this will be an earthworm in 1000 years

man downstairs

2009-04-09T12:25:00.001-07:00

There is a man standing downstairs. He has been there since last night at 1:28 a.m. I am sure because that is when I was walking home. Last night he was guarding the levelized rubble in front of the new condo they have put in. Today he is guarding a wet patch of cement the size of two elephant backs, the size of one hotel swimming pool on the stingy side, the size of my large brick bedroom in front of the new condo building they have put in. Next to the crack house with the hotel sign and the worn down patch of astroturf laid out like an unwanted sacrifice at the invisible door. He guarded it last night when a sleek brown rat tumbled out of the rocks at my feet and ran into a black symmetrical crack beneath the block-propped foundation. He guards it today as we, linked and strolling out for coffee, consider slapping our outside hands down into the impressionable mud and running off immortalized.

I love you.

How are you paid?

You wear a messy broken hat and a clean plaid shirt. Some flecks of drying cement on your face? I think, with the job you have, and the people walking by, and the hazard of assholes, that you should have been (it's too late now) given a uniform.

Little bit of mess everywhere.

I wrote I love you in bite marks on his back.

2008-05-03T10:17:00.001-07:00

I scratch
my head now.
I am confused
what
to say next.

I think things

radiator

progress

I think of greasy trains

with dick smell.

I will not cook for you.

I will notice your problems.

I am a carver.

carpenter ants

burst umbrella sad bag

you are the yellowest

poison.

I will eat your gold.

for my friend

2008-02-22T10:50:00.000-08:00

They chopped off my head today.
It fell to the ground without rolling away
I sang a quick song
and gurgled "Hurray!"
Had no clue my feet
were so dirty and gray
and if I were not dead
I'd wash off the clay...

But they chopped off my head
and I painted the sidewalk
with splashes of red.
No sense of completion,
no eulogy said
they stood me up tall
and chopped off my head.

Love,

Cara

tree please for me please

2008-02-14T00:00:00.000-08:00

I keep my head busy
with saturday thoughts
and tie up my fingers
in personal knots
I loosen my feet
in the flimsiest ways
kicking the wrappers and
racing the strays

I want a pine tree
to erupt in my room
in minutes
there splatters
botanical doom

Le Fine first floor panties
with needles of green
pokesnagging the lace and
insulting the seams

a hot captain coffee
tossed up from below
while some hungrychumps eggs
dust the branches like snow

I faint like a witch
who smell her own grin
who cant stand the green
or the heat of her skin

I laugh like a doll
in a jewelry box maze
kicking the clasps off the
racy hurrays

I chooses my dresses
and partners to trap
but can't can't CAINT TWIRL
'less the latch is unclapped.

doing the prostitutes job

2008-02-13T13:35:00.001-08:00

If millionaires were afraid of death they would not smoke.

or fuck sad women.

but they do.

I am thankful for an end in sight.

and the poverty which makes the wait.

the poor do not fuck sad women.

they need too much cheering.

and their women do it.

for free.

like me.

gladly, see?

doing the prostitutes job.

2007-07-26T20:11:00.000-07:00

Emma Goldman. Numb fingers rip at the waxy and crumpling skins of onions. Oildrops. Progress. Wrappers upon the eyes. The harsh fruit within. The frail, innocent, wicked wind. A boxed-up blanket covered in warnings. A sticker factory. FRAGILE. THIS SIDE UP. DECEASED. TO BE BURNED. CONTAMINATED. GINORMOUS. TO BE EXONNERATED.

Where a man once was with his white-cupped tide of coffee tilted as if to suggest an unreliable axis, where he once sat on the cold, dry sidewalk next to an open-mouthed orange road barrel, full of trash and snow and rolling carelessness, now with the rain on and on point I pass him again, transformed into a wide black garbage bag with the strain of something square stretching it out. A broken piece of furniture. A bag of bones. EXACT SAME PLACE. A couch with the bottom blown out. Aren’t we pretty? The room of a stupid teenager. Black. A phone as a centerpiece. Some inner organ gone corrupt and unnoticed. Like your lungs, darling. I cry and flirt.

An old man with fake orange hair eats a small hot dog covered in a pile of anemic onions. An actress with a flat backside and faked blonde hair lets her cell phone ring some recognizable bastardization of a popular song several moments too long before answering it chirpily and eerily-on the very next note in the progression. She knows her life so well. The Onions and the Actress could make a delightful fairy tale together.

A face of the rave. A raving face. The face of the grave. An unoriginal rant. A machine gun full of poppyseeds and leaking vinegar on expensive, forbidden carpet. The president removes his shoes in the white house. The president has head lice. The president wears plastic booties and has only one time in his life aimed a revolver into his own or someone else’s mouth. This is a story that will never be spoken of again.

I wanted

2007-07-13T17:46:00.000-07:00

I wanted to sit in my window and smoke a cigarette but I can't stop watching the neighbors on their patio-the two of them. He cracks a beer. They split it. She has dark hair. The back of his head is gray. I wanted to stare out at nothing, but because of the shape of my window and the shape of myself, this is the way my body has to be angled, facing them. I suppose it will appear as though I am watching. I wanted to smoke a cigarette and forget about my sister. But the people who hurt you the most are the ones you can't forget. And the people you envy you can't stop watching.

2007-07-09T20:25:00.000-07:00

The Devil's Wife Still Comes

the devil?
He's in a hospital in Detroit.
He's a colored man
and commits idolatry
by watching television
on purpose.

keeping up his evil

for good, for beautiful, for true
do not concern him
he left his wife fifteen years ago
after a botched abortion
but knows she is watching
from an electronic plane buggy
while he finishes peas
and trades jello for ham.

He knows two phrases in Latin (pig)
and uses them to condemn his enemies
and often rhymes
the water line
in Palestine
my demons there
destroy the time

keeping up his evil

The devil is being made to eat his medicine.
The devil is accepting souls
in return for observing his bedtime.
It is 1967 and outside things are happening
while the devil tempts heaven
and chases a sandmachine
that forces his sleep
down the hall.

It is an electronic mop
and he is the devil
and his wife brings a bag of fruit sometimes
and sad, angry eyes
to the room with the warped TV.

"It's you and me." she says

"It's the devil and his enemies. I'm dead."

The devil's wife begins bruising his fruit
on purpose
and committing adultery
with a cop
who let her off
a speeding ticket
last week when she almost missed visiting hours.
Her devil has not had her
since he became a mad man,
but the devil's wife still comes.

2007-07-09T13:59:00.001-07:00

loose headboard
lost watch
maid blamed

Ordinary nights

2007-06-26T10:49:00.000-07:00

Those were ordinary nights
falling down like jelly beans
tripping over piles
of good gold nothing
all the tables we had
pricked with empties
Why do I lie?
Why do my eyes dart
over birthdays and ages?
Why, after all this time
of continuing to do
the same thing,
do I still
consider
myself a sinner?

Maybe I was meant
to be a rainbow.
Maybe I was meant
to be a child forever
but the only way
to be a child forever
is to die young
and I am not
being let off
that easy.

My eyes dart
over birthdays
and ages.
those piles
of good gold nothing
those ordinary nights
an old mouth
full of jellybeans
a table full of pricks.

to be sung

2007-06-14T00:11:00.000-07:00

Alouette ooh wee ooh
the madrigals falling
the principle coming to dinner
the principal coming to fat
underneath a table
at his parent's wedding
the sleeping rodents
the pig's way
one dastardly supper
every day
And who can return
the widow to sleep?
What freezing feet
dismember dreams?
What animal fingers
drill up seams?
The one in the wake
cannot catch a fall.
the lark in the cookpot
the blood in us all

Gunshots: a comedy

2007-06-03T17:39:00.001-07:00

Somewhere on the street below, a man was screaming from four bullet wounds. Upon hearing the four explosions, me and my roommate hung our heads out my bedroom window on either side of a chipped white box fan propped within the frame to suck out the heat. The day had been a hot one. The screams sounded like they were right in front of our building. She kept trying to place the sounds. I kept thinking how that was like making guesses on where we'd see blood the next day.

From across the fan we exchanged fearful, nervous smiles which I misinterpreted as meaning amused. For a moment, I imagined my roommate to be as inappropriately sadistic as me. This only further amused me. And the pathetic screams. How can I laugh at a man screaming his life out?

And today this rain. I woke to church music and rain. The church music I took, strangely, for the shot man’s immediate funeral. I realize now that it is Sunday, a day originally set aside for church music, and besides, this assumption makes no sense. They wouldn’t be burying him already. Furthermore, there’s nowhere to bury him around here.

I woke to disappointment. Two things were immediately disappointing. The first: I had planned to photograph two parades today, my only day off, and with rain falling from the sky both parades would be cancelled. The second: the rain would have washed the gunshot blood from the sidewalk.

