Spinal Structures

Not a dirty path, no boots, no high-noon beaks tearing at what was a man before the crack of gunpowder echoed a call for supper. Not the fur a desert leaves on the face of someone turned animal in the sun. Not some goddamned outlaw's land where what you want waits in the shadow of a cactus, to see if you're cold fucking bastard enough to walk right through its arms. Not the amount of cuts on a man's face: a show of wealth. Not the place a man leaves in the base of his neck when he comes here, a civilized territory. Not the city of the damned and the dead that looks you in the eye when you tap his shoulder and his neck turns.

I'm glad I married you ;)

I will give the benefit of doubt, think the best. See your face always with the blurred lights of a Christmas tree behind. A shutter clicks, and you remember the way you used to feel. Nothing fancy, just the curve of your fingers around the camera. The frame of black around the image you choose, so that when we look back in picture books our lives are exactly the way they were to us.

Hollow's Eve Exodus

These bones slide out of their place, into another place I've never been where sidewalks are cold and dark and even fallen leaves slide past. It is a place no one stays for long, nothing is permanent. So that when you go back there it is a different place altogether. It is so that if you walk these sidewalks clinging to a wool coat with your eyes stinging you will have traveled through entire desert nights by the time you stop to put a match to your cigarette. Also when you are there you are alone in the mysterious city of Kôr but when you are there, there has never been a city to begin with, so there could be no bombs or lights to put out. Sea turtles even have never been here, where the moon is quick to move on along in its route to California in a current of clouds. These bones can feel the displacement. Entire generations of word-addled junkies with bibles and manuscripts who are the children of senators moving west from winter. These bones seek absolution, a row of palm trees melting in the waves of heat breathed by cracks in the boulevard, a mirage as out of place here as you, and that is why there is only one thing to do here which is to seek to be somewhere else. Somewhere in no way identical to here, so that these bones may once again come together.

Fragmented Thoughts on After Life

Dear, what will it be like / when we lose / what here is, to be happy / to smell your hair / like I don't know anything else / to talk about / when you are there.

What here is / is not what we thought / it was / but is that why we endure / so well / in the presence of a fleeting / 4 a.m.

Dear, what will it be like / when the ocean / glides off / without telling anyone / and the sun / bakes mud / for our / footprints / our dirty palms pressed.

Oh Messiah / what will it be like / when neither one / can turn from the other to / face you.

Can you forgive / love / and can it / forgive you.

Dear, what will it be like / when we lose / faith / because / it had been / in one another all along.

Or is faith / a breath / you must one day / release.

I got nothing fuck off

mjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj,n goes the cat.

Ancestral Morning

Sit with my mug where the ground cuts suddenly to a cliff, and traction gives way to openness. Sit with my mug at the edge of my present tense, in the folding chair, dirt grating as I shift, a steady hand stained with dirt and coffee. Dawn, there is nothing to say in the beginning or the end. The morning flows and I drink, until the beginning has reached the end, and again I am silent in the old sun.

Upstream Proclamations

Cream
slides
into
coffee
in
a
milky
way,
and
perhaps
maybe
swell
if
you'll
sit
and
watch
with
me (
I've
lain
a
sandy
towel
here.)
A
cold
breeze
from
Puerto Juárez
comes
under
your
hair
and
up
it
rises
electric.
Oh,
esposa
palms
pressed
with
shells
gathered
palms
pressed,
esposa
to
my
shoulders
when
we
press
into
mouths
warm
like
coffee
cream
slipping
past
in
darkness
do
you
think
we
could
sit
and
watch
and
pray
and
will
you
wear
rings
here
where
a
cold
breeze
from
Puerto Juárez
comes
under
your
hair
and
up
it
rises.

