When I Say What I Mean

Lover

2011-08-21T11:14:00.000-07:00

i find whispers in the telephone ring tones
your voice is set to ringing, ‘answer’
and then we lock eyes at odd intervals

(a flat note from a woodwind)

do you see me smiling with someone?
their joke is not funnier than yours
& i can smell you from here.

so flush with a thought of you
capillaries rise, a cut pink
the ideas fixate themselves in front

it’s hard to articulate the very snap
of your skin to your bones or the slow
cook steeping of the tension between

you

2011-07-05T16:40:00.001-07:00

i think like a coward clown fish
in a full reef, no place to stay
safe: “if it isn’t you, it’s someone
else.” but else never is
you don’t ever stop.

but you should change
your number. it makes the future
come faster. even if you write
their's down on a post-it
it will always be stuck
somewhere.

four years ago i first saw you
the you appeared prematurely
and i knew you would somehow be
the shark that unhinges a jaw
and eats the fish whole.

instinct. origin. (2010)

2011-07-02T14:33:00.000-07:00

when you died, i swallowed a part of your spirit that no one with a mother needs. i want to feed and clothe more than. i want to guide and love and chisel maps into stone, break the glass in case of emergency, trying to hold on to the same axe as someone else’s. it’s not a competition but a repetition no one needs. It’s a useless talent that can’t go anywhere without a process of adoption. i ask if they are cold and it is an empty gaze back. when you give, you expect to release that gift. i am standing at a child’s party holding a romper that won’t fit, fit for my returning. “send a gift certificate, it’s okay.”

i have absorbed part, i— not needed. a cat looking out a window at a nesting bird with a full bowl of food on the cold tile kitchen floor, infinitely refilling. i can’t create one but i can create one in me, maybe in a decade or so. it seems. is there time for my own? what i won’t say is that my life is not one built for longevity. statistically, based on parental mortality i won’t see 60. when most of us finally take the time to sit and look out the window. i am looking at the window now and i see closed blinds, a shadow of a tree against clouds. i see books scattered on my floor. i am in a chair, but i should be on the floor. gift of sight, no one cares to see. come back and take this away from me. i look out a window you will never pass by, or stand in, or be in again.

there’s only room for one. there is no one else here.

wild

2011-07-02T14:32:00.001-07:00

we roam around each other as collective entities packs of wolves finding the other through scent. the forest for the trees, you sit tall. look at me. slightly cock your head to the right. howl at the moon: your eyes guided in time, all of the rising tides. when your eyes fall away, the water only lightly grazes the sand— like the tips of your fingers against my face, when there are no phrases, just the scent and night.

how desire feels like hunger, how assuaging desire is feeding, how i give myself pieces of passion to digest slowly, how i cannot ingest it all without becoming sick, into something that is too much but isn’t prey, tell how i could— consume your skin with my skin, my skin a mouth to eat your skin. our skin—mouths resting together in lip-lock. your eyes green dimmed behind glass, the green grass, the forest tops.

marks left and not left visibly, i find the spots, those are the spots we go. we circle, claim, circle, and the stakes. we are at each other’s throats. i find you. i know you, so solemn. disheartened, so confused in your compromising the most troubled bit of your herd with the hunger of the pack. let—

do not concede doubting thomas. all of i wish to be nothing less than yours.

Bodies to Drew Kalbach

2011-07-02T14:31:00.000-07:00

i find the need to invest in bodies. there are 20 dollar signs at the end of my email signature followed by an emoticon of a penis, which i have colored purple. i have been looking for the right body, i have been looking for the right shade of nude color that fits the obliviously nude body. i found myself in The Gallery examining bodies. I took notes on all of them and filed them inside of your mouth, the jaw, the hinge to a filing cabinet if you can keep it in your brain. I have been thinking we should get rid of the brains and keep the necks. there are some interesting bones and arteries. i thought about this in my kitchen while preparing a dinner entirely composed of bodies of pulled plants. i took pictures and sent them to you, since you can’t eat without your body. you printed the pictures and ate them instead.

I, Still

2011-05-30T23:23:00.004-07:00

sometimes it is there in the morning and it drives
the quit to buy a pack. it is so implicit that if i said it
i would be sure but it would sound of another

language. i pull back from you because to be
totally within you is the truth. how your skin is
the verdant grass on the rolling hills
of a country i could call
home but have never stayed—

and the magnolias in Philadelphia
could be you if I had my nose
buried in the nape of your neck.

the non-specific morning rings of you
as I wake, peering through the blinds
at a concrete cove, it pushes through
hours, to night, end—

you are my crimson sky at set, a sign
of smooth seas, to have you would be
to know, to be
sure, of everything
else,

and without i
wake and hear
you, in all of
the leaves;

i, still, after all of this time

in saying this

2011-05-30T23:23:00.003-07:00

so again, we meet. it is more than chronology but continuance. the moon comes again. the tides come in. i feel as if we have wound tightly around each other longer than we have currently lived. it is before words and after. to glance back without, before i felt. to be mistaken that there was before, drawn backwards. as i breathe in an another life from the back of your neck, i feel the scar near the base of your back. like the first time i felt it: desire maps itself onto hindsight as i looked forward to you. there was no need for revision. it was already there. i saw you and i knew you. it is as if you’ve always been and will be, again. so again, we meet. and again.

Couplets of After

2011-05-30T23:23:00.001-07:00

i have yet to fall back
from my unrelenting loneliness

into a bed of hydrangea
a scent that stirs of then in sea winds

as i read the newspaper at the table
i dream of rain and hands only, in solitude

all things tend to speak a dialect of wind
a symphony of alternate stagnation, rushing

he knows not that which is the wind can be him
there is satisfaction in the tufts of a shared blanket

in extraordinary stillness of the nights of shared blankets
the void does not consume that which it occupies

i can almost smell the bay winds of then, skin,
being absorbed in warmth, comfort, fullness of heart

swept up in the winds against the window, breathing,
almost rhythmically engaged like hands holding in rain.

Poet's Time

2011-05-30T23:21:00.000-07:00

i look over my glasses at myself

i begin the next sentence

“this is autobiographical”

it took me this many steps to reach you

it takes this many to be facing infinite directions other than

this isn’t a warning but a gauging of realities

it’s now one of the infinite strings.

i don’t want my love to know what i mean by “poet’s time”

i told her; she knew the clocks by which i abide even before

all of the ocean is filled with darkness at some eventuality

if i were blind we probably wouldn’t have had a conversation

your eyes were full of daunting expectation.

there were obstacles planted by clocks

i walk more quickly next to water

my blue and brown glasses are more full of sight

there are always birds if you look.

i move my house away from yours

you lock yourself in linearity and i have no propensity

if we had water to walk around this would be a non-issue

i would lose you to find you, which is now

as it always is now where you make the mistake

we start a year later.

that’s now in poet’s time.

folds

2011-03-21T23:15:00.000-07:00

it seems in the folds you have expanded. i see inside of something else your jawbone cut like marble staircases up to a large monument. i see the Capitol Building, I know what the round room looks like, I have set foot inside of someone else’s heart and was not escorted about by security minutes later. Do you see me in the rearview mirror? I am quickly gaining on you, and your lack of horsepower. I imagine you car with crooked alignment and telling you about it before you even knew. “She knows about cars.” She knows about things yes, this she, not breaking at the end of never a sentence, seldom letting the fluidity of prose stray from the realm of poeticism.

i’ve written you a love letter, a breakup letter, a farewell letter, a catchup letter, a “can I have that book with the torn binding and robin’s egg blue cover back? i’ll provide the postage” letter, the “i have met someone equally as invasive into my immediate solitude as you once were, so i am informing you that you are sincerely now an afterthought, after years” letter in advance. It took a great deal of speculating what i am or will be, but i find i found you easiest to write to, in your whenever.

I have yet to look you in the eye across a table and i sit in front of a page, a paper, a hermitically sealed jar with no intention of being opened. I am filled with the air of the Great South Bay, New York, salty and moist slipped underneath the tongue when taken in right. I will share it will you if you promise to turn the lid slowly, delicately, like you were handling your favorite, cherished, item, the one thing that is more than it is, because I am too. And I might want that, hypothetically, from you. just the guarantee that you won’t spill.

After

2011-02-19T13:36:00.000-08:00

Gertrude Stein is better than an alarm clock. I lick chocolate off of my arm to clean it; the goal wasn't to eat the chocolate. That is the integral difference here. I have two fleece blankets, one knit blanket, and a comforter. I'm taking an inventory of the sediment between me and the air. Carbon dating does not work as well as tree rings, so I'm staying in tonight without you. I wish you'd have fun in your new life and leave your old life at home with me, where it is dying. I change out the bedpan and sit by the side. You have coveted one of my blankets. It is keeping you from the air. You are keeping your teeth from me. I am keeping my candy covered arms from you. I am waiting to wake up. I am waiting for you to be there. But nothing rings, it just silently whispers "he always thinks when he knows and he always knows," as my house stands twinkling in the moonlight.

old room

2011-02-09T21:40:00.000-08:00

whenever i leave something relatively new alone, at once i disappear from it. i return to the old room and you and your ways of seeing. i ask you plainly to run away with me, from the possibility of not-you. a plea against anything but a soiled, tainted, unfeeling not-you. as you, the actual one, stand in front of me, in my mind's eye, feigning a casual lean on my stoop's railing, smoking a cigarette, making eyes at every brick stacked. the way is cleanly, dimly, lit with posts. your eyes are more blue than ever, right now. i can't make myself grab your face. it isn't written. we haven't written that, yet.

you say it is impractical to think now, imply a not-you transient situation can be the blue glistening tarp over our unfinished home. i say this home can't be built on the smoke you keep inhaling, it's too expensive, quit; i cannot stand to see hypothetical cancer eat you, i cannot take care of the cancer, when i want to keep you fresh and breathing the sighs of relief that come from realizing that you are where you belong, no one but you, right in this moment. there is a blue tinge to the ends of your sentences. As I no longer long, I hope to replace everything but, I know to replace everything but. i return to the old room and you and all of your ways of loving me through shadows of sentiment, never firmly grasping the voice, the words.

tuesday, noon

2011-02-08T09:13:00.000-08:00

i haven't said what i meant in a while. the floorboard heating sounds like a boy climbing a chain-link fence, getting his foot stuck in it, shaking. everything else is humming, check the weather for a third time before changing. stand on the back steps in a nightgown— shrouded in night: i face february. its insistence on the sun hiding behind the clouds: the skin on my legs is already dry and chapped. even if hidden, it finds its way there. all i can think of is the lack of sentiment, the solitude, my vocabulary failing me as the winter biting, rising hairs on my arms, one by one erect in the face of the kiss of a chilling, whistling wind.