Last night I barely slept. And I’d like to say it was due to a crawling, nagging fear of being ambushed or gunned down or, selfishness aside, sympathy for the man who died on the sidewalk. He must be dead. We threw our robes on (the roommate and I) and tore down the stairs just as they were loading him into the ambulance. We had waited until we heard the sirens because we knew it was safe (at least this is how the retelling goes-in reality it was simply at this point that curiosity got the best of us and we couldn’t see a damn thing from the roof) to head downstairs and join the sidewalk gawkers. Right in front of our building but on the other side of the street. So we’re safe.

We watched the ambulance sit with him inside it for fifteen minutes before rolling off in the vague direction of nothing. The police precinct is one block away from our building and it took them nine minutes to arrive. A Hispanic guy. Or black. Definitely not a white guy. Either he died on the gurney right there or, or, or…what? He must have died right there. Why else would the ambulance just sit there in the street with him inside of it? These mysteries…

The mysterious witness I spoke to on the sidewalk. He was thin, black and small framed. I say this as if I were picking him out of a lineup, and in truth, since he disappeared directly after speaking to me, perhaps I am the lone witness to the lone witness. Of a lone crime? Only the lone know the lone.

He was thin, black and small framed. He had a mostly shaved head and was dressed well but plainly. I was standing and staring when he randomly muttered “Shot him four times.” My head whipped left to catch this update. “What?” I said. “Where? Four times? We heard four shots. From the window up there. Me and my roommate.”

The man drew two fingers in the shape of a gun down the right side of his body to illustrate as he spoke, “He got shot in the head (he pointed), the neck (he pointed), the trunk (or torso-he pointed), and the leg (he pointed)” I was agape. I managed a “Wow. That’s fucked up.” I had barely managed even that but it kept him talking. He continued. “I saw him running down the street.” Certain he could not mean the victim, my natural response was “Who?” He said nothing, perhaps because he did not hear me. I reiterated “Who? The shooter? You saw the shooter?” This elicited a response. “No”, he said. “The guy that got shot. He was running down the street like he was trying to get away. Then he got shot.” I pressed on. “So you saw him get shot, then?” He said no. “You saw him running and then you said he got shot so you saw him get shot? You must have seen the shooter.” He shook his head and quite convincingly said “No.” I turned back to the scene. “Still, you should tell the cops what you know, though.” I turned back to him to deliver some straightforward moral responsibility via eye contact. He had vanished. I went back inside.

The real reason I didn’t sleep? Run of the mill insomnia. Run of the mill technology-induced insomnia. The computer and all it has to offer at 5 am. Checking Craigslist, the Times, the gossips…inertia. And then imagining I heard the door being pried open, remembering I left it unlocked, frozen to hear another sound and to determine the level of danger I was stupidly sitting through. Eventually, I managed to creep into the kitchen and see that I had already locked it, but not without being absolutely certain the killer was hiding behind the bathroom door with a .45 aimed at the back of my ear. So perhaps my insomnia was caused by a combination of inertia and sympathetic terror. But I’m hard on myself and, therefore, accuse myself of the inertia.

I stayed inside as long as I could today. No parades, so much rain. And then dinner with a friend just now. Delicious food and I devoured it while telling the owner, the bartender, my friend and half the customers about my sleepless night and my harrowing tale. The bartender gave me a free glass of wine. Because of my harrowing tale. Because it happened across the street from my building. I don’t even know if he’s dead or not. On the way home I bought a cookie. It was chocolate chip and harder than I generally like, but overall…fine.

I was walking alone, having dropped off my friend, having eaten my fill and I crossed the street across from my building to stand where it all happened. This is what I saw: powder blue rubber gloves-one pair which were glossy from the rain, several bits of napkin and random incidental trash, and a crack in the sidewalk full to the top with rain and deep red blood.

It was one of those places where four independent cracks in the cement come together and form a sort of spider shape, or triangle shape, or maybe a shape like a web of lightening. A place where the sidewalk is deeply crumbled. On a dry and dusty day such a shape will cease to be a certain shape and merely appear dilapidated. Fill it with rain and blood, and I will stand there staring at an angry shape, testing the color with my eyes, deciding if the sidewalk is faking.

I took a bite of my chocolate chip cookie which I was still finishing. Maybe a crumb fell into the blood. Maybe evaporated blood falling new with the rain landed on my cookie. I think I hope so.

I looked one way down the street and imagined the man I saw bandaged running from a gun. I looked the other way down the street and heard his screams again. I thought of how long it took the police to respond, and of the ambulance that sat and the witness who vanished and the rain which had not washed the blood completely away. I thought of how the police, the ambulance, the witness and the rain had all really failed that guy.

2007-05-13T20:10:00.000-07:00

the stars, dull and whistling,
turn south with the beggars and birds.
They are nothing
now that I've touched them.

baby tomato

2007-05-10T13:13:00.000-07:00

noose

2007-05-10T13:11:00.000-07:00

lasso

2007-05-10T13:04:00.000-07:00

lasso

2007-05-10T13:03:00.000-07:00

scarves

2007-05-10T12:57:00.000-07:00

over the counter

2007-05-10T12:55:00.000-07:00

duct

2007-05-10T12:53:00.000-07:00

hoops

2007-05-10T12:46:00.000-07:00

Israel Day Parade, New York City-May 6, 2007

2007-05-06T21:56:00.000-07:00

2007-05-06T21:46:00.000-07:00

2007-05-06T21:41:00.000-07:00

2007-05-06T21:37:00.000-07:00

2007-05-06T21:35:00.000-07:00

2007-05-06T21:28:00.000-07:00

2007-05-06T21:26:00.000-07:00

2007-05-06T21:23:00.000-07:00

2007-05-06T21:21:00.000-07:00

2007-05-06T21:18:00.000-07:00

2007-05-06T21:13:00.000-07:00

2007-05-06T21:11:00.001-07:00

2007-05-06T21:11:00.000-07:00

2007-05-06T16:54:00.000-07:00

The good things
are small
when you can get them.
A wishbone fossilized in asphalt.

You can fly down the dark
hall of the Williamsburg bridge
on your bike
at night
very late at night
and feel like a blood cell
racing out of a vein

The red-checked shadow-flecked
moan of ghosts above your head.
The buzz of the road behind you.

The yellow construction lights
in the skeleton of a new condo
all lit at once
hardened webs of honey
thick spit in a hundred throats

You get these things
on the brink of exhaustion.
Perhaps it is exhaustion
that gets you them,
tunes your sense to something,
anything anything anything
good.

gagging
the sound of a chop
faint and ridiculous singing

The good things
when you get them
are usually at night.
Night which makes everything
smaller
and small things seem silent
and in the midst of so much bigness,
bits of silence are
good to get.

Night.
Late.
Nobody's watching the moon anymore.
That's how late it is.
You wonder how
a street
with so many windows and doors
can lie so silent.

The good things gotten at night
picked to be personal
a shattered, hammered, sparkling star
among a million others
that would not exist without you.

The Living and the Stainless Touching

2007-05-03T20:40:00.000-07:00

Leanna brought home flowers in her bicycle basket at night. It made her feel regular, normal, like a real person. To buy flowers...usually the daisies they dyed all sorts of crayon colors-hot pink and purple, cartoon yellow, medicine red, solution blue. At these prices it was easy. Flowers were cheap in the city. Especially when you bought them at night. Most of the guys that ran the bodegas would mark them down in the evenings to try and get rid of them before they started showing signs of death. There were some who maybe kept them the same price, but she'd learned which places to go, and felt at these places that her consistancy made her a regular. Or just regular. A normal person with a routine. Truth is, the only two things she did every day were fingering herself in the shower and brushing her teeth. Also the shower then. But her own fingers in her own shower were so entwined as to qualify as a single act.

The flowers were once a week. Old Portuguese guys. Old Indian guys. Old Polish, Puerto Rican guys, old guys on the run from the former Soviet Union. Setting up shop. Hadn't seen their families in years. Probably never see them again. They smiled at her. They liked the white girl.

Dyed daisies were mostly three dollars at night. Occasionally she'd smile back just right and get them for free. Leanna had a square face and kept her hair pulled straight back in a tight, well-washed ponytail. But a smile, and a especially a smile late at night can't help but come across as pleadingly pretty.

Leanna's hair didn't match her personality. Her mind wandered a lot. A person casually observing Leanna from the opposite side of a bus or park or restaurant where she was eating alone would most likely think her quiet due to her wandering mind, serious due to her jawline and fastidious due to the ponytail. Two of these were correct. She mostly kept quiet, and took most things very seriously but Leanna was not, is not, could never be a fastidious person.

Sometimes when she bought the flowers she picked out an ice cream as well from the three foot deep slide-top freezer. There were three foot deep slide-top freezers stocked with ice cream in every New York City bodega. Even in the ones without the cheap flowers...not that those mattered. The guys kept them stocked, stacked-little pints one on top of each other in teetering towers down to the bottom. Leanna believed the best flavors were, in fact, at the bottom and so would press her stomach up against the peeled caulking at the edge of the freezer wall and lean all the way in until she toppled a bit and a casual observer might draw a comparison to a little girl lost in a box of toys...but Leanna was rarely casual. She understood the power of an upside down woman.