Framed Images

Follow an image with a staggered gaze--a bird in flight, refracted from panes of a glasswork clock hung above the piano with the framed picture of the dead sister, if you like; a silhouette against a white cloudless expanse of air, refracted from the panes of a glasswork clock hung above the dead sister, if you can concede your preference for exactness. You should take time for this decision, though. Should consider heavily the differences (take time within the reach of the clock's metal arms): Flight, on the one hand, as linear. Bird, as sharpness preceding fragility, as an arrow, or an idealist. Silhouette, on the other, as grieving, irrevocable understanding, of the absence of the flight, the bird, the sister.

Pack Animals

Finding you hiding in the brush, so near. Yet it is dark, is it not my friend? I felt you brush past and you were gone. Our enemies are many. Certainly we agree on this point. Where are you tonight, are you well? Unseen? We're small, are we not, my brother? Our enemies are many. I've left the door open, so that maybe; she and I sleep in the hot flies in our eardrums rattling our foundations. My sleep is like a fit of shaking, I hear a ghost howling among the crickets for a way back. Somewhere in the back of our small heads we hear their voices, our enemies: You can't go back. Wish you could hear my voice calling your name, pitching my tone to reveal, "The fuck you can't." Finding you hiding in the brush, so near. We wait for your drawing near, from our enemies who are many.

Summer Without Forwarding Address

Sweeping motions made with fingernails on dark street glass windows glowing warm cast candle fire on one cheek, the other wind-striken and free to wander as it will. Albeit a little harder, a little tougher, a little less sensitive to the touch of a strange gloved hand when a Boston Christmas shopper might reach with indefinite and thoughtless emotion, or actually imagines this touch behind his eyelids for a moment as he passes. But these sidewalks do not cross, they are parallel lines into a snow storm the likes of which loneliness had not known some many years. And she wonders and he wonders if anyone wondered when the goddamn summer planned its slow burning crawl across the sweaty streets. Yet the stars carve sharp little penknife points into a letter not bothered to be read because it would be much too boring to remove it from its envelope with the pretty looping letters and postage. And who cares who it's from, who can tell with fingernails on dark street glass windows glowing warm cast candle fire on one cheek, the other indifferent to the stars and the things they may carve.

A Fox as Autumn Ends

Pressure in the head, pushing out ideas like chocolate pudding running down the sideburns like dark tears, can't remember anything that way. Crippled with sickness dragging on in the night the most positive thing anyone's said in years. Winter's on, coming on like a fleeing of lovers into shadows into the crooks of trees nestled like foxes which one will not find at midnight dragging on past sidewalks, the wind has moved in and pushed lovers to the fringes, beneath the trees. Roots dragging from the cuffs of our jeans, scraping down past sidewalks. Lovers nestle beneath us, we are unrooted, through our bark up moves the pressure to our heads, and we forget. If we could be lovers, we could flee into shadows. Foxes digging for warmth in dirty lovers' holes. Oh what a sight if one could see foxes in shadows, nestled in dirty holes one could not stop talking on about it. Chocolate pudding pushed from the ears, running down the whiskers to forget like dark tears. Find me, oh find me if you can. Don't give up so easy it makes me sad if you give up I can see you dragging past sidewalks at midnight and there is a pressure in my head, and I see now the night builds pressure in the wind and it is us, this winter that is coming.

