so quiet below the fog

you expel brilliant

every word a flower

we are heavy against the spirits

you gather luminous 

witches, rosebuds

opaque and tired 

blurring at the edges 

my likeness will

seek the road back 

unable to stop

Topics Covered at the Sunshine Friendship Club Luncheon for Senior Ladies

Window replacements
Rent
Carpet stains and their remedies
Jewelry
Soup recipes
The health of the ladies who are not present
The fact that Shirley's granddaughter is moving to Africa
All the diseases she could get
Safety and break ins
Loud noises in the middle of the night
Migrating to Florida to escape winter
Weather
Driving in bad weather
Television programs that nobody was able to catch last week
Grocery store options
Which housing communities allow holiday wreaths to be put up before Thanksgiving
More health gossip
More soup recipes
What will Shirley's granddaughter eat in Africa
That lady in the computer, Siri, who never listens
Cannibalism
...just kidding. More health gossip
Address books
Being forgetful and writing everything down

after

smell the warmth
sniff the mold growing in your shower curtain
after you dry your hair
rub the curtain on your body and feel jesus
take hold of your jean jacket and slide
your wavy arms inside of it and live
a little longer inside of a cupboard
above the graham crackers

all of the animals you love will die
and all of the people might go
might rend your vodka filled ventricles
into pulpy long walks from one part
of the desert

you murderous sluts

3 girls walk into a bar
a blonde a brunette and a red head
the blonde says beer
the brunette says wine
the red head says scotch on the rocks

they seem to be friends
the bartender squeezes up to the girls
giving them barnuts and napkins
and extra lemons and such
little pecking motions
swirling barstools
the newscaster next to them
asks if they'd like another ride
he coughs I mean round
on him
the blonde says beer
the brunette says wine
the red head says scotch on the rocks

later in a liquor store parking lot
near a retired rockstar's apartment
the blonde says beer
the brunette says wine
the red head says scotch and a bag of ice
to a driveup window girl
with a neck tattoo
maybe a clit piercing
postcoitally they share a smoke
blonde drinks beer
brunette wine
red head with her scotch on the rocks

all their men long dead and gone
buried headless near the border
themselves skeletons
the blonde asks what they'll miss
the brunette says wine in a tall slim glass
the blonde replies a cold beer this time of year
the red head squints behind her glasses
shouting

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