The guys liked it. Her ass in the air. Not much of an ass, but a girl who could be expected at least to smile in a few moments while paying for flowers and ice cream, and at the very least...an ass in the air. It was often enough to save her seven dollars (the price of the blooms and the sweets combined)

She tugged at the door of her room. It screeched open. Warped floor. The previous summer it had been very hot and she had found an old air conditioner on the street. Leanna borrowed a power drill from the guy across the hall and found some strong boards and got it up into her window, but while she was away one day the thing leaked chemicals and water all over the floor. This warped the wood. The first day the door wouldn't open, there were several moments of hysteria as she imagined she had been sealed in by an enemy. The hysteria subsided some minutes later after she tried to picture this enemy and came up with nothing, and subsided completely when she gave what she desperately declared "one last push" and flew halfway into the kitchen. She came inches from hitting her head on the pointed end of the counter where the dirty dishes were stacked. Leanna was not fastidious. She still had that power drill.

But what was this business of imagining enemies? Leanna had no friends to begin with, and therefore no breeding ground for future enemies. Leanna had had no friends really ever and therefore no breeding ground for present enemies. Enemies happen when you tell people things and grow to expect things from them. Or worse, when they grow to expect things from you. Leanna had roommates. Living with people, one can suspect them of being either.

Tonight it was Moose Tracks and purple daisies. Roommates out. Flowers and ice cream. Solitary indulgence. "Life's little luxuries." Many times she would repeat these things she thought in her head, knowing how normal they sounded and liking how regular they made her feel. Leanna avoided saying regular things out loud for fear of sounding sentimental, but it was a great comfort to say them in her head. "Life's little luxuries."

She was feeling anxious in her body and behind her eyes. Little tension headaches, little knots, but why? It couldn't be found. As if something was about to happen. The feeling you get about a ghost in the room or an impending punishment. She set the flowers on her table, a cardboard and reconstituted wood desk from the salvation army. It had mold in the legs from the water incident the previous summer. Leanna liked the faint smell of mold, though. Made her feel removed and missionary and even...unkempt. An old word. Made her feel old. Not that she was a woman frightened by life's possiblities, eager to get it over with or have it all in the past...she just liked old things. Not old men, though. Not men at all. No enemies.

She had the couch to herself tonight. For now she was alone. She sat. Unbuttoned her pants out of comfort and tapped the top of the ice cream pint to test its readiness. Solid rock. Fifteen minutes at least. She was tempted to switch on the television but the damn flowers in their damn plastic wrapper required immediate attention. It is lucky that New York City guys who run bodegas that sell flowers do not usually wrap their flowers in opaque paper as Leanna would have forgotten about them the second her ass hit the couch. Left them to wilt slowly while she slept. Not that it was a comfortable couch. In fact, she suspected it was infested with ants, and it was constantly covered in too many blankets and even articles of rather angular clothing left there in the rush of morning...belts, shoes, stiff pants and dress shirts...so that when you sat you were perched atop a constantly shifting island of disorder. Like a dung-piled wagon being pulled by a rampant donkey.

She liked to imagine the couch was a burning landfill. At that moment, sitting on the couch, rather than turning on the TV, she imagined the couch was a burning landfill. This gave way to imagining her mind was a burning landfill. Then the flowers in their clear plastic called and thankfully so. Imagining one's own mind to be a burning landfill is the sort of thought that gets the TV smashed. And it belonged to the roommate.

She picked up the bouquet and started towards the kitchen. Checked her phone first. No calls. None were expected, but no calls. A busted glass crash. Her ears tuned immediately for another and caught the sound of a landfill burning, the paint cans and old fireworks within it's gray-heaped gravy igniting and popping one by one. Leanna stood alone in the room. The above-ground train poured by her window like a cold air current. It passed. Silence again. A woman's scream, this time with direction attached. Other side of the wall. She took three steps and pressed her ear to the dividing plaster like a sleuth in a movie. A man's commanding slur. Leanna's concern ringing in her own ears, twisting the overheard violence into pictures. A bloody woman. A belligerent man. One third party who happened to be around at the right moment to hear this horrible thing and what would she do about it? Leanna stood frozen on the other side of the landfill burning and chewed her tongue. An ant wandered its certain way across the floor. She caught it with her toenail, cut it in half. She listened. Responsibility tastes like thirst.

Leanna poured herself a glass of water. One: to quench the thirst. Two: this brought her into the kitchen and closer to the door which would allow an easier intervention should this fight make it into the hallway. She set the flowers on the steel counter. Something so clean about the living and the stainless touching.

Leanna had never hit another girl in the face. She was apt to knock into someone accidentally in public to cure a bout of her own frustrated aggression, but was also apt to treat it as an accident and offer a bewildered apology afterwards. The fastidious do not deliberately shove. The frightened abandon their impulses.

She had hit a man once. Once, when in college, as most stories of daring and unexpected acts begin, she had taken a date with an almost stranger and he had taken her to dinner. She ate. He spoke. She nodded. He laughed. She wiped her mouth. He unzipped his pants in the car on the ride home. Leanna had struck him in the face and caused him to hit a Chevrolet Impala that chose that same moment to stop suddenly in front of them. No human damage was done. Toyota damage totaled thirty-five-hundred. Impala damage was taken at ten thousand. A collector's item. Leanna had never felt any guilt over that particular situation.

Another crash could be heard from the other side of the wall. A scream. A slur...something involving "you fucking bitch". She put down her glass of water. She walked to the door leading into the hallway. The same door that she unlocked every night to enter and the same door that sat like a stupid twin at the end of the hallway next to theirs. They of the crashing and screaming and gnashing of teeth. Not that Leanna heard their teeth gnashing. Not that she needed to with the sound of metal shelving being ripped from the walls. She took a moment to breathe and turned the knob. The sounds from across the wall cleared and abandoned their muffled blur. "Hit me in the fucking face." she heard him say.

It dawned on her a little, but maybe a little too late because she, angry at the possibility of damage possibly being done to a fellow woman, called out "Hey." In her most authoritative voice and right outside their door, the sound from her mouth pointing in. At them. "Hey." As if to say "Stop." As if to say "I'll call the cops." but with some less threat. A woman's moan. Several urgent whisperings. And with that there was silence.

Leanna stood in the hallway alone, while the people across the wall slunk to their bedroom. She ran a hand over her forehead and ponytail-a self-conscious reflex. She stepped back. She felt watched in a silent hallway. The feeling you get about a ghost in the room or a ringing that eats your ears. The feeling you get when you've interrupted strangers fucking. You'll see them in the hallway. You'll never stop noticing how much mail they get.

It took three steps to re-enter her own apartment. All done quietly. With an embarrassed perfection. She felt strange about her neighbors who seemed so normal in the stairwell and who came equipped with decent, clean furniture (she'd had strange and weather-talking tea with the woman once when she was locked out and had sat on their couch) but who were reality hitting each other with things and fucking with anger probably because they weren't ready to have a baby together after ten years of fucking. Or maybe because he was in reality, or she was in reality-secretly, embarrasingly, devastatingly gay. He'd never released the right way and was manic. She'd gotten expert at faking it with her eyes closed and buried in his sweating neck.

Leanna's thirst was suddenly and accurately the sort of thirst only solved by a beer. She shut out the light of the hall with a quiet shut of the door and kept the darkness away with the refrigerator open and humming. She had nothing. No booze. For a moment she considered hitting the bodega on the corner once more, but wanted to avoid the hallway. She didn't even really want to be in the kitchen anymore. Remembering the ice cream, she left the kitchen and returned to the couch where once she imagined her evening would end. Without eavesdropping. Without the muffled fucked up dysfunctional sex sounds of next-door strangers. She tapped the lid of the ice cream. She applied a certain amount of pressure. Ready for a spoon.

She didn't have a spoon. The bouquet of dyed daisies were wilting and abandoned on the counter. Leanna would have to go back to the kitchen.

Grandma

2007-05-01T13:22:00.000-07:00

Mirror

2007-05-01T13:17:00.000-07:00

snow

2007-05-01T13:15:00.000-07:00

Barn

2007-05-01T13:14:00.000-07:00

Door

2007-05-01T13:12:00.000-07:00

Bulb

2007-05-01T13:11:00.000-07:00

Mirror

2007-05-01T13:10:00.000-07:00

Slow

2007-05-01T13:09:00.000-07:00

Sidewalk

2007-05-01T13:07:00.001-07:00

Abandoned

2007-05-01T13:07:00.000-07:00

Nashville

2007-05-01T13:06:00.000-07:00

Read

2007-05-01T13:04:00.000-07:00

Puddle

2007-05-01T13:03:00.000-07:00

Yeller

2007-05-01T13:02:00.001-07:00

Go

2007-05-01T13:02:00.000-07:00

Place

2007-05-01T13:01:00.001-07:00

Place

2007-05-01T13:01:00.000-07:00

Dad

2007-05-01T12:59:00.000-07:00

Grandpa

2007-05-01T12:57:00.000-07:00

Things I've written on my walls in my room which I will be leaving soon.