Just

A picture is worth at least a word, or maybe lighting a cigarette is enough. I remember photographically when father's cigarette burned the flesh of my hand at the race track infield in the dewy morning with a black coffee in my hand. Funny thing black rooms and burns. Funny thing the way memory presents itself in a library elevator in the aftermath of a loss the proportion of which will burn for some time to come. I would like to go back there but it is complicated and I cannot leave, I cannot leave and I do not want to leave what she has given me. I am grateful of the life we have on dirty carpets with dogs and cats. I am glad of the dances we have oh dance with me my darling if we could take a picture of this it would not be enough but it would be something to later burn with some difficulty. Underhanded in its musical score a minor chord, captures our anger in a mirror oh a mirror and we are weary of looking at ourselves. None of that maybe stuff, timid boys and shy girls are lonely types and we despise them because they are or were us and who are we kidding they are us and after such a tremendous loss we despise them very much. eramos algo. Si eramos algo, just once. Christmas lights and a doggie running wish we could run why we can't run I don't know honey please lets run and plug in those Christmas lights Christ how in the fuck are we gonna find our way back home without the Christmas lights and how could we ever know what's out there in the dark tie a bow on top of your tree not even a real tree but as long as the electricity is still on the home can't break your heart so keep it that way in your heart or you will break oh we might be broken but I don't want that kind of painkiller let's feel this pain out. Please let it touch me, let it scratch I've had worse I'm lying but if I don't bleed out now I may never get the chance. Only the lonely don't know when to shut up mostly because of the scarring which is irreversible. Desert wanderin yeah. Desert wanderin Bethlehem boy invents nuclear warhead of bored frustration. Wants to express his anger, obliterate a people scatter particles like fire crackers among a spreading circle of boys. I see why you drink, brother. The anger is epic. And it is spreading.

Eramos algo. Si eramos algo, just once.

Linguistics

Chalk marks pock the side of the wooden cupboard with one wishful streak between the specks of white and the gray morning wind wipes away the imperfections with a bite that brings warm things closer together. Fogged windshield hides a crack under its skin, from a highway rock some time past. But the engine tinkers and cools from a state of perpetual heat, oh let's throw that rock into the water at the docks as the gray morning wind wipes away the imperfections and then lets go sit by the cupboard and have breakfast.

Ode to Sea Cow Copulate

I am a little tired of this. A little tired that's all, the apple a little yellow and a little hard to bite into leaning in a gusting cold river wind against a tree we've climbed many years ago. The arms sway easily, easy as we slip past the rocks and out where the manatees are screwing as if wanting so desperately to know one another the way they have known spinning blades upon their backs. That's a metaphor, you know the words. Intimacy is pain. Everyone. But do they know they're fat, do they know they're fat as shit and are they embarrassed to be fat and screwing in brackish water, just screwing for hours, are they tired. I am a little tired of this, that's all.

A Matter of Conversation

Hey there missus can you tell me is that rain bursting down, I think that rain is bursting down. Hey mister is that wind in our hair or do thoughts elude us when we fall. Hey mother, when I suffer I'm more like you than ever. When I cause suffering I am attempting to escape you Father but with the understanding that I am certain to fail. This failure comforts me a blanket of soggy newspapers as the rain is bursting down. And hey there baby, do you know what it is to suffer for someone and can you teach me, you can teach me by lying there asleep beside me. Hey there baby I want to wake you but am unable my hands are clasped in prayer my feet bound and oh honey I want to wake you for my very own pleasure but am less selfish than I'd hoped. Oh doggie steamy puddles in summer streets mat your fur and can we compare the weight we carry after a storm when the rain lifts up again. Hey there doggie can I take you home with me, so I may at least stand taller than you who are burdened. Qué está passando a mi pisadas they are inaudible. Maybe I am not moving but it is only the sensation of drifting that grabs. Hey God, could I bother you to steady me. Could I bother you to spare some time for me to suffer, to feel the rain bursting down, it is a matter of conversation and questions for which we pretend to have no answers.

