Sixteen Coyotes

Dramatic Exercise #1

2011-12-28T14:26:00.000-08:00

Close your eyes.

Imagine your are yourself, only very young, and you have gone too far into the woods alone. The air smells like cinnamon and peat and something black, like death. Imagine the cold licking at your skin, causing it to rise up pebbly and chill beneath your clothes. Breathe. Imagine a root hooked above the earth like a gnarled finger. You trip and tear your sleeve. The place you have hurt yourself glows red and there is a bright stream weaving down your arm. Feel the pulse rushing through your body. Breathe. Taste iron heavy on your tongue. Now you are crying. Now you are truly alone. Wind whistles through the branches. You begin to hear footsteps behind you. Breathe. Again. How small can you make yourself? Will you fit into a monster's mouth?

Fully Pressurized, Stability Rated

2011-10-17T21:47:00.001-07:00

I am in love with myself

filled with blood, tight

as a tick with it, as though

any passing tack will

tear a hole in me with its

tiny tooth, and everything,

the beauty and the poison,

would yield to that

one moment of malice,

would burst out of me

all at once and I would be

a skin of my former self.

I am in love with myself
rotten to the quick, the bones
click-clacking endlessly,
grinding their grudges
into each other, one day
I am in love with the idea
that this scaffolding will
fall like rain, and there
will be only foundations
from which to infer
how to begin again.

The Separation

2011-10-13T11:15:00.000-07:00

It could be that nothing is sacred to me,
or it could be that I have seen enough of altars and alder groves.

A thyrsus is only a cock, after all
and a holy virgin only a girl who won't call.

Let's go ragged as old coats tattered by a wind
whose playfulness makes love to the idea of apocalypse.

Carry on, carry on, I feel it in the popping gears of my heart
that rattletrap old box of bones.

Some comeuppance it was, howled loud as a rabbit's hop
and half as deadly, some great vindication--

all your books lost at sea but the painting I had given her
for her birthday still hanging around.

She had wanted it. Love will leave you it said without prelude,
how macabre, and she wanted it.

Wolf Dreams

2011-09-28T16:08:00.000-07:00

In the night I was
devouring your heart raw
the thick slippery flesh and
ropes of gristle

a savage banquet, the

flowers of your blood blooming
hot and rich on my tongue.
In the morning my teeth

dropped on the pillow in

vengeful splinters and what

I had dreamed was your heart
was my tongue, ribboned now

and useless, and my rage, which was

so hungry I was eating myself alive,
the animal part refusing to be cowed,
my sleeping jaws grinding at the

softest part of you, where you

are most vulnerable, in the morning
there is blood, and blood, and
I am heartless, without words.

+1

2011-09-21T17:52:00.001-07:00

It's entirely possible that
I need to unfriend
all social media
since it has become
a tool of my own oppression,
or some other thing I learned in college,
but I can’t live
without knowing if you like
everything I say.
O brave new world
that has such metrics in it,
what feedback percentage
will be enough? Will I ever be
optimized to the point of
pure celebrity, will the sound of
a thousand strangers
clicking their approval
drown out the analog whispers
that still rattle around inside
my head, you are made of paper
and flesh, which means
despite your digital lovers
you will burn when the fires come,
you will still burn,
and all the statuses left
un-commented on
will be less significant even
than ash
and smoke.

Clarence and Helen

2011-09-10T13:55:00.000-07:00

People said she was in it for the money,
the tall blond farmer with big hands
and rolling fields. What better way to escape

than uprooting from high school halls
and replanting on the sweeping hills
high above the river, where roots

can run deep. What better than a place
where everything grows; fat yellow kernels
and fat brown chickens. Eight babies grown,

uprooted, replanted, but the long reach
of time and blood and love collects them all
back again, the long reach of love

spanning decades, measured by harvests,
by baseball seasons, by each new birth,
each new set of roots made possible

by the first planting. She was in it
for the money, they said. The gold turned out
to be measured by the bushel and bale,

the wealth of love so much more, without price.

Dramatic Exercise #7

2011-08-04T21:47:00.001-07:00

Close your eyes.

Imagine you are standing on the deck of a ship. Feel the cool salt air on your face. Breathe. Taste the breeze like tears on your tongue. From high above in the crow's nest a small man is playing a faint tune on his pipe. Breathe. Again. The waves push at the sides of the boat and you feel yourself sliding toward the edge of the deck. Imagine each note of the small man’s melody hanging in the air, a delicate crystal sphere. Suddenly a wave has swelled like a great black beast and pushed you over the edge. Breathe. Again. Feel the water rushing into your lungs, your chest swelling with tears. Your hand finds the cold slick links of the anchor chain, but you cannot grip it tightly and you slip down, down, down, languid as a dream. Breathe. Again. The small crystal spheres that come out of your mouth and spin lazily toward the surface are filled with music. Imagine you can compose the melody of your oceansong. Is it a song of love? Does it resolve?

Until I Saw Your Other Girlfriend Wearing What I At First Believed To Be No Pants

2011-07-21T19:26:00.001-07:00

I hadn’t been aware of the scope of the knot. I thought,
I need a bigger sword. The word I got was not
untoward, but it definitely cut deep. What

creeping snakes have taken up residence in my heart,
what art is required to make of them sweeping tendrils!
It’s exhausting, endless, except then this part:

sometimes the elegance of economy converges so neatly
with the economics of necessity that the cart
is only holding you back. That elegant fact

has captured me; I'll hack at this Gordian mess
until it acquiesces, until it goes slack.

Half-Connected

2011-06-04T15:49:00.001-07:00

Inside my chest the
veins and thick bone

knot around each other,
caging each other.

This is the missing piece
if there is one,

in the same way owls sweep
across starlit fields,

in that same way. Silence,
then the fatal glide of silence

a whispered prayer
no longer than a wingspan.

All the blood in my body
rushes to my heart,

all that killer focus
pooling around a

trembling lump of flesh,
mouse-timid,

hearing that
prayer.

Terrible Couplets about How Pretty You Are

2011-05-23T13:19:00.001-07:00

How alien you seem in your great beauty,
how beautiful the cruelties your exquisite brain can devise.

Light streams from your fingertips, the corona of your hair,
even in your blackest fury you are clouded by butterflies.

I search for meaning in the delicate whorls of your ear,
the particular subtle geometry of hip and thigh,

but find only beauty upon beauty, indivisible.
This power you hold, this unconquered loveliness, do you realize?

Slaughter

2011-05-08T00:40:00.001-07:00

I didn’t see the act but I saw the belly sliced open

and the guts tumble steaming to the ground. Gleaming

milky-white and milky-blue and milky-pink

on the boot-trampled square in front of the hay barn.

There was very little blood. The sheep had its throat slit

and its back legs twined, was hoisted gullet-down

by the bucket of the John Deere; bled until

the thick viscera gleamed half-white when

the dark-eyed hired man sliced the belly

with his curved knife. Lanolin-sticky tufts of wool

clung to the blade and drifted through the

twilit sky, catching in my hair, dreamy flecks

collecting at the corners of my mouth. The hired man

licked his blade and winked at me. The carcass

drifted dreamily from the tractor’s crenellated jaws,

beyond care.

Old Habits

2011-05-03T17:09:00.000-07:00

When I was

younger

I would sometimes

beat my head

rhythmically

against the

wall or the floor,

whichever was

hardest.

I wanted to

feel my brain

feel itself

beating

against my skull.

I wanted it

to know.

Shift

2011-04-29T18:16:00.001-07:00

The sun will shine and grow thick the twisting vines

to obscure all things this winter has laid nearly bare—

the icy core of my heart, the snowbound expanses

of my picked-clean brain—but I am afraid to see them covered

back up again. The distances were easier to clear and the paths

easier to find; though the wind whistled and the cold bit

most needle-sharp, then I could not be untrue

without risking the soft tether of your sure hand.

