Backwards violin

I could see you becoming cold
only to me,
only to everyone else;
successful.
I am afraid
of your success.
You study notes.
You play them backwards and forwards and
and
and
and
and
I cannot
touch
you
at
this
time.
All you hear sometimes
are backwards violins
and, of course, lines.
Those thin squiggles of sound:
that screen.
Notes make
a thick wall
around your
head
and my voice cannot pass through
your wall of notes.
If a question were less
than “Why is my shirt on fire?”
(which does win attention)
you would not hear it.
If the question was
“Why is your shirt on fire?”
you might go on burning.
I take comfort in that.
Your comfort?
Walls of notes.
Like a safety factory and a wilderness
and a cracked tooth smile all warmed up and glass splintered pavement
and simple rocks,
rocks because they’re simple.
Thank you rocks
for being simple
and saying nothing.
You wall of notes, delivery truck of notes-
wretching underside bunch of vibrations
speeding through your brain like a mission;
running through your face and out;
leaking bent fences;
sounding shrieks for emperor’s ears.
If we had emperors
they would pee
their satin shorts
and send you gold and wives-
-gold-
-wives-
The gold I would eat.
The wives I’d have to kill
with backwards violins.

frantic

how funny it is
to be frantic
over something
frantic
over
some
thing

Dark shit

Whose dark shit is this?

Stacks of quarters
i love you
and
I keep folding
and refolding
and folding and refolding folding re folding
and folding clean napkins.

My problems are clean napkins.
My tears are hot food.

Dark shit is mine.
Plastic bag.
Sleep too much.
Dark shit.

it's a dead woman

  

The hospital cafeteria is empty except for all these people.

They walked us in here single file. The floors are clean lemon-white tile. We choose tables like in junior high. I'm sitting with Blon Oloonski, who looks like a Russian Bill Murray, a pockmarked suburban woman who works for Morgan Stanley and a stack of books and papers I brought here myself. We're all extras for a Bollywood film. Except the papers. They're a fire hazard.

The woman keeps explaining her weight away. No one has asked her to, but seven times she has said "My husband can make anything taste so good, I put on 40 pounds. He's a chef and I gained 40 pounds. I used to weigh a hundred, now...everything tastes so good."

The slightly Korean girl with the concave face, mostly flat and flat entirely as well in her starlet dress, deliberately wide-eyed, heavy blush under her cheeks makes her look like a beauty school skeleton. "Think thinner" she must chant. Moves like wires.

I stood in the cash register line with the real people...the hospital workers. I opened the humming case which was a wall of soft drinks and water on shelves caked with spilled orange soda. I reached for a water. My hand brushed the orange mess and gathered one long black hair that had been fossilized in the amber thick of the soda. I had a moment trying to pull it off with the very tip of my fingers. It kept getting stuck between my fingers.

When the clerk in her green X-ray smock said a dollar sixty, the phone rang on the wall. I wasn't sure whether to hand her the money or the water. The hum of the case, the phone ringing...my mind froze, I guess. I guess I handed her the money.

The phone rang on the wall. I took a drink. No one answered it.

Windows of Wilderness

Windows full and windows
full of wilderness
catching the light and the rain
windows full of moths, mouths
shouting into wilderness

a wilderness of windows

webbing on the street
catches feet
and wild things
screaming by
wild things on serious legs
windows they forget to check

left open
left cracked
left polished and stacked
on a factory wall
new windows for a strip mall
new shirt for a fallen face
waving through this wild specific soaked endangered place

wilderness

windmills made of wire
supper of raw tires
close the latch on
widows beneath windows old
and weeping on the street

windows windows widows
without feet
peeling iron hangnails
for the wind to eat

windows
feeding cold to the room
feeding screams to the street

windows feeding wilderness
clapping for an audience of eyes

a paper mill

  

Anywhere else

Good Fortune Cleaners is closing
and I'm picking up dogshit from the sidewalk
in front of the sign that reads
"We appreciate your patronage over the years"
and the same thing over again in Spanish.

I am resposible for this dogshit and this dog
Somewhere different. Rainforests.
I couldn't get the bag under her ass in time
Anywhere else but here.
so now I have to pick the warm, brown shit up
with this plastic Target bag.

Good Fortune Cleaners is closing
I never gave them business
I took clothes into the city
when I had them

An old plantation home.
A bucket full of beautiful paint
I could splash on a wall
or throw off the roof.

Why don't you move somewhere else?
Let's toast to tyrants,
inspiration sleeps.

I sleep with a man I'm not married to
and only rarely consider
throwing myself off a roof
which would be a mandate
if I was sleeping
with a man I'm not married to

Anywhere else but here.

I watched you walk away until you disappeared today.

Slurp

I know the man's name
the one who's talking in the back of the room so loud
he tried to be my friend earlier when I first walked in
he explained to me how he was different
I didn't explain my silence
as I bought my drink
and loaded my camera

It happens to be his birthday
tonight and I'm taking pictures
of you who I love on the stage
while the man whose name I know
speaks and speaks and speaks too much and too loud
back in the back of the room

so that all I do is imagine
how I want to kill him.

It goes well with your music-the imaginary killing of him

His name is something Irish except
he's black
and he thinks I'm pretty
and maybe he masturbates like a fat man eats chocolate
or eats chocolate like a fat man masturbates

maybe he's poor or has Herpes or wets the bed or has a dead mother-things
which would excuse him for being such an inconsiderate
shit
but I want to kill him anyways
you play
his voice
I slurp too loud
hoping my slurping
will mask his mouth.