Literary

Fuck literature and the writers of literature and those who read literature fuck the elevation of language fuck the elevation of authors who employ the elevation of language misinformed bookworms and MFAs rhetoric PhDs and Ginsbergs and the snapping admirers and the college liberals fuck a typewriter a plot a seminar fuck writers unions dreams of publication worming you fucking worm for the publisher's word of approval failure a badge of individuality in the face of the system fuck individuality that is not individuality that is only the word individuality comedy tragedy Aristotle social retardation fuck the undergraduate retards whose mental development is nervously monitored fuck a cycle of reading Hills like White Elephants teaching Hills like White Elephants reading Hills like White Elephants teaching Hills like White Elephants reading Hills like White Elephants teaching Hills like White Elephants reading Hills like White Elephants teaching Hills like White Elephants reading Hills like White Elephants teaching Hills like White Elephants reading Hills like White Elephants teaching Hills like White Elephants reading Hills like White Elephants teaching Hills like White Elephants reading Hills like White Elephants pyramid schemes of academia archaeologists stealing meaning from sarcophagi wearing the wraps of embalming fuck tombs and tomes and bibles fuck prophetic text fuck those who died before their time fuck the shitty poems and stories they never had the chance to write so that their best works were forgotten and so that they died nameless and meaningless fizzling out in darkness not in celebrity fuck dying fuck fucking to escape dying fuck base language and lack of punctuation lack of ingenuity frustration at being meaningless the way you say a word over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over until people are skimming for meaning fuck people who skim repetition fuck repetition fuck repetition when coupled with predictable phrasing and fuck words that are used to create predictable phrasing fuck creation fuck God pre-rest and for that matter fuck God post-rest too fuck the one-eyed smile on my hand the difficulty of smiling quite so wide fuck endings happy sad witty intellectual read aloud in smokey rooms with clapping hands standing boys and girls with glass stemware eating olives eating out of the mouths of introverted fuckers behind typewriters and online blogs and poems and stories about fucking over and over and over and over and over and over and over and fuck an idea that begins with nothing and fuck nothing

Family Composite

Went home. Oh we went home in the dark, a quiet ride through a little bit of stardust. Just like we always planned. Went home with a wedding picture in my pocket wondering if you'll ever take a picture again. Wondering what kept me talking in such a quiet after such a winter. Covered in white and roof collapsing in. Wondering how we crawled out wondering how we found a gasp of burning breath steaming nebulously from us into the night. Did you oh did you lose the film under the mean old snow storm. I wonder if winter ends, because no one has ever known. Perhaps it does not and our rings will never fit our fingers again. Maybe the picture in my pocket is a story and we aught to tell it when we get home, like a secret. Maybe then it won't matter if winter ends or if everything collapses. Maybe if everyone is quiet and someone tells it. Is it something like praying? Or is it broken, a small laugh when you've counted the moments left and there is nothing to do. When we fall grasping each other with fists red and bleeding, brothers. Is it broken just like we used to pray? Left home, oh I left home this week, quiet with aches and pains and wondering if you'll ever take a picture again.

Will you let me die in step

Take the wind away from me take the cold away from me, I don't deserve the chill of your breath when you say those things. The signal between is rushed and maybe lines are down with living wires to destroy us. I can explode if you want me all over you, if it is the quickest way to travel one hundred miles in sunless morning quiets. What good are words in a good quiet. If God dont shut the hell up for once, if a Voice aught to be mute a while, let it inside, just let it in, a pause. A rest. Much needed, I know. I know you need it. Please let me take it from you, take the cold wind, you don't deserve those things I say. And if I miss you we can't be to blame now can we. Who the hell built all those roads anyway. And how can we close the gap, God, how can we close the gap. That space between where no one is being a clever atheist. And when we are each a leg and a lung count to three and we both step across the end and exhale together.

finalmente

Finally I'm gone. The waiting is everything. The waiting, think it out. One thought in front of the first. We were supposed to be friends. Supposing drives disappointment and if that's a quid abstract if that isn't enough because it never can be enough. Picture the edge of tallest building and stand there and look up I am rising. Sun tears you up where did I go oh where am I this time, where am I. Blindness especially in children is difficult and now you know a difficult fact about life so you can survive it. Fuck it as copulators say. Throw it away. Take what makes it great and burn intensely for one moment. Then finally you are gone. Oh they will cry for you, the crying they have held secret in your presence all this time. So much time. Don't blame them laugh simply. They have lack of words and they know at last like waterfalls entering gaping mouths and swelling throats there is nothing of value to be said when, finally, we are gone.