This weather makes me so afraid. When the warmth

lets my limbs go loose and spreads its placating fingers

over my face, I forget. I think myself full well and

lushly flowered. Not spending bitter hours searching

for shelter or release, I spend dangerous hours forgetting

that ceaseless struggle. I remake myself newly glorious.

I design myself exquisite victories and place myself

at their core. I weave a solitary bed and sleep mindlessly.

The sun will shine and the thick vines will twist.

I am afraid I will be distant. I am afraid I will be unkind.

Poem Meat

2011-03-29T22:58:00.001-07:00

When I cross a high bridge I sometimes think about the moment the pebbles in the asphalt below will spring into focus, so when I cross a high bridge I don’t look down.

*****

Her body looked like a mint

bruises flat as nickels

big as printing plates

stamped indiscriminately.

She wouldn’t talk about it, though,

because she thought

she deserved it.

*****

They said I was a mouthy dyke

so they cut out my tongue.

I visit it sometimes on its pike,

flapping in the breeze like a lazy gull,

happy, I think, to be freed from its burden.

*****

She was so filled with fire

the only answer was

more gasoline.

*****

She has a dollhouse built

girl-sized, cups and plates

for an overlarge mouse.

The table set, the head empty,

throughout she sits in obedient silence

anticipating the sound of boots.

The Door Which Is Not A Door

2011-03-13T01:19:00.000-08:00

When you feel good you feel so good,
you almost feel like calling yourself I, almost.
The hunger pangs have lost their fangs,
and the serpentine fear coiling around your heart
has stopped toiling for a sweet breathless moment.
When you feel good you feel so good,
you almost feel like brushing your hair
because the chattering thoughts that nest there
have gone silent and still. You've gone silent as well,
it’s a smooth white pill death,
it’s a long white corridor.

On Reality

2011-03-08T16:12:00.000-08:00

At twilight
a cloud shaped
like a unicorn
hung suspended
from its single horn,
the fantastical
holding on with
what makes it
fantastic.

Dramatic Exercise #6

2011-02-22T23:27:00.000-08:00

Close your eyes.

You wonder why you’re drawn to the back of sheds, the way sunlight through the cottonwoods ripples across corrugated doors making them rise and fall like ribs, the way prone and naked ribs rise and fall. You wonder why the smell of half-rotted apples sometimes fills your mouth with its venomous breath and then a white-hot ache spreads through your chest, and deep in your belly your own apple begins to swell and swell, and why the sound of rainwater through a culvert rushes through you sometimes late at night. You wonder these things all the time, when you remember what it is you’ve endeavored to forget, like the heat of the day, the way it lingers in the creases of big hands, or the steam from the gut bag of a sheep, why that resonates, why that carcass hanging behind the shed makes you feel equally empty, why the slick green rot of leeward branches turns you slick and green and alien, why the rustle of tall grass against rusted chains makes you feel rusted inside even now. Why this, why that. Breathe. Remember this. Remember this. Breathe. Do you remember who you are? Do you remember when?

Revolution Poem

2011-02-12T01:32:00.000-08:00

Dark confrontations along opaque roads,
scraps of talk, reversals and obfuscations—

for twenty days and nights the watchdogs bayed,
the starpricked silence offered up in exchange for

jagged howls and condemnations. Oh, my love,
what has become of us? This transformation

from the greenest stage to the frantic
persuasions of commitment. This moment’s

fearful black distress. But oh my darling one, in
the warm honeyed light sweet voices lift and carry.

The onrushing day offers a pledge greater than
this pressing moment. Oh my love, the place it breaks open

is just ahead; walk along the wall with me,
the dogs are still, are sleeping.

Auto-Crucifixion

2010-12-11T18:51:00.001-08:00

I was up on the cross, you know, hanging out
when someone else needed the wood.
Pulling those nails hurt like a motherfucker

that much I promise you, but I promise you
I didn’t cry. Look, I don’t want to
drum up any sympathy—

all done on machines now anyway, so obviously canned—
I only want to demonstrate that I can handle it,
whatever pain exists in the world, wherever it comes from.

Blah blah blah, right? It was always easier to
declaim nobly from up there, even though
I didn’t believe half of it myself.

You know, I resented having to tear myself away—
what’s that guy need a table for, anyway?
What a fucking monster I can be. Behind every action,

though, there is a compelling force, behind every leaf is
a new leaf. Seriously, leave yourself up there long enough
and nobody’s impressed, least of all you.

If I wrote another poem about your body

2010-12-09T01:24:00.001-08:00

it would be to say your body is—
and by now you could fill in the blank
and anything you said would be right
as long as it was rhapsodic.

Meteor

2010-11-07T19:04:00.001-08:00

I am bad at considering time sometimes:
there was no moon tonight, but I didn’t stop myself.
Worry cupped your face for a moment; I saw
the shadow of its hand. Said yes but
took note. Like you looked out and saw
there could be the bitterness of compromise.

I tell you this: time and I are old friends.
My impulses are indulged because they arrive
meteoric, white-hot. Meteoric in the way they cool
into tangible evidence of eternity. Don’t let worry
touch you again. Like this hadn’t been waiting
to prove it was stronger even than all of that.

Invisible Ink

2010-11-03T00:59:00.001-07:00

I have been paying out secrets for pieces of string,
and the damnable thing should be this inequity, an eye
for a lie, like that; oh if I wasn’t so fond of tying things up nice
and pat, if I could let them bleed until their hearts were leaf-dry
the need would surely subside. Oh if I wasn’t marred
by pride or oh if I could stop wearing these wounds like banners
it would be easier to part with less. Instead bless these
shattered hearts with the will to mend. Bless these
endless fires. These senseless crushing desires. I love you
unless that’s the sort of thing that makes you strange.

Oh if that danger wasn’t there I’d make liars of the pair of us
blind confabulists with more hope than sense.

Dramatic Exercise #5

2010-10-12T01:24:00.001-07:00

Close your eyes.

Imagine you are very deep underground, in a root cellar or bunker. All around you is the steady drip of water from pipes. Imagine the rapid swallowing of sound as each drop hits the puddle beneath it. The air is thick with ore. Take a deep breath. Again. There is a single light source on the far side of the room. Imagine moving toward it. You begin to feel warmth touching at your fingers and your throat. Take a step toward the light. Another. The heat rises as you approach, billowing around you like living breath. Take a step toward the light. Another. Behind you in the swallowing dark you feel the pressure of many eyes. With the pulsing heat from the growing light you hear the soft rasp of many creatures breathing. Imagine they are afraid of the light. Do you reach for it? Do you pull your hand away?

Floriated Lyric

2010-09-24T01:34:00.001-07:00

You taste like an apple
exactly: everything
about you is so sweet.
Muguets des bois and
the ocean. Hyperbole
and devotion. The discrete
motion of your body,
its soft swells and
exhalations. Your eyes
tonight are bright
with stars; in you
a constellation.

Okay

2010-09-15T02:25:00.000-07:00

A phantom wave pushing yes pushing yes
pushing yes up from the hips, swelling
the ribs with yes,

lifting and expanding,

the volume of yes rushing in like the levees
had broken. An amphibious yes rich
with salt, yes crashing hard like the rough edge
of the sea. It keeps coming on, this tide,

pushing yes farther and farther up

the body, yes inexorably, exquisitely, oh
how this yes whispers in pelagic tongues,
the rippling language of yes
say yes

say yes—

Maybe We Took Summertime Too Far

2010-09-06T22:24:00.000-07:00

I hear a woman singing to me in the bathroom fan
so maybe this is it? When you start hearing
secret music, I would venture that’s a sign.

But oh yes, I see hands in the trees which isn’t so far
to leap; I see them holding long strings of bells playing
soft melodies. From the median a squat little man

reprimands the streetlamp. These are signs.
Insidious, like razors in apples. Everything springing
from the gold fire of this apple is insidious.

