading books because you don't like people
Schizophrenic relatives who
mentioned you in their autobiographies
revealing yourself to me so honestly in
five minute chunks
my idiosyncratic friend
my friend

mornings, the sadness rises in me
like an only sun. it's gray outside
my window, gray inside too. Iowa
is Auntie Em's funeral on a skit-skattered
grainy loop. i want to go home, home

home, i think. i close the curtains. i open
them again.  C Avenue is exactly the same as
it was the first time they opened-- clouds grayed
and faded in the wash, trees veiny
wrists twist-growing among
 a factory smell harder
than sidewalks.

dorothy understands me-- she clicked her heels
together like cymbals til she couldn't hear the
wound of her own want
anymore.

Urbanism II

last dry clothes soaked
as bricks in the rain-slicked caddesi

byzantine corridors
no friend to the foreigner
who makes his way by minaret
and the angles of the bosphorus

but I have seen this city by rooftop
these hands have touched the other world

if you think above the clouds i didn't hate you for putting your cup on my fold out table

and at the same time i would have grabbed you first had the plane gone down because you were old, i guess, and you could be my grandmother and tell me you

felt bad that my life was about to be "snuffed out" because i had so much un-made potential.

i would want to find someone ok with dying to hold me while we plummeted

i don't care what happens after that  

do you think these fantasies make me a miserable day 

so i can rip out my pubes later and put some pills in the water 

just to find a thing to say again 

i wanna tell
everyone i wanna

brag and show every person at this party
your new video

i wanna lean my head back
and smile so everyone knows

but between you and me
i think it’s ‘cause you’re impressive

or maybe
i just wish i were

piece of work, a hamlet punk song

A little more than kin, a little less than kind
of this post-haste and rummage in the land (in the land)

Madness, mad north-north-west
to grunt and sweat under a weary life.
Denmark's a prison. Words, words, words.

A dull and muddy-mettled rascal
like a whore, unpacks my heart
with words. The sun breeds maggots
in a dead dog, good kissing carrion.

This time is out of joint.
It's as easy as lying to
play upon this pipe,
this mortal coil.

Wit's diseased. How now? A rat?
Thoughts black, hands apt, drugs fit, time
agrees. Ecstasy. Thought-sick the act.

No man has aught of what he leaves;
a little more than kin, a little less than kind
of this post-haste and rummage in the land.
The rest is silence.
(g'night sweet prince)

A Poem For A Friend In Germany

Your mouth is an apocalypse
for farm animals; your lips
are fertile for gerbil droppings. I hate
the way one eye closes more than
the one next to it.

i am sitting in the bathroom
drinking the coors light that jeff left us
chugging my way through as
the teenagers giggle over
twenty dollar vintage dresses

everything here is a surprise
the mimosas in the fridge and
my fifty year old friend
or the honeycomb dipped in
dark chocolate

you are all alone up in there
in your house of a head
and you always tell me
family is the most important thing

because it's still my fault all thing things I didn't want to do
when I was ten years old and
it's still my fault now that I can talk of nothing that is
of interest to you

wind chill

here it's nice, empty, but full of
dust that breathes from the floorboards

cold, clear light filtering
thick and pure through paneless windows

curtains that reach out violently against
a sudden breeze that makes me hate it

makes my fingers freeze and my nose run
my sleeves damp and stiff and far too thin

here there has never been warmth

The axis of defeat

give in to your blandest desire
put off discovery out of optimism
drink another latte
and watch the fire hard enough
to extinguish it.

the name collector

There was Curtis, perfect if only he
had never opened his mouth, who
talked at length about his own facial hair
and who never sent me a text
message I didn’t ignore,

and Andi the German,

who tasted not a thing like
Deutschland but instead like rum
and who afterwards blearily watched

me roll back up my tights. I walked home
alone.

Alex loved me and I hated him for it.

Yafet flicked a roach into the gutter,
told me he liked my name.  He

liked white girls tired of white boys
and I liked the way his hair matted into
a halo. The bathroom floor was what

we had in common.

