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)