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.