Jog towards a wandering glimpse of future, what is this
Wanderlust or some other pageless phrase
With no delineation of tasks or conversely

Freeing engagements, it’s a hustle
To the chair,
To a door that is closed and filled with the hum
Of a white and perfected mind.

I see the sand of some clawed for talent,
Broken by the immediacy of sloth and aged
In the sedation of being in love.

And it waits in a sloppy car and breaths
Shallow or deep but unaccountable to me.
The wish that is old and oxidized green and O
O so beautiful is this house that I have forgotten.

Seal, Anesthetic Beloved

I sit on the seal's back while they hold her down,
Eyes dark, wraithlike, bloated gross to me
And huge thrusts of deplorable
Grunts as I shove the needle into her spine.
Health disgusts me now and the
Tent is white, the pool, damp, shudders like everything
Is cold seeping water into my boots
And I retch a little
Dumbfounded to my preposterous decision,
Why I did it for him, though he won't ever know
Not here anymore, but everywhere
The blank black glare of this seal and
grinning spot of white and yellow
teeth. That grin is him, as he
Welcomes me to hell, and shakes
On the sparks of stars and then my
Eyes go back in my head and I see nothing.

THE CAR IS JUST A METAPHORE

He was the lost:
Maddening costliness of youth--
I drove him in my car, let him drive

To buy his drugs, repercussions
Of an unnamed heroin. It was the end of something.

We traversed a stupid land decked with lilies,
And bought the closet shut
In my car with a smile.

She and I, also
Drove in my car, repressed by bad directions
My specious infatuation…

She knows everything and there’s nothing I can do about it.

It’s the car; it’s the rebirth of me and what I can’t contain anymore.

It isn’t the car, just
The ability to leave, this stupid star
Preposterously far away
But its there and its family, and I suppose its

The locksmith juggling his own disbelief.
My mind
A pile of unwashed clothes.

Now You Wish She'd Never Come Back Here Again

Piles of clothes on the floor that he moves
around from time to time
in an attempt to tangibly clean.

White walls framed beneath by
clusters of Steel Reserve and the grease of intoxicated handprints.
He has the same gray comforter
she let him take, dense with the smell of
him, night-sweats diffusing the old effect of her.

It's noon and he
lies awake in bed and opens his eyes to stare at the dusty off-white
ceiling fan. He's naked but stays like that for a little while to try
and reverse in his mind the bloated sense of his recent weight gain.

He puts on dirty jeans and nothing else in order to feel that cracking
open a beer and nothing else is justified, and he sits by the window,
tries to think of his new landscape.
choking overpasses decked by decadent palms--
as a good newness--

he doesn't have to think about her anymore.

White Birds Are All Around

There’s a space right here in which everything is awake.
I’d like to wear shades to cover my eyes but the sharpness of this world's addictive, and
so what
if the humidity of claustrophobic comfort divides the lines from time to time, dancing like the water of our constitutions, cause that’s okay, its all the better when it goes away and her legs dance,
quiver slightly as she walks, and his hair is ringed with tips of fire, a halo of gentle reversals.

Behavioral stones that spill from the mouth in embarrassing moments. Your stones are stars and mine
are the boredom of self-effacement.
your stones are stars that you hold so light
dainty in long fingers that wither to the tip of a branch and the clear
air of unadulterated control. (compassion is everything).

The distinction that permeates good conversation, books
of nostalgia that seep in tangled lines, underlying every utterance.
On one side of the world it constricts in gross observation, but on one side
it’s the whistle of unassuming affection, erecting
monuments clear
up in the silent air, awake with the blindness of silent landscapes,

In and out of a white that is nothing, glorious, everything, birds
that shuffle all around, shuddering comfort into abrasive chests,
wary of connection: light monument of the lines that fortify our motives,
awakened from the sedative
forgetfulness of self-involvement.

And then I said the fact I’d been unable to say:
“I’m sorry,”
and I watched her lips give way into smile and her heart
unconstrict as the birds shuffled about.


[Her face is the deep ocean.

Her face is not the deep ocean.
Her face is the grey sky.

Her face is a blind alley.

Her face is her touch is her breath
Is her fingers is what remains
After the laughing is over.]

the design of three locations

Seedy bar: bar stools, alcohol, cigarettes, juke box, pool tables, cues, balls chalk, etc., video poker, the usual video games in seedy bars. Possibility of bar fights, bumping people with pool sticks, sleaze-balls hitting on girls, girls goggling over hustling pool sharks, arguments over music, (dancing?) and the liquid to make it all believable.

Foxhole: traumatized (or bored—perhaps traumatized and bored) soldiers, guns, grenades, explosives of different kinds, deck of cards, some food and maybe some alcohol and tobacco. Soldiers (and the mistress that is hiding out?) are under attack, or are so bored they have to find something to shoot at.

Cage fight: fighters have gloves, mouth guards, and adrenaline. Corner-folk have the fighters’ robes, ice, tape, towels, and suggestions plenty. Young woman announces rounds with numbered signs held over her head, walks corner to corner in bikini and high heels. Fighters enter to music. Obvious conflict, and space for audience input.

it is pretentious to speak of

and he kept on, agreeing and nodding and jostling around. I willed him away but there he sat, intent on asking, intent on finding in me something to hange his cap and gown on. I was embarassed to be speaking, small and hunched behind the table under the heat lamp and I stopped talking about it. I said it is here and everywhere, genocide and war, it is in Sudan now and you and I are having a casual conversation about it. I wanted to spit it at him, a ball of sickness, tied up in brands: mass rape, mass graves, murder, suicide, racial cleansing, DEATH. The wrong people die, the wrong ones mostly. I stopped talking then and watched the timed chess game, watched a Hatian loose on purpose his challenger chanting, "Come to Papie, Cherie, come to Papi."