2007-05-01T12:36:00.000-07:00

His name is darling. He kisses my respect away.

The girl was born Betty Bayhem Metter.
Better belong to a son that'll let'er
burn mesquite in a roomful of roses
cold red cheeks and sawed-off noses.

I say I don't love you.
He says I don't know you.
We continue from there.

You told me you know my ways
you just can't show me another day.
Without a reason to fear this fight
I dress slowly sad and tight.

All my addictions are friends.

The ghosts you're afraid of are laughing at you.

The names of my ancestors and when they came here:

Soloman Haddad-1890
Beirut, Lebanon

George NeJhame-1890
Lebanon

Estelle Whitley-Irish/English/beautiful
Here always?

Heaven is a poor man's mausoleum.

"Now this story's not very interesting
and it's not very funny
but it did happen..."
-my aunt Annie

your teeth and sleep

2007-04-30T08:04:00.000-07:00

Last night I dreamed you called me, came after me under some friendly pretense, saw my face, waited until I turned, came up behind me, touched my shoulder, kissed the part of my cheek right by my mouth and part of the corner of my mouth and then you waited until I turned and kissed you back. With the rest of it.

The rest of the dream was just that. Kissing. It was so nice. I wish I knew how long my dreams last. But if I knew that, I might figure out how long death lasts, how long it takes to die...and I believe this information has been deliberately withheld from me.

For my own good.

And for my own good that I don't know how long we stood there, your arm across my back, my arms mashed into my chest and kissing. We were kissing. I felt like I could die by slipping away into your chest or feeding myself to your mouth. Both looked empty.

I want the time my dreams eat,
my time that is eaten by dreams.
Dreams with their mouths open
kissing my sleep with teeth.

I want the time my dreams eat,
my time that is eaten by dreams
to crawl between your teeth
and sleep.

Receiver

2007-04-25T08:35:00.000-07:00

There is a Polish woman openly weeping on the other side of my bathroom wall. I have no idea how to help her. She may even be Lithuanian. Or Russian. One thing for sure: these are European sobs. Another thing: these sobs are coming from a woman. The thing about the phrase "openly weeping"-it implies gushing, floodgates...I imagine the front of the face missing and replaced by a torrential waterfall. A poached elephant, hacked and open. An unpotable, salty, erect wall of water where the face should be. Hands distorted in distress. This is not the first time this has happened.

She weeps with some regularity. Always during the day. Usually sometime around the time I'm waking up...noon. Not that it's strange that someone else should be so emotionally invested in their day already at noon when I am just beginning mine and have no opinion of it outside of the state I've happened to wake up in...mouth dry or aching, leg dragging, hair a nest of angles, stomach hungry or agitated or drunk. Usually there's a prolonged trip to the toilet. Some stupid magazine that gives me my only news. Usually this magazine is heavy on the color pink. Or yellow. Or red. Flashy colors. Flashy stories. They're good. They help with the coma. But the bathroom. This is where I hear her crying. Right on the other side of the shower. And I think sometimes, what if I could just step thorough that tile wall? Like the looking glass what if I could step through the shiny white tile and maybe a layer of mildew and maybe a layer of ants...oh no. Last night I dreamed my apartment was infested with rats. Traps everywhere. Trash and tails. This just came to mind. A layer of rats...a layer of cheap cardboard scrawled over with love promises and vague threats...to her apartment. I materialize on the other side of the wall in her apartment suddenly with my arms out and open like Christ. Startled, the next sob chokes back in her throat. The rest back down. I put my arms around her and she in no longer afraid. She instantly pours out her problems in Russian or Lithuanian or Polish and I nod. I let her squeeze me around the middle and tear at my shoulders with her agitated fingers as she speaks. I let her tears mix with the mildew and the ants and the rats which have already stained my white robe. I do not understand a word but she does not know that. I am a thing that has materialized from her wall and therefore can only be interpreted as magic or an angel. Either one is something she didn't have a few moments ago. Either one could be an answer.

I'm just a receiver. I think that's what people need most. Just something that can materialize and receive their troubles. An instant and miraculous answer.

dance

2007-03-27T14:16:00.000-07:00

He dances up to my desk with his bag on his back. A little step towards the elevator bank, a little dance back. Smiles apologetically. Says Hi. Asks what I'm doing. I say good. He says good. Working I say. On what he asks. Memorizing something. Oh. Same smile again. I stop typing and stare at him long enough and pleasantly enough to make him uncomfortable.
A little step. A little smile. Maybe a cough. I was trying not to notice.
I can't think in this place you know, he says. Something about it. I can't think here. Must be the walls, I say. What about the walls, he says. They're blank I say. No, he says. I think it's just that when I'm here I'm focusing on work. I say maybe it's because when you're here you're not moving. Little step. Silence except for my chattering keys which I am priding myself in not abandoning for one second, not a moment of silence for this tapping machine. I'm even beginning to be able to carry on a conversation while not looking down at my hands and keeping the clacking at a reasonably feverish pace. I am a real secretary.
During lunch, now he says. During lunch I talked to this lady. It was wierd. Oh? I say. Yeah, he says. We both saw the same thing or something. She was a business lady, you kow well dressed or whatever and she's sitting there on this bench eating sushi. This guy comes up to her and he says Ooh is that sushi? and she says yes and the guy says-I think he was homeless or something-Let me try one of them and she gives it to him! I guess she felt intimidated or something. Women feel like that sometimes. Then she started telling me about her family or like her job or something. One of these people who needs to talk, you know? You know those kinds of people-
I clacked.
I don't know maybe she was going to cry he said. But she must have felt like intimidated or scared by that guy and that's why she gave him the sushi. I asked her why she did it and she just shrugged and said I don't know. It was the middle of the day. I mean, I understand being intimidated if it was late at night and the guy came up to her and asked for some of her sushi or if she was alone but it was the middle of the day, there were people around.
I kept typing. His dance had ceased as his confidence grew. The story. Of his lunch. The woman and her intimidation.
He said, I mean, I 'd get on a bus late at night if there was only one other guy and wouldn't think anything of it. Especially not in the middle of the day. I said nothing.
Then he said But some women...I never feel threatened if I’m the only one on the bus. But women…some women.
I said Some men, too. Can feel threatened.
He said I don’t know, most men aren't going to feel threatened-
I interrupted him and said-Do you know most men?
Little dance resumed.
I pressed further with You speak to most men...most men in this world on a regular basis? You know them?
He laughed and said Yes, that he did.
I said I bet you do.
The elevator opened maybe at that moment or maybe moments before or perhaps he ran to the button and frantically pushed...while dancing and getting away
from that
which threatened him.

One of these people who needs to talk, you know? You know those kind sof people.

Strangers.

2007-03-23T08:25:00.000-07:00

Counting the rocks on the way home
pills in the cabinet expiring
strangers
strangers
strage
sorry, strange.
Mistakes
made in counting.

My aunt has asked me to ask around and find a man she once watched play Hamlet. She says he is the only man she thinks she could ever be with for the rest of her life. She wants me to ask around among the "theatre scene". He played Hamlet at some community playhouse in Alabama, had long black hair and muscles, passionate about acting. So it would be great if I could ask around about him, being as I'm involved with theatre and this is New York which is where people go who are passionate.

She said she's prepared to know whatever I might find out. I'm going to tell her I bumped into him at a supermarket...the grocery store...the subway...a bodega. I will tell her I met him late one night in a crowded club. We were parallel to one another, climbing our way up to the bar but seperated by three degrees of people. We reached it at the same time. I found a stylish and likely expensive coat beneath the bar on a hook and tucked it under my arm, thinking of finding the owner, starting off as her hero, becoming her friend. I opened my mouth to order, regardless of the bartender's lack of attention. Someone else's voice spoke my words. "Seven and seven." Seven and seven. Our eyes met. He paid for mine. I spilled his when his hand found my thigh and my balance eluded me.

It's a cruel world, auntie. The way he did Hamlet for me that next morning, the whiteness of his teeth, the cruel madness in his eyes. He didn't have to captivate. He didn't have to constantly eclipse himself with more moremore and all of that. I suppose I didn't have to find him. But I did. And you were right. It was glorious. I end.

I end here...with this imaginary shit. I left a library book at the bar I worked at last night. I hope it will still be there later. I hope I didn't scrawl anything derogatory about my employer on the bookmark. Shit. I think the bookmark was my paycheck. Shit. I should call. I should write. I should make time for mourning while still allowing myself to function within the confines and schedules and rational practice of a normal stupid damn ordinary day. I need to have one of those.