...---...

Seems a lot of things are this way or that way. Okay to be plain spoken aint it. Hell I don't even know anymore what it's like to look one in the eye. Lost my edge is all, maybe get it back this time around with that .22 rifle we used to shoot at small hares and like. Rusty up in the shed humidity pushed us past 100 aint that a bitch what a bitch a shed with a rusty .22 rifle in 100 degree humidity can be dont they knowit this swamp is pressing at her seams and hell if any of us can be delicate and sew her up again before a bleedout or worse. Or worse? Hell worse, not a worse to or. Buckets are no good for sinking boats thats what all them movie fellers got it wrong buckets are little boats and fill em and therere more sinking ships its an unkind passing drowning but its a calm as butterscotch cream eternity with seaweed hair blowing like one of them commercials on the tv for shampoos douches tampons crackers yogurt macaroni Q-tips rubber vaginas dogfood catfood parrotfood babyfood elderlyfood maggotfood cereal fast cars slow cars cars that are sometimes fast and other times are slow national monuments women men who dress like women tambourines a parade a circus laundry soap dogs money televisions hair that flows like seaweed/something about the humidity makes one tired of all these commercials and but sometimes there are ones to sell you air conditioning units the size of sheds where .22 rifles are kept in perfectly rusty condition freon buckets/the ones for buckets must be the most creative because it is the most depressing of the products, so they speak plainly to the masses, "Don't you need a bucket? It's also a drum brrrra-pa-pap-pap and so on." A bucket is like most things, one supposes, even if it is not really a drum because how can a miniature sinking boat be rapped upon brrrra-pa-pap-pap and not papapapbrrrbrrrbrrrpapapap in a time of great hardship and loss. It, like most things, is this way but often that.

Another Day in White

Another day in white
another day in white
Eat the day be gay if possible live life opposite of most
Burst any bubble that looks fragile weaknesses are
a way to deal so don't let the dealer lift a palm from the rivets
you might lose this hand if it's five card draw naw fuck it
stud
grenade pin pick ya teeth got a few seconds unburned
maintaining of course rank and gender
It is best this way, keep appearances. Sell appearances but never give them away they will
fucking eat you alive or dyingdead.
Grill ya grill
If you don't get it there's another, homie
don't worry it's the game and the player burn em both a life.
On the street I should know right on the street we shoot niggas for shit like that man play hearts like a white boy but I am not a nigga man just a white boy with a little heart left, just enough to drag on just enough
Don't know nothin about losing heart in tough spots I don't know tough spots
don't know you but you seem alright but you look alright don't know but you bullshit alright caballeros and shit
stand up, hey
stand up if you got a foot or a toe or two a hold
run if you got a building sense of aftermarket open market green light a building sense of murdering after the first time it is difficult after the first time you've lost heart get shot for shit like that
Gentleman and cowards share a bathtub doesn't that make any sense
tired of communicating with you, sun rising on pink cut with shadow slivers of grass a moment of peace, please shut up a minute and look to see soon will be another day in white:

Primitive Flight

Aftereffects are detrimental to one's health according to the labels provided by the FDA provided in pamphlets provided in the seat back provided you are seated with the seatbelt fastened dinner provided headphones provided sexual organs not included eating out eating in eating up in flight cinema critics boo and throw chicken bones at the steward who rides disgrunteled onto the air via inflatable slide and subsequently dies several minutes later yellow is also the color of a banana and a banana is also slide shaped but a monkey would never ever under any circumstances ride a banana for 40,000 downwards feet monkeys are prone to go up the aftereffects of which are also death with some bit of irony ha ha atmospheric reentry is a matter of personal spiritual preference when you choose a church and it requires oxygen from outside sources make sure the FDA isn't involved because monkeys never ever under any circumstances approve of oxygen from outside sources they have become suspicious of this sort of thing and if God is truly dead it may have something to do with aftermarket parts such as nosecones and heat shielding monkeys are funny that way.