Marce wanted to have sex with me
something awful. I said, “Beg for it,”
and he begged, “Please. Please have sex
with me.” I laughed and said “No.”

There was Seth, Ethan, Nico, Orlando,
and other men, too, men whose names

 I’ve already tossed into the trash. No

appreciation value.

You weren’t supposed to be in this poem.
I told myself I was going to write a poem
where you didn’t belong.

But before all of these names was you—

the bigness of your name too much for one
sentence—

and I wonder which of these years I’ll

finally stop writing you love poems.

lots of little black scabs
on aft side of sailboat
pucker and vibrate in
middle of lake
formed between fence and wall

wind is fucked
cirruses spit
deep spectral bow reflects itself
twice in sky

there is no Fall of man
or any other temporal season
but fore side moves like spinning
and sinking sometimes salty
scabs hang on no matter what.

Again and Again

There is a thing
about dead mice
like half eaten chicken wings
like used tampons
that makes me believe
the world is redundant.

once you told me
making love to me is making love to the earth

I think I'm finally beginning to understand what that means that
a painted landscape is not nature that
the leaves change colors
that fluctuations mean nothing to the
overwhelming feeling of the air and the
wind and the sun

I cannot celebrate men
they've never understood the fluctuations and
the cycles or had
red life leak out them
I cannot find my many selves in their eyes
only the appreciation that I am what they are not

divide, divide

I.
once, you were mine. you belonged

II.
to me. my winters have always
belonged to you: dog-eared
blankets and the ground a soft
white belly footprinted with you,
our two hands teacupped around
each other, ruddy cold and stinging.
we argued over nothings unsweetened.
have you

III.
seen the deer? they miss you.
they turn their heads and look

IV.
for you at sundown.
I want something
to remember you by,

but snow melts
when I hold it.

a good night--
"glad we met," you smile, hungover

but you better get her
name right when you punch that number
into your phone 'cause
your uncertainty is showing

five-oh-five...

getting drunk is the best
said the drunk girl
you are everyone and everyone
is yours

touch my hands

my face

arch against me

i can taste

sugar and spice

in every kiss

shared

dinner

if i act cold it's only because

i am cold. what, were you expecting
a lengthier explanation? listen: you're no
Freud-couch and i lie to my therapists.
go away, soft boy. your heart is
too many mashed potatoes.

everything here is
plastered in american apparel
advertisements

everyday i sift through
Abercrombie and fitch
extra smalls

everyone get on your
OBEY hoodies
we're going to walk into the ocean

birds and fucking round two

today I saw hundreds of fucking
crows land in a tree all at once

the sexiest man alive is
the one I'll never fuck

and tonight I'll have dreams about the birds
tearing up the trees
and it will be the most romantic dream I've had in years
because to ruin reality is to make it romantic

a poem for two people

i miss you because of that night
after the show in a hotel
room with two beds,
we opted for one

It's a Newt

Some people are cops, wanna carrot?
Wannanother carrot?
It's time to get sticky - Moby What? So can
a calculator.
you chose looks.
Poor kitty, they're speedboat salesmen.
The girl from your story,
don't breathe at all.

song of overworked cashiers at the dollar store

i never been to
college, but
i know
some things.

things like,
chewing
six sticks of gum
every two hours enough
moving
to make you feel like you
been
moving, even when
you standing dead still.
things like, you work someplace
desperate enough, people gonna
take even the plunger outta
your employee bathroom.

a boy with no shoes
come in and steal him a pair,
you learn
not to say nothin.

after crystal castles iii

Disco went to the women's bathroom, pulled its glittering skinny jeans down inside out over its knobblies and began to cry and menstruate at the same time.

It's So Easy, Writing A Poem That Doesn't Make Sense

First, you make a reference
To Rosanne Bar's Presidency
Or the way a road is a path
And a maze.