SHORT

She cried like a puppy
Dog, base and whining yelp of love--
Animal and unaccustomed to human propriety;
"Oh Jesus, no no no no no..."
I woke up to her because of that

And it was like
Like I stepped on her paw
When she saw me--

And me, they propped me up
And I couldn't see, the (white) tubes
Around me stifled my vision

And the emmense effort of lifting my head
From my shoulder, was for her
Mother, ignore

These crass bald veins and blood red eyes,
(She said
They were so red
She couldn't even see my pupils).

They gutted my stomach and I yelled at them for it:
"You cheated me, You cheated me!"
(such a teenager)

And when I woke up a few days later, I looked in the mirror
Remembered my mother, and tried
To wash off the blood from my thin blue fabric

Stained like I stained her with my brutal apathy

(Forgive me, Lylia)

Jack Scratch I

You have to understand, he wasn’t a big deal to me at all. I only saw him on the periphery, in the corner of my eye, slurred vision of some formidable figure.
There were bonfires in the middle of each bar table, that’s what I remember, and I didn’t have a light.
So I’d say excuse me, politely, and divide his group, dip in and out of the fire with fire and satisfaction in my lungs.

I was going to leave and he bought me a drink. And watered down my defenses, and like a docile lamb I let him lead me:
We sat, we drank, and then went somewhere else.

I remember the glint of night water on the concrete
Outside, as he kissed me
And I had to strain upwards, shooing away the mistaken identity of my attraction.

He said, “I’m gonna bite your neck,” and he did.

Later on, after my introduction
To a strip-bar (his guilty addiction),
I remember laughing at his bed, as it pulled out of the wall.
I think my self-effacement, and effacement of him made him laugh,
He was so unused to it.

And then it was night and we did all those things you do in the dark and the darkness of illogic.

He had a small mouth, I hadn’t noticed it before. And he had
Blue eyes that shocked water throughout my system, the application
Of a freezing IV. And I was so surprised to notice
My hand’s inability to fully grasp his upper arm.
(I didn’t think he was attractive when I first met him.)

In the morning I realized all that we had talked about, the click of immediate intuition.
And the funny part was, he didn’t ask me to leave, after clutching me on the couch the night before,
“I love this girl [me], so crazy much!” not real love, of course, but that other strange thing that
Shoots out of ignorance into some strange half-knowledge.
(he got all my jokes; he was smart and it killed me).

He didn’t ask me to leave, just asked me what I wanted to eat
So we walked half-drunk, through the sudden hardness of cold wind
Into the pizza place, where he bought two pitchers of beer and grinned with that small mouth
And nodded his head at me (dastardly, ha!).

After napping we went out again, and sat at a table, staring at each other, then to that caustic mirror by the wall; he loves to look at himself, and I was shameless
In emulation. Looking back at him was better, though,
I’d let these strange swells of pleasure creep throughout my senses and quiver on my mouth.

I was so proud back then, of my new room, I had painted it
(drunk all the while, I told him, and he laughed),
That I brought him easily into it, giggling madly together,
I guess that’s all I remember
Above the music and joyous rush of seeing him fall off my bed. His embarrassment was hilarious,
Because I knew he wasn't used to that.

And then we did all those things you do when its dark and logic
Is purposely ignored.

And in the morning, he got up
Dull watered eyes reflecting nothing
And he kissed my cheek, and left.

We spoke once, after that, for hours. I made him laugh again which heightened my joy to funny infatuation. I’d think of him at work and smile, with my face getting warm. He was like wine, and all those other addictive joys. I thought I had a boyfriend. I thought he’d want to be my boyfriend.

After not dating in so long (rebirth after disastrous marriage), I didn’t know how it was, I guess.
And he didn’t call me after that, and I found out that he’d gotten his love back.

An I pushed him out of my mind and pretended
That it hadn’t really happened, because it really wasn’t a big deal to me back then.

don't be kidded by the pronouns: memories and their lack

I remember unplugging the phones and locking the doors. I don’t remember when exactly I fell in love with her. I remember my father’s voice, smelling like earth-salt through the phone, “Of course you will loose her.” I don’t remember breathing. I remember her face settling into a smile; the way hair falls always to one side. I don’t remember how I managed to talk to her, heaving with sadness, wrapping my father’s words around my fingers, around my teeth one by one. Everything I said to her was twisted. I don’t remember when she stopped being a child to me. I remember kissing her goodbye like I had known her all my life, no: like I would surely know her the rest of my life.

I remember the way she hung love before me like a limp dick, threatening to come off in my hand and leave me with no body. I don’t remember her. She is nobody, nobody, I am the body she stole. I don’t remember what I had to prove by winning. I remember the consummation of our fighting, like fire, like fear in my belly: all my love for her, all that I hated in her, embodied. I don’t remember if it was to her size or to my weakness that I lost. I remember feeling safe for a few days, having forfeited my will to hers. I remember staying months in my room because of my face. I don’t remember what I looked like then. I remember praying God would take up my cause with furious wrath. I don’t remember when God stopped smiting the wicked and burning the proud.

I remember lighting candles at the church, buying prayers with the money she paid me. I don’t remember praying for myself. I remember notes sprinkled like rose petals in my office, my name in her hand. I don’t remember why she wore a Shiva and not a Brahma or a Krishna. It was Ramana’s white loincloth and sun-brown cheeks that stirred in me an affection for Jesus, sailing on Lake Tiberias, the wind scratching at his beard. I don’t remember when I stopped telling the truth. I remember why. I don’t remember learning to count. I remember my eyes spilling liquid secrets, my veins opening in time, to my surprise. I don’t remember when I realized I was dying. I remember hanging all my weight in her arms. I don’t remember if I ever saw her again. I remember changing my mind about who I am. I don’t remember wanting to live, really. I remember choosing not to die.

wednesday march 30: notes

Officer Jenkins has sand colored cheeks chiseled by the batting of his ocean-eyes. His surprising beauty paired with the humiliation of my circumstance catches silent in my mouth. He asked me questions. I look at my feet and nod.