Fertilizer in Syntax

Stuck in the head, stolen, words, stolen. Stuck in. Stolen words. Getting the rhythm right. Getting the rhythm, right. Grasping at new, cipher future, drink past, fuck the present. Just a way to explain decay. Fuck explain. Fuck. Create. A clay structure. Hardened clay, a wall a wall to not climb to shatter thinking always of patricide. Rides to groups of two or less. Safety in numbers, slide fingers under the skirt. Rides to groups of two or less. Attention is dragged thin with only ten fingers. Tonight is a bad night until we rest, entwined this way like the way vines grow around rotting cadavering. Tonight is a bad night, until, entwined.

A Foot Asleep

To be a little bit tired. Motion lessened incrementally. A measured fashion. Rulers and such. A clock. Hash marks all around or filed neatly on edge. Somewhat distracted. A word, a word, can't be remembered but replaced by many others in stampede. Trampling is a leading cause of mortality, in an alphabetical sense. Or conversely in an alphabetical nonsense, more commonly. Why? might be a question asked. Only that it must be asserted rhetoric because a change in volume may net an echo but little in form of an answer. This continual might be asking is central to tiring. Measurement occurs implicitly. Suddenly it is still.

Jesus's Mural, Paint by Number

Listening is an art, the only true one left to us. Breaking bread makes its sound, though an old and often heard one. A crunch if the sun is hot a wet and doughy collapse if it is raining and if it is an hour of the morning that is dark and anxious and where one is swallowed by great sucking gales of breath then silence.

Request to Communicate Denied

Destroy it how sand flash bangs, tit, tat, rip your face clean open palm so you gotta smile so you must admit that gaping at her is judgement that turns you on quick like on switch like conflict one position up take it baby detrimental grasp on her hips lurid, I want to make you uncomfortable the way it feels to know how much time there is left to see death raised on your skin, eat you so slow tricks you to think you'll live for ever and fuck for returned minutes can't watch yourself rape her perhaps it isn't stated consciously that's what it's like getting raped by the sun afraid to roll up sleeves afraid to step out of a bucket of tar afraid you couldn't be afraid like it if you tried splinter vertebrae and let your neck hang on it, slide toward a growing mass until everything crawls and everything makes you angry.

everything makes you angry.

The act of relinquishing have you considered what this might mean. Scratch and grind like dogs do when they lock their jaw in a moment of the most real. My enemy that is a friend, no words hold us so close as the hill that we slide toward gestation. Hate is the wind that surrounds a pause.

Tree Songs

Branches before a sunrise in winter are old things taken for granted. Sometimes it takes a breaking to turn a head, and even then, and even then. Honey you know the trees don't have no song to sing, and even if, who the fuck would listen to an old man cry. Branches before sunrise are things unseen. Like the rising tide or a slowing heartbeat. Like a wrinkle on the skyline. If you sang to the trees they wouldn't understand the words. It would be like singing to no one. Maybe that's what songs are for, you'll say. And goddamn if you aren't right about one thing. Maybe.

The future must die

Honey he says, I would be with you like we were everything that could burn, a world glowing red on our cheeks, he says I would be with you and I would see nothing beyond our brightness, but chasing fire are ashes and breathlessness, like your eyes reflecting the moment I am capable of hurting you permanently, the moment we look past each other, the moment you can't remember how quickly a world may melt, the moment a wisp of cool smoke takes what we were and leaves the dark in its place so suddenly that we're unsure what we'd been, the moment our touch is not familiar but foreign again, the way heat is foreign to coolness, the way fire is foreign to nothing, time foreign to love.