Spies, spies, everywhere. The cat next door with
saucered eyes. The woman in the fan calling to me
like a siren, inviting me to come find her.

Later We Assigned Ourselves Characters From The Big Chill

2010-09-06T18:17:00.000-07:00

It’s divine immolation
if you can’t hack it then whatever,

and you were so right; setting myself on fire
seemed so reasonable just then.

The way you roll the filter between
your thumb and middle finger

is the way fish swim, in long rippling
pulses. Fuck it, there’s

no fun any more. Smoke scatters around
your face, brief allusions to Tolstoy,

then pills, a sigh, marking time
before going back down the stairs.

My Name, Say It

2010-09-01T01:56:00.000-07:00

You're funny how you do what you do:
not ha-ha funny like a dirty joke,
uh-oh funny, like give me enough rope to hang myself with

before I have a chance to give in.
Glance up in the dim porch light:
it can still be a sin, if you keep touching your lip just right.

In the blushing night what’s the risk?
In the blissful dark it develops
Enveloped in red light, yellow light, green light go,

I don’t know. There’s nothing to it
except rushing through it, you show me
only the barest bones, a ripple of liquid light through lace.

I could go on about your face, but
that’s a long race; right now the pace
could kill me. So here’s this: a kiss, some thrills, a pretty song.

It Wasn't Yours In The First Place, Okay

2010-08-11T16:13:00.000-07:00

You were too happy or something, which means
somewhere in Bavaria or Senegal or the high windswept
Steppes someone was too sad. And God, or whoever

trafficks in cold reality, pointed a finger or
lightning bolt or whatever does the most damage
right at you. This is not uncommon.

You were too happy, or something. You made the
mistake of contentment, you fell Odyssean
into that perfumed trap. And Circe,

or whoever turns pearls into swine, said
not so fast. So you slowed down a little, but it
wasn’t slow enough. Your movements

could still be tracked. Sure it’s like
you fell into a thresher. Sure it’s like all the mountains
rose up like arrows and boomeranged

back down, their craggy peaks inverted
into stone teeth, the jaws of Atlas
or whoever, reminding you of

how good your sorrow tastes.

Listening to Nico Sing About Leaving

2010-08-11T00:07:00.001-07:00

I have this hangup about love being
a finite resource; that’s why I don’t tell you
every single minute. Instead

I clutch these burning flowers
to my heart, I burn holes in my heart
to prove that the love will pour out,

exhaust itself and leave behind
a heart-shaped wound rimmed
thick with char. But look at it,

I’ll say, do you see where love
used to be? It left a space just big enough
for your hands.

Oh if

2010-08-10T17:40:00.000-07:00

we were some stars, two stars
locked in an orbit, we would be
slowly decaying into each other
the white heat of our pushing inward
devouring everything, inevitable
that our plasmas will spread
like fingers and knot into each other
and burn and twist like fingers
entwining, like fingers around throats.

So Now Your Grandfather Is Dead

2010-08-10T13:17:00.001-07:00

You called to tell me he had died and it took me a minute
to remember exactly who you meant by your grandfather.

Then you said about four months ago, and I knew it was his dad,
that grandfather who died, not the one I thought was gone already.

Look, I thought they were both gone already. Look, I thought I was
hatched from an egg, or sprung from my father’s forehead,

Athenic. No, I thought they had already both—well,
I don’t want to say it again, I heard your breath catch when I

made the mistake on the phone, so I thought I was grandfathered out
because our nucleus is strong, you and me and him,

nobody else with our thick bitter blood, the kind that pumps
warnings through our knotted veins, the blood that kills

open hearts, that whispers everything you love is already gone
you just don’t know it yet. So now he's dead. Okay.

Write Like A Girl

2010-08-09T18:59:00.001-07:00

Fuck your soft emotions.
When I woke up you
were gone and I didn’t care.

You were gone
and I’m glad I didn’t have
to make you leave.

Fuck your mornings. I won’t
remember your mouth
past lunch. You sucked on

my lip with such force
that all you’ll be to me
from coffee on is a bruise

and a name that starts with
a letter from some alphabet,
I’ll bet. Fuck your soft emotions,

you didn’t even
leave a note.

Strung.

2010-08-09T18:54:00.001-07:00

I would write letters to girls all the time
if I could get away with it. If I could let
myself off the hook. But here I am. All
hooked up. Gilled. All speared and strung
up to swing and shiver in the breeze from
the lips of girls, girls, girls, oh, I’ll strain
and gasp and oh yes pull on that bright line,
each tug a silver ripple from my open mouth
to the soft cool fingers of the girls whose
liquid eyes and woven lashes net and gill
and girls, girls, girls, letters to girls, I’ll
give you anything, anything, let me off
this line, keep me oh, oh, oh, that silver
filament. I’ll give you anything, anything.
Dear girls, dear girls, I’ll swing and shiver
dear girls, anything, anything.

little bit

2010-08-04T01:57:00.001-07:00

little bit in love with you
the idea of you

also your face
which is so lovely.

mostly fascinated:
sometimes a child a butterfly

sometimes a
cobra a mongoose.

the principle still applies.
to touch your skin,

thumb::lip; twist hair
to keep at arm’s length.

little bit mouth and hands
and nape of neck.

to think about it
flirt with the topic

the hallmarks of
your good qualities

little bit in love with the
idea of you in love with an idea.

to cut my hair and get
a suit. the awkwardness again,

can’t even finish the

Equinox

2010-07-09T01:24:00.000-07:00

This sin isn't original but
oh how it wants to be
exploded out, plumbed and
weighed hand to hand

like an apple, wants
to be bruised with too much
grasping. Oh bodies
bodies, bodies. Everything

alive under this touch,
writhing under this skin
oh bodies, oh bodies, oh
fingers, mouths, every

soft part; oh yes let's--

in the sodium streetlamp
haze, in the dense black
undergrowth. Oh bodies,
brutal and lucid. Oh yes,

let's.

Untitled

2010-06-14T01:59:00.000-07:00

We sat on the bed for a while,
not touching on purpose,
and the whole time I was wondering
how much I would know about
your mouth in five years.

I was staring. But your lips were
parted just so, and I wanted to be in
a romance novel, where that
sort of thing is an invitation.
Soft, soft, what I really want

is to captivate you but
leave that space between,
to kiss you without touching.
What I really want is
to kiss you in your dream

the way you do in mine—always
the moment just after, the space
between, the heat. The golden interval
before you pull your face away,
just that moment, over and over.

There was a knock downstairs-
more guests. Your wine was across the room
on the table near the door; the way
you flew off the bed, it was like
I’d kissed you.

(uggghhhhhh, turrible. but i will replace it with the inevitable six-line version when it happens)

border smoke

2010-05-17T01:19:00.000-07:00

well shit
here it goes
in orderly rows
in orderlies’ robes
broken spokes
buried hopes,
etcetera.

We Drove To The Ocean And Then

2010-03-18T15:32:00.000-07:00

We sat on the gray crust of beach,
tongues rasped clean of speech with
each salt-curdled breath. Everything

good we had to say was said
in the car, before the turnoff
to the peninsula. Past the neat

cottages and cranberry bogs
we hit a vague low-hanging sea fog
or something, it was so apt

we descended into a fuzzy
silence to match the mist,
pearl-gray as the lining of a coffin.

On the sand our purgatorial communion
was presided over by the
dirty gray waves, each fizzing

breathless sweep hissing
now what, now what.

What Would Happen

2010-02-22T23:34:00.001-08:00

Everything is predicated on
anticipated pleasure; this room,

this bed, these years of desire.
I am readying my limbs to burst forth

in a froth of cherry blossoms,
I am trembling with unwritten music.

Loss blooms on the tongue
a bouquet as seductive as having.

Will you lift your sunlit hand
and drink the inevitable liquor,

not weep when it spills, not
smash the glass?