I fall asleep in the parking lot memorizing Rebecca’s lines. Rebecca is John’s wife. I love the name John. John will be back in Dublin by now with fragments of my tenderness: he forgot me so quickly, threw away my picture.

The courthouse is easy to find. An officer is riding a horse in front of me. Click-clack, click-clack. It feels odd, obtuse to be a horse inside a city. I wrap my belt around my wallet, keys, lighter, a few pennies. They float through the x-ray belt in a Tupperware box. I do not beep. I put my belt through the loops in my jeans. I throw the pennies in the garbage can. I scribble answers on twelve pages. I don’t want to answer any more questions. I don’t want to talk about this anymore.

White chalk on blood red doors. I write: behold the day cometh that shall burn as an oven. I fold a small box out of a larger box and force it into the hole in my wall, made by the metal stool I threw months ago. I roll all my money into the box and cover the hole.

Brian’s face is bright against his black hood. I fail to heed the warning in his brow, the strength of his jaw. “We meet again,” he says, “It must mean something.” I borrow a single paper. It means I can roll a single cigarette.

I have 85 cents for dinner. I steep Earl Grey and add two inches of half-and-half for protein. It is almost white, soft in my mouth, the color of skin.

Xiu Xiu battles the metal band next door. He sings shutup-shut-up like a lullaby. The light hits him blue and yellow from behind but doesn’t make him green. He apologizes too much. A small dark girl yells, “Let’s dance, people!” It’s so stupid that no one dances. I lean on the wall: my legs feel like rotting stilts. I sip coffee, not whiskey.

The bath water folds me into her measure, curls me up maternally. In her embrace I am so young and tired, too tired to wash my hair.

In my dream I fight a man with a knife. I am afraid and so I ask to try again. The second round I am not afraid of the blade, but of my proximity to the man.

MIDNIGHT IN THE SHAKER CEMETARY (Jack Scratch II)

2/10/05
Like music
I move--
Like water I shut
My eyes.

Its amazing how he broke me, after years
So quickly. Making my slurred mind
Alright; making
My heart-hardened consequences
Like the brave decisions of Good Men

[My shakey
desperation for love didn't matter. He broke me
In a barren way

I mean that I was barren of protection, and he didn't mind]

That was then; this is now:

I'm exhausted by pretending to be in love, because that hard stone of real affection has caught me hard, and crying hard with you
has purely exhausted me.

I feel that I've lost tons of disasterous meaning, along with my keys and phone and cards and trembling stability. I feel
That I wanted you to cry it all out, and clutch you hard when
You threatened the violent execution of your greif. That gut loss
Is everything to me, I mean:
You practice it and hold it and touch the smooth or brittle mold of it in your hands
Untill you cannot remember anything else. This is bad poetry...sorry

I'm sorry I kissed you so much, because I didn't want to bother you, and I was
(a little, just a bit) drunk, and now
I've lost another day, just sort-of washed away into your sorrow
With you it seems ferocious but it's not--
It's almost gentle, you in your desolate and blistered landscape.
Perhaps the rush of your desolation simply cloggs my senses with kindness, but for now,
My limbs are light and my head rests in this inch of indelible water, it isn't as ferocious
as we both think, our strange company.

When I was fifteen we would take a car (the busted semi-depression of the suburbs), and drive out to the Shaker cemetary. It was always quiet and always frightening.
I had greif on my shoulder and putting his heavy fingers on my waist.

You see they're just like us, silly comparisons that shuttle through my mind and bloom into BIG realities, the quiet made a stasis course throughout all my pores and the bell of hush and fear was like grief. you see
They were all buried standing up

[they're just like us]

O far, like teenage ghosts--
Walking down the long line of white stars.

A bone to pick

There comes a time when a woman has a bone
to pick with a man, insert any male face
into that spacial illusion, it's all the same- present absence.
Men, getting them to face you is rainbow chasing.
I've always felt it, the missing bone.
Back to eden I went inside where he broke out of me.
No wonder they hide, they know they're thieves.
We've forgiven them over and over our dead bodies.
It doesn't matter, they don't care.
they stare blanky at the galaxy,
they try to measure themselves against our breaks.
We stare out from the universe, unmeasured
pouring milkyways into black holes.
It isn't our impotence that keeps them dark.
They are busy counting what is infinate.

and yea shall MOw down the wicked...

or in some cases, the wicked have tread the girl. The charges don't bother her. She could laugh off two bullets, the trade of life: his for hers, hers for his. She's tried at playing god; failed. You could say she's learned, but then, she did get arrested recently. The lady-cop said with a smile or a smirk it's just a bump. A bump in the road, humans humans making stops along the way. She stoped to write warnings; something bad for buusiness and something true. There wasn't enough time. There wasn't enough ink. She's not sorry, only guilty.

Ink is worthless. It surges now for all the years (all the cocks) that never payed, that she payed her body to and...

dreamed of murder, complicated, brutal... She doesn't have a gun maybe, when things blow over, she'll stop wanting to use one.

She found something after the cop talk, after the lawyer talk, after the joking: Behold the day comreth, that shall burn as an oven; and all the proud, yea all the wicked, shall be stubble: and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the Lord of hosts, that it shall leave them neither root not branch.

Yes, let's leave them neither root nor branch. Yes, let's burn him. Like his mother did. Like his Ladie does. Like he burns inside. Lets's synchronize the abuse.

She prays, sometimes. I come and smite the earth with a curse.