Shortcomings

2011-01-30T21:36:00.000-08:00

how confusing it must be for a poet
to tell you she can't tell you
how she wants to say it
in written word.

is there a way she can truly
convince you of the reality
of the corner of her mouth
being bitten by her top row
of over-bitten teeth is as suggestive
as her hazel eyes are intent
at that moment.

she is now burning you
inside but she does not want to
tell you how you feel: she is not
living inside of you. she is
just visiting— for now.

could she be stirring something
if her smirk emerges while she writes
small digital letters? could she
at a distance, indeterminate,
draw you toward her?

the questions, the poet asks
at her desk, while drinking tea,
setting fires, and humming softly.

Instincts/ Instances

2011-01-26T18:37:00.001-08:00

it's the same idea. the first version
of the narrative mirrored exactly
the factual events, while later editions seem
to have been revised—
like the Greeks and their wine colored sea
being a bright blue to us now,
as most of the time looking back
through the fog bending into the city streets,
we find more than there was, and less than we
needed and hoped for, or something completely different
or the opposite.

i curl up close next to my first instincts
they are red in the face, fixated on
the streetlight streaks shining through the slivers of
the blinds, unfolded, their breath slight, quivering.
the blank sky is falling to make a blank ground.
it isn't a surprise.

i am trying to tell them,
their discoloration and instance won't
make anyone change their minds or change the trajectory they
are riding on, or create a rip in time,
to change anything back or
forward.

the sleet hits the window panes
forcing off the remnants of the last storm
only to remind us that it came, it was once here.

2011-01-20T22:33:00.001-08:00

relation is another country and i can’t find a second proof of identity to drop the money on a passport. you smuggled in cubans from canada. your smile says that you just smoked one. i don’t find that attractive.

i don’t find anything. my bed is empty. my phone is silent, not just because of setting. i can’t write. i write about a body. i can only write bodies, write on my bodies with a body. it seems so impersonal.

it seems i take it personal. it seems like a writer block. i want to block your body into this scene. i want to ask you if you get along with your mother. there is a time and a place. i want to know what your regular childhood meals were. all i can focus on is wanting and it is driving me, since i don’t have a car.

i don’t have a car or a big bank account. i have two cats and a comfortable chair. i resist the urge to use the word “comfy.” i resist the urge to consume chocolate. i indulge in writing about it. i want something else. something cinematic, a waking point a conversation at 7 am. watching the sun do one of the two things it does during the day. or ignoring that for night sky. i want to see nature. i want to see movies of nature.

it isn’t my nature to think this and that and that’s why i pour it into language framework. i feel like a geriatric Jackson Pollack. I feel like O’Hara’s last cigarette. I feel like I want a cigarette. I feel like i want someone to touch my hair and say “is that okay?” because I need that question even without a question. i need for someone to say “it’s okay. it’s cool.” i need for someone to take my glasses off.

Zodiac (a piece of a collaboration series of the same moniker)

2011-01-16T09:46:00.000-08:00

In the year of the rat, i found you in his room. there was talk of books, academics. you asked me what my favorite was, and i'm sure my answer wouldn't be the same now. something of carver, something of vonnegut. something not too far off but not the same. i don't remember what you were wearing, but you sat in the chair behind his, tilted, rocking on the hind legs of an unsteady chair. you made a passing comment to him, that he passed on. i'm sure you don't remember that, i'm sure you don't remember.

the future

2011-01-15T00:30:00.000-08:00

we envision:
two story ranch style homes set up against minute forests, a sound barrier from the southern state parkway. the robert moses causeway connecting this piece of winding highway to the beach. the sun gathering over the bridge, striped with rays, rays below in the bay, crossing over to fire island, engulfed in the dawn. the dunes receding into the background as the sea takes back its harsh advances on our space: it no longer wants to lay waste the land we’ve wasted. all of the planting of dune grass has convinced it to let us be. the shells gathered on the wave break at this low tide time, the moon determining where on the sand we can stand. taking your hands from your gloves, you dip only the tips of your fingers in the ice water. there are still birds despite the snow. there are still deer despite the hunters. there is still hope despite the seemingly endless cold.

admitting you were evil is the first step

2011-01-14T23:31:00.000-08:00

it was never in my nature before to ask questions. i suppose i didn't care enough. admitting you were evil is the first step. i imagine myself saying: please keep your pants on, this is important. when i docked the row boat i was unaware of the coming snowstorm. i would have tied a tighter knot, or perhaps, sat in the canal with my life jacket tied to 3 pounds of dynamite. i'm sure the fuses would get too wet. it would be my luck. sitting in a row home, docked, solidly, covered in snow.

when i open my mouth, inevitably someone is listening. it is never for me, so i try hard, because it was horrible. i used to catch at every corner acting like a velcro strip but really my hooks were metal. I'd tear at every piece of cloth left dangling, leaving more than a stain but a scar. it isn't something i'm proud of but if i think to denying it distasteful. it's under my skin, bite down on it, clench with your teeth. the juices have been wrung out.

the intuitive ones can smell it on me when i let the words slip. they've tried to read my poetry and make a case against me but didn't separate the "me" from the "I" and i say it's a trope. i sat red faced almost forgetting the dead skin that wasn't mine underneath my fingernails. can i be both and still not? loved and still? you don't have to answer that. strange of me to even ask.

Now

2010-11-17T21:50:00.000-08:00

i was born backwards, filling tea cups at birth with earl grey. i was a resting stone for mother at his disappearance. i sat in the river wherever she needed. i blocked the downstream from dragging her. it isn't so much about losing, it's about purpose. it isn't about sadness, it is about purpose. if i was a knife all of my life and found a fork with a sharp edge takes care of me, what now? do i become an instrument? a drum stick?

when you are old, you are used to things. it is crueler to be used to. it is crueler to be taken from what you are used to, before you can remember. it is crueler when you recognize the future, rather than asking to be taken in a friend's backyard sit on the swings in a sun shower. i had snow cone all over me when dad died. it isn't about getting better, it's about purpose. i'm glad i didn't have to watch. i recognize the future. i see my mother dying. i watched. the sun does come out again, but does it hit your face the same way? it isn't about a bright future, it is about blood letting, a leach sucking it out. we move on, but it does not move from us. no, not so easily.

long division: remainder/inheritance

2010-11-16T21:20:00.000-08:00

my mother died and left me her menopause. i am sweating, unsteady. Erratically consistent like the rapidly changing tide, i can love you and hate you in the same day dragging down the details. forgetting your name in frustation. my body heats like an oven and turns off like a light.

my mother died and left me her maternal tendencies. caught catching a crumb from a peer’s facial hair without word. i wipe your face and require you be careful leaving your apartment each morning. i have taken to worrying about night travel. i sit in my room and read the paper. i play with my cats. my only wish now is that you find love.

my mother died and left me homeless. i have a reason for not showering, for sleeping in public places. i can yell at passers-by who disrespect my public cinched bubble. my beard is growing; i can curse the rich without recourse. i will take your money and any left over food you care to share.

my mother died and left me lonely. i sit in bed asking her to visit me, through the flashes of heat i see her hands. they are holding a letter that cannot be opened. she longs to hold me. this is impossible and makes it worse. there is a bank account. i plan on feeding the next thing that loves me dollar bills through a twisty straw.

BUFFALO 14

2010-07-07T01:29:00.001-07:00

it’s difficult to define my times of solitude from those of loneliness. i want and want want want and then the guilt seeps in from Sister Anne. i see her in her habit, making my habits feel sinful, soul searing, yet, she still supported something productive and insidious in me when she guaranteed a greater love than a strangers’. where can you get that but a woman that takes vows, or shaman in the field staying overnight to make sure the bison don’t make it into Montana, where they are slaughtered. there is laughter in sally field’s performance flying. i’m not talking to you about this tonight or before you leave. there is humor in rulers hitting desks and the fear of god that kept me from getting up to use the bathroom. you wouldn’t want to hear it. i see my first crush in a train station parking lot and he kisses me on the cheek. it’s been weeks since anyone has touched my arm. i just want to hear “yes” once.

BUFFALO 12

2010-07-07T01:17:00.001-07:00

honestly, i know i need appeasing. the weather holds as i wish it were holding. no bags or pockets. no memories. rumors that are completely unsubstantiated. i am meeting myself half way, as i often do, this time of year. the humidity is a warm unwelcome hug. the sun’s annoying half kiss on the cheek is more painfully sweet then when i can’t decipher a kiss on the head from a chin resting there.

i would have taken loveology. i stretch my body like a bridge. i stretch my limbs out in dirt, i grow hooves, in the grooves of where my fingers are disappearing. tumors that are completely unsubstantiated. tudor homes viewable from the sprain brook parkway cutting through forest, or a forest cutting through usable road. a path once created by herds that actually existed.

it is an odd feeling when people who knew you since you were born barely recognize you after a few missing years. “you’d like my friend” i say, “for some reason i needed to mention it.” although some reason isn’t as exact as every reason. it’s like people can know what i mean if they are from the same state. i’ve surrendered that part of me that hasn’t a reason. i’ve blamed the plains indians too long for my platelet lain hands. i have taken the study of: i want.