The White Canvas

2010-02-19T23:58:00.000-08:00

A modest square, twenty inches or so
hung in a dim alcove near the back door.
The curator explained it was kept there
for cautionary reasons; the emptiness
stayed with you for a long time
after.

Ten of Wands

2010-02-10T00:23:00.000-08:00

I’m not afraid of unforeseen obstacles.
Never has anything been so
anticlimactic; what’s another
week or two of scrivening?

Chalk it up to practice for
when it matters, what else is there
to wait for?

Primer

2010-01-29T00:26:00.001-08:00

I will open by saying I will
lay it all out for you, though I won’t
reveal exactly how just yet. A well-placed

break is a little jewel. Your breath
catches in your throat. Here is
a beautiful metaphor, the jewel at your throat.

The shift into seriousness, from charm
to passion, requires a complete thought
of its own. The intensity begins—

at the moment of deepest conviction,
the heart of the poem, this, here,
I am saying I love you.

This stanza is where the poet turns
to their subject, where Christina
turns to (your name here) and says, very

hand-on-the-shoulder, don’t be afraid.
See how the words are small and soft,
whisper them if it makes you feel safe.

See how you are past that feverish core,
and how you are unscathed? I have
engineered it. Do you follow?

This poem is a map of itself. This is
the resolution.

2010-01-23T11:41:00.001-08:00

Note to self:

Blame Talking

2010-01-22T22:09:00.000-08:00

Like the smell of you,
your blood heat
or your name, which was
a word for fire,
oh god, all that remains
is thick black char.
Oh god, the whole house
swallowed. Oh god
all the pigeons
released from the eaves
(which crumbled
with the rest), they
carried all the words
and the breath that
made the words, they
brushed the tips of their wings
across all that fevered air
and fanned it up and up
oh god, no wonder the roof
blew off. In the end
there were too many words,
too much breath. Oh
god, or whoever. Just another
exaltation, or exhortation
or exhalation. It will be over
in a minute, anyway.

The B Side

2009-12-18T20:04:00.002-08:00

I have violence and hatred in my heart;
it is kept in a room with an unlocked door
since God took the key and hasn’t been

returning my calls. I rang through to
voicemail, but hung up before the beep.
In here is a playground for deformed and

ugly children; you’re right, it’s horrible
to live in this much fear. But if you
did it to her, you could do it—

easy. Like falling off a log or going
out of town. I don’t usually feel this precarious
but it could be today: the last time,

so I felt foolish all the way down.
I wanted X with you in a dream I had,
but then I woke up disintegrated.

(The other shitty thing with regards
to hopelessness is that I am so good
at it, and you know all the right moves.)

Let’s danse macabre, then. Let’s clack
our brittle bones. Our final steps
together will be frenzied and wild because

the parts we haven’t spent yet
will be snatched back if we don’t
break them first.

Side A

2009-12-18T20:04:00.001-08:00

I have been thinking about this little nuclear family.
It’s hard thinking, something wonderful and terrible
and scary as hell about it,

a flickering half-life, printed on celluloid,
you know, the perfect reality of a film.
It’s hard thinking about

such a huge question. Like I Love You
is a question. Could this ever happen, what would
she think if she knew I was thinking it.

Don’t feel afraid. It is lovely and slightly painful.
Family, friendships, lovers, anything.
I don’t know if it’s to my detriment,

a weird sort of ache, sweet and
bittersweet, from the center of my desire.
I can’t keep repeating myself.

I felt terrible and God called me back.
It went to the machine, but I picked it up.
Out loud or not, sometimes I pull this

from its hiding place and brush my fingertips
across it. It’s odd to want something so much.
I know it is imposs—

for so many reasons. I still can’t shake
the moment. I can’t shake the way you
looked at me, there was complicity in it,

maybe you understood. I want you to know that.
It makes me smile, the portrait of an alternate life,
all the best parts of it.

Dramatic Exercise #4

2009-11-20T12:21:00.000-08:00

Close your eyes.

Imagine your lover is leaving you. You are in a bar or a coffee shop with torn vinyl banquettes. Imagine the compassion in the eyes of the waitress. She is holding her hand out to you. Take it. Imagine her pulse like a string of pearls pulled through her veins. You are smaller and smaller and soon you are small enough to slip past her lips and inside her body. Now it is your body. Imagine traveling the pearl-lined corridors of your body until you reach the dozens of doors lining the red-slicked hallways of your heart. Try each one. There is one door with a name written on a card. It is your name. Now you are twisting the handle. Again. Behind the door you hear a low voice murmuring. It is your lover’s voice. Close your eyes. Again. Imagine you cannot understand the language. Does this soothe you? Why not?

Dramatic Exercise #3

2009-11-18T19:19:00.000-08:00

Close your eyes.

Imagine that place in you where the leaves are curling and the nights are cold and silent. Imagine the house that is built there next to a brackish pond. There is a lone crow hopping through the leaves on a twisted foot. Imagine the crow. Imagine the house reflected in its glassy eye. Breathe. Again. You are fully here in the place that is caught between dying and death. Imagine the blue lace of frost on the windowpane, see how it fans and spirals and suspends the reflected moon as a hapless fly is suspended in a web. There is a shape dimly visible through the glazed window. You scrape at the glass with your thumbnail and see yourself swaddled on a high bed. You are sleeping, wrapped tight against the cold as a fly is wrapped in fine silken threads, like the princess in a fairy tale. Imagine this is the place that exists between pricking your finger and your miraculous rescue. Imagine waking up too soon. What does the world look like from here? How do you get back?

Dramatic Exercise #2

2009-11-16T03:02:00.001-08:00

Close your eyes.

Imagine this song set over the surreal dream sequence, in which you are chased in slow motion through a field of poppies by a man in a bird mask. Imagine the man. Inside his chest is a heart threaded with gold, the flesh like a bird beating against gilt bars. In the heart is a small chamber painted blue, and you are sitting cross-legged on the floor, wearing a bird mask. Now you are really inside yourself. Now you are listening hard to what you are saying, but the mask is muffling your words and you cannot understand. Imagine this song floating out from behind your bird-mouth. Now you cannot hear yourself at all, and you are walking backward out of the chamber, which closes tight and recedes into the glistening mass of the man’s caged heart. It is slowing down and presses less desperately against the bars. The man is slowing down, the profile of his bird-head growing hazy against the ocean of poppies. He calls after you but your feet are leaving the earth, you are hurtling through the atmosphere. Imagine when you wake up, the word is there, written on the palm of your hand.

Brain Death, 4:42 A.M.

2009-11-15T22:53:00.000-08:00

At that moment there is a burst
of electricity which is said to cause
the gates of Heaven to open
and time to stop.

What happened was your watch
stopped at that moment, and
the rest of the clocks in your house.
Four bulbs burned out—the ones

in your room, and above your place
at the table. The piano went
out of tune; forever after the story
will hold: at that moment.

If you had taught me to be
superstitious, I would think
the whole world had gone
into mourning. If you had

taught me to be kind,
I would think the whole world
was as small as your house,
and that the things you loved

had ceased in homage.
Instead I see in coincidences,
and honesty as the opposite
of kindness. At that moment

I wished, at the next, I wished
your lessons had been
less lasting, and that moment
more beautiful for us both.

I will adopt kindness for
a moment of my own;
it sweetens the bitterest truth,
lends grace to the notion that

the things you loved
loved you better than I did.

Inventor

2009-10-30T18:12:00.000-07:00

I have a garden that grows strawberries
as big as a human heart.
If you cut me open, my heart
is a strawberry.

I have a golden bird with a tether
around its foot
made from a strand of spiderweb
tied to my wrist.

I have a pool as deep as the earth
is wide, and in it sleek fish swim.
Inside my eyes are pools
and in them, you swim.

I have a house made from a stone
with two windows and two doors.
I can put it in my pocket
and carry it with me.

I have a ladder that goes from my doorstep
to the moon. In the middle
some rungs are rotted and cracked.
I have wings, in case.