GARGOYLE 1: or THERE IS A LIGHT THAT WILL NEVER GO OUT

It feels remarkable, if it’s true
That the topic has never been broached. Intensely charmed, Lou can’t ignore the seeming folly of these girls, his group of adorers. We all sit about and delight in ourselves and his attention. I, feeling myself in essence married, only think of myself in the most abstract terms
But surely, he says, we are all so intense.
And in our own right we are-- Janine and her jewelry and smacking lip kisses at the end of a meeting, and Kat’s cherub face and free blonde hair with a drink in her underage hand. These kisses suddenly torment the gossiping woman in my secret self

His wife, pretty mouse
What does she think of these girls?

His wife and her large belly in the summer noon, deep shadows of children adorning the courtyard.
And her brown hair tied back low and modestly, she says hello, and nothing else.
I want to say that I’m married too, that I know
But I do not: childless, I am as unaccountable as Lou in his guileless attraction.

I want to yell at Janine and her kisses,
[Men are not like you, they’re weak!]
But perhaps these girls are as weak as him, or more so
and in printable terms, he's innocent as a child

His mop of dirty hair, and liquor breath at the art opening
Go home to your wife, Lou, go home

[when we first met you asked me if I spoke french, caught me praying beneath your ugly Jesus. I said I’m not religious, and then you asked me if I wrote.

The open breath of that place caught me in an eternal stasis, when I’d run from him, from the asthma and tightness of him, you’d open your arms like a father and strange
Strange, like a lover read me back all the things in my shuddering constitution]

And a man with such a beautiful mind deserves the honor of marriage--
His quiet life, his quiet Christy, the honor
Of not making her motherhood a foolish thing.
Deep seated in his mind these girls discuss with frivolous intellect, and sometimes
I cringe, thinking others may see me like this,
His brother perhaps, scrutinizing my softened manner, I hope he sees that I’m an adult and consecrate my own love without hypocrisy. Someday, these girls will be ashamed of the young sylphs they thought they were, running through the blistering green and overcast days
With their arms stretched open like unassuming sirens.

everyday is like sunday

It’s funny seeing you now--
The mark
Of my admission like knots

Etching out your face, and my limbs
Tense with blooms of shame
Knowing the names of each interaction

Round me and I cannot bear it--
See you tangled in foreign crutches
The too true peace of you

Contented soft, soft as her hair
Soft as the spark comes to shudder, smooth out

You’re too kind now.

Sociology

I can do nothing

We who are always filled; all we want is more. Satisfaction leads to the birth of new hungers that we didn’t even know existed, we become unsure if they'll ever be filled.

The little children who waddle across my television set, bloated bellies intensifying the look of Hunger, with wanting eyes look into me. I sniffle
At commercials. I obey them, give what I want for myself. Though love is given in dainty little checks for twenty-four dollars, I am a hypocrite. I myself couldn't give anything so base a need as food, and with that, the needs pile onward, sprouting branches of more brittle want, hungry and angry want.

Would you give up one meal a day to give it to another? Or would you allow the responsibility to diffuse among all of your peers, eyeless and earless strangers who along with you shut out empathies breached over shallow water. Shallow swells that lull us into impotent emotion.
I can do nothing, I say. Myself, simple microcosm of a capitalist world, where hunger grows with each meal, giggle on the valium. The valium-like spreading of a grin, after a good meal, after seeing my heart resting on a plate in a store.

dissolve the cult

[Hitting pool balls but not hard enough to dissolve my rage] He should dissolve the cult, like Krishnamurti did. Of all people! They follow the sociopath. He is magical once in a while, I’ll admit, I didn’t stand steady under the spell. Enough current to really hurt me (more than I told you. I keep his secrets to my end.) He is the third man I have been afraid of, physically. There was a man in my youth, Chris the Weasel. And of course my father. His throwing of china and other like objects that made loud noises when hurled frightened me for the first few years and then my fear became momentary, induced by a look in his eyes, defended by my girl-child rage, winning sometimes by sheer volume.

[Enter unlit parking lot] I take my heart and find men to shatter it over. I saw them all, the one I fell so stupidly in love with even. It’s been a year exactly. Stupidly, I haven’t gotten over the humiliation of falling in love yet and I fell again when he lifted me up and said, “Ya looks lovely! How are tings?” I fell again, but not in love, and he held me there for a moment before I smiled and said, “Thank you, Kavanagh! (Things are perfect.)” He was sweaty, climbing into the truck with C, who used to flirt with me and just then pretended not to notice me at all. Let us divide the sheep and the goats. Some are loyal to their master. Some (two) give me hard hugs knowing that their sweat doesn’t bother me, knowing that I am someone.

[Enter den]I am that woman-predator. I stole in with a motive to climb the testosterone ladder, with an eye on him. I am not an apologetic person but I am angry with myself for existing at all (at all!). Erase me: none of this would have happened. Or better yet, replace me. (He will, thank god). She drives a shin into chest and bends to give K a hug. I contemplate beating her face to pulp. Instead I stroke her ankle softly, softly grinning. She retracts it and orders me to leave. I tell her to take care of her face. She says she knows how crazy I am. I stare at her grinning and say, “You do know, don’t you?” She sits knees-up hands down sticking her made-up face at me. I offer to step outside for a chat but she declines.

[Exiting den slowly because after all, it really isn’t my place] All the men pretended I did not exist. How quickly she spread the slander. How exhausting it must be to be her. How lonely to be to be his wife. Slander spread like butter, like fire: I am a whore. I am the antichrist. I exist just enough to be the object of his misplaced affection and her accumulated hatred. I am THAT woman.

[Sitting cold on the lamplit front porch with J] “...because conflict is the most calming, centering experience. Every small voice falls silent, every bouncy thought, every blemish in confidence, every pretense stops to listen. Fight. I am present in the present, only.”

“I thought you were just really angry.”

“I am.”

Well, Love,

you are in my state and I am in yours. I hope you are fulfilled now, I hope the two of you do not grow apart. If you do, if you continue to surprise me and he continues to close in on himself, I will take care of the child when you go back to school. And if you fall out of step with the fanatics around you, well, I will praise god-who-I'd-rather-not-speak-of.