BUFFALO 9

2010-07-07T01:16:00.001-07:00

doesn’t time-zone change just fuck with you? i ate the plains, the plain, the no cheese. i sit here staring at you from across the table, are you watching me fix my hair? i think you did, let me do it one more time to see if you are. i wonder if i turned off my vcr sometimes i accidentally let it run, see the same scene and rewind, but the tracking is a bit off-kilter, it’s never the same. i appreciate the packaging. i appreciate the bones in the ground. what if the flesh was still fresh— it was meant to sink into the layers, ashes to ashes to a dusty autumn flavored road orange, yellow, green dimming in the sunset. i picture you getting off of airplanes. i wonder if now is enough to for you to realize that every train and everything that transplants you can’t take you away from yourself. they moved the american buffalo from state to province to state in order to keep them alive. they were too proud to realize this was killing them and we are here now.

BUFFALO 8

2010-07-07T01:15:00.001-07:00

i wrote a poem about him dying but you look just like a friend of my mother’s that died, which i think all too often. she is too young and so am i. i was late to ryan’s poetry class because i couldn’t sleep that night. your hair and your skin are the same. i don’t want to. i found his note tucked in a yearbook and i’ll never show you. i don’t know if he thought about me. a male buffalo often obstructs the female’s view of other males. you are severely indifferent to my past. you roll in your wallow, throw up dust obscructing my recall. it’s from a friend that died. JACKEE. it says. WE ARE SIMILIAR PEOPLE. i keep thinking this. YOU ARE ADDICTED TO. i embellished. AND I… WELL, MY VICE IS DRUGS. they took you i wrote a poem about it i got an A i felt better for you. EITHER WAY, WE ARE BOTH VERY SCRUMPTIOUS PEOPLE. he signed it. LOVE, MCKEEVER. it is important because it is important for you to really know me to know this. he once looked at me like i was alive. can you look at me that way?

BUFFALO 3

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

male bison eclipse challenging bulls by standing in front of their intended female and blocking their sight. but i am wary of the roar that comes from this roadblock. it interests me greatly, the labels on the packaging. the superlatives, like when i said that “you are my favorite” i don’t have a direct object in that sentence, but it is all implied. and if a male is following a female around long enough maybe she will catch his scent in her fur and forget the difference between them. he stands in front of her and she knows, because it is implied. the sun seldom acknowledges the moon. beyond the pasture there is only more pasture. beyond that, there is water.

BUFFALO 6

2010-07-07T01:13:00.001-07:00

i have been trying very hard to be honest. it seems the trend is to love me when i am a distant object. i changed it. we killed you; every single one of you majestic larger than life creatures singing to the president singing to the the shining seas singing our praises singing into the line you were snorting singing into the cameras singing into the toilets expelling what could keep you from singing singing and be a superlative and being a model and being the reason i will never be satisfied “being.”

i am too busy being to notice anything beyond the breath, breadth and brevity of every life squeezing pang, pinch my sides, clip onto my waist, held like a child on the hip, more like a burdensome stack of papers falling to my feet on every staircase, blank pages i have yet to fill, to kill a tree, to be a part of it, patriot sounds only homophonic. it manifest destiny-ed onto my desk next to a small stuffed animal bison. i want to write an opus, ode, flammable material. i want it to burn until it reaches the wet concrete i lay face-down in.

i wait for you aflame on the corner of your street and make assumptions. i spend most of my time assessing the amount of time i spend being caring. i don’t sleep because i have nightmares. i have the strange desire to purchase lumber and build you a shed for you to keep a typewriter. a superstition. i wish that you. i realize that that won’t do anything. i wish i could let people. i want to know you want to.

i remember feeling comfortable. my sister and i used to pretend to host a talk show in the bathtub. we had a plastic circus we played with in the living room. we didn’t like the clowns. my favorite was the elephant. she used to tell me i was adopted. i never felt like it was a competition. i think all of my taking care wasn’t the best thing to do. we sang in the tub like guests on talk shows. no one bought my album. the wallows were dust bowls cupping the empty space of the animal that is no longer there. as i got older, and was alone, i planted my face forward, and pretended to drown.

the bay

2010-04-22T22:52:00.000-07:00

water in bones. a narrative more like marrow.
sitting in between cartilage and flesh
is a sense of structure
underwater resurrections
somnambulist sea-stars
concurrently killed by crustaceans
re-coagulated, cultivated
clutch the cold sea floor

it isn't ironic because
i am your body
and your blood it isn't a metaphor
because you'd die without
those things you eat
me you grow
back your limbs
a sense of
whole

faith in an unsailed ship
while we are still in port please
come here and tell me why we
persist in leaving unbaited hooks
caught in each others' cheeks.

i tie myself to the plank and hang for days
tied at the wrist, the risk i'd take just
to place my salty lips against the new skin
you've grown around your mouth.

2010-04-22T22:42:00.000-07:00

being irish means i'm superstitious because i'm pretty sure the inverse isn't the correct order. i order stars to give me wishes if they are the first ones i see. like a boss that tells their earliest employee to make the coffee and make it strong. i wish you'd think i'm pretty. i wish you'd see me on your shoulders. maybe i wish to no longer be without my body. i've been missing it and it misses me. sometimes i take pictures of it, and only through looking at them do i know it's there. you see this one, i have a new freckle on my thigh. i haven't been in the sun very much. sometimes i'm louder than sirens. i'm sitting on rocks and they hurt as waves burn my ankles into stones. i wish you'd want to hold me, hold me back. but my freckles tell me the tears and wishes and green isn't over. no, it's all just starting.

how not

2010-03-15T19:15:00.001-07:00

i don’t know how but
i know how not. i keep
digging graves for my
self. i have plots in 4
different states. just in case.

i think this belongs
to you. can something be
for someone or about them and not
belong to them? isn’t it like another
piece. i can act indifferent,
but that’s differently from how
i act otherwise.

it takes a lot

of energy to not
say. i think about

the obligatory pictures i’ll never be
in. i think about the times i won’t get
to dig into this ground, break
deeper. moments I won’t
ever have before they
aren’t happening.

you’re a part of my
body. I can never reach
you, to really give you
what you deserve. unless
i bend almost til
breaking. i love you
intensely without
even thinking it.

my closet is a mess. i keep
hiding my feelings in it. can you
help clean it out? i think some
belong to you.

Prologue

2010-03-14T14:44:00.001-07:00

i don’t love you inside of something else. it isn’t in a will or desire. it isn’t wrapped in a motive. this is a path i have chosen regardless of something. my gut can’t draw me any closer to this notion. i am full of lonely; the world has much lonely in it. it is the plight to not know where. it is the plight to see that place and not reach it. to send out for maps and to ask for postcards. i have hope that one day the soil can be sent and i can pretend i am there and bury myself in it until i cannot breathe. the envelopes will come every week-marked “grave.” i grow tired with every stamp i see, a new historical figure on each. they know what it is like, to make history. as i become it. to ashes i shall return unless i can go there. unless you will be there too.

Even the Sun Sets.

2010-01-10T19:56:00.000-08:00

i briefly remember a conversation about "time" i had with a coworker in a break-room of a bookstore. you know where i work so you know this could be a true story, or true re-telling of a conversation. maybe this is a complete elaboration. why would you ever think i'd lie to you? this is where our communication issues stem from. (time isn't necessarily linear). you look at me like i have five heads. (A PHYSICIST SAID IT. SAID THERE ARE PLACES WHERE IT DOESN'T EXIST) you look at me like you want to go to bed even after you think i am lying to you about something that actually happened? i'm getting tired of making your breakfast and telling you i love you without hearing you chew. you take it into the other room and read the paper like it's sexier than i am. i always knew you had a black newsprint ink fetish. i saw you smell it the other day. can you let me finish? (time can also move backwards). i'd love to go back to the beginning and tell you i never want to see you again to spare me the ink you cost me everyday. i never want to wear an apron again. i never want to smile again. i never want to write a lick of poetry. i'm going to stay with that old boyfriend and not have another friend and watch him play video games although he's 28 and he's giggling and i think he might be an alcoholic but at least he told me my eyes were beautiful. none of this relates to what i was saying or makes you any less than the perfect chair to sit at my table and stay forever but even the sun sets at night and you can't expect me to be the moon too.

I Don't Have Any Friends

2010-01-10T18:30:00.000-08:00

no, i don't have any friends. i found these people on ebay. i started an email correspondence after i bought their random products. they each found it mildly amusing that i play their records, wear their clothes, drink out of their blenders, and i wonder what they were used for before. this is my version of online dating. it's more invasive. i told linda i felt her pleated skirt brush against me on its own. i said i thought it was her spirit held within the skirt. linda answers my emails frightened she's made a deal with the devil. i tell her the devil doesn't use ebay and she agrees. she then tells me what she would do if she were the skirt. i copy and paste her replies into an email with jim, whose white button down oxford shirt is too big on me. this is my version of voyeurism. i think about you while i do this. i think you wouldn't approve and that delights me and saddens me. i think you know who we have both resorted to being. at least i can see myself in the mirror.

try. harder.

2009-11-17T21:51:00.001-08:00

and then god said, TRY HARDER. live more than exist, but i can’t feel my fingertips when it is this cold in these sheets. even if he had a water bed i wouldn’t fuck him because he isn’t you. and it is fall, and enough is settling. every leaf that lines the sidewalk looks like a tiny yellow stingray at the corner of Berks where i’ve waited to meet temporary standards of enhancement or contemplated writing about them. i think it would give the leaves pleasure to know they didn’t die in vain. it gives me pleasure to know i am not dying in vain when i am dying a little a lot from evident persistent frustration.

my professor told me loneliness can lead to sleep problems. i wrote a poem about that at 4 am while smoking a cigarette alone on my back steps. no one knows that i can’t close my eyes without collapsing. i end mid sentence with you in conversation. it’s when my body wants to. i can’t help it. my body is telling me to tell you to use what you have for my benefit. my body talks a lot about the weather too. these things have become static.

i don’t think about people naked anymore. when i think about sex it’s always partially clothed. i smoke a cigarette to extricate the thought of nakedness. i put another sweater on. i wrap myself in a blanket. i turn the heat off, and i appreciate clothes. i remember that taxi episode where andy koffman’s character had to fuck his passenger in order to stay warm when their taxi broke down in a blizzard in white plains. i think about people naked.

my professor tells me some people do not desire new friendships and that there is no loneliness for these people. i wish to be these people. i just want to clean all the dead leaves off my patio so i can tap dance and the squirrels stop freaking me out when they make the leaves crunch. i talked to you about all of this and you understood. sometimes i want to tell you that you’re lying to me. i am too happy, in that moment, to ever do so. Jackie told me nothing important just happens. You have to try. i listen to Patsy, I put my fingers inside, and I pray I don’t fail. i try harder, i try at all the wrong things.