Normal stupid damn ordinary need four more syllables that's six and now at thirteen day. Oh day you began with a stranger who touches me like a wife. You begin with letters and fragmented feelings of alternately mad and upon a point of breaking...something to considering what to do with that bicycle I bought for twenty dollars with the cut lock from the man on the street. It's yellow and stolen. The man was brown and lying. I have chained it to my own bike in the basement and am trapped by the illegality of my own yellow possesion. Comes upon me like a courtmarshaled billing statement. "I must be dealt with. I am yellow and in the basement." Maybe I should donate it to children. A stolen bicycle? Donate? To children? Shit.

What else, what else. Elsinore. I am to play the part of a woman who dies a terrible and frightening death in a film. The character is not based on me, because the man who wrote it did not know of me until last week when I auditioned for him, two of his associates and a video camera. However, to curb my own recent tendencies towards destruction, I will throw myself headlong into this woman and die her death to purge myself of any risk of myself actually dying. I cannot die if the character dies. Because films are not real, see? They are fiction. And one who dies in fiction cannot die in fact. Cannot die, in fact.

Goodnight, goodbye, good else what else is good? Time to wash the sheets. I've lived in them too long and others as well. They deserve to be blank. Strangers. They deserve to be burned but I need them.

Carpet and Carrie

2007-03-16T13:52:00.001-07:00

When people walk on carpet
no sound
no sense of progress
suburbs and office
make numb
make nice
streets make crazy
hard and hot

There was a girl named Carrie in college. she had thin lips and crunchy blonde hair and no one seemed to notice.

(those things)

Oh, they noticed everything else. She was a Christian. She did not drink. She held offices in Student government and in her sorority and had a cute boyfriend who wore shoulder pads without irony, was on the dance team which meant she wore blue spandex. This is the problem with women in offices. At any given point any of the stenciled women in dark blue suits carrying papers might have worn spandex. Blue spandex shorts with MT stenciled across the ass in white and little pompoms to cover it with shimmy until just the right moment. The problem with the "girl next door" is really that any "girl next door" can never be taken seriously if at some point in her life she ever wore blue spandex.

My spandex was orange. Hooters. The girls who weren't good enough for blue. Across from an auto-diesel college. I drank GrandMarnier at a shit trap tourist bar in Kissimmee and drove forty five minutes home in orange spandex and a sorority sweatshirt plastered. I turned up the radio. I kept between the lines as best I could. I turned up the AC. My hair was a rat trap of dye jobs. My purse was a spilled chess set of product. I cannot believe sometimes that I did not fall harder. Life was so real. Traffic so frustrating. Malls so soothing.

I ran up credit cards as soon as I could get them. Any they world sent me. I bought things. I kept in touch with my roots in the sense that I hid them. I bought packages at tanning beds and gyms. I went out to the Wing Shack and drank beer with a fat girls ID and ate fried food with a skinny girls metabolism. I cannot remember the last name of a single person I knew then.

With Carrie it's only her first. Carrie. That's all she ever needed though. Homecoming Queen. Probably grad school. President of shit. Girls who feel important by being elected to jobs no one else really wants to do. Maybe that's kind of what it's like to be an artist.

Give it the sun

2007-03-15T23:26:00.000-07:00

Soft skeletons
wishing their bones away
at the face at the wall
of an unresponsive prison
screaming
shut out this crawling
shut out this moving dream
of night
we will never be
tell me when i come in
let out
our minds have grown ropes
oh walls
oh wrestling big
one among the other we walkspit
compete
stuck together
with no other pastime.

grass

We will never be
let out
but you know a joke
so let us hear it.
Magnified
bits of plenty
reconstituted
like
like
beef
like
sideways
like
which is on
sale
the bones
of the skeletons
laying down of course being sideways
grifting their slate
up on nothing
a sandbag
a gardener toiling free
(sarcastic)
master everlasting his ground hard his
his hard ground his everlasting master
and flowers his pricks of jubilant lust
when they bloom
but what if they never come?
when they bloom
An endless winter?
A renegade maggot?
a churlister chopping rock
graying its frays
whittling the henhouses to dust
whittling the streets with speaking

Carpenter carpenter build me a street
of bones and pricks and mismatched feet
what will this sagging grass have for its run?
Give it the sun. The sun.

We decided the clock was a woman

2007-03-14T17:44:00.000-07:00

I dreamt of the death of my Grandmother. I dreamt of a numbered fortune I would freeze and hammer into shard if I ever got my hands on it. She had called the night before and left a message in a sweet and pleading voice. Surely this and the guilt of not immediately returning the call was what signaled the dream. Much of my clothes are wet with coffee. On some the coffee has dried leaving its fragrant stain, but others remain in a heap on the floor, mush-together with the brown stuff. I delight in imagining, as a hallucinogenic effect of the coffee smell, that they might spring up as if infected with the form of ghosts, and dance rudely about the room for my amusement, or start speaking in riddles to me from their crusted folds.

The reason for the spill is this: I am not sure. I know I came home in a state clutching several bags containing what I must have interpreted as sustenance. In the morning I observed a half bag of chips which had spilled some onto my desk (I ate the strays for comfort of my acid stomach) and a crumpled empty slab of white butcher paper I am guessing at some point contained a sandwich. On close inspection, the sandwich consisted in part of hardened and cold but formerly melted yellow cheese. There was a bit stuck to the paper as a bit of brains might stick to the thick bleached California freeway, turned and broken by some mid-morning seismic shift.

Now I am wearing the sweater which smells of coffee. If there was a detergent being sold in these days with the smell of coffee and if it were reasonably non-allergenic I would buy it. If I needed to. As it is I need it not. I have few things I wear and most of them were on my floor at the time the coffee cup which had been left inside of a paper bag slit itself open for fear of abandonment, was stepped on and crushed open by the drunk and greedy plodding of my own ridiculous and already sleeping feet (for the cup was crumpled or mangled or physically disturbed in some savage way when I found it the next day in a pool of its own thin brown blood.) or…or…perhaps both of these things happened, like the dog trudging to its death in the speeding street whose marrow is already webbed with cancer.

A sweet smell, not unlike chaos, or fear when it withers away with the cold. Shriveling madness, inching away along the back like an itch, unnecessary. Circumstances were tolerable, the itching of madness unnecessary. But nonetheless she drinks with the light out, and when one wanders upon her nonetheless she stays speaking to a stranger she finds ridiculous, staring at a mirrored woman she finds insane. Insane. Insame. I speak. Yes, I speak. Of myself. But sometimes, when the thought becomes alive with possibility, when the thought becomes, as it were, real, I becomes she and she becomes a stranger, capable of flight and centered in fiction and capable of explainable things. For most of the things I keep encountering are unexplainable, the triangular globe hanging from the corner joints like a wad of snot, photographing my face as I stare into it and dream of a knife that might remove it seamlessly and without detection. Would I then attempt something illegal? Would I then hide within the walls or behind them or at the very least out of view to ambush a sick woman waiting for a ride? No giant guttural eye to record my progress to her face. Nothing but a busted alien bug and an empty corridor and stairs for stumbling surprise. But nothing even more so. No progress. No busting evacuated ambush. Reason? No knife.

You I can explain. You are a mystery in terms of facts, but if I were to be asked to place things upon a plate which you would eat you would clean it to prove me right. It is in need that one loves. With personalized plates and seasons and for Gods sake rooms, one wants-more this, more sunshine, less derivative angular shit you call inspired for the walls, less action and more leisure, the leisure of time to talk not for the sake of noise but for the sake of introductions, for the sake of discovery and ultimately love. I have leisure. I have no time to talk. My Grandmother calls me. Her name deserves capital letters, but I cannot call her back. Instead I fear her death like a guilty conspirer. I fear her health like a sentence. I fear my own thoughts when I sleep because it is then that I cannot shape them, that they warp and curl into dreams I can only watch and stutter and shake through until they end or bleed into another. Elbows frozen or liquid, face a hideous mess of emotions, like a retarded but earnest adult. Earnest? Oh the muscles of a swimmer.

I have recently engaged the muscles of sex on a regular basis. From this I have learned the regularity of perhaps the other way of thinking-that dreams are the one and only time my thoughts are controlled, limited to only what is already inside, even perhaps impervious to some insistent whispering in my ear when I have been lucky or cursed enough to get it. In a dream I cannot suddenly be subject to new and destructive information. In other words, in dreams I cannot get fucked. Mute to any possibility I cannot myself conceive and often when I sleep these days I am drunk, so those possibilities are by poison limited. I know this from trying to enter interesting and challenging conversation while intoxicated or full of lust or food. I flounder and drown in their-anyone’s-all of their-voices. I cannot get the rhythm of reply right and when I attempt it, some faster reacting individual across from me has already taken that beat and made far better use of it that I could. I intended to say the cloud looked like a piano. You had it play sixteen discordant and escalating notes. I could never have played them for you. Better you reached it first.