[Remember when we looked for men-of-god? Meaning, of course, men that cared- that knew of carefulness and maybe a higher goal. I have met a few of these lately, they don't talk about god so you would dissmiss them but god seems like an excuse, at best a conductor to say what we really mean, to be who we are, really. Who are you really, Love? Oh, do you remember asking that question and the way Jason asked it with fire or maybe tears in his slanted eyes? ("How are you really?") It is a question, not a greeting. Better to smile and pass. How are you. It's as socially infantile as saying I am well when no one asked. Hi, Franz, I am well.

I am well (you didn't ask). Well, underneath my covers curled closed up around me. I am not sure about some things and I cannot (will not!) decide. If asked I will say no. To be on the safe side, and because it's not so bad-- being alone.

Well. And there are so many options. Men are like college majors. My type varies by term and terms like parenthesis pick one and study three. Well. Don't pick at all. Enjoy your studies but don't declare until everyone you know has graduated (or been married. Well.)

I am so young; sometimes I too old to laugh, too frail to love, too fragile to start again (and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again) Too tired, too old to live. Too young, too unfulfilled: so live another day and maybe that's what life is. [Sorry, Love. Your mind is full of definitions, your linguistic ladder to god: Grace is the blood shed for you, love is patient, love is kind, you are stained, etc. Three ways to check your actions: 1. Prayer, 2. Alignment with the word of god, 3. The prayerful inclinations of the Elders. You are so tired from weighing everything against perfection. Toss my definitions in with all those theologians who explain away the message of everyman.)

What I meant was this: maybe life IS the again and again.

This is it Ted, the only honest way I can say it, without yelling, without getting angry, (long title, sorry).

I like numbers; I should just number everything.

I'm writing this because you asked, but you should already know, the anger that blooms so ferociously is just a reaction to everything. Ted, I remember everything.

1. So it's dark, and I've worked ten hours, with the seals and so on...and the trepidation begins when I jangle my keys and open the door, and you're there, all dark, with your booze and your hatred seeping out of your pores and thickening in the air, making me cough and hack a little and shudder. And you've got the darkest eyes, which I take into account, back pressed against the wall and my smelly scrubs and my quivering little hands--
and you hate that fear.
but I see you there, yeah, burning a seat in my memory, and after
you dissipate, and I change, you let me sink into you,
be a wife again. and love you, and love you.
and I get you dressed, and tell you I love you, and everything is well until the next day. And I think I've made you happy for a few moments: all of my possessions bundled up into one momentous and momentary triumph.

2. Ted, I say your name and it sounds false. It's the recurring dream within a dream. I don't know why I'm writing this, I suppose because you asked, and I want to discard a few of these photographs that clog my memory and make me silly, riddled with caustic inventions. Because I think I've invented this. I smell your face when you'd come into work and find me, at Joe's. You know, I wasn't really the victim you thought I was, and hated. I was actually a master of perserverance. I kept it madly, grasping at the knowledge that yeah, maybe my Ted would come in and see me. I had you there and it was everything to me. I suppose this is just me telling you that there's more than anger, the anger that stems from love and all the things I will never forget--

sometimes, sometimes...
you're tinged green like the esplanade, and the white birds (boats) of my thoughts surround you and there's no thought of addiction or grotesque stepping stones (fights). Because the thought of adorning you with tenatious affection is better than the symptoms of our gross personalities.

this is just an honest hello.

[Teddy and Gabe sit on the steps with the winos and filthy backwash of roxbury (broken people, breaking us and each other, but we loved it, didn't we.), and I'd come home, so upset...because I hadn't slept and you didn't care, but it didn't matter because you weren't supposed to, you never were supposed to, and that's good. And god, you had the darkest eyes. And I don't know if I'll ever want to be anyone else's wife again, and perhaps I'm finally getting to what I wanted to say...perhaps I'll never marry now, but still, that's not it:

I fell into you and slept safe in a toxic womb until I was born again. But it wasn't your fault, and I guess the point of this is...I guess boo, that...

3. I'd never take any of it back.]

Fear.Of.

I sit, and discharge, and
Quickly run from my writing place, a place of tumultuous secrets
I am not sure of what, but I would like to go away, and sit
Under a lovely hedgerow, in Coventry, or something silly like that

Fear of--

Work, and money
My own dying mind, my
Memories, passing into nothing

Older men staring at me
My viciousness, drawing them in
I am a bald shell of disbelief
Awakened, and bored with perseverance.

When I was thirteen, I lived in a shack
That is no reason to be so pitiful

1. At night the world crashes down on me
2. In this sullen hole, a reckless bore
3. In this messy life, the future has halted
4. There is no whole anymore, I stumble at the breaking spot
5. Looking down at the ignorance of life

6. Myself, written through and through--

There is a battlement of houses

O darling, look
At the bonfires in the south. Wind
Washed, and falling fresh into red precaution.

Crying off, off my animal
Into the slow noon, peak of insecurity
Like a red dress, kissing our wounds

In the forgotten shade, wishing
In its creature shadows
For all love recurring

Its soft face peels with soft
Bark, rotten and giving way to you
Tender green and watery flesh
With tender awe of time

Marred in mind, shrunken thoughts
Twisting again from the stopping point
Beginning again, unended

please stay with me? if you do...please stay with me.

you'll be gone but please, please stay with me.

[my veins open up and cry like eyes]

(and other things cry as well).

scratching in the dark, desperate for a door that's already been closed.

stay. stay. stay.

