1
Daytime exerts its tyranny over the moon, and all the sad-faced kids
burrow under the covers. I’m ashamed of my guilt and shame—it
turns out feeling bad is my latest addiction. Sex got boring and
disease holds sway over too many dicks. Woe is me! declares yet
another self-pity enthusiast
2
PRETENTIOUS GRAD STUDENT: Today has been a truly Sisyphean struggle against the existential dread of modern life! Allow me to express my despair…through interpretive dance!
He ululates in falsetto and thrashes across the room, gesticulating wildly.
3
My inhalation draws a swirling cloud
of glittering pollen, a garden worth
glimmering like God’s wet dream.
We are bursting, blossoming like fireworks
through this life—the sperm and egg
meet and light like bulbs: zygotic eminence.
Little curved thumb unfolds again and again
and over again into birth.
Shrieked into being and mucousy slick,
this squalling cabbage blinks
its eyes against a light it
just cannot get.
4
The prerequisites have never been offered:
Inner Peace 101, Self-Acceptance Survey Course.
This fine quavering sense of who I am—
comes and goes, it comes and goes.
Karma Chameleon? More like Samsara Salamander.
5
hungry? let’s sliver ourselves:
into delicate stems shoots
petals
6
perjorate innocuous
syllables
in order that
I might break the
little literary rules
govern the placement of
poem
7
drag a bright red finger through the topmost crust of snow
to spell the letters of your name—
this daylong graffiti is no more brief
than our little lives to some onlooking God
8
delight denotes
how one lights up
when this new product
bends their tongue
into the shape
the malevolent will
of a marketing team
9
eye-
(light pinpricks
its way)
lid
squint : closer
closer still
close off
the you
in you
10
propinquity:
our hot wet places
the long and long longed-for
meeting of meatiness
Fuck me!
yelps the phantom on the screen
channel our cumming through internet porn
11
Listen:
I want
what I need
and it is somewhere
to lean
some firm-bellied boy
who will breathe in my ear
12
sticky at nightfall
triumphant thrust
13
we glitter our way through this life
(blissful ephemera)
who poked holes through the birdcage slip God drapes over sky?
what deity symphonized the wash of color called sun
breathed wind into mill and milled wheat into ergot?
LSD is the closest I ever felt to God.
14
Listen:
I held the corners
of a canary yellow
bedsheet, leapt from
a sheer rock face
but I didn’t gently float
like some low-rent Mary
Poppins—I crashed!
I crashed! I crashed.
15
Wrapt in gentle tulle chiffon
silk and linen
cup my balls in lukewarm saline
puddle spit in my troughed tongue
lick my lips until they drips
16
rub terrycloth along my brow
dab the grease and spit
in my eye. love a good cry.
17
radiant amputee my heart’s become
cut green apples in cold clear water.
slotted spoons, serrated words. as in:
we need to talk. as in: the test was
reactive.
18
Tired as a limp tortilla. Tortillas and eggshells and orange peels and blood.
19
Hereby, verily, I do declare:
The least interestingest unrealnesses
of my time are as follows:
congress, AIDS, my sleeping habits and spaghetti.
20
Ling Ling! calls the panda handler.
Ling Ling! cries the racist telephone.
21
high school projector wheeled from room to room
catches pencil shavings fingers’ oils dusty hair
(oh! sprinkle these yum yums on your tongue
tongue be my little dustbin
mmm…)
22
The most interestingest cataclysmicness: 6th of August ‘45
when pavement sang the song of bowling balls
on tin-roofed sheds.
23
truncate my species
would you tsunami?
haircut clippings line
every nest. toenails
(whole ones, surgically
excised) litter beaches.
biohazard bags snagged
on razor wire.
eyeballs in ice cream
cones. Now. Tell me:
why not flood,
oh ocean? All
the multivaried viscera
of med school
dissections are flushed
down toilets, poured
in rivers. tendons
like fishwire
in water-weeds.
24
Was is the past tense form of
we, or the present form of war.
Warmth makes itself of the broken
bits of when, wakes in we the need
to, well, fuck.
25
honeyed eyes cling like peaches
drain like cans of same
26
Caramelized expletives gently
lick my eardrum
27
We’re mostly bones, I guess.