This dream? My intentions? The smell of this room which is pleasant but masking something sinister I am sure...the question I am getting to is this: Is this sinister thing myself, or some presence I am trying, through immersion in vice and doubting of self or immersion in self and the doubting if vice indeed does exist, destroy? Can dreams inspire guilt if guilt exists in the same place as dreams? Surely one does not exist more than the other. But then, no one ever says "Oh, it's just my vivid guilt..." the way one says the same about a turbulent and colorful dream. I dream, and I'm not sure if I entirely believe it, but I've believed in nothing for some time, so nothing continues to surprise me.

As a child I dreamt of killing. Not myself cast as killer, but dreams of killing that terrified me and caused me to wake in sweat. Sweat I rarely knew as a child, being small and stick-like, stuck together at the joints by very little, and almost more like floating bones in their bored and jangling rest, kicking off the front of the couch, kicking my sister under the table. Days and years and minutes spent indoors watching the hours pass into night in which I dreamt of monsters, of fatal situations, of myself falling into something and of animals, vicious leaping muscle aching with spit to end me with a snap and a tear and a rabid sequence of instinctual movements. Now, more and more I dream of logical death-the death that takes slowly and slowly wakes each day with a little less surprise. The kind you hear about over the phone from miles away. The study of an abstract concept which leads to oblivion of the senses. That nothing is nothing is nothing thing. You keep speaking and speaking and say so little. The eventual death in that way. The cloud has been overdescribed. The fence overpainted so it peels and cannot stick to itself, flays in the wind like an exploded stick of dynamite. So here I am overpainted, with nothing to say. Sending up prayers? Keeping it in your head? Either is maddening.

Consider seeing a man screaming at the sky. Consider seeing a man screaming at himself.

A woman gives birth to an hourglass, blood in swirls upon the curved surface. She pants and requests her child. The doctor wrings his hands over how to classify the sex of it or not at all, maybe better to lie and profess the infants death, whether to jump from something or to wipe his hands and make a speech? An associate of his, weaving a joke of his own nerves, assigns it the female sex obviously referring to the shape a grown woman takes at one or some point in her life if she is lucky. The doctor, being a man of logic and humor being a form of magic, does not find this funny. A serious colleage enters the room. As it does between these two, debate ensues.

A man is not a clock.

A clock is not a man.

We argue on the same side.

No, just because another does not take the part that a man is a clock or a clock is a man or a clock is a man and a man is a clock both, doesn't mean...

The associate speaks.

We decided the clock was a woman.

They all fall down.

Esses and Enns

2007-03-13T13:58:00.000-07:00

April is going to be a beautiful month. I knew a girl named April once who is now I expect no I know she is married. She wore quite a lot of makeup and was very good at organization and leadership. when I decided April would be beautiful Iwas not immediately thinking of the girl I once knew, but her presence in teh chain of thought signifies something. Perhaps the aspects of her personality-the makeup, the follow through-will be things I will suddenly be gifted with as soon as April starts. I wish the month of April would go ahead and start.

I will maybe buy some sort of new hat. I will maybe feel like a thing that is alive and alove. I saw a man drop a dollar on the train today. I was eating a pound of the green melon known as honey dew. I forgot how sweet it is which is completely unbelievable as the name itches with sweetness. I ate it with a plastic fork and I stared straight ahead into nothing with my back curved and bags and bags beneath my feet and on my lap. I carry too much. I always want to need something that I already have. That to me feels convenient and like I am prepared for anything and also like I am complete in the face of the wilderness. Often I leave the most important things behind, however. Like medicine. Money. My mind. Ha.

The man dropped his dollar as he was arranging the various things on his body. He was standing right in front of me on the train platform and tying the sweater about his waist this was and then another way. I was watching him over the horizon of my honey dew because he was standing over the horizon of my honey dew. Stabbing with plastic. That strange heavenly green. The pillowcase/sheets of an iceberg. the dollar fell and immediately, without waiting for him to pick it up which I'm sure he was about to do...this man who was so carefully and rapidly adjusting his outfit was not oblivious to the loss of this money. I said, "You lost a dollar."

He bent to pick it up and put it into his picket. Pocket. He said "Lost is an overstatement."

I think he was very right and I was wrong. However, to my credit, I think my reasoning can be explained. I felt the need to speak. Because no one else really was that I noticed or maybe everyone was speaking at once but not about the principal thing: that being, the dollar which had fallen. I needed to make a noise with my mouth and also, Ithink part of me wanted that dollar.

In that sense and also in the sense of being an unnecessary voice, I was wrong. Perhaps also in teh spelling of unnecessary. I never understand the complicated rules involving s's and n's. Esses and Enns.

Esses and Enns.

2007-03-08T23:49:00.000-08:00

cat crosses the street
our hands meet

dust and muscles

2007-03-07T13:55:00.000-08:00

I am a witness to
two types of desperation.
One-
the desperation of backing away.
The other-
desperation of desperately wanting.

I decree them equal.
I am a split witness.

I recently found myself
listening to a short story
about a dead pet turtle.
Small and green,
it escaped its aquarium
and wandered a desert
of shag carpet
equally green
the sort of synthetic wasteland
a small green turtle gets lost in.

It was found three days later,
shriveled in the position of trying
to crawl under the door.

Tragically funny and magically sad

decreed equal

I have mistaken peace for happiness,
easily done
without a sharp sadistic sadness
to provide adequate contrast.
A wash of warmth
disintegrating palate
Happiness misses its enemy.
Oh, they write...
but the distance becomes...
(spoken with a sharp turn of the head and demure sorrow)
"...too much."

and another thing:
Religion has infinite possibilities.
Last night I promised to pray for a dead man.
I have not yet succeeded, however,
I believe I am intimidated by the endless infinite.
Perhaps I am speaking to nothing.
No.
I know better.

Perhaps I am speaking to everything at once.
The podium of the gallows.

I am a witness to the fact that
others share my aversion.
In fact, most
prefer
when possibilities are not
infinite.

Examples:
Television.
Video Games.
Money.
Mazes.
Land.
War.
Law.
Hippies.
Gadgets.
Sex.
The Equal Sign.
Aquariums.
Dead Turtles.
Examples.

In fact,
if someone were to create
as God once did,
a world containing all these things,
I believe it would rapidly become
the best sort of life to have
especially if there was the sense
of being watched,
a happy desperation
and infinite peace
and all things were equal
within these bits of maze to move in.

2007-03-06T07:18:00.000-08:00

Mattress and Boxspring store
Prices in the nines

windowfront full of
heated rack full of
complimentary hotdogs
a crimson aquarium
stuffed with piles of
dusty yellow popcorn

Sleeping and Eating

Lap

2007-03-05T14:31:00.000-08:00

If I met George Washington
in a bar
with a strange woman
on his wooden lap
(I believe this could happen)
I believe I would have to displace her
by screaming
at the absurdity of it all

Yesterday I groped at the moon.
Yesterday I accused the sink of insanity.

I mouthed off at the mirror and fought an epic battle
amongst my own piles of clothes.

I have been piecing together borrowed quotes
to form a coat
that is both alluring
and will provide me with
a secret armor.

I believe if I saw George Washington
with a talking cantaloupe on his map
and his lap full of battles
and his throat full of emotional apologies
I might begin to question

this iron table
that endless night
my tastebuds in their ignorance

or a dance I once remember having with a boy
when I was a girl
Heaven had an equator.
Music
came memorized.

If men are made of dust
and women of blood
and dust makes wood
and blood makes a stain
then men are marked by women
like a tree on the hill of a massacre.

The gills of floorboards
breathing in the dust of George Washington
soaking up the blood
of the woman I laughed off his lap.

2007-03-03T15:12:00.000-08:00

The steeple in all its prettiness
the tree tired and big and black
the sharp edges of buildings
the unexpected hot
headlights hit eyes
causing temporary blindness
all of it
causing temporary blindness

what causes these babies
everywhere
to elope with music?
temporary blindness

the sleeve of large black water
eating up my sun
dreams eating up my sleep
temporary blindness

White Noise

2007-03-02T14:00:00.000-08:00

The brown cement buildings on my block stuck to their lots like sponges. Blotched from the rain which has made me quiet. In need of something acerbic. Cut open my eyes to a throat-filled fear.

“You know, darling, 27 is the deciding year. Whatcha gonna do with your life?” She asks the question like she’s allowed to smile about it. She drinks like she could any night. She talks like everything that means something was never meant to hurt you. Like she can lie the sound of night with her eyes. This is the sound of night. These are my eyes.

Her laugh. A month is nothing. Slipping your fingers into angels tired of slipping. Her walk to the bathroom. I consider the consequences of following, all these consequences a flat, imagined nothing under my heavy, stupid, arrogant fear. She chose her escape in a convenient moment. She doesn’t have to go. She’s playing with me.

Her laugh as she disappears, taking with her the last happy bite left in a minutes-old joke. How dare I fear anything? The closed door behind her.

The sidewalk fitted with small pools of murder, yellow radioactive soup gleaming up from a construction crack marks the spot some sub-dominant creature tried to rise to the surface but backed away to cower and plan, leaving its failure behind. A yellow, radioactive pain. Rust colored dusklit factory spew might have been a murder. Or at the very least, something organic. Something human. An industrial lust.