JULIAN CORRECTION

I think they are in love. Inevitabley, I think that it could have been me. But he's changed--
very utterly and sadly. His eyes have grown quite dull, and his hands and forarms swollen with apathetic abuse. I look and grieve with my nostalgia disease, for the man I love. He seems so small and weakened by the accumulation of filth, but sometimes I see glimpses--
It's funny because in my youth (fishnet daze), with terror and awe my mouth would clamp up and only like a fool would the words come spilling from my eyes. But there's none of that now, and now I make him laugh and joke like old friends, and that's when I see the spark of life in his eyes and the slight curve of smirk on THAT mouth, and it comes back in surreal bursts. I am thrown backwards by my conceptions of his ornery and subtle moods, and I know I've been around him long enough and must leave to write. Some god sent me here to repair that four-year old wound--
Now I observe his exhaustion, have no idea if he thinks on me with any affection but it doesn't really matter. The sadness (benign and loving) overtakes everything. And when I see them spending the day in bed, holding, for that's the only physical contact they can muster, shots draining the intense brilliance he once portrayed, I only want them to stay there clutching one another, just barely above water. But for myself, I'll catch him before I go, and ask two questions:

...and the answers were everything I ever needed to know...and I should trust myself more.

Chico II

She looks tired and I know why. There is a strange silence hanging in our breaths; we smoke. I have become a woman now, an real adult. I must drink my wakefullness, I must smoke my clarity and first thing, first thing after waking. I have a routine.

It is raining here and gray like home but we are not exactly home. Not far, in limbo like travelers, in purgatory to slow us from the highway speed, on clouds that cloak us like home cannot. Can and Will not.

Small thoughts and not large luminous revelations, not seperations, scamper underfoot. I am the bridge: the channel, the mouth of the operation. Say, "AWWW." And that was the point, to put the large home-fears into the vast-road perspective. I will paint about you before I forget. I will write in riddles and abstract logos lest you understand.

The mud hut awaits. (Grass, adobe, I have not yet looked into hut-real estate in remote places but I will. I will and do not yet.)

she doesn't stop

you don't stop. You can, I mean, you must be able to stop. But not when I'm screaming STOP. You know me well enough to push on old infections, sores covered with maybeline- maybe you will think I'm born with it.

I am scattered. Virgos need neatness. Vigro, virginal, and proud of my newfound sanity. I need to organize my clothes, pack my namebrand backpack just so.
1. empathy.
2. compassion.
3. pity.
4. revolting disgusting maladies, revulsion, disgust, i cannot hit you because you are begging me to. I cannot hit you because I want to be empathetic, compassionate, and calm. I am none of these. I will knock you out if I do not walk away.

walk away. You know, we made it. We even slept a little and we even slept in the same Kingsize bed. I need a rest. The insanity has followed, doesn't it always? I am not looking over my shoulder for a man, but I am scared of your little nails tearing complexion from my cheeks.

I might uderstand but you would rather exault yourself as The Misunderstood and Most Pained. Certainly, you have been hurt and if we are measuring (and you seem to be) I have only been beaten but you have been tortured. It is no excuse call me names when you know I might believe you. Isn't that His excuse? It's not good enough.

Fuck me: I'm stupid,

and I want to die. The force of reason sputtering deadly home in my brain makes absolutely no sense, and i'm a hated object because i want to be hated, and i'm ugly because whatever there is inside that makes me desire the hatred of others is disgusting and ugly, O god, you can't stand still on a moving train, and it's been four years, four years and I have been living every day in a way that will make my stories fun for him, stories in my mind of when i was saved and it was raining and he came and took me and when i tried to make him hate me he didn't, he just laughed, and kissed me with big hands on my face, and i had never felt love like that before, ever, the total acceptance of me, completion...and we never touched after that...just one kiss burning in my mind and with the wine and ciggarettes of every night sometimes i recall, and write in my head, though i never write to him at all. but now i'm a little afraid, a little, and can't deal, and i'm a little afraid, no no no, i'm weird, and have destroyed again a situation, not for myself, but for the ones i love, because i forget, and get so disgustingly egocentric that i cannot stop, i cannot stop until hit or abused, and then it's okay, and then i sleep like a baby. okay, this is the love of my life, i'm gonna see him today, i don't know what else to write about him...excess brimming over-- i'll always love him but it doesn't matter...
oh god, i really wish that the next time i say a really bad joke someone will just shoot me.

"i close my eyes and all the world drops dead
i lift my lids and all begins again
I think i made you up inside my head"

What Did I Give?

Your success was predetirmined white boy.
Polyester congratulations
surrounded you like carnations
patriotic blueblood red white graduation.
What I have stomached,
I could give my speech to a row of corpse.
There are girls over our heads,
full of dashing, so slipper soft
you don't notice them
running through us,
keeping us nervously palpitating.
Your confidant heroic jaunts
leave you bored and hungry.

Visit

Heavy full of quiet,
my family
all tucked into this
house in the old soil.
Compost piles of lives
un-hurried over years.
They deserve the peace.
I'll be glad to leave,
to hit the city
with my old hat boots
and chime in the clutterland
of noise and boredlessness.

Spring break

My little honeys
They must have left
I'm leaving too
we'll be back
in a week or two
my darlings
the three of us
together again.

The Trap

Pennies shine-
little tokens of sun.
Streets invite me,
I say no, pretty day
to grace your granite
sidewalks as the petals do
that is my wish,
to step out of my room.
but I am not allowed to move
some old latch is at my ankles
around my stomache, at my throat.
To move is to tear and rip.
I must be still until I shrink enough
to slip out of the trap.

I'm still scared of you,

even all the way in far-away, childishly afraid. Fragile, such a woman. Something passed over your face one time, maybe twice, and I thought it might be murder. I recognize it; I see it in the mirror from time to time. You have a faith-based non-plan-plan and it includes me; I am your missing rib and you know, you KNOW I will see myself in your side one day and in the mean time, you are longsuffering. You are patient when you know the ending.