A Sense of Urgency

We're going to die why and why oh why are we going to die I need us not to die, I and I oh I need us. Can we stay beneath the blanket away from all of everything and god damn everyone to obliterated shards because I just want to break it all and it would be such a beautiful thing to cut our feet on or could we stay, could we just stay would it be okay to stop just for now just tonight just us just what we expected when I said I love you like the words would never rise like a wreck a skeleton in seaweed ribbons and we look so pretty wrapped around each other in a motion of sinking.

Precipitate

When it is not raining but did rain before, the mud carries the smell of unrest up into the smoke-browned dusk. What does one say after such momentous inhale? Is it best to start with sorry, or do soggy pants spattered with dirt remind us enough of our transgressions. Are we wasting time here under clouds that won't part, are we wasting, when we are not good enough how do we say something new? Or is that rustle when it is not raining anymore enough to drown a whisper.

Formulas are Like This

If time is distance then how much time do we have and at what distance.

What it Means

Do I say that I have two brothers and one sister or do I say that I have two brothers and I used to have a sister or does that suggest that she is no longer my sister despite an acute absence like our fingers touch two sides of sheeted ice and we both move together but our worlds are not synchronous in her image mine like a moon in wind-strewn Gulf and though it is all so still and cold there is always movement away from and away from so that I have two brothers and there is one sister and she peels a dark shell from this snow where we might sit one day and I have a wife and a sister and should I suggest they protect me when I am most vulnerable though only one sinks into my bed and I have a sister and a wife and a dog and two mothers and what do I do when I want to know which one to finally crumble before and pray and ask to be forgiven or who do I allow my love to flow around and past to fill the room in unspeakably quiet ways saturating the way I clench my fists or do I not clench them at all but hold her skin in my palms if the space between is erased there will be no turning and leaving and which one will touch me back or do I say only that I am loved not by saying I am loved but by never getting to say what I wanted to say in the first place which is that it is better not to speak but like those voyagers waiting to leave to let everything that could be said be torn apart and wind-strewn back upon us in ways that cannot be spoken

Definition

Shatter the afternoon too many words to say to scream to shriek to gag this how we document today and then we are simple too simple to make this better understood though do we need to be understood though do we need to be less simple or are we in tune are we in key are we staccato are we at rest do we play or are we just trying not to be sad or are we trying not to eat if this makes our stomachs too full to understand empty to understand is something we don't have time to talk about so we have to talk fast and talk in this way that is frustrating and you want to fucking punch me and punch me and punch me and we both ache because we both understand nothing a macaroni moon falls over us isn't that something mommy would have an objective way to love one of us more than the other and there would be no reason to ask questions such as what does this math problem mean or what do you mean or what do I mean after the sun is down there can be no more cliches so called to describe what is before us so here I request that we truce long enough to feel the breeze of twilight on our bruises and sip tea like tea sipping faggots that's what a brother might call it what a stupid thing words what an absolutely awful thing words and anger here slips between the letters and hate between the anger and soon we are layered in things we hope, more than anything, do not define us.

Walksleeping

A shiver of Hertz rings true to we the solitary boys. And to solitary (girls)? We don't know if we've never heard them, and if they are shy and won't let us hear them then the echoes of the brick and the oak as we tap will serve as their voices. If they ever sing to us, we won't know which songs are special but they will all be special. And if they are with us we must always love them because if they leave we will not know they have gone and even the taps will be empty, sometimes like the taste of the first morning after her space is October Country, chill, and unoccupied, and Heaven is suddenly just a bunch of assholes you've never met like Jacksonville, Seattle, Leon, Boston, the nerves in our backs dead and our shoulders heaving. This is why I would like to meet you, and you may kiss my nose and linger above, I will be sleeping I promise.

A Familiar Astronomy

Chisel tired eyes who express how old this day has been brushing dust across the teeth. Bang bang on our daughters' birthdays ceasefire in July just bugs swimming in fire eating ebony-skinned firmament and you and me being common and sweet. Smiling just the way another warm body once did in the palm of tree trunk roots right before she kisses him unsurprisingly but expected in the only kind of way that will unfurl his fingers wanting only to touch. In conclusion there are ordinary ways to know the boredom of moist breath on your cheeks and he will love her for it.

