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.