I will not talk, will duct tape my mouth, cut my tongue, will change my name. I will never speak again. If I could still speak I would not admit that I miss the boy in your eyes and the blueness or the adoration. You are a menace to me know and I was foolish to admit to myself or you or anyone that I cared, even as a friend, I am a woman. Women should be extra careful about caring, lest some man-shaped-boy gets the wrong idea.

MEMORY EATER:

Coffee, two cigarettes, eighteen years old:

I’ve never liked coffee before, but it seems that everyone here drinks it. I pick up one of the anonymous plastic mugs that were brought up from the kitchen and fill it with the hot pitcher of coffee (is it real coffee? No one knows for sure). I go and wait in line.

The reinforced glass windows of the door let us know who may come in and who must always stay. When Carlos takes us out, jangling his keys, he holds the door for me and smiles. He likes thinking that he’s doing me a favor, giving me moments of attention. In the elevator I strain my neck upwards and shut my eyes. It seems such a long time untill we are released into the winter air.

I’ve brought my cup of coffee with me from upstairs. I am awarded two cigarettes for my innate propriety. I do not yell or bicker; I am a docile lamb. I light my first cigarette with the aftertaste of cheap coffee still on my tongue. This must be what freedom is like, I think. The air bites through our layers of thin hospital fabric. With her coffee and Newport, Andrea mutters next to me. She’s positive that the woman who just past by us used to work with her in the police force. Carlos catches her arm before she is able to do anything embarassing like asking her about it.

Sometimes, on the weekends, they take us on walks. We walk down to the CVS on Longwood Ave. and pretend to shop. Every time we go, Andrea collects fifty billion items and brings them up to the counter. She spills out various credit cards, none of which work, and Carlos shakes his head again and mutters to himself. I like how he pretends it’s so important, our mishaps. I like how he tries to make us feel responsibly at fault.

One time at CVS, I actually had some money. I had five dollars and spent it on bobby pins for my hair. I pinned my bangs back to show off my forehead, my eyes were big and young. Carlos and Bill both told me I looked nice and my heart broke open with gratitude. When I looked out the windows, the space before my vision was vast and hairless. The overcast shuddered into my limbs, the ash of my heart.

I did not write about Kosova.

Maybe I was romantisizing my trauma, savouring something concretely bad. I am not Vietmnam vet, not a soldier, not a war hero (oxymoron). I apologized for it, actually. I did fly to Prague to inch my way southwest, to join a war, to fight for peace (what an idea!), to save the world... Bullshit.
.
To save myself. Sorry for the cliché. For the sake of happiness.
.
I read "Night," by Ellie Wiesel, see, and it was about pain. I looked in the mirror and as always then, found nothing I could like or love. Nothing I could even tolerates. In his story and it is HIS story, no one is beautiful, no one has hand sized waists and DD breasts. No one wears Gap or Old Navy or Dickies. No one wears anything. No one has a waist. No one has breasts with which to nurse, nor children anymore, to need breasts for. But I am plush and flushed with health and he is walking death and he would bury his father to live.
.
To spend his life talking about death. Mass graves. Massacres. A child that hung on a rope to light to die.
.
In my suburban house inside by supple flesh I spend my life wishing. Wishing until wishing is foolish and then death sounds like an end when I don't think too hard. How did he stay alive? I mean, WHY? What made him want to? What made him want to live so hard?
.
This is a disclaimer, a prelogue to my running after a war. Humans were dying, not MY specific race of human. Not the Irish/English/Norwegian/Canadian/Americans. We are plump and plenty in large empty houses with college educations. Great grandpa’s with African murder on their conscience. Greatgreatgrandpa’s with Cherokee blood weighing heavy they bend like their canes when they walk. [American, and Cherokee is the only name I can think of. I will call you Americans, since you were, and I am the white child of immigrants, some of whom were murderers. Miseducated. I failed American History but they taught us about rich senators, not people, not The People, the brown and white people. I’ve never seen a red person, but I am close to pink, in shades and shades of humiliation for my fathers].
.
I went to put my self into perspective, live days without a mirror, live days without the time for vanity, and without vanity, I am not ugly. Days not without beauty. Albania was the most beautiful place I have been in. Keep your eyes up though and off the ground, there's trash in the street. And in the rivers, but the water is bluer than eyes. Don't drink it. And if you do, get some medicine from the Italian Caribineri. They’re like police-militia, walk around in Speedo’s drinking wine. The Belgians and the Italians and the Americans, they came quick and puled out limp and left the country emptier than before.

PINSTRIPES

Pink and soft, that's you
in white and pin stripes blue.
You can afford the beach
and the luxury of looking poor.
I, in my black ruffles, rouged
for the show, go home to the floor.

Roxbury, or "Fuck you, Theodore James Collins"

Excess brimming over--
I’m in love but it doesn’t matter

High above the street, baked brick
Fuming with dissatisfaction, I wait
And thirst with the negation
Of Old-E on my lips

I cannot help the tremor
Of your return, and the slow dying
Of pain, into joy as you return

On the swings, with little children
Screaming with delight at our attentions
Sorry and sad, birthed by the projects
And molded in apologetic love

O god, I tremor when you return
Afraid of work the next day, the façade
Of my daily self, the exhaustion
Of keeping you okay.

You’re mean
Mean mean mean, and punishing--
I have nothing to do with them, but you won’t pretend
And that love is so present, blatantly
Eclipsing me--

I tried to clean today, sweetheart--
And you didn’t notice, but ran
Down to Calle’s, to stay
In that place that I cannot go, can only leave

I swear in the heat of this flat-roofed home
I’ll jump, I’ll jump, or just throw this bottle
Down on the street

And split apart like shards of glass and be free.