Me? Yes?

Monday day yes
Tuesday day
Wednesday and Saturday nights yes
yes yes
any day

I want to crawl up your sleeve now.
You think you'll leave now?

Wednesday evening and thursday night yes
and yes Friday
yes Friday
yes Friday
until 4.

Until 4 on Friday.

I'm unhappy.
Yeah? No, that's a good sign. That's a sign this matters to you.

( A long silence between them )

I mean, there's just so much apathy, right? At least you feel something.
Yeah, I do feel something. Sunday?

banjos

I want my brain
to unravel like a spinning ribbon
Until my ears bloom into tulips
Until my eyes are spinning daggers
And my feet have wings
my fingers tune the wind
tiny
banjos

Bitten Babble

Boats great ships break like bitten ice. Like smashed honeycombs wasps nests broken beehives

Running past ditches and dandelions, the croak the creaking and crying of crickets, frogs and their breeding pond…

Graves marked with farm rocks.
A witch in a movie

Babies and their bare feet on gravel.

Bitten Babble.

Cut and Died

Immediately you lost your flower
which
fell
all yellow and petals
from your pocket and you ground
it into the

black dusty stage

with your big black dancing
foot. The flower died.
The foot was innocent.
Your hands were innocent.

That flower died when I cut it.

Talk is fat

I don't talk to my sister.
I don't talk to the phone company.
I don't talk to myself in the mirror.
I don't talk to anyone without a tattoo.
I don't talk to vagrants or spiders.
They have inferior brains.

I don't talk to the ghost in the hallway
or the mush of bones on the road.
I don't talk to paper. I scratch up its skin.
I don't talk to the man at the pharmacy he watches me
and I can't ever see his hands.

I don't talk to telemarketers or strangers or
fashionable women who seem to think...
or fat people. I don't talk to the very fat.

I find them depressing.

They'd probably find me depressing as well
in my silence
refusing to talk to them
for being fat.

All the poems you write

All the poems you write
are about drinking
wine and trying to write.

Don't you
Think
Trying
is a little too terrible

to pair with wine?

all of the shit thick world is in monthly storage

I have bags and bags
and bags
of pitchdrunk nights,
fond mornings,
folded clothes collecting dust
and the sharp certain corners
of fear
and fear
of fear
tucked under
my fingernails
my mouth
cannot reach.

I expect
the sex-grunt of brakes
on my private street
to be the neighbors loving too hard.

my life swings on pages
my shoulders cut themselves
and this
is therapy
and calling my mother
is therapy
and breathing out
ash
is therapy
but so
is eye contact
with strangers
and sipping fake
absinthe
and wearing fake
smells
nails
and loving the neighbors too hard.

Therapy.

a prescription for moaning
does not exist.

but neither does God
and people
prescribe him
all the time.

I'm undergoing
therapy
for watchful violence.
I watch people.
They're violent.
all the time.

If mothers would take
the task of teaching
daughters
one foot
in front
of
the
other
other
other
other

oo

then billions of hips
would get shifting o
and tricking o
God into thinking
we need no miracles or
therapy or
mirrors or
theracles.

oo
theracles.

o useless o

trashmen laughing at their fingers
useless nights

thickwithwater
damaged
financial papers






far away fingers









Gd


has


his


hips


missing Gdhashis mind missing
and bags and bags and bags
and bags
and bags bags bags bags bags
of other people's
shit
thick
in his attic.
He's too nice to say no.

did it really look like despair? The actor turned to me and said "Don't despair."

“Hard as diamonds. Like diamonds through butter.” A cucumber loses its neck. The severed green bowl rocks from side to side spurting blood before being unceremoniously cleared from the table by the back of a large dark hand. It falls screaming into a tall, metal trash can she pumps with her foot as she slices.

She holds up a sheet of white paper and cuts it straight down the middle. “Diamond-edged blade.” Making filets of green meat like a sushi chef. I notice the cucumber is soft and puckered. How crisp the cuts of the knife make it look. You’d never know your vegetables were rotten.

My face feels rotten with coffee. I just watched a famous actor’s backpack and pizza while he took his two-year old to the bathroom. At first I thought I knew him. Everyone thinks they know him but then I asked “Are you an actor” knowing he would say yes and myself not knowing what else to say but “Oh.”

I don’t know who he is. I feel somehow on a lower life tier than him. Like public. I want to give him my headshot but that would further reinforce the fear within myself that I am impressed by celebrity.

Shit. Sad. Knives. Wonder why. It’s so hard. To get a yard.

The truth is I’m homesick and restless. I’m pushing and trying to make my life better. Last night I accidentally ate a maggot that was in my bag of chips. We have roaches, ants, moths and maggots. I live in a trash dump and last night I stared and stared into the screen of my video camera (a relic of more prosperous times) at the green yard and the red dog and a younger me running around and smiling (even singing) and I looked at the walls of my loft and the floor covered in ants and crumbs and paper and records and trash and…

anyone who doesn’t get homesick is soulless…or homeless.

fall for dance

a dead rabbit turns into
the mechanics of a clock into
a crushed brown leaf into
a chandelier and it was only
a dancing woman.