Inventory

2009-10-18T23:37:00.001-07:00

An egg-shaped bowl lightly scarred with the flagellate threads
of steel wool, a tin cup with a bitten rim. Vinyl chairs,

their curving tubular legs spotted with rust, a
plastic tablecloth printed with daisies, a salt cellar.

Four battered gelatin molds tacked to the wall: a fish, a flower,
a heart, a domestic mandala of concentric circles. The

running toilet in the WC, the frog-shaped dish of
violet soaps. A basket of buff-colored eggs, one of

tomatoes going slightly soft in the afternoon sun. Lady
nosing pink-snouted at the screen door. Six cracked

spindles on the porch: four on the south side, two
on the east, hemmed by the sprawling groundcover rosebushes.

Two plump bees circling the glazed ham left on the stove
to cool, Lady snapping lazily at them, ears flicking. The

grinding churn of the combine trundling in. Fat kernels
shaking loose from the threshing drum, dotting the gravel

like flecks of gold. The crows, ten, twenty, prospecting.

Boutonniere

2009-10-18T01:47:00.000-07:00

Bent at the stem
it was there
for the taking.
There was no
moonlight.
Well-meaning youths
walked their dogs
and rode bicycles
in the dark,
wheels whizzing like
ground blooms.
It stood out
the picture of
the thing,
but real, so
picturesque
there was nothing to do
but bend down
and twist it off.
Gemmed with rain
as it was,
what a foolish passer
to by and by.

Dear Young Lover

2009-10-16T01:44:00.001-07:00

I remember you at your most radiant,
the spring of '96. By summer
you had grown hard about the mouth
and too thin. April or May. It smelled
like lilacs everywhere, and cherry;
you cutting flowers, you standing,
your stillness warm as the late
afternoon light. Still cold at night
but in the twilight frogs whose
voices ground like grain in a mill.
Everything about you finer than
it would ever be again. What it was--
you were on the sharp edge of adulthood
but still soft as a girl, your smooth fingers
the thickness of an iris's throat. There exists
a conspiracy of beautiful things
waiting to break our hearts; one is
you, then, paused at the kitchen window,
licking your berry-stained lips.

boy&girl

2009-10-06T21:09:00.000-07:00

their puppytongues
& delirious skin!
they dress up in
soap& bare-blooded
language
saying
over&over
to the still
fingers &tongues:
touch! taste!

Love after 17

2009-10-02T14:59:00.000-07:00

1. The yearning which crackled so viscerally through the body still crackles but now instead of crackling over raw flesh it throbs in an impacted molar.

2. Knowing from Byron is knowing that consuming ardor is best left to rich aristocrats whose occupations are a) mooning b) gambling c) sex. No option d) love.

3. There is a tipping point at which love turns into habit and then another when habit returns to love. Since nobody notices either, after a while the bitterness will disappear one morning without ceremony.

4. Contrary to populist opinion there is a finite amount of a certain kind of passion, which is why it is harder and harder to evoke over time. Much of it is squandered early and like the undergraduate’s credit rating, life will teach frugality or end in a field of lonely sorrow. Knowing from Byron this is an understatement.

5. Lies are essential, especially the ones directed inward. There is no crime in this since on balance everything has turned out to be equally sacred. This benefits lying by allowing for the egalitarian ideal of each truth, which may be true to only one side.

6. Sometimes the force of it is overwhelming and it seems like a lucid dream of youth. Waking up is a pleasure.

7. There are days of indescribable beauty which feel more real than expected until the benefit of comparison is taken into consideration. These days feel more beautiful after that particular consideration.

8. Love grows and grows and will never fully die. It is a virus wanting no cure, though there still exist the days in which the sickness is so great getting out of bed is the most that can be accomplished. Dressing and speaking are out of the question.

9. You will recover.

10. You will never recover.

Half-Remembered, In Uniform

2009-09-20T12:25:00.000-07:00

You might be someone’s little brother
grown long-limbed, too-jointed
or a year behind me in school.

I recognize you as a boy, your
remembered softness and milk-smoothness
harrowed by adolescence into the

thin ropy muscles of your arms.
I mourn you like a woman
widowed by the war of her own girlhood,

all the young men of her town
whose faces are distant golden suns,
each blinking out in the hours before dawn.

You aren’t dead yet, but the resolution
in your jaw is enough to keep me from
asking your name, or how we knew each other

or when.

L., Lodged at the Savoy

2009-08-30T09:53:00.000-07:00

In the back of the room is the
unfamiliar white bed, and
chaste as I feel, I feel
I will be complicit in
some tarnished scheme tonight.

Up the rickety steps to
a foreign apartment
I will doubtless assist in
some sordid exposure of
flesh or soul or

something of equal or
greater value. My heart
beats a continent away.
I see now, epiphanic,
why this alien and

vestal bed distresses
me. You are married
to the air, the sea. The bed
and implicit embrace will
melt like breath

from a windowpane; soon
your name will confine itself
to London, your old
stomping ground. See you
around, you’ll say or

have already said; I admit
I haven’t been listening.

(I am kind of excited about this because finally, a poem that allows me to answer the question "what is literally going on in this piece" in like a sentence)

Exodus

2009-08-27T12:27:00.000-07:00

Flapping their wings, all of them at once.
Like snow; it was like snow falling,

the perfect silence of it, the action that has
no sound except the sensation of wind

fluttering past the ears. Even less than that,
of the air, the thing that holds the air

growing weary and slipping off in soft
curling strips, floating down as though

our breath was a knife, and the struggle to keep
breathing was the incision in the wallpaper

in the dining room that we changed,
remember when, on the day all the birds

in the garden took flight at the same time,
and you said you would never believe

that there were this many birds in the world,
let alone nesting in the dahlias and the iris.

Where We're At

2009-08-23T20:25:00.000-07:00

I can be here, you talking
about the waitress’s
shy smile, be right here

but see another woman
entirely. I can lean in to
accept your kiss and

smile slyly; at that
sweetest moment, it is
her mouth on mine.

What I want to know
is do you hold
your other lover

the way you hold me?
I feel like asking, pleased
you won’t know

what yes means.

By 26 You Should Know Something, At Least

2009-08-23T19:44:00.000-07:00

The man using the pay phone at the gas station
twists the silver cord like he wants
to strangle his fingers. His ash-faced wife
in the gray-primed sedan. There are five, six,
seven fire engines howling through

the intersection. We’ve done nothing.
No evils and no goods. We’ve got this
shuffling hesitancy to do anything
at all. The man watches the fire trucks
and loses the thread of his conversation,

he looks at us hard as if we know and
aren’t telling. But we don’t know anything except
the fugue of living in a dream world with
uncomfortably sharp corners. We haven’t
done anything except doze through

this part, when the young man sets out for the city
to make his fortune. This part is always
a fiction. Best not to do anything except wait
and watch, though nobody is coming.
We wouldn’t know their faces, even if they were.

Retreat

2009-08-19T18:56:00.000-07:00

The woman I didn’t like
had cut her long hair off.
I smiled knowingly

This was before
I knew
anything,
by the way—

at her act of contrition;
there had been rumors
and she’d written

not even knowing
how powerful
the word is
for believers.

a book. Thinly veiled,
but names, at least,
changed to protect

Instead of
my own thin skin
I should think
of yours;

whoever else might have
been involved.
We all knew, of course,

after enough time
things said and
unsaid
start to take root.

just by looking—there
was a desperation
that clung to them

This is the last time
your body
is something
familiar.

fine as ball-gown gauze.
Their proximal need and
distal necessity were

The last
transitory breath
before our mouths
stop touching.

spitefully funny at first.
Then, without warning,
achingly sad.