2009-11-16T16:21:00.001-08:00

I said good afternoon to a man whose breath smelt like kraft cheese and crackers. i often think of you naked when i think of cheese, two things missing from my life, both for their own reason, except i could willingly have one. you smelt the inside of your shirt to make sure you were still there. you brought night air on the cusp of blooming into solid ash into my apartment. i felt you trying hard to be nice; it was endearing. i kept clipping on my insides waiting for you to reach through and tell me to put down the scissors. you do so in your own way. i am a boat with no name, an emotionless wreck. i crashed into the cliffs on the sides of this island, and no one cared, because i did not belong to anyone. you told me it is my fault i paint myself this way. i’m not good at calligraphy, i want to say, but you wouldn’t get it. i wonder if it hurts you. it hurts me to think that way. we get old and tired, but it isn’t a bad thing if i can share it with you, on some kind of unnamed afternoon.

Sailor III & IV (part of my new book)

2009-10-19T23:04:00.000-07:00

it's like we were talking over a bowl of cereal or a vehicle for maple syrup. And you know how I think, you know what the moon does to me, and in the morning, I will be so high or so low. You know when you can see the barnacles that I am not up to par, that I am out at sea, instead of in by the coast and what you know. I am fleeting inwards into my own self, shifted by a gravitational glow, a celestial attention. you set sail, sailor, when I am spread the furthest out and open, pushing off, rudder heading in line with my center. and sometimes, you sit and wait for me to fold inward, so you can wade through the small pools i leave behind, the things that i had underneath, casually.

I am sure you are very aware of your seafaring attire. In the mornings before work, after nights of ceaseless reflection, you come down the stairs to me and you stop looking for yourself in me. The crashes crest up to your hips, but you never seem to swim. You dig your toes into, and I, I am here. Even when you're landlocked, looking, and I am rough, you still sit waiting, not to leave upon me, but to be upon me. And I am not your road for all intents and purposes, I am just yours.

well, isn't that the point?

2009-10-19T22:16:00.001-07:00

you and I—
we talk around each other using
parentheses and modifiers
in between (integral) clauses
to offset the strength of
honesty

whatever truth may mean
in a cold still corner of the bustling city
we do not know but we do
know it is bigger
than both of us,
individually.

(with every examination
a pang growls inside of me
of an unidentifiable certainty
of some kind of beauty
of Rittenhouse in autumn)

like a gestalt, i see the vase
i see the silhouette
of a young woman—
but i cannot see it
all at once.

white wine

2009-09-27T08:33:00.000-07:00

i wish i could just burp and it would be over. he opens his hand to close it on mine and ignores it. i picture a life amongst books and life ignoring books. he says it is what he wants but he does not say how. i have loved you for so long with every brick of this old, refurbished house, with every cobblestone laid underneath a concrete top coat with every single one that lies exposed in the parts we deem old, as i intend to grow, hopefully close. it does not transmit and backs up through my nose. he opens his body and clamps it on to mine and he ignores it. he opens his mouth, clamps onto my mind and ignores it. i wish i could sit in the rain for three hours and it would be over. he would probably look different without these walls. what is this outside these walls? he opens his arms clamps what is mine and ignores it. i wish i could know what difference it would make. i sit in the rain drinking white wine out of paper cups.

2009-09-21T21:51:00.000-07:00

i often think of you after a cup of tea
when my breath shortens and quickens
and my hands only hold but warmth
a stimulant housed in porcelain

or in those moments right before sleeping
i think of the infinite physics of space
and the fact that when i yawn
a cop car always slide past the back of my apartment
so it looks as if the siren is being emitted from my mouth

blindness

2009-09-17T21:23:00.000-07:00

i knew you at once. defining a part apart from the whole. stringent and malevolent to an unconscious extent. it is hard to compromise when i am fibers and you fail to recognize my concrete existence. i have loved you with each brick in this house, and you refuse to believe it is any more than a shire, empty but warm, flowing freely around you. my shutters are sick with dismay, cluttering the windows with their splinters. i cannot stand to be left out in the rain when you leave the windows open. and in borrowing my umbrella in the rainy season, you fail to see that as i dry your hair and towel off your skin, i am dripping onto the wood floor. there are puddles. neglected puddles.

i've asked enough

2009-09-12T09:39:00.000-07:00

(i am going to rewrite this several times)

I write life as I would like it to be
a sentence on a notepad on your refrigerator door
telling you we need to buy more fig newtons
or celery, and you ask me why i am feeding you
the snacks without the sugared glaze, saccharine sweet
and i'd rather say, can't we do that on our own?

but reality does seep in the cracks between
well thought out sentences, regardless
of their paths. they hook left at a preposition and i am not
telling you to stay. i am tell you to leave me
because i want you to stay.
please
make a loud noise, so i can find you again
and you are just in the other room, asking for a cup of tea.

your winged backed sentences and your blue jeans
are stitched together as the philadelphia light can only
weasel its way through my blinds, in the small slits
and you lay on my bed and heave a sigh.

i become too sunk, as i do not, and you do
not consider time, and the open books on the floor
yellow with age. can we expect to be this silent anywhere else?
and if i smile at you expect to know the reasons behind it
as i hold a hand not on your wrist,
will it stir something inside of you to act?
would you hold the skull and ask if it's worth it
if i am not there?

i could share, i could.

2009-08-31T22:35:00.000-07:00

when you lock the front door
not the storm
door, the front one
the first heavy door
on the top, bolt it
bolt, not the storm
door, it locks so i cannot
get out or in.

if i were to get stuck
between my apartment
and this door
it would be an endless loop
just like i am
and you are
of each other.

it is a fire hazard to the people
in my building
but i like to think of it as
a franza kafka novel
and eventually i realize
there wasn't a point
because keeping people out
was what made me sad
in the first place.

2009-08-31T22:11:00.000-07:00

what winds would change
not quite ice and it is now
we have seen a drop
an unsuspected low

you are never alone when i vacuum
i take you into those dance moves
an indoors ballet for the autumnal equinox
cut up apples in a circle on the philadelphia pavement
we couldn't share the secrets of the sisterhood
but we could dance like we were endlessly greeting
you are not a woman and i am not dancing

but maybe it is more in the bed-making
a place to reside when it is done being just that place
an empty method-less container of coils
waiting but not really doing anything
spread like wind through my sheets
you are no placeholder and i am no maid

but maybe it is in the leaves turn itself
rather than what we want to do about it
maybe in that moment i find you, crisp
and ready to grow into what you should have been
and fall from a branch
and hit your head.

2009-08-31T21:26:00.000-07:00

we're falling apart
the stitch comes lose, snags you, just
thread barren spines left

past lives

2009-08-27T20:50:00.000-07:00

i have this one ex boyfriend
he is a tap dancer
and that in itself
lends a quality of music
to his profession

we used to go out on the parking lot
a veritable playground
for our fancies
where other people telephoned our needs
to each other until i realized
three days later
for me it was over

i wish it was as easy with you
as four square was then
when i'd pass to someone else's corner
and shift you out of your spot, out of the game
and into my periphery
and it would be that simple.
loving you would be that simple.

2009-08-20T16:50:00.001-07:00

the sun cracks some kind of dendritic spine and it spills forth you. i could close my head up with something super, something stitch like, something non-existent. the power of positive thinking. we lost everything when we moved here and you need to know you aren’t the same thing, but the same shell. we are all but shells. i am linked to yours, prisoners in a two person line, tending the fields as penance for our crimes.

2009-08-09T09:19:00.001-07:00

i wish there were more pronouns.

snippets of SCRAPS

2009-08-09T08:40:00.000-07:00

can you make love to me with the computer on? the screen gives off just the right amount of light and i can make out the freckles on your left leg, disregarding the right. when did we fall apart? i remember it ended and you broke off, and we were separate again. you took a sewing needle and ravaged our pajamas. we were stitched together like a floating dock to the mainstay, drifting and colliding constantly.

snippets of SCRAPS

2009-08-09T00:58:00.000-07:00

what i loved in him was his nerves, whatever tense you'll have, love. the way i felt them pulsing at the pressure points. i touched too much before i could see the bones. he never allowed any saws into the operating rooms. he was into homeopathic medicine. i wanted barebones science. what i remember is faint and then i was caught. he jumped from the table in a hospital robe and caught me. when he first kissed me he was shaking on a sleeping bag instead of his lofted bed. i think he was nervous and that's what i first loved in him, two years later. something tells me we're working backwards. lights. i don't remember his voice. scalpel. or the mark on his skin in the small of his back. suction. i remember a pillow grip. gauze. and thinking with all we've forgotten and fucked up already, could we really lose? okay, time to close it up.

snippets of SCRAPS

2009-08-08T23:59:00.001-07:00

what i loved in her was her bones. this is the most basic of principles. if you love someone’s bones then you know something people who love their skin don’t: you recognize the integrity in the foundation, the structure keeping it all together. you’re not just about aesthetics but the base behind it blocked from the light. i remember tissue but i do not remember her. we cracked each bone open to receive the prize inside. her marrow killed the man with lust on his lips. but my fingers felt only love. she smiles and says it doesn’t “make sense” and forgets to lock the front door as she leaves. it makes something i won’t remember in the morning. another wasted dream and stale sesame bagel.

snippets of SCRAPS

2009-08-08T23:26:00.001-07:00

tonight, we are on the floor and my legs are above my head. every night is tonight and i could swear we’ve been here before. if there is nothing to keep there is nothing to lose. you’re not even here and we don’t enjoy anything by lack of comparison. i don’t regret your skin. does a tree make a noise if it falls down and no one is there to hear it? and there is no moment if someone can’t remember it, it is empty space filling in the age lines creasing against your forehead.