In this moment I am holding a beer in my hand and trying to find a new point of conversation. (She’s left us dry and uninterested in one another and with nothing in common besides a mutual fascination with the little glimpses of teeth and spark and unconcerned availability her flirtation offers.) I think at some point I must have placed the beer on the table next to me or on the head of the man I was left with or let it slip from my own to his own hand. Perhaps a hinge in the back of his neck opened and I dropped the can in like one does a trash can. Perhaps he was equipped with recycling or is actually a magical, bottomless well. He wrote for a trade publication. Had black hair. Wore tennis shoes. I wouldn’t have noticed. He may owe me a wish.

The room is full of mazes on my way to the frame of light at the end of the hallway. The maze of women forgetting themselves while remembering to always remember their faces. The maze of women interested in my intent. The clusters of men that secretly hate each other but love to appear interesting by association. A civilized murmur among the coffee shop art on the walls and the coffee shop talk of the party. Why would she dream of coming here alone unless she meant something by it? Why would she mean something by it? A month had been plenty of time for her to accumulate new things. The skirt, for one. The laugh tinted white and strong with violence. Little differences. Little men I knew nothing about. Bigger than me perhaps. Able to break my fingers or my face, but little men I knew nothing about.

I spent a month expecting her face at every door I sat behind. I’ve never wanted a stalker so badly. There was a “Fuck Off” when we parted. Now she stares at nothing on the wall with her eyes wide and deliberately intelligent. Now she’s composed and pretty, possibly two or three pounds thinner and too pristine to have ever uttered such a gross phrase.

Her position: second in line, behind some thin, jacketed fiend with a face that reads “I’m gonna piss all over the walls.” My position: I decide to banish all further small talk. I’m a wolf…maybe even a lone one. I need no one and nothing except to tear that huge white laugh from her throat with my big bad ass teeth.

I offer up a fond memory we shared.

“Member when you told me to fuck off?”

She’s struck.

“Brian?”

“Kate. Do you remember when you told me to fuck off?”

"Ok. Yes.”

“Well, now I’ve decided to fuck on.”

As soon as I say it I know I’ve made a ridiculous sound. Like a burping songbird. She stares at me. I’m momentarily grateful that I detect no suppression of laughter. Maybe a smirk? Nothing. Somehow worse.

She delivers a cheap shot in the form of a slow once-over and says “Have we really run out of things to discuss, dear? Is there only passion left?”

I want there to be a waver in her voice, but ultimately settle for the slight readjustment she makes to her purse on her arm, causing her to misstep for just a second. This glitch could possibly be construed as a stumble and I’d like to blame overwhelming emotion, but I’m afraid a single barrel scotch with two ice cubes and a splash of soda deserves the credit.

“Brian, do you remember how whenever I was annoyed at you, no matter how pissed I would get, that I still couldn’t keep a smile off my face. Just a little one? Like a smirk?”

She offers a smirk to demonstrate. It’s a fake one.

“Yeah.”

“Well, I got over that.”

I privately wonder what sort of contrived shit she’s been reading. There is malice in my thoughts, a mean-spirited sarcasm burning up my loneliness like ethanol. Crude oil. Dirty burn.

Door opens. Exit thin jacket in a dense cloud of piss-smell. The bastard succeeded. Light floods the hall. First time I notice the walls are purple. What sort of idiot, I wonder…I wonder how she got away so quickly, the door shut again.

I tap on the door with sadness and victory set firmly in my eyes. No. Too judicial. Perhaps a bit of understanding in my posture? Have no idea now to act. Who to be as soon as the sound of my hand on the door and the voice from inside makes waves through my ear and is real…really real, I lose sense…of how to be. Alone at the end of the hallway. The dead end of confrontation. I think I will be whatever she wants. Give way to aggression and hope she finds it sexy. Give way to sobbing and hope she forgets it’s real.

Too many new things she’s given herself. The new clothes. The new laugh. The new stories about things she’s done I haven’t heard about already. Her private injustices we haven’t interpreted together yet. I am even…perhaps a story she has told someone else and perhaps been advised on. I tap with my hand again, feeling louder, feeling my face fall with the weight of confusion and worry.

I prop it up by the time the door opens. Only a crack. Three fingers at the bottom of the door. A smell sick and wet. I wedge part of my face that has an eye into the opening. In seven months I never saw her vomit. Her high white laugh hacked into cackles. She defiantly vomits without me. Stories I haven’t heard yet. Laughing days I’ve missed. The joke never stopped. It just grew savage.

She turns up her eyes like the insides of wires. Her face is a wild chattering tree of exposed nerves waving and reaching for me. Thin, screaming fingers of red. When you imagine yourself having no expression at all on your face, it must appear distressed to others. Like when you boil a lobster or a fish. Its eyes blank? No. Boiled. Seeing her on the floor by the toilet in this new way…I have no thought in my head for a moment. I must look boiled. She tries to shut the door again with the same three fingers, grown weak from the loss of blood to the drinking greed of her face.

I examine the mush of piles and broken bits of the street. I imagine places things could live. The garbage cans surely fit castles for rats and roaches and all sorts of microorganisms we fear and most often forget about and occasionally fear forgetting. Attracting oxygen and the ability (with it) to become airborne. Garbage bags rising like bloated balloons from their grey, diseased underpinnings. The brightly colored oozes everywhere. The fear of always noticing. I never noticed when we walked together. I noticed a crack in her hand. I noticed when it healed. I thoroughly examined each eye and places I’d left untouched and the common unrequited moments of sleep we spent just sleeping. The brightly colored oozes everywhere. The mysteries of nature bled dry.

I want to be one of those young, Puerto Rican guys in a respectable, shiny car in the middle of summer and spend the first half of the day being cooked breakfast by a bright, cinched dress with short brown legs that is my mother. And the second half of the day sweating under the rough black guts of my car, tuning and sweetening the sounds it makes. A tuning fork. A wrench. Expensive wax and beaded water and the third half of the day smoking weed and cruising a zigzagged grid of streets with music as loud as the sun and friends popping and shouting like harmonic solar flares in the backseat. I want everything in my life to be washed.

I want the sky to be white like her laugh.

She is silent in the way a wilted, finished thing is silent. A clipped and bitten flower. A bloodless mouse. I push against the weight of her hip at the door. I get in and take off my shirt. She is a very small thing up against a very flat and high and unforgiving wall and needs to be lifted. It takes exactly as much strength as I knew I would need and I use exactly the muscles I expected to use. I breathe in my own comfortable, expected strain. I sit her on the closed toilet like a porcelain doll with a cloth body. Only her head is chipped. Her heaviest part. It sags to demonstrate its weight. I take off her shirt. Her stomach instantly stiffens for display.

I take off my pants and her skirt and each one of her difficultly thick leather boots and each one of her thin, pink socks like a second and softer layer of skin that her small feet somehow need in order to be feet. I let her think what I know she’s thinking. I let her not stop me. The hot and cold metal knobs are these two silver aliens alone on this terrible expanse of white marble planet plunging and rising beneath them. They stand so straight together. I wrench them both and the bathtub fills with hot and cold conversation which I appreciate, considering our silence and the noise of the small talk just outside the door. The writer for trade publications. Her lying, sour mouth. The tottering, murmuring girls lined down the hall, blunt with need for relief. Having to pee. Needing to tend to things. The stress of a jostled bouquet. I could imagine their groans of impatience, but I don’t need to. The tub fills itself and all necessary sound. We face each other on our feet on the tile. I am the only one standing.

The tub brims and fills, eating our feet, our clothes, the last dry island of tile sinks and retreats in quiet, bathed silence. The frame of light flooded. The carpet outside the door forms a soggy moat against the line of protest. I lift her again. Naked, we slip into nothing. I am cold she is hot. I am hot she is cold. We flash back and forth between each other like the timed ends of an experiment on the conductive properties of water. We flash back and forth with our silent nonsense. No laughter. No sky. Naked we slip into nothing. White noise.

spit

2007-02-10T19:44:00.000-08:00

Everytime I attempt to fry potatoes, the two inches or so of bristling oil bites me all over like invisible jumping spiders and I end up with tiny red bumps over my hands and grease in my stomach which probably at one time or another was a symptom of the plague...or witchery. Or beating the plague with witchery.

When I was younger than I am now I told my little sister that when I got very old (older than I am now) I would simply decide not to die. Because I envisioned myself knowing the moment. A slow build to an eventual and very aged end. I could not conceive of being unable to refuse death. And now, I can not exactly conceive of the words to make this nonsense make sense...

Yellow oil spider bites come fast. Spit. Shit. Pop and hiss. Oh. I imagine most things are actually like that.

Hello and ha

2007-02-10T15:10:00.000-08:00

You there.
Reader...hey
Hello
Read this poem.
Welcome to my poem.
Read this poem.