The mesh of calcium interwoven
without them just Jabba the Hutt
(in his slimmer years)
sludge my way across the floor
a slug, a snail, a semen gob
half holding fast to me like my
wise twin stuck on your palm. He sneers:
A cumshot made a gift of me
and I am here for the long haul.
28
non-sequitize sense into puzzlement
as the ampersand of my breath links
moment to moment to moment to—
(and —and — and —)
29
Matchsticks stand, demand equal rights
or else they’ll (big surprise) self-immolate.
Too obvious! heckles the neighborhood cynic.
30
All the refracting views on memory, when when becomes never happened or what didn’t dent is inserted after the fact (or factually challenged) what we used to call a lie.
I didn’t say ’Simon Says!‘ shrieks the warden, but it’s too late—Ol’ Sparky has jangled the decrepit killer’s bones to dust; his pelvis wild in blue-white arcs spitting like cats.
31
Parse out
the hegemony
of me over
no one
Determine how blue
this skin
could be
before you’d have to
breathe.
32
press a palm against
mirrored marble.
there are more eloquent words than
Why?
but the meaning is the same.
33
Mistify (n) – to reduce to mist.
Ex.: I placed his body in an enormous atomizer
and proceeded to mistify his jelly flesh.
34
lenticular wisp the day
into dreamy unbeing
cumulonimba:
let us embrace
vaccinate the self
for lonely, for dying alone.
mist your way inside me. Here, allow
me to spread like I want it like
I need it like no, really like
right here and like right now.
35
thirsty. malignance.
see how
yummy rose
thorn swell
in belly
could be
36
In my aching for this beauty In my aching for this beauty oh I’m aching for this beauty.
37
In the dim mendicant dusk
of a hot Sunday we sweat
through the crotch of our
last clean briefs. Mash
dandelion flowers to a fine
grainy paste.
38
The dream is getting away from me.
39
Blistered by the degree
of my want
focused hard on
finding words
to complement each
other word
while still emitting
meaning,
beauty,
pomme, er,
poème— Oui!
(little apple of my mind…)
40
We intertwine our sticky parts,
become a fleshy tangle
woozy, perfumy with
the munificence of mums.
My vocation is loquation;
pay’s minus shit, but the intangibles
are legion. A fleshy palimpsest,
my arms bemoan a vicious
adolescence. The story of my descent
spelled out in scars across my arms.
41
Sweet blow of delirious language—which storm between dawn and dream could shudder the unsung soul to lather itself in this strange half-broken mystery? Or put another way: what midday turbulence would spark the self to bathe in chance?
What will it take to risk it, eh?
Conjure castanets from out the cacophony of car alarms—there! Amid the timbres of shriek and rumbled dumbness is the cunt-puntingly aggravating way I am awakened. Garbage trucks play dumpsters like drums, speak the climactic syntax of shattering glass.
42
Operations stem from a faulty hypothesis, cut.
Theory is less interesting than fact, look.
Geese take off like little planes, warmongers.
Rain terror on waxy leaves, shit.
Meanwhile on the alkali flats of a distant moon, hot.
As if the very word did not imply you’d freeze, dry.
Sparked to spook like a nervous fawn, trigger.
We hung around the rims of cities, homogenous.
The thickly-hookered places, cellophaned.
At the slightest hint of chase, catastrophe.
We’d set out for the next motel, slum-assed.
On the tenth day I woke up and he was
gone. Preternatural stillness of a cheap
motel at 4 a.m. I went to the sink and
splashed my face. My cheekbones were
so angular they’d cut the softer boys.
Those fragile little toys…
43
Another crystal dream:
my pupils wide as dollhouse plates
cataracted silvry-white
like lightninged mirrors
from which i knew
the crash’d come
the crystal’d gone
44
Cast out from God’s velvet ropes
when Eve presented her split
fruit. Nectar and new, this mystery.
45
I have longed to disconnect meaning.
46
How a cow femur seems
like it could belong to anyone
This eye, pressed through a sieve
could be sour cream
And this map key doesn’t make sense!
It’s measured in increments
of an elephant’s eyelash. It’s thicker
than my pubic hair, sure,
but even Montana’s still thousands
across. (And I walked them
one by one by one by) wake, cheek pressed
sweatily into asphalt. Gritty
and hot. Cars inch by and I
did not call dad on
Father’s Day. He never earned it.
47
Oh, oh, oh.
The long clawing back to meaning.
Oh, oh, oh.
I am tough as leafy spurge.