For Economic Reasons, We Decide To Stay Lovers

2009-08-18T17:23:00.000-07:00

My body has proven a better investment
than my overtaxed heart. Even with all the
broken parts the returns of the flesh increase,

a skyrocketing trajectory of pleasure.
The measure of the heart with its
paltry economies and sinking bottom line

can be made by comparisons of pain,
how much I have caused you and
the reverse. There is no litmus test,

but then a recession is always sensed
long before it is written down.
Now eschewing the diverse portfolio

we trade solely on sensation and the
tangible aspects of passion; how much
joy can I give you, and the reverse.

The Party and The Dream of the Party

2009-08-16T23:00:00.001-07:00

Scrapes on my arm, two: long and curving and purpling at the edges. Bruises on my knees, small wounds on my fingers from knives, glancing burns from oven racks. The stiffness of my neck. I can’t move correctly, I am blocked in on all limbs by broken vessels, broken skin. My mind is thrashing itself against the walls of my skull in sympathy. We’re all fine, everyone is fine. A refrain spins through my head, versed by images of bodies moving, women dancing, by the texture of the ceiling. The sensation of falling to the floor heavily once, twice. The inescapable sound of laughter.

**

In my dream I was laughing, and bones were jutting from my skin. Bones had broken through my shoulders as I fell. All fine, honed as the blade of a knife. The sharp edges of the bones pierced the floor where I landed, the air smelled of oranges. I could not stand, pinned to the earth by the wings spreading from my back, feathered with plumes of smoke and spatters of blood. Today in the kitchen an orange has disappeared from the wire basket on the table. In the dream I smelled oranges and wake to find one missing.

**********

Oh man, a prose poem! FIRST EVAR. Sad how it's not very good. OH WELL.

After Seeing You Stand in a Pool of Light

2009-08-15T11:46:00.000-07:00

You pause under the lamp as under
the soft beam of a star which
anoints you with consecrated light,

gilding your lashes and the
rounded lift of your clavicle.
An icon in three-quarter relief

your cheek full as an apple,
amber as a harvest moon under that
ecclesiastic glow.

The record of my desire is bitter ink
and paper, rough and absolute
when held against

your half-lit impermanence.
Your faint shadow on the cusp of flight,
tenuous, fleeting as faith.

Dear Jane,

2009-08-13T00:01:00.001-07:00

The time has come for me
to seduce a married woman

as long as she is delicate
and often tucks her hair behind her ear,

though her face is not
the general idea. There is something

about the kind of woman
who belongs to someone else—

Helen was certainly a beauty
unsurpassed, but she was also

Menelaus’s wife.
That’s the general idea.

Beyond that, the sweetness of
reawakening girlhood

with its attendant
shifting sensations;

to flatter and beguile—
which is to say exploit—

the fluttering uncertainty
of a woman long kept.

This may be unfair of me, but
I will offer myself as a service

not crudely, rather with tenderness;
the unknown thing that draws her

irresistibly. The soft mystery.
The long-standing desire. Forgive me

for telling you this way.
After our life of robust clarity,

forgive me for wanting
the tender distress.

She Begins to Hear the Voices of Children Calling to Her in the Night

2009-08-09T21:35:00.000-07:00

A little boy runs circles around his
exasperated mother, singing proud and joyous

Nobody, nobody in my kingdom
Nobody, nobody in my kingdom

his voice high and clear, possessed with the
regal self-assurance of a solitary monarch.

Nobody, nobody in mine either
though our lagoons could be touching,

or royal deer wandering back and forth across
baronial lines only he and I know are there.

Perhaps we will meet and exchange seals
large as the moon’s face at midnight,

his small noble hand brushing mine.
Nobody, nobody in my kingdom.

In a show of goodwill I will send pigeons
over the castle walls as he rules his

deserted domain; our twin lands
will remain at a wary, unspoken peace.

The Root

2009-08-07T21:24:00.001-07:00

Childhood, he said, is full of terrors.
Nothing is fully explained—cannot
be explained, since as a child
there is no knowledge of pain,
or if there is, no knowledge
of how it will pass
or how it won’t.

Gifford

2009-08-05T00:51:00.001-07:00

It doesn’t taste like salt when you breathe,
or coffee, or the thick haze of
unleaded gasoline.

There are no speakers or stoplights.
There are no consciously quaint shops.
There is dust and hay and

the deceptively rustic greasy vapor
of diesel exhaust. There are
mourning doves, and crows,

and the thin cold yelp of coyotes.
There are no people of Consequence.
Nothing of consequence except the sun

and the rain and how soon
the frost comes. On the porch
a sparrow and a rotting

windfall apple. Trawling the
rippling gold fields, combines net grains
of unfathomable worth.

Poem for you, who knows it.

2009-08-05T00:45:00.001-07:00

In a different arbor we could have been
yew and eye from a branch
shorn to make more sunlight;

in a different alphabet
u and i, nestled cozily
but inconsonant.

You and I
broken by the infinite possibility
of pairing, marvelous, breathtaking

in our nearness,
marvelous, breathtaking
the view between.

Residency poem #1

2009-08-02T23:53:00.000-07:00

(title to be determined later)

berries carpet the sloping walk

down to the fields. they purse

in the sun, clutching their seeds,

retaining their flesh like boxers

their best jab,

a last desperate hope. the birds

have moved on to more

succulent pastures but the

berries still parade their

shriveled skins.

swallow us, abandon us,

it's all right;

these frail and withered bodies

were never really

the point.

Midnight, through the window.

2009-07-22T00:20:00.000-07:00

The world is suspended in vivid orange, bisected by a swath of pure night. Sodium lamps fizz alien light into every crevice. Across the glittering chasm water burbles and a room glows blue as halide. Inside there is instruction on how to behave when we get where we are going. When to laugh and when to cry, etc. Some of us will be able to guess. Some of us will remember. For more these demonstrations of folly and ambition will prove the only valued instruction and where we are going will be where we have been.

From the other side is the Word of the Lord for seven hours straight. Over here there is a baby crying at any hour. Child of God. Moses in the bulrush of picket fence, buffeted by the steady gurgle of the fountain and slow wash of cars. Or something pitiful for how it wails. The choir swells until manna seems about to burst from the clouds, the Advent like a breath of ozone before a flood. The child screams and screams. Allelu. Allelu.

Sea Change

2009-07-03T01:55:00.001-07:00

I can’t because
this thing or that
is too dangerous

in your tidal manner

I am pulled under,
kicking without
passion, splayed

toward the sky where

buoys rest, garlanded
green and rough
with the open beaks
of love.

Your mouth is
a danger highlighted,
drawn around red

seamed tight, inside

a pearl. Inside is
the flesh, marbled
and salt, inside is

the mystery, inside is

whorled

2009-05-30T01:17:00.000-07:00

openmouth kissing under

the dock, flagged up and down

green and red

hello like a hurricane lamp

soft twitching in the halfbreeze.

pictures of celebrities.

gum stuck on the lip of a

beer can in the john. well,

on the sink.

a squalid caress, barnacled,

mineral. row over row.

tooth and clavicle.

things happen in pairs

apples fall and then pears

and then salt tears.

Home Life (draft)

2009-05-16T15:38:00.001-07:00

The kitchen sink
leaks. Each drop hits
a rough shred of
leftover beet.

This domestic
rhythm. Each drop sends
a rich red shudder
down the clean

white enamel. From
the living room, scraps
of Grieg, then
the Für Elise.

This Service Is Temporarily Unavailable

2009-04-07T14:28:00.001-07:00

You have been in Costa Rica since Friday
which being five days ago
makes for a very short century.

I have the tattoo of rain to keep me company
as always; together we tap out
an unhurried SOS. Your frequency

is banded by the tropics. Mine is
three times a day, every eight hours
and will be until the crackling air

between us is smoothed out, until
the hiss of the rain and the static
of insurmountable distance dissolve

into a fine clear whisper. Until your mouth
rests next to my ear again.

Scraps

2009-04-06T16:02:00.001-07:00

song

love and strife
will sing
their old
anthem
together
alternating
verse.

* * * * *

your mouth

what else
can be said?