Then describe light trickling
Through clouds or leaves
As it slowly reaches your
Eyes at the speed of light.

Or you could list the possibly
Fatal desires that lie inside
The dark center of a peach
Covered in an outer sugar.

Boil all of this down
to the few little specs
swimming for their
lives in your wine.

Finally, you must compare
Your precarious situation
To something that opens
like a ballet, or syringe.

haiku about a daydream

closer, closer your
long fingers and hot breath all
over, in, through me

Nixon and Khrushchev

You too have clung to our European mother
while the fingertips of the void
brushed the back of your neck

A worthy enemy!
Like us you turned to face the steppe
and looked out on a vastness beyond History

The sin of mankind is shared by mankind;
we are all descended from conquerors

new freedoms growing on my brain

all of the sudden I'm
alive
thinking of your soft lips and
wide hips and how you're
my favorite dancer and you take
off your clothes everywhere you go
oh darling be with me girl
men can never do what we can we swell up
like fruits that grow on trees wet
with rain

slicing the tomatoes

I like to slice the tomatoes. I like it a lot.

When I slice the tomatoes, I use a machine.

The machine is called Hobart.

On the machine there is a sticker that says ‘BIRTHDAY MASSACRE’.

Here is what I do when I slice the tomatoes:
1. I get the box of tomatoes from the big fridge. I inspect them and select the reddest, firmest tomatoes to slice.

2. I core the tomatoes; this consists of using a paring knife to remove the top, sliding my finger outside my cut mark, and fingering the core—sliding it out sexually with a crisp ‘slop’ that resounds when the arterial bits pour out.

3. Two at a time, I place them into the slicing tray, set the heavy, studded handle atop them and slide the handle over and over. I’m slicing. I make approximately 8 slices of tomato per tomato. I like them to be perfect and thin and red and complete.

4. I set the tomatoes in the bucket. As the bucket fills, I press the tomatoes down in interlaced rows.

5. When I finish, I mop the seeds and juice with a yellow rag. I squeeze the juice/seed combo from the soaking orange rag into the trash can.

6. I put the tomatoes in the small fridge. I smile. I like to slice the tomatoes.

Can I Send Your Family A Scrapbook Of Our Love

All the things that are true are
trivially true & the clatter
of your stirring is like a
body made of windchimes.

Sleep with me, asleep. hold my hands.

Did You Notice The Snow

Your hand torching
through the pharmaceuticals

gag reflexes buried
between your stomach walls

and your dwindling
geography of lost teeth

but, no, I don't give
a fuck about the drones

lipping the underside
of every lost letter

licking for hours
the stamps of hooves

a severe seasonal
emotions rising horselike

from a small cage
in a large cloud

the first time i lost something
that i loved it was the little brown dog,
called todd and left at a hotel in kansas
or texas

the realization left me with a startled
feeling of loss and i swore with every
part of myself that it would never
happen again

clubbed hands

the time I killed the butterfly on accident,

wings all hole and shred, little cigarette
tipped scars without burn, but

before my hands trapped

the butterfly to the ground—

white, whole as a jug of

milk, and fulled enough to be the moon.

dusting wings beat

against my fingers with
a knifing heart, and I
mistook the panic of
filmy frantic veins
for something gentle as an eyelash,

a slow blink beneath my prison-fingers

what is it about these hands

what is it about this touch

walks

sometimes i feel as if my next step might break the concrete
and as it shatters i will fall
through into blackness and it's
something like in a book i once read:
"dark and silent and complete"

if i tread hard and with purpose maybe
someday i'll find it

you can pencil me in whenever
you find the time
between falling in love with
the bright lights
on the television

and ancient greece

the pussy myth (inspired by sizoe and cut up from below)

even a bird would fuck a woman fold her back into
the velvet skin

people remember looking, waiting for god
to tell them they're real
but men don't realize to taste
a big-thighed woman
starving her pussy

rather
the curtain falls
on every day a
normal difference 
keeps me wanting