Answer

Tonight is the party for Lisa. We’ll grow taller like her with each drink and reach up to the sky with twisting limbs and sprout friendship. Her arrival has only made me happy for Brian. I realize now that what I thought was real love was the devotion of a friend distilled with mad infatuation. Our marriage is over, and though I cannot say I’m not a little sad, I am thrilled at his contentment. All the throttling irritations that pent up in his vein warped arms and concentrated in the jumbled monologue of his anger have dissipated. And my heart used him to free me, because I am free from Teddy, and the world has cracked open and spills promise. Every day now is the day that I know resurrection.

I don't care

I'm funny nervous and care horribly but trying not to care. I don't care, don't care very much at all, am just incredibly incurious to see her, but fascinated, shit. O beware, beware
I'm starting to care...

ooooh, maybe this can all transfer to someone else, I hope because like a blush it's growing disastrously tangible.
Perhaps it will go away soon, I hope.

one hour.
~
later:

wow, it's all gone, gloriously lifted and truly
she's darling. oh lovely listing longing gone, and no ambiance thick in the air of despairing scenes.

chasing war with Cognac

or a party for the dead
.
As it turned out, the explosion was one of many in my mind that no one else heard and though I frantically searched the ashes,I found no one bleeding and no one dead.
.
We chased the Valium with Cognac in celebration of my imagination, not to drown out the war.
.
I drove sober from Pristina through the sheets of rain and did not notice the cliff on my right and I did not think of the lorie heavy with UN tarps that lay crumpled at the bottom of it. I curled around the missing bomb-sized pieces of road (US shell sized) and I did not think to myself
.
"how romantic, to die in an explosion" because no one dies in explosions here or anywhere-
.
I found no one in the mine-rubble in Kukes and I was driving us straight to Athens like westerners, just for something to write about, Kerouac, Miller, Swift, etc. chasing
.
the dead girl's Valium with Cognac in celebration of my imagination, not to drown out the war.
--Kosova 1999

14th and Columbia

Brian and I sit on the couch, and she
Tremors and waves slight
Sweet fingers--
And everything she says breaks the heart

Deserving like we'd never deserve--
Only take and intake like the hungry
Bastards we are--

She's beautiful.

For Seth

A . S L E E P . I N . T H E . C R A D L E . O F . Y O U R . S P I N E

guess what, i found a picture of you - a file that i had never downloaded, a picture and its been decorated with someones awful poetry - i love it - i am astonished, it looks just like you. imagine that.

"the composer has stepped into fire"

i don't really know what to say - the roses are dead, everywhere . . . this desk is a mess with roses and papers and books and your letters printed out for the novelty of hardcopy these days now that were past the turn of the century.

i have to leave soon, and buy cigarettes, i need to speak for my doctor - i need to bear the hospital, you know, i am in no mood to be going to be observed right now.

i need to go and know my reasons - why i shouldn't die, why i should continue living. i'm going to make a list, and have some good doctor decipher it like no body should – regardless of if they are able to or not - i want him to write down reasons for me, though. the last gentlemen i saw had the most wildly uncreative reasons behind his outbursts we let pass for his feedback from our sessions. such as, why waste all that you have inside of you? almost . . .

i am going to live with this, constricting disease of sorts . . . is it the mind or the brain, which do you think?

the mind, of course it is the mind, isn't it? it matters somehow. but i cant quite feel right about either or.

words, i love words, meaning so easily lost in their own abstraction. its the okay insanity – when the words stop meaning anything when repeated too often in such short blushes of time. so what kind of book will you dedicate to your time? are you tired of these kinds of love letters yet?

what about what you were saying last time? im sorry – i missed wanting you as badly as i do.

I am an old sore, who waits for the rain
In my brittle body, who's latest exploits fail
To catch the desirable, my want of likely
Loves are frail when compared to your coquettish reaction

The rain is over the hill
Coming forward more drastically
Now, when summer deludes you
From self deprecations
And you flutter after affectionate graces
The world of the mind
Is pathetically finding folly in me.

In lashes brittle like books
Forgotten, my cat
An affectionate bore, my chairs
Gross with age and want
The sun strikes a glass on my eyes--
Cataracts like a very old man

On Sunday I felt the void of you
Striking, as noon broke open more
White birds on the Charles
And I wrote letters in fanciful departures--
It is the story of when we were knotted in work
Loving and grasping
From chances' inspiration,
Avoiding the blade of Mastery's will.

[Stay until you find my eyes] obsured and overedited

the savior of my pain
drinks the cup of human perdition
and lives
and lives
and lives
the human condition
and dies.
.
[my wrists open up
and cry like eyes]
.
To justify your lack of love:
you are not qualified
you, afraid of being deified,
rip pacifiers from your script-
Though you walk through the valley of the shadow of death
you'll be all right.
.
To jusify my need of love:
Holyman brought eleven men
to stay the night
while he writhed
and found small comfort
in their sleepy eyes-
.
but god sleeps tonight.
Seal my veins in skin,
bind my blades and
Stay until you find my eyes.

sometimes I'm tired of myself, the sputtering momentum that heaves into being. Drastic because each sense is so horrifyingly accute that they bloom on my face and throughout every nerve ending, electric on fire, buzzing like a fly. and then the sorry aftermath of my mistakes, abhorrance and quavering shame, you can't stand still on a moving train, oh man.

if you're beautiful I want to fold that stilted image into an eternity, box it jealously, make no more because then I run the risk of not being there-- people can be so beautiful, its too much sometimes, for in relation I pale and sink into the wall and my words sound funny and forced. And there's always the desperate risk that I'll be discovered, monstrosity, see, and the spark clicks and comes to shudder, smooth out.

You said my name...
and I went down swinging hearty
on some great vine
Ladytime got hipslow when I heard that sound
me in your syllables
about to drop
my grape heavy heart
for the sound of my name
when you say it like that
this is not about my name
it's about that fruit
sweet concord black
that hangs in me
all ready to fall.

love poem

all is well tonight--
clear air and stone

I wander through the city
With news of your life

your flags at the bay--
wind snapping them cold
against a stone coast