man downstairs

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.