* * * * *

like the disc

like the disc
of the sun
i will
wear you
high
on my
forehead
so the world
will know
i am
blessed

* * * * *

motives

we are caught up
in blood
we make poems
like cups
to carry it.

redact

2009-04-05T12:02:00.000-07:00

of course she would have an opinion
   on translations of sappho
   and would prefer anne carson
   over any comers.

   sound like a couple of dykes
   maybe

they are mysterious, the pair of them
   in ways she is not.
   fragmented
   in ways that she is
   which is a comfort.

   some things are wishful
   usually

the tattered scraps of great love
   are easier to understand
   than pages and pages
   of pap and saccharine.
   so she loves sappho
   and carson best.

   other things are true
   somehow

instead of rolling her eyes at another
   suggestion of marriage
   she thinks of garlands
   and how beautiful the girls
   of lesbos
   must have been.

promise

2009-04-05T11:59:00.001-07:00

we will
leap
across

a sparrow chirps
sheep bleating

your hand

instead of

because

where snow
clings
to the banks

the sun makes
ribbons

your face

a coin

as children we went skating

2009-03-25T00:26:00.001-07:00

always the prospect
of thin ice. the innate
knowledge of gradation:

thick solid white,
porcelain white, then
something finer,

the rippled translucence
of bathroom windows
and so on down to the thinnest

dusk-gray wafer where
the first cracks split open,
the drifting snow suddenly

blue as a vein.

Here it is:

2009-01-31T17:16:00.001-08:00

I want indivisibly the sleet smell
of chemicals giving up,
not giving a shit, of molecular
who-the-fuck-cares,
because who does? Who should?

Your eyes are the bottom
of a swimming pool with its
chlorine like the clear green rind
of a watermelon, I want
all of this. I want all of this.

Is it wrong to want this much?
Here there are cracks in
the window like icicles
here your voice rings out
like sunlight on snow.

It is not mine, but it must be,
whose else? I want you
and this, the world you
cradle in your arm, that
suckles your approval.

Is it wrong to want this much?
Punk rock music and
lights beaming down in
scrupulously intended ways,
you there, its intersection.

thirst

2009-01-29T20:50:00.000-08:00

i have made peace with everything.
washing the glass, drying it;
its thickness, its heft,
i have carried the world. it fits
snugly in my hand. it asks
for nothing, only serves
its singular purpose. the rest
is daring, is flourish, is expectant,
not necessary, only desired.
the task is to do what you
are made to do, all else is gilding.
the world is this small, it is
this solid.

Ruth and Howard

2009-01-12T18:34:00.001-08:00

She saw him once, the golden man,
under the pretense of being at church camp.
His plane flying right over her very house
landing in town, how could she stay away?
Going with Lenore for the weekend,
she told her mother.

Sweet bucktoothed Lenore, who never got
into any trouble. Who made everything dull
and safe with her reliable presence, even
when Ruth made her practice
being him, now you are his mouth,
in the dark secret parts of the night.

She was sad when his plane kicked up
clouds of dirt instead of fine white talc
like in his pictures. But it was him,
it was him dropping off the wing,
that night she whispered NR258Y
for his plane.

En are two five eight why why why
with sweet Lenore fighting her teeth
to be the perfect man. Ruth gripped
her mattress, now you are his hands
and felt the sweet rumble of those engines
pass over her, again and again.

Season's Greetings

2008-12-25T22:31:00.000-08:00

I want you to know this:
you have broken my heart.
Like a butcher severs the
thick red knot of flesh from
the cavern of a cow’s body,
you have hollowed me and
left me to fill myself up again
with bile and black thoughts.

If you try to run from me
I will find you and carve
my name into your skin
with my bare hands; with
my fingernails sharpened
to points I will show you
this disease and I will
make you know that

everything in your life is shit.
Everything you love
is irredeemable. I will seal it
with a kiss, pull my lips away
bloody and hot to make you
know this sour consumption
which eats and eats at me
until I am only bones.

I will force your ear to my chest,
to my slick white ribcage
and make you hear the way
this winter wind whistles and
moans through me. How
hard and empty I am. How
this sickness has made me cold
and grotesque. How it catches.

Shh

2008-12-18T20:43:00.001-08:00

Smoke spreading shifting shadows
spilling, sliding swiftly,
sluicing streetwise, slipping
subliminally, scalloped
shimmering snowshells
spurring soft streams,
silent strands sent
spiraling, spinning,
shoreward, seaward.

In Transit

2008-11-21T11:13:00.001-08:00

I was on the bus the other day when I saw
a man wearing a bright green wig, he was
rigged up like a Christmas tree. No lights,
but his brightness outshone any bulb.

On the bus he talked and talked and talked
about baseball, which he called dropsy,
like the thing babies get. Maybe it was the
wig, but nobody stopped him.The dropsy

the dropsy the oopsie he dropped it
line drive center field oopsie-dropsy
sticky fingers on that pitcher, sticky sticky.
He wasn’t picky, didn’t discriminate

between second base and home plate.
The words interested him more, to say
what you mean is lazy, and yet you couldn’t
say he was crazy, even with the hair

and the dropsy, like a grounder past the shortstop
he was all right, a sight like a mascot
from outer space, a poor displaced pilgrim
who speaks in tongues only because his lungs

don’t know our air, he’s a rarity, and
on the bus we offer him charity by
pretending green hair and sick babies
are the most ordinary things on earth.

Rain Poem for J.C.O.

2008-11-07T23:27:00.000-08:00

The rain like a broom’s stiff bristles swishing
or an officious cat briskly purring
the rain grumbles through the gutters
and sometimes seeps beneath the shingles
to strike a rumbling tattoo

then in my head the way
sometimes my pulse is the loudest
thing I can hear, rain like
my sinuses rhythmic stick and unstick
rain like my jaw clicking late at night

tick
tick
tick

as though I am chewing
on something ugly.

The rain like here, like now
when it finally bubbles up
and curls the linoleum:
much worse than I thought,
much more troubled
the foundation.

Worst-Case Scenario

2008-09-10T19:55:00.000-07:00

The sweet rot of windfall apples fills the air
until it has become the air, as if every breath
were filled with music in a minor key

the end of summer, like the end of a marriage.
Days divide up their goodness, parcel it:
the sunlight for early-morning frost.

The apples slick, bronzed with decay,
exploding under bicycle tires, spattering
mucilaginous pulp across the blacktop,

their sickly, sugary, syrupy scent
unavoidable, the concurrent rot in my core
a twisted corollary, if I hadn’t

painted this world in peeling colors
would my own frescos stay lifelike?
Would these pictures of babies

never to be born, would they still have
all their parts? Or would they as now
have no chance?

Untitled

2008-08-25T14:23:00.000-07:00

Across the street they are cleaning the drive
with stiff-bristled brushes that swish
and sweep like swick swick

like our hearts tick tick here in the bed,
while the breeze from the open window makes
our sweat-slicked skin cool.

The younger brother, he’s touched in the head
you said not unkindly, he’s thick,
with a red-rimmed eye, sentimental

your quick fingers trace mountaintops and
ford the streams of my body. Here a trickle
of salt, here you pick

each thing to be your favorite, call my hand
a bundle of sticks and kiss my fingertips,
and then my eyelids.

The younger brother’s laugh wicks in
through the window, ha ha ha,
so big, and you murmur

there aren’t enough mouths to hold
our joy. Instead we give it wings
and watch them spread.

The Way Emily Dickinson Might

2008-08-20T18:24:00.000-07:00

I am afraid of your mouth, which is so sweet—
and of your heart, which has its own set of teeth

when you press your breast to mine I can feel it—
trembling, salivating—and hear its mercenary beat

strong and fierce and hot, I am afraid of it, and—
of the way you tell me I won’t ever be too much

even though your heart wants to eat me up—
I am weak, I am small, I am not enough.