I address you
Because I feel if I do not, my words will dilute
like a drunken, chattering piano
Coughing over
an echoing lobby
of their own meaning
chords of clashing conversation

about men
or women
or women wanting men
or men wanting...what?

This is a poem.
Not a description of anything
Really.
Except a page,
and words
and that lobby I mentioned earlier.

Condemn it if you wish,
but understand
it doesn't even involve paper at this point,
and therefore cannot be torn.
Ha.

crack

2007-02-02T09:43:00.000-08:00

the treasure at the bottom
of a Cracker Jack box
is a tiny white bone
cracked and moonshaped
the size of a tooth
it has bits of fur
clinging to it
and an uneasy smile made up
of caramel sugar and sick,
misleading shadow
i ate it along with the popcorn
not realizing what it was
until after i swallowed
and i may not have Xray eyes
or a brightly lit aquarium
stomach
but i know it's in there
resting against my soft walls
and busy being absorbed
a little slower than all that other shit

an observation

2007-01-20T20:15:00.001-08:00

Upon entering your apartment
I noticed first
your backside.
I thank the stairs.

I noticed second
the useful end
of a screwdriver
driven into the soil
of a dying houseplant.

Unconventional.

Upon falling into your couch
I noticed
my backside
and fished a red handled hammer
from between the cushions.

Unconventional.

I never imagined
you simply lived
in fear.

rats

2007-01-11T22:19:00.000-08:00

I seem to have become stuck in some sort of momentum I feel somehow I did not "sign up for".

I didn't know it would really feel like the racing of rats.

I never saw myself as a rat.

I hate rats.

hung

2006-12-30T00:09:00.000-08:00

I'm eating ice cream
and sighing
the face man in his box
white window chips on his shoulder
mentions dying and his own smile.
He speaks with solemn practice...
it seems someone's Christ
sweats on a rope
and you remark "It seems..."
"It seems this is not really news...
not really
big news...
but I think people and their stupidity decide that
...ultimately."
Well, ultimately
I laugh
ultimately I say
fuck him
stone him
unearth him and all his treasures
lets make our babies on piles of dead gold
and atoms upon piles of dead horses
after all, isn't that the way it has been?
I think that's the way it has been
for a thousand and sixty nine years.
Does history applaud the prosperous and forget the poor?
I'm eating ice cream and sighing.
Aren't the poor only righteous
when sanctioned by God
or disease?
A disease lets call him.
A crowd. Yes. Let's maul him.
Who killed Caesar, Jesus and John Wilkes Booth?
Fragments of mercury bubbling in the blood?
A pauper?
A lobby?
One stringsick starstruck lamenting fool
better served to char his feet on a slave ship
than to dabble
to dabble
and dabble again
in politics.
Thank God (you imaginary man)
for politics otherwise
we'd never get anyone hung.

I live in a home

2006-12-18T13:41:00.000-08:00

I can't touch the nurse or she screams at me. I used to have a wife and she was fat and we slept together every night. I got her when I was nineteen. She had tiny ears and a big butt...in a good way. She made me dinner every night. We had two sons and a daughter. Jake, Paul and Sheila. Our daughter is forty-seven and both our sons are dead. They got in a fight when they were in their thirties and killed each other. My wife died of a heart attack last year.

I say that wrong. It wasn't a fight that killed the boys as much as it was a car accident. But Paul was mad at Jake and Paul was driving and...who knows what the hell happened? Point is, both my sons are dead and I live in a home.

I'm not bitter. I'm just bored. And lonely-I can admit that. I know I'm hard to live with-I've always been kind of a bastard so I understand why Sheila doesn't want me to stay with her. I don't think I'd really want to stay there either. I think mainly what I want is to get back that slow time I had when I was 20...how it felt like death would be a relief. How it felt like life would take forever. Maybe even if I could have a woman. Fat don't matter to me.

It wouldn't be so bad if I didn't hat ethe damn TV. I hate that damn thing. Damn screambox. We never had one with the boys. We never let them watch it. I hate that damn thing.

My name's Amos. Amos Henry. I've got a nice cleft chin that girls used to really like. I remember one...this one girl...she had something wrong in her head, I think. She didn't last all too long. She took me over to her house when her mom dad weren't home and gave me the business.

The nurse won't let me touch her. I'd give her the business if I could.

No reason

2006-12-18T13:28:00.000-08:00

Its fine to imagine being born for no reason. Being a free agent and having all these sweet deal every roads a different kind of life choices. I agreeeeeeee with that. I agree with that.

But then you see a picture of your grandmother. And you realize you've never considered her to be a person as much as you've thought of her as an extension of yourself. Then you start to think of all the people that think of you that way...as extensions of themselves. This is my girlfriend. This is my sister. My mother. Oh shit.

Reason? Reason then? The scariest thing in the world is to look at a picture of yourself as a baby and realize you look like a baby. There's people in the picture all around you that are old now. People in the picture all around you that are dead now. Makes you resent the no reason. Makes me resent the no reason.

Because then...choices, yes. Choices are good. But this meant to be shit? This family shit? It must be something we need and have created with our minds to attach ourselves to one another. It must be...a mind-created thing...shit...that we need...I'm essentially saying the same thing over again...but I mean, candles? set tables saying grace and holding hands and mourning for each other? You start to wonder...I start to wonder who are these people? I start to feel like what's the point of being a family if we're all going to live on seperate sides of the world and barely speak? So you have someone to leave your shit to when you die? No reason?

2006-12-15T23:31:00.000-08:00

The window washer is an artist.
Him with plastic hands,
disappearing inky white
razor streaks
swirling neat
Him with soap for paint
and nothing permanent…
an ever changing canvas of faces
darting among the seaweed,
the cracked purple castle.

2006-12-12T14:00:00.000-08:00

Thank you for sitting across from me
and for reading when maybe you don't want to do your reading here...
and all so that I can write something.

I won't tell you I failed.

staples and papers

2006-12-11T12:35:00.000-08:00

licking envelopes
my sad little mouth
as the sun goes down
in the middle of the day
and drowns drowns drowns
the dark away

wake

2006-12-01T07:05:00.000-08:00

I wake to the floor dark and quiet. A blank crouching sheet beside me. A pillow with no face whispering sometime in the dream you vanished. I am left to reason. You being bright, the starving night sucked the window open and ate you. I blame the need for breeze. I blame your restlessness on whaling black midnight and charred draining streets, on someone you may meet you haven't met yet.

The sun peeking through the window and pointing at my face. The sun laughing at my wet startled eyes. Your bone ground against the rickety bridge of daylight. Your simple somewhere else makes blinking lights seem dangerous and a quiet room indignant with guilt. Your body chewed by night's diamond teeth. I consider sleep and refuse myself. I put on a torn blue coat and run about like a crushed bug. I dirty my feet on the hallway floor. I cut them on the crust-glass stairs. Pacing the roof? I rub my eyes. Empty roof.

I have schedules and jobs. I have an art I practice with some regularity. How strange you should need to think. I have a reasonable set of friends I can occupy myself with and yet the discussion of a world, the concept of my time, the understanding of a thumb upon a page within a book upon a desk that I once bought is defined...my time is defined by your absence.

Green Flies

2006-11-24T21:31:00.000-08:00

Green lights
not on the street.
Green flies.
Maybe it’s Christmas?
Talking to the refrigerator,
trimming my eyelashes
to a reasonable diameter.
“If I was a woman I’d do me”
comes on
-favorite song
of all time
so tongue-in-cheek
tongue in teeth
seems to hurt.

Melodies catch everything but flies.

It seems vodka is the only fuel

2006-11-24T15:19:00.000-08:00

and it seems I'm out.

2006-11-15T12:02:00.000-08:00

A Mexican baby with Down Syndrome
a black man with a beard
eating chili
from a Kentucky Fried chicken bag
bag bagging bag
stupid as a rainbow hat
stupid as rainbow glasses
stupid as a rainbow doesn't know
where it's going.

The only God I know

2006-11-08T07:02:00.000-08:00

The only God I know
is a bitter stinking poet
crouched over a mess of ragged work
ignoring the tiny scythe
dug into his back
and scratching the ant bite
harder

Backwards violin

2006-10-26T22:25:00.000-07:00

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

2006-10-26T13:23:00.000-07:00

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

Dark shit

2006-10-26T13:06:00.000-07:00

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

2006-10-24T09:25:00.000-07:00

The hospital cafeteria is empty except for all these people.

2006-10-24T09:00:00.000-07:00

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

2006-10-18T22:08:00.000-07:00

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

2006-10-18T13:11:00.000-07:00

Anywhere else

2006-10-18T12:56:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-10-17T11:23:00.000-07:00

I watched you walk away until you disappeared today.

Slurp

2006-10-15T11:05:00.000-07:00

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?

2006-10-15T10:55:00.000-07:00

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

2006-10-12T00:33:00.000-07:00

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

2006-10-12T00:30:00.000-07:00

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

2006-10-10T22:54:00.000-07:00

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.