Songs about nothing at all

What do we forget, oh what do we forget in refrains oh what songs we used to know. Trying to remember like ice in the vibrating numbness of a glass still not half empty and other noises who fill us to our brimming cheekbones. Parisian cafes stuffed with intrus tortillants wine glasses fast warm Italian rubber fast Italian suits parking attendants who think God how fucking sad are these who drive away from their time and they can only drive these cars with brevity before they are repulsed entirely and must step from the doors. But what of brevity, we could ask them. We are all brief and only you are moving without velocity. They will never answer but will hand the keys in the moments that are silent.

Stillness

What it is like to be bored of mirrors. It is like this, or that, it does not matter which snowstorm we choose. A footprint lasts so little time here, no use in movement, impossible in stillness. What it's like to shake from the nucleus.

Starfish out of water

And then one day it all ended and from then on it was hard to find a beginning.
And then we drank with our teeth clenched and blood on the edges of our lips like a leech so that's how we remember good times.
Cheers man what the fuck else to say. Cheers and happy birthday in our eyes to a star that's already dead a lot of times I think needing someone is that way. You're both looking but distance deafens telescopic noise and it takes all kinds of astronauts to be happy. We can be happy and you can have my oxygen and you can have my heartbeat and we don't need stars that are boring and old and dead before we even can know them by name.

So This is What Happened in the Car Today

There is too much heart disease spreading in the space between fingers on this street between these cars leaving home with haste and wanting only to hug warmth with roundness. It is a Friday and it is cold when I know that colors could eat every one of us and that this is what you mean to me.

Absence Makes the Heart

Ice ice is not as sad as it feels only the means to slow down and to creep down into a night like the heavy breathing from another pillow catching your cheek before it leaves again.

Where My Money Goes

These are the aisles, smelling like the sarcophagus of an old story, where I waste money on books. I say waste, a word not created by myself but by those who are not me and who do not know me when they pass narrowly by. It is a word that implies the imprudence of spending, such as by wasting money on books that might be used for the emergency room bill that is many months late now and has been sold to a collection group called First-American. To do this is considered imprudent, also their word. But these words, these which smell like wind-worn centuries, they are secretly also new, newer than these other words, and they are my words, in the space that separates each from its meaning.

Children's Moment of Silence

When our mouths are filled with a mother's sagging breast, there is nothing left to say.

The Boy

was born and walked and said mom and stole first and saw a breast and kissed awkwardly and fondled a nipple and got a car and slipped into a girl in the car and wore black to receive the proper documentation from his high school and got on one knee in the wet sand and cried because he yelled at her and got sick and spoke softly to her stomach and held the little girl in his arms and told the little girl stories about people who might destroy her if she let them and held his wife for a very long time after they yelled and got sicker and got older and said goodbye with tubes like plastic arteries dangling from his arms and died.

When he died he remembered every moment since he was born and when he got older and sicker he wished he could walk and swing bats and speak to his mother who had passed and when he held his wife after a fight he felt her breasts pressed against his chest and kissed her and wanted to fondle her and slip inside her instead of drive away to work and when he told the little girl stories about bad people it was because he knew she'd get married one day and leave him and when he held that baby girl in his arms he wondered if she'd heard them say I love you from the womb and when he proposed to his wife by the ocean that night he thought of no future but her and when he graduated he worried about debt and the ring but not about sickness and when he was naked inside her across the back seat he did not imagine his child's face and when he kissed he did not understand the different things a kiss could mean like I'm sorry or I want to remember being happy or goodbye and when he pounded across bases the yelling seemed more natural and when he took his first step and spoke to his mother he knew nothing of the world and its hurting but would learn and when he was born he understood that he would never die.

A Long Poem