Last Call

2008-08-19T19:06:00.000-07:00

Pausing on the back step to crush a sprig of nip
for the inevitable cat wending her way around
the doorframe, tail a ghostly arabesque in the night,

lush with crickets and rustling undergrowth
and the pop pop pop of fireworks saved,
jealously hoarded for months. Down the street

a drunk is singing his way home, lurching into
garbage cans and mailboxes, his voice cracking
every time he stumbles over his own feet.

Blue moon, you knew just what I was there for
he’s holding up his lighter and at first it’s aimed
at the tip of his white-filtered cigarette, then

he thrusts his arm aloft: without a dream in my heart
he waves it back and forth: without a love of my own
and then he starts to cry. The cat leaves off her

treat, a mangled leaf still caught in her teeth,
eyes huge, tail twitching as she listens. The drunk
sobs magnificently, wailing against a sympathetic backdrop

of gray-swathed sky and mournful leaves
rasping dirges in the late-summer wind. The cat bolts
when he finishes belting out the last whiskey notes,

is rewarded with bottle rockets and car horns.
Up the street a television blinks lazily, showing the world
to the sofa and the potted palm.

Chinese Box

2008-06-27T01:02:00.000-07:00

where did I see a box like that,
squat with fat little legs
like a pasha, was it real
or the other-real of a dream?

what this means is
did someone else see it too,
in a waiting room or
the house of a mutual friend

who passed by this same
storefront one day,
or is it all mine, all really
real, the way it is

when it’s just you
all alone, the faces and
places and the spaces in
between, and it doesn’t matter

why you’ve given blue eyes
to a brown-eyed girl. the
hyperreality of the mind
playing its tricks, like

how a squat little box
with legs like a pasha
exists somewhere and
nowhere, all together.

Untitled

2008-06-06T14:36:00.000-07:00

A dry bed but frothing with effluvial blossoms.
Riots and rages of them, more than water
but hot, but dry, but spattered and speckled with rot
far beneath where the masses of earthworms
churn and blind digest, around, under, over, through
endless swallowing, endless, endless,
a shifting sliding mantle, spinning earth
an unwavering and defiant core. Unwavering.
Aching. A loss. A burden, this life,
all flash and bang, all color and light, all endless,
all endless, streamers, banners,
a slamming door and farther off another.
The faint last gasp of light evaporating from the tiles
and you walk away, away, across the
hollow ground, you pass over the seething mass
of violent coiling earth, and step
and step and step. Monstrous, holy,
with tongues like pages always turning,
life like ashes, still hot.

Impossible Departure

2008-05-08T01:01:00.000-07:00

Like when we were kids and smeared
rubber cement on the soft pads of our fingers
and blew on them until they were tacky.

Press pointer to thumb and pull apart:
whoever could stretch the sticky threads
longest without breaking them won.

Or when Bugs gave Elmer Fudd the hotfoot
and his boots sank down, soles spreading
and bubbling like pancake batter.

He tried to chase Bugs but the melted threads
yawning between the ground and the boot
snapped him back like a rubber band:

like that. They always looked like teeth
and rabies spit to me. Like my hand
was the mouth and the glue was thick disease.

The threads are what I mean.
Like a mouth,
yawning wide open.

Like Elmer’s soles holding on to the earth.
Like Elmer tried to run, but that mouth
just ate him up.

Pastorale

2008-04-08T19:31:00.001-07:00

f you could afford to think about it you could lull yourself
with memories real and invented of bucolic nights
smelling like hay and dirt and granite, the far-off yowl
of a coyote, so movie-perfect it’s almost surprising
that the barn doesn’t tip over in a sturdy breeze to reveal
a cheesecloth and balsa façade. The steady reedy thrum
of crickets. Cows sending up warm exhalations of
humus and shit as they shift in the pasture.

An engine blatting across the dark.
If it is a tractor or an old Ford truck it will fade away
like an aural illustration of Zeno’s paradox,
reverberations stretching into thinly audible infinity.
Instead it cuts out abruptly
like it has turned the corner into an entirely different night.

Love Song for Howard Hughes

2008-02-26T19:04:00.000-08:00

Her megawatt smile lights up the Hollywood night, but

under the dental acrylic and silicone are
the crooked teeth and sagging tits
of ordinary humanity.

The pre-eminence, the prescience of tiny things:
how elegant an idea to start with just one—a single cell,
a single thought floating through whatever nascent, whatever
embryonic fluid, pumping the waters of life
through its sieve, puffing and collapsing,

under that, the rotting black tongue
and shuddering heart of
ordinary humanity,

replicating thousand by thousand by incalculable million,
the flora: flagellate, amoebic, ciliate,
each a perfect copy of the one before, carrying the nucleus
(the idea, the photograph of eternity)
in its porous and protozoan sac.

Under that, the prismatic efflorescence of
lush microbial forests, the infinite cellular history
of ordinary humanity.

And maybe it should’ve stopped here—it would have been
easy—a sip of the aqua vitae and the precious blueprint of that idea
scattered in broad handfuls by some careless god,
the infinite scintilla of what is suddenly becoming what could be
by virtue of where it lands, it is the act of becoming, this—

(If you look into his eyes they look red, bloodshot, but if you look closer—if you can stand to—they aren’t bloodshot, they’re bloody, and even if you can stand to get this close you have to look away rather than face the angry expectation of those scarlet eyes and the awful entirety of the war he is losing, losing, no matter how many pharmacological miracles are trumpeted in the headlines. But don’t mention the rot, don’t mention his body, a bloody sponge (the undersea kind rife with parasites). The things you present to him are clean and beautiful, marcelled hair and expertly applied kohl. You appear to him a soft-focus marquee angel, sexless and odorless behind a plastic curtain that makes you feel plastic which is just as well. If you are conscious of your sloppy humanity he will know it. Just don’t mention the germs and he will believe he is fine.)

—and then that’s all, like an upturned puzzle box
before any of the edge pieces have been picked out, those
beautiful, perfect, simple cells, each one an egg in no danger
of hatching, all bumping softly against each other,
all glancing away, each one drifting peacefully

under that, nothing except tiny dots of light
which aren’t even that but can be explained that way
for the sake of ordinary humanity

with its own precious parcel, its own golden kernel of
wisdom bobbing serene in an amniotic sea,
all those pixilated bits of the whole picture without the threat
of image degradation. The portrait of All Being when viewed
from afar like a topographic map or a projection screen.

Public Discourse (Revised)

2008-01-14T22:29:00.002-08:00

Instead of counting the minutes until
we can count the rivets
on the rockets

and the decibels they spew shrieking
and jagged through
the atmosphere

we put our fingers in our ears and
sing sing sing songs
without words

our native tongues flung grief-struck
and dumbstruck
into empty air,

language a mangled machine in
an animal world that has
no use for
equivocation.

Goodbye to you,
it says, prying open
its jaws.

Behind its sicklesharp teeth the
swallowing darkness; and still
and still and
still

we blame each other for
hiding in candied
fantasy,

as though there were anything
to choose between.
As though
it were

the easy way out.

This Is What You Get

2008-01-14T22:29:00.001-08:00

The levees have broken again,
in the desert this time
which is not quite unthinkable,
but unshakably Biblical

the photographs of drowned houses
looking even more surreal
when punctuated by saguaros
sticking out like sore losers,

playing the patsy to
the universe’s latest
practical joke.

Public Discourse

2008-01-10T18:13:00.001-08:00

Instead of counting the minutes until we can count the rivets on the rockets
as they rip jagged courses, siren screams through the atmosphere,
we put our fingers in our ears and sing sing sing songs without words

our native tongues flung grief-struck and dumbstruck into empty air
language a mangled machine in an animal world that has no use
for equivocation. Goodbye to you, it says prying open its jaws,

behind its sicklesharp teeth the seeping darkness; and still and still and
still we blame each other for hiding in candied fantasy, as though
there was anything to choose between. As though it were the easy way out.