snippets of SCRAPS

2009-08-07T21:38:00.000-07:00

we can’t hardly remember what it was we forgot. tens of thousands pieces of driftwood wandering wading but not lost, no not at all but maybe at odds. we broke off with the continents. we all knew one ocean, as there still is only one ocean. all the water is always touching each other about our heads.

eliminating writer's block part 1 WORD PLAY

2009-08-03T13:47:00.000-07:00

let's try coasters
rolling up on the garden
state your name and address
i will send you a christmas card
wishing you lived closer.

and sometimes when i lie
down by the water in the sand
in the sun i like to think maybe
you feel the same
rays i am feeling
or just a hint of it
somehow.

okay so i think a-
head, shoulders, knees
on the pavement, you bike
in your own neighborhood take
the train to my apartment and
stay the night.

but there is something
not said

i can't help but ceaselessly tear you in two

2009-07-29T21:52:00.000-07:00

i am lonely and i miss it
that sea shore covered in plastic wrappers
the industrial park turned into my old
neighborhood, covered in soot

do you miss me?
what with large expanses
and less battery than i should have
i miss the heavens out of you
the ones i never knew existed
underneath a carrot canopy.

and i can say the town name like a new englander
and it sounds upper class
but if i say it with my accent
you'll understand the dead flowers
and the backed up sewer drains
the street turns into a lake
and i was never one to pass up
an opportunity to float

i must admit something i am not yet willing
those major sneaking secrets like hidden candy
something edged in sour sugar burning the buds
but god does it taste good, like christmas or gelt.

i have hidden you in places you don't belong
in that lake, somewhere, buried in the park
you're in an airtight chamber sleeping soundly
a historical remission you haven't earned but i,
i all too stubborn have gained a shovel
and an increased knowledge of preservation
and your skin is as pale as the day
i saw you on the street.

Okay (2).

2009-07-26T23:13:00.000-07:00

you sit, contemplate innards and rainforests
as i daydream outside and imply it will,
ask me but not, oh it is nothing

i once considered play dates
but realized there was daylight
savings, thinner thighs, fickler characters

i have asked to soundly sleep,
correct your taxes, do your laundry
never, but if i could maybe

you thoughtlessly enter another's kitchen
and put the gallon up to your raw and cracking
lip, and wipe gently those parting petals with your claws

i know you'll take your shirt off
i know i will watch you.

Okay.

2009-07-26T22:12:00.000-07:00

you sit, contemplate my
possible toenails and ask
me backwards, oh nothing.

i used to wait to see that feat
but you hinted impossibility
when i heard an endless ticking

i've asked to sleep on clocks
to dive into film strips, broken thermostats,
drinking orange juice

you drag your paw across your lips
carelessly chapped and hardened and drained
a rivulet which leads to a red sea burst and bounded

i know you'll take off your shirt
i know i will watch you

beginnings

2009-07-23T13:30:00.001-07:00

i didn't want to bring this up, but with that sentence i suppose i did. look, i think you're like a massive wave coming to hit the shore, so swell, get larger, and then explode, okay? i don't think anything else of it, i'm not trying to surf today. hell, i'm barely facing the water. so don't crash just yet. you'll recede but the winds will pull you back. just as a full moon mingles with the tide, and i bare my claws. let's not make a mess of all the sand castles yet, making all the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. i'm observing from a distant cliff.

Postcard: Tyler (B)

2009-07-22T23:07:00.001-07:00

then i spit on the screen as i was typing this to you. i went back and inserted that sentence. i like your glasses, not glassed color screen like some kind of window. but i shouldn't cook now that the windows are closed, and i'm frying filled with smoke. it would be too cliche to call it alphabet soup, but it's oil and broth and it's okay. i'd love for you to come over, but i haven't a ladder, latter when i wrote this, unless you build one, but it would just have to be CONSONANTS. in SHORT HAND. SHORT HANDS? then i am vaguely reminded of that cyrus girl and i wish you had a boat.

Postcard: Tyler (A)

2009-07-22T23:06:00.000-07:00

if reader's digest wasn't such a flexible term, i'd take it to lunch. i've taken to sautéing leaflets to better understand that hands they have been in. it doesn't taint the message to add a bit of garlic when you're picking olive oil. canola oil frying requires some extra spice creativity. i never know how to go about ingesting poems— can you print this out and deep fry it please? my constitution can't take it. it's against the 3rd article. this is the hardest magazine to read. every bookstore is halfway to a bistro. i cut through a couple of walls and cooked this for you.

Postcard: Drew Two

2009-07-22T23:05:00.002-07:00

i get tired. you get hungry. i am tired of telling you that you aren't hungry and you are tired of eating with big spoons. i say MAYBE IT WILL FEEL LIKE MORE IN A LITTLE SPOON. and i say it always feels like nothing and you say BAD DAY? and then i don't say anything and then you know it's everyday and that's okay. and could you control your cravings for once without monitoring because i need to sleep and then you say IT'S NOTHING but the thing is i never believe you even if you're telling me the truth. and maybe you should look at yourself as a catalyst rather than shiva and it's okay, because there is never nothing created or destroyed, never nothing.

Postcard: Drew One

2009-07-22T23:05:00.001-07:00

you'll wear your hair short, short, okay? don't be too short, i want to see your ears though. i have no particular reason for wanting to, heart, don't be short. stunted. i prefer your long languid sentences to your Hemingway stunting. stunt. prop. I can prop myself up against your ears. short. not too short. shorter than some. but that's more than not, subjectively short. and i don't know how to keep this simply short. short. but it's okay. i didn't really care, but i had an opinion and it just sounds like i'm being more than likely short.

surgery

2009-07-20T20:33:00.000-07:00

my mother's scar tissue heart is so literal it kills me. the men in the face masks they poke and prod at it, literally. now they are telling her it is encased and is becoming restricted, truly. i'm not kidding you or speaking metaphorically. but it almost seems a shame to sacrifice the pun when you're at the end of your rope. and drew looks at me and says "i write what i know" as he picks apart his own scarred heart but figuratively. some of us require scalpels.

new ideas.

2009-07-15T20:54:00.001-07:00

i have a new idea for a book project.

it's still rough to me
but it will probably resemble drafts in style & format
but the subject matter will be a lot weirder

and i'm going to call it scraps.

i've decided.

give me a year.

can't

2009-07-12T20:47:00.000-07:00

couch sits still like i sit on it. but still isn't it. because it isn't the same as it was yesterday and a million pillows later, i will feel the same. and this couch shifts batting, shifts lumps of filler. no slip covers will fit over it. and i don't know the use anymore.

tell me robin, do you believe in magic?

2009-06-25T20:04:00.000-07:00

i say all the wrong things when i should be saying the right ones. a genuine flare for misplaced honesty and awkward wording, especially in spite of conservation. SO IT WILL GO LIKE THIS. i will feel like i don't want you to feel like i'm putting this weight on you so i'll say something i think alleviates it but sometimes people want weight and i don't get that because i've never known lightness and then you'll sigh or something and i won't get it. i'm trying to tell you i want to be with you and you're hearing I DONT CARE ABOUT YOU ENOUGH. well i hate you enough to commit you to me so okay, let's not do this beating around the bush thing, he isn't our president anymore and i don't know how to not be honest if i don't have an example in office, so please know something, okay? i'm not so much as looking another in this pit of fire. you're the bucket of water i've been letting fill forever from the dripping faucet in the bathroom i forgot to change the lightbulb in so i didn't realize you were full so now you've over flowed. and i am drowning in something. something, something. something.

self awareness

2009-06-20T00:09:00.000-07:00

I am salinger coughing up black ink on the side of an upstate new york highway. everything you get off your chest winds up in my book and spreads like scars criss-crossing my back. people like me are chronically alone. but you've read this poem before and it doesn't like feeling judged and scrutinized by the likes of you, even though the writer behind it may love you. hell, you know she loves you. but when did that ever matter to you?

start 3

2009-06-17T06:25:00.000-07:00

i'm starting to realize the emphasis of skin depletes the importance of holding it off, hanging it in the corner to wait to suit us when we can be sewed or ironed together for the duration of the trend. when it almost seems like a pataphor, that means i mean business without a specific context: i will be showing up at your desk in two weeks and giving you my letter of resignation from being the great debater and asking to be promoted to partner in the firm. i know this is a big step, but i can't face the ethical atrocities associated with sitting here and watch the whole take a down turn because i refuse to be a whistleblower. if you don't know it yet, i can turn it around or we can, if we did this together. OR i will be carving a checkers board out of your sidewalk. i will play against you and eventually after i have made it there without being jumped, i suppose you will have to king me, and i can move freely, spatially through the gaming sphere OR i will throw the wool off my eyes because it isn't to my standards and pull your blankets closer. i need to expect something from you.

start 2

2009-06-09T00:18:00.001-07:00

i am digging up explanations for defying precedent by obviously using a thesaurus and decoding something backwards. it is almost like i am writing the bible when i am trying to figure out how your bones sit so perfectly in your skin. i can't think about it enough without wanting to strangle you, admittedly, you tense up my finger tips with every mention. i hear your voice on the telephone and i think of how much nicer it sounds, personally, you know, in person, which should rather be stated, "in-corporal" or some version of that latin root defying the business world with its amiability and literalness, without sounding too made up. i think about the small mark on your back. i burrow myself close up next to my spine. you have touched more. i want to know why i should let you, but not to would be like putting the mountains after the sky. the bumps and grooves of the country of your skin are imprinted into mine and documented. i will know where i have landed and that i will be safe when i get there.

start

2009-06-09T00:01:00.000-07:00

we should have been there together. but then there is two hours and change, but not anything towards the positive. not a hope of less than two hours, but a promise of more than two hours, a negative change. how fall sometimes deceives you into thinking it won't end in its brisk crispness and then falls ever so quickly to the bottom of the thermometer, shivering in spite of itself. we aren't there yet. i can watch you hold, watch watch. counting on the times i will be around then. then we will plan, while i plan now. i is without the we when it is not together. i have seen science fiction movies without you and i have since, but they never really ended the belly up face down, collapsing scrambling jostling way they did when we figured out that everyone was actually dead. we are less than talking but still heavily compensating for the distance by creating more change, in the negative direction, when we should be together.

Patience

2009-05-19T21:59:00.001-07:00

i sit.
the sheets collecting dust
collecting red blotches from sudden swift
attacks picking up at the edges,
the cuts on your finger tips from a day
at the office.
i lay in them.

you dress
simply. wearing a pair
of plain pants that encase you nicely, not
tightly. i focus on your lips
but you focus on the clock
and the temperature, the weather
and the things you cannot control.

i watch
you sort through the objects on your desk
fix it to be how you want me
to see it. i see you, though,
only.

the clouds
gathered over my head, like a bundled comforter
in between your legs.
i grazed your sides with not all hands
and it seems you saw me
for the first time.

i taste
island air, wrought with absence
a general consensus that
this is a permanent taste
existing in my buds, i can leave it
will linger
in my travels.

when somewhere becomes everywhere
you go there.
when someone becomes everyone
you go there.

natural disaster

2009-05-17T14:17:00.000-07:00

dusk hits, breaks the branches
canopies set aflame, fire rising
smoke billows into clouds bursting
crashing into each other
igniting a tempremental bolt
to a appear & collide with
the ground

you bring one bucket of water
& expect the sky to grant rain

difficult

2009-05-09T23:03:00.000-07:00



i'm conflicted in the worst
wondering what you're singing 
songbird, in a rare pennsylvanian
version of a redwood

your canopy sunk
when i told you i had been
climbing other trees and whistling
tunes in some other branch.

you never allowed me to sing along
so i went to a place where i could stretch
my vocal chords amongst the leaves.

yet i wonder
what you ponder
from your elusive perch
besides the weather.

thoughts

2009-05-07T23:44:00.000-07:00


been thinking about your
tired old body that was
not so old, as it was tired
but your skin as white as mine
shrouded me like a winter's
first snow.

been thinking about the trail
to your parts, the points i picked
at and ravished upon on my way
to the mouth of the iced
over river.

been thinking about the fire
in your follicles and the way
we wandered looking for
kindling,
you felt mine, intently.
as it burned.

been thinking about how 
i want once
to be again
and again.

We Are Astronauts

2009-05-06T17:17:00.000-07:00


we are awake enough to explore hypotheticals
but there isn't enough natural light
for me to see your eyes.


"is it just because the man on the bike
is twenty-five?
or is it because he is on a bike?
or it is because he is he?
or is it because of "we" or "you"?"


and you moon man
stepped on two seconds 
too late before the man before you

i lived there
trying to embarass you into admitting
maybe i was right
foot first

left for a second.
but i'm back.

well, were you?

2009-05-04T17:27:00.000-07:00

were you crying on the El this morning?
I was running broad street and hooked
left and fled north east and i ran at the speed
of the train, with nothing to lose or gain
i latched on to the sides.

i saw you sob into your sunday times
you let every minute dissolve it took
to write a word with a tear of ink
and i watched you through glass
destroy the bad news.

were you crying on the C this morning?
i hopped on south bound so i can see
the streets at a higher level, instead
of demoting myself to substandard
conditions.

i could see you, sitting in the back
taking a gander through the glass
into your own red-faced reflection
wanting nothing to do with me.

brief consideration

2009-05-02T20:58:00.000-07:00

you have made nothing
clear, transparent, see

through the
nebulous, cirrus, something.

i remained dusted polished,
in full bloom, watered

and don't let it be apathy
that ruins this, or that.

look at me hard.
i really want you

to think about this.
all night before sleeping.

in an aeroplane.

2009-05-01T12:40:00.000-07:00

i went to sleep
dreamt pennsylvania
was the pacific
specifically the expanse
you'd pass
over.

all the little lights
were howland islands
& you were brave
& alone.

i got sucked back
into 1937 waiting back
home for you to hear news
of your landing.

i deduced that the ocean took you
sucked you into its caverns,
& you were a feast for the flesh eating
bottom dwelling day-glo
fish who usually dine on filter
feeders.

i awoke and there was news you had landed safe
had not been swept away in a windowstorm mass of land
in the windiest city i can think of
in the country.

you were no amelia
you were not brave enough
to stay or disappear.

my body hates me

2009-04-29T18:36:00.000-07:00

you had car sex by the river
& dumped your body in the water
& let your toes drive down through
the muck into the weeds on the floor
of the delaware.

we have no car between us
but we could find one between
us, we could find the seatbelt
between us, chaffing off parts of
us, between us there would be
nothing.

i would have teased hair, teased
you with cheeky kisses, on the
cheek, but you did not say one thing
so i kept being cheeky to get closer
to your lips.

tense

2009-04-24T07:47:00.001-07:00

pulling fingernails
out of matted
hair

a mishmash monstrosity
a jumbled combination
clutched with humility

my hands
are trifling with grains
of sand

the gulls sweep
and skim the shoreline
when you crash

and i run into the flames
to salvage what is left
of you.

(and i will continue
to do
so.)

We Are Astronauts

2009-04-15T13:04:00.001-07:00

a female horse
in the night
a mare
a night
a

a night
mare
marred.

we sit here
and i
without mask
gasp for nothing

you almost go
to open your mouth
but realize, it might not work
if you pushed your air into me

although the risk is high
i am positive—

i fall on my side
a moon crater
a cracked shell
a collapsed lung

you cried
and you cried
and you cried
until the airlessness
pervasive waters
cracked your own visor
and we lay in a crater
both defeated.

i wake,
i wake in that visor
in those tears that cracked
the thickened glass, plastic bond
on horseback, galloping away
and sliding back.
please don't
let it end
like that.

We Are Astronauts

2009-04-11T23:12:00.000-07:00


we sit in a room with less 
than four walls but more than 
four walls. there are no apertures,
just caves with clutches of 
uncomforting armchairs. i speak 

in metaphors, stressing metonymy. 
you answer in inconstancy, idioms 
and roll your tongue back into 
your face. your nose is buried 
in a stitched binding, a significant text scrapped 
up number one on the list to read 

this weak. your hands drift toward 
your side in sudden winds. i catch 
this gust and shift in 
my seat. your stomach retreats, 
curving concave into your spine. i almost 
say— but i catch the breath with better 
judgement and squeeze shut 

my eyes. in here, we are.
I kiss your stomach to long 
remember your stomach, sewn to  
your spine. i wake, you burst 
to bind your lips to paper, a contract 
expelled in smoke. i won't pretend 
to inhale. there are no windows. 

only us: glass & steel.

shortest short story

2009-04-10T07:51:00.001-07:00

"i'm smoking again."

"why?"

"because i don't know how to be nice."

We Are Astronauts

2009-04-07T21:31:00.000-07:00

4) taking up space


You, 
you are—
some comet lighting up the night sky
i hope it crashes into my lunar lander
and strands me, burning at the edge of my suit
tearing the air from my lungs 
and destroying my comfort

You,
you are—
some substance on my periphery
subconsciously invading me and placing
probes indirectly between the neural activity.
you have a vested interested at a distance
but i am deteriorating within your study

You,
you are—
unaware of my allergic reaction to your indecision
digging into my skin looking for some kind of satisfactory glance
i would keep you there if you clung rather than wafted
a loosely placed nicotine patch on the verge of being
scraped off.

You,
you are—
everything up to and including more than
enough. you are the "e" at the beginning and the
infinite spaces following the "h" at the end of the page
flying off into the air surrounding. 


You,
you are—
you build the context you are the support beams of the building 
i show you my newest work in. you are the armchair i half fall asleep in 
to hearing your scribbling notes. you are the question at the end of the day 
i want to answer. "yes, yes, yes" you are the scrutiny i apply to my term 
papers. You are the stacks of books lining the walls. the columns. the molding.
the plaster. the drafts, and drafts, and drafts.


You,
you are—
you are the topic of this poem.

34 Anna Street

2009-04-06T11:10:00.000-07:00

Submitted for Open Assignment 4/6
Nearing the completion of this section of my book WOOOH

11.

My grandfather fought nothing but the North African air, stationed at the end, picking up French in his spare time, playing poker with the chips falling into place. The star encrypted into his skin instead of stitched to his jacket: it appeared on his face, in the prominent feature of the chosen people. He and my father cooked dinner together smelling the sauces, until my father’s hair grew too long and the apartment floor was covered. There were calls from friends traveling to Canada where the shampoo foamed around the rims of the public fountains; my father flew to Texas to be trained and tackled the tail he had grown with scissors and tact— his skin became leather, tough and cracked, crackling under the sun rising in the east, but not in the middle. His father had traveled along the axis to break it, but ended up beaming along the edges, an asymptote untouching: a tombstone in New Jersey with rocks sitting on top.

12.

My mother was a chimney in her past life before me— sipping Slims between her tongue and her clipped-lip incisors spreading open to pass the smoke rings through the flue up into the night sky lining the Pelham parkway. She never rolled her own, and rarely bummed, fed Phillip the money she had earned by working in a now-defunct bank, held up on her first day. The bills spread along the streets and stuck to her shoes as she stole into the liquor store drank an entire fourth while finishing the pack she bought in the morning. My grandmother glared but didn’t ask while she ironed out the wrinkles in the soda bread, kneading the raisins in one by one, until they were all perfectly placed inside.

13.

My father feels the strength in his left hand disintegrate with every lack of movement. Hunched to supports himself on the elbow skin, he does not notice the lesions on his forearms, stretched and shaped like the length of my island. He orders Chinese food on Sundays and keeps enough for a meal everyday of the week. The stove is too high for him to properly boil water, so he disrobes and adjusts the thermostat so it will boil free standing on his table in front of the vent. He empties packets of ramen into the bowl as I was finishing baking the pie. He asks, he says “HOW’S SCHOOL?” as he can only write in all caps, so to speak any differently would be a farce, and I tell him it is fine before I remember I am not talking to him, but something else, camouflaged and loosely fitting into the body of a once brown belt who taught at the Y. He reads my mind as says “I COULD LIFT MY LEGS THEN.” As they disappear slowly into a scrapbook picture I found in the closet last week: holding my mother’s purple heart and injecting some new blood into it as she lays on an operating table 8,173 miles away.

We Are Astronauts

2009-04-04T09:33:00.000-07:00


3) taking up time


i have gripped edges of moon crust
cut into rock craters,   curdled  milk
ridges rising, glowing    against  the 
/from                        glare of the   sun

the ink never sets       out from quill
to paper in this anti-      stick teflon
universe. we are contained        here
and it is obvious            you're  stuck
to the ground             refusing to  be
pealed                                           away 

just once i would like to see    you
out of the steel confines, sun   on
your cheek glaring, without these
suits              without these masks

We Are Astronauts

2009-03-26T23:13:00.000-07:00


2. taking up time

if i cannot root in this soil
grow into the ground and out-
ward, i will waft like a leaf
in tornado winds,              bursting 
a balloon againstan uncappped 
fluorescent        long light 
bulb in the laundry room    i 
knew in         my childhood.
 

I sat on        the   dryer 
and stared out the   window 
at an unfamiliar stray cat.


when i stalk stairs      back
down,through a glass, lightly
you are there, on a l l fours
arched back,   hairs-stand-on
end, purring graciously  into
my hood, and  then i    think
in those     windows floating
backward, could you   glimpse
the world   you could stretch
your claws  and    dig    in?
can you   see the superficial 
marks al               ready?

We Are Astronauts

2009-03-26T22:39:00.000-07:00

A series I will actually work on and expand entitled "We are Astronauts"



1. taking up space




clumps of hair fall to the drain
and strained through the protein
fibers: the lengthy  engagements
the benches, the run-   ons, and
    brought out and up, compound
words, the lo n  g e r sentences
    the opposite of normal
when the sky     holds sidewalks
and the tops  of baobabs bobbing
stepping stones—the earth is the
only thing li vi ng, m  ov   ing 
like water. You'll raise  plates
and ground me.   You are enough.
And                You are more.

I got published.

2009-03-25T20:21:00.000-07:00

http://www.zaumpress.net/

They haven't updated their website yet, but I'm the first two literary works in their magazine (Zaum 13) and I'm in the company of some smarties with Degrees. That's kind of cool.

Jackee

Shift, Split the Street

2009-03-25T20:18:00.000-07:00

Submitted for Workshop 3/23

1)

Fished it out from— indecisively center myself. the puddle was inverted sky. In France, the streets are wider and never mind the Queen’s English Bulldog. They know how to get things done there without a kind of trash bag following their canines around. They just jet-blast the streets with hoses, high-powered until everyone can see their reflections in the pavement. We should learn how to show French unhappiness.

2)

When I was born, this wasn’t Canada— it was Mini-soda ladling portions in 50 calorie segments out to the neighbor’s kids in Dixie Cups— it was a rough ridged STATE rather than TERRITORY of some other French speaking something Manitoba. I had my first kiss in Wyoming. I voted for Clinton. I told the first lady I was an illegal alien and she laughed at me and said I was inalienable. She offered me a glass of wine and spoke Joyce while denouncing the IRA(Q) war. A nation is the same people living in the same place.

3)

Steps to subtly stealth, slapped wrists censure seconds away from simulated version of partiality, bi-partisan cigarette butts litter the stamping, stomp grounds of anti-Altria lobbyists that dwell in lobbies and sleep on concierge’s couches. Their wives smell smoke when they can escape the hotels and suck it from their jackets and lungs and regurgitate it into a PSA while the aftertaste is graying by gauging the consensus of perceived actuality, he can’t quit. Warren Harding inhales and FDR catches the remnants of the whiff on the exhale. This is not a café. These are not American Spirits.

4)

People slept there. People lost sleep OVER there.

5)

H I L L we can stand on top but it isn’t expansive. Not the same place as Jack, Jill. Water, water. Really, it is sunken and sullen, a swamp. Everywhere. The one time I visited I was younger than ten and there was a someone dying from a something shot. and not. School House Rock is playing somewhere and a kid doesn’t know that Bill got shot. a drop. a sad scrap of paper. a false goal— played up to those waiting for elevators. to drink.

6)

Did you even see the cover of the Maverick Room? I don’t care what was dancing on the inside when the message is plain in a picture. Anyone can try to exact the facts, the objective truth, still perspective even if it appears in black and white. I am traveling on an asymptote that is infinitely nearing point but a line would have to break somewhere for us to reach anything that said YES or NO.

7)

Freedom rings, freedom fries, frog legs.

8)

Kill them with a wood chipper. Kill them by being chipper. Kill them with kindness. Kill them with a kind of knife. Kill them with a knife. Kill them by being nice. Kill them by being nice and near. Kill them by being nice near and kissing up. Kill them by being near and kissing babies. Kill them by kissing babies. Kill them for being babies. Kill them for being. Kill them for being different. Kill the difference.

9)

It broke and NO.

10)

The Statue of Liberty was a gift of friendship resulting from the diplomatic relationship between the United States and France. The irony is in the masonry. The opinions of the people post-disaster. The name changing. If it is sliced thin, it’s how i like my string beans and potatoes. How do I order at McDonalds in Tokyo? Would they get the joke? Even the folk singers can’t focus on anything else but the hopelessness of the situation so they sang about love instead and started to read books they’ve been meaning to read about the French Revolution.

Trunk-Branches-Trunk-Branches

2009-03-16T09:28:00.000-07:00

Originally Submitted for Workshop 3/16
Ecopoetics Assignment

1.

didn’t make anything climb to
the record player in a club
house in a tree on a
branch.

didn’t make the plastic laced
in ridges, tiny rivlets out-
lining a path to the mouth
of a larger river to a
melodic sea, sing.

see, i didn’t, it came that
way, when the rain was
and is opening over a
song entitled “wet
the day.”

2.

but the boy hung a house in one
of those oak extensions that
breathed over the entire
breadth of your own
property.

and tiny sparrows let them
selves enter into an open
tiny door, clipped for their
wings, to perfection.

the boy placed seeds on the lining of the door
and on the living room floor of the house
floating above his head on an oak arm
from a step ladder in Hancock, NY.

3.

if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it did it ever fall at all? what if we watched it on TV. what if we sat down inside something made out of similar trees and branches, and smoothed away our wrinkles and swatted at flies and smushed ants when we saw them marching triumphantly through this kitchen. the ants know we do not know and that pleases them.

4.

if a tree falls in a forest two lakes
outside of your apartment bedroom window
when you were a boy who maybe loved that tree,
would that stump be something more than a remainder
of something that does nothing?

maybe there was more in that tree
than that tree wanted, or something.
you can sit on that stump and
contemplate eternity.

that tree does fall, and do you feel that
impending gust that flocked straight to
the sea, like the gulls diving slightly
for fish, or food trash. did you go to
the beach that day to feel the wave that
reflected your history’s energy back?

5.

Walter, age 5, an inconspicuous tabby cat engages in playful eye contact with everything that seems to be outside his window. After chasing and pummeling a pinecone from a near by tree, and nearly consuming all of its parts, Walter was sentenced to “Life in Living Room.” Little did Walter know, it means he wouldn’t have met the tree, that he might have climbed with a certain boy, so today, Walter is in good spirits. Walter has found that ants have taken to coming in through a gap in the backyard screen door. Walter is tried on “Attempted Murder.”

6.

From this height I can see my mom’s house
and all of the stray cats that she took in
running out.

If I were on top of my mom’s house
I could see myself in this club
house with all the cats, running.

7.

littering the lawn with a bit of hair, something else’s hair and not his. there were fifteen minutes then when he could have changed the course of time. the coarse time, held up, by lengths of unhuman hair. he could have suspended it between the other oaks and hoped for new fibers to seal the saw wound. he thought he saw tiny orbs of light, but the sky was too selfish to let one go, to let something happen, to sear the slighted confound. to edge the wound into a certain groove. to let us, let ourselves go with the falling of a tree in a forest two lakes away from some guy we barely knew besides the fact he has an affinity for felines and maybe for trees too.

2009-03-09T00:23:00.000-07:00

see your front foot, feels like you're hopping, hoping on that one leg. i, rodeo, have been grasping and trying to wrangle you. once, you were clean to me. but as i surmise what i can't see suspicion is all i have, dripping with insincerity, you arrive from the mud pit. what a clumsy dance. i am covered, and stuck with the remains. the audience watches but doesn't expect.

what makes you slippery is the truth you're not telling me.

this is what it looked like

2009-03-05T20:18:00.000-08:00

he said he cared about me and at one point it annoyed me because sometimes it was him — i just didn't want to talk and i wanted to ignore every elephant in every room that was dressed like a gorilla but i am complicit and stayed and so he said "COME ON JUST FOR FIVE MINUTES" and inside my head was this:

concrete patches put        together              to lead us   to something, 
     regardless they end    and i tried to walk        on the inside curves    of the road instead,        but it didn't do           anything           but bring the 
snapped           edge to my attention             when it was dead.         I COULDNT 
WRITE I COULDNT WRITE                         I COULDNT WRITE FOR SO MANY DAYS     
    I COULDN'T RECOGNIZE                           ANY INK ON THE TIPS             OF
 MY FINGERS.                        THERE WAS NO RESIDUE                 FROM WRITING 
YOU OFF.






i wed you to the flush left and i stuck you there and that was OK for you but not for
 me because i can't compromise my poetic 
  integrity for your comfort, if i want 
to move you, let me move you, that's what this is supposed to do. if it moves you

  away, it's doing what i say i want it to do, so you are subscribing to my ideals. my 
friend you cannot win. i will not 
 make a deal. i will make a block into a song 
into a rose into any other name and i will call you your name and then wipe 
  my
 feet on your chest.

i don't want to and i don't want to and i don't want to and i don't want to and i don't want to i don't want to i don't want to i don't want to i don't want to i don't want to i don't want to i don't want i don't want i don't want i don't want i don't want i don't i don't i i i i i i i i i i i i i

CARVING CARVING CARVING. there are a million thanksgiving turkeys decorating your counter aware of their slaughter the child enters the room and says WHY AREN'T YOU CARVING I STILL FEEL LIKE THEY CAN FLY. (i gave them all fake wings last night so they'll look alive so i won't have to sitting here describing my future career)

CARVING CARVING CARVING my initials into a million tree trunks and i cannot bear to share the bed bunks bottled up in the back of the truck where the popup camper is sitting and slowly swaying to the rhythm of the concrete patches paved over by asphalt they all thought better of it of us.

CARVING CARVING CARVING into a certain amount of wood laid out on a work bench in the middle of the forest, my mountain man awaits me. hs is making some kind of rocking chair so i can sway gently, sway, sway gently into the rhythm of the cadence of the sheer tonality reflecting off the syllables of every book that is on the shelf he built and we live together in an apartment in Penn's Forests but not in the forests that you think.

CARVING CARVING CARVING into the chips, i made scrabble pieces after digging under the gazebo a hole where we can not, where we can always or we can just not do, or do much because sometimes i don't want to and sometimes i want a cigarette but only when i feel like i can't crawl back to you and the fire is always so close to my face.

AND THAT SWEDISH MAN CAME OVER TO ME ON TUESDAY WHILE I WAS WAITING TABLES AND I WAS SMACKING MY GUM DELICATELY IN BETWEEN MY TEETH AND I WAS SLIGHTLY SALIVATING AND HE POINTED AT ME AND SAID SOMETIMES LOVE ACTUALLY BECOMES FOCUSEDBUT I WILL NEVER BELIEVE ANYONE WITH TIGHTS ON PAST THE AGE OF 40. IT'S JUST SO CONSTRICTING AND WISDOM AND ERICKSON SAID THIS BUT I NEVER READ ONE BOOK IN MY ENTIRE LIFE FROM FRONT TO BACK LIKE I READ THE MENU AT ROYS. END OF STORY.



"i don't view you              that way"  "I wrote a                 million               letters" "It is a historical     inevitability" "more cohesive            notes for our absence" "i smell         your stomach to long remember            your stomach""i owe you""i find         your absence               grimly problematic"" we should             see other          people" "legs simply disappear" "that's why       we should" "which way        stella, this way?"



                            "he was not ready to receive what I had to bring."









i engraved your initials into my tombstone so i won't have to sleep alone;   this is just not right, it is left, and i have left, or something.

I will not stop writing about you.

2009-03-01T20:35:00.001-08:00

they are born, somehow, they are pushed out and away from their mothers and their bodies are imposing but they don't know this as they sit in tiny chairs and break a leg off, or two, and slide to the floor. they can't measure themselves against their opposites self conscious of something and unaware of their bigness and their overwhelming hair. they'll try and grab at something— some vague concept some misty topic some kind of allusion and completely destroy it. They have no idea how big their hands are. they could crush my fingers and not know it, under their own toes. i am flattened to the pavement, i am pavement, i am stone. i want to evoke more than street-scape and teach them the way my insides behave but i won't be a test run. or a jet they're learning to fly that's over sized to fit the selves they don't know they are even housed in. the format doesn't necessarily match the content. their hands are hairy and mine are smooth, and i hate to admit that the coarseness against my skin is just as comfortable as a child lays in a womb. we give up one bruise for another wound. and the big hands won't scoop until they know they can.

i am a folded paper pounding against your thigh in your pants pocket. you're jogging up the stairs to your apartment in your gym clothes. please unfold me with your hairy hands. i can't take the touchlessness of my light pale skin in the nights of the coldest months, with no warmth but in the gaps where i'll eat lunch, and tell you things when you aren't here. i know you must eat everyday, but i can't imagine you eating. no, i can't come close to imagining you opening your mouth with no intention of telling me you can't —, someway or another. i am not a wretch or a paper lined blue and red. i am not a suicide hotline, or a baker. i am supposed to be a something more, am i? i am. i am. i am?

2009-02-28T19:45:00.000-08:00

9.

All the Jews mix in now. They aren't like poets where you can tell by the scarves, the lightweight sweaters, the knits, the glint in the corners of their eyes. They're more like a green-colored camp, something inauspiciously beautifully, not so suspicious as historical. They are glued together by something more, large and chosen. When I fall apart there are millions of pieces the people can't bother to clean up. I am the body parts of the blown up from the mines, hanging in the trees of far away countries in the most depraved and revolutionary era in the century. I am the rattling of the attic's floorboards when the cold, dead space is being emptied of your dead grandparent's past. You never knew them as children, but they were children, as they have seen you. Did it matter that they were a raisin in the sun when you knew them? I have always been without any real identity, in my mixing, in my being a blend. I am hyphenated and uncertain of anything that constitutes the menorah in the attic i will never uncover. the pilgrimage that won't ever be made.

10.

My mother misses her mother so much it makes me feel guilty that I can't bring myself to want her to call me every minute of the day. Most of the time I miss her, but a lot of the time is scrambled between books writing papers preparing presentations and pushing against the unbearable weight of being and making love to memories of making love to memories of making love to somebody. Grandma had beautiful skin, no matter how loosely it hung. She glowed until the cancer caught her arm and ate its way to the rest. I heard her call the wrong way in her last days. Mother won't let her go anywhere, and I won't let my mother go anywhere so we all sit in the apartment looking at each other with the keys to the cosmic cars in our collective hands. We dart for the door, but I am not going anywhere in case mother is going anywhere in case grandmother's ghost wants to leave and my mother can't bear it. I have been stuck within the radius of 3 hours, 100 miles, for more than 100 days. I have learned to make my fingers dancing in the air, against the light and into shadow. I have learned to teach myself stories of freedom, but I must babysit the living afraid of their visiting the dead. My mother drives over to see my father. My mother knows she must stay with me.

-ment

2009-02-23T19:53:00.000-08:00

that other side of the word
that little space in the open-
ing of the OHHH.
i filtered it through my friend coffee
meshes i keep in the cabinet.

oh don't you want. want, want, man.
i can smell it on the tips of your fingers
you've been digging and you cannot
find the root, of it all.

but i know what it is in the bottom
of your pant legs dragging through
the mud, i smell it and I CAN see it.
i see it everywhere, like newsprint bonded
to your pale, light, stretched skin.

when i look at you i can see myself being
something more than a bolt of fire emanating
from the sky, or a small flame wandering through
a narrow patch of brush.

no, i see you
and i think of you in seas and oceans
of opening veins of possibility
bleeding into every continent
and touching every inch of the shore
sublimating itself into the clouds hovering
over every inch of land and letting it go
into the ground, to be swept up
back up trickling itself over, back to the larger
mind of the sea.

no, i see you,
and i think i want to be every boat.
and i want to be every submarine.
and i want to be algae, and seaweed
and the Mississippi.

I want to be the beach and the sands
that you fold into, with your changing tides
and your changing moods.

frag-

2009-02-22T08:33:00.000-08:00

I will be working on this for months until it makes any sense—

it keeps me wondering about continents
not my own, or ours, for that matter.

(when i talk about leaving forever i mean it, i swear to fucking god i mean it)

i could transfer myself somewhere else
without moving. you say things just to say
not because you want to listen back or hear
how i feel about it, or something.

i could leave whenever i want to
i have numbered miles i have built
from being a mother and an object.
i know the cargo holds of a UPS
truck. I know the holds of a fedex air
plane.

if i were anything else—

constructed tiny vesicles to plunge
from the pores of the shore, poorly
pouring down into the river.

could drift straight into the aegean sea
leaving my father with lost hope and nothing
i forgot the white sails and i keep weaving
black threads.

close off at the end
the stump on the rose, seals off
and the petals fall.

but i am not anything else—

i can't travel, come home without thinking
i have left you in the outskirts of, the edge of
your limits, at a cliff looking downward.
i was never your mother, and that's how we keep it.

if i could keep it
it would be a pillow smothering me
a can of gold paint clogging my pores
a new kind of carbon reconstructing my core, bases.

2009-02-18T10:45:00.000-08:00

8.

My father leaks from the sides of his seat some kind of venom made in the pulses that flood all the worlds we can't see. He has stored, somewhere, visions of metal parts clanging, of a man with a razor, of hospitals on the west coast. i can't bring myself to call. the phone indeed works both ways, as he indicates in his voicemails. "THIS IS MICHAEL, YOUR FATHER, YOU KNOW, MICHAEL SADICARIO, YOUR FATHER." how he can still speak after months of sleep is beyond my immediate and infinite comprehension. i can't lay waste what connections i can make before the shell of what was dies off and flutters, sucked into some whole, hole, of matter. well, does it matter?

2009-02-18T10:36:00.000-08:00

7.

My mothers worries about my state; not necessarily pennsylvanial, or emotional, or social, or financial. her mind can't take that square shape conatining me on the map without thinking i am kept from big city lights and the draining illumination that prevents me from seeing stars off the certain western shores of my island. I cut clean that conversation by blaming it on the cabin fever, the inadequacy of my latest works. what ruptures and is ruptured isn't as important as the eyes that should be closing at night. I'll sacrifice my sleep for her sake.

2009-02-15T09:04:00.000-08:00

6.

My mother never fell out of love with my father. She spent her days sewing up pieces of the past until they formed one big blotched, botched blanket half covering my sister and leaving me to find new fleeces. I never had a father that I could remember, but he sits somewhere in a shell, post-coma-mortality resurrected Jew, in an electric wheelchair waiting for death to knock. He always takes an hour to answer the door, wheels caught in carpet, screaming "I'm coming." She sees him a couple times a month; the dead always thrive when they are slowly killing the living.

My Mother, My Father

2009-02-12T21:26:00.000-08:00

From a new work-in-progress set to be book length 2/11

1.

My mother was the inventor of the quick cup of tea. Resting against impressionable wood— leaving rings of sugared moisture on rushed mornings. I spoke thanks in my sleep— slovenly reaching for my skirt and kept the mug close to my face. I gave it a stir before I ever did. I never meant to move.

2.
My father was an avid user of witch hazel— as my nickname. He spread it gently over my fresh skin— Brunhilda, my mother, tried to wipe up the sting but I grew scales of a dragon— as grandfather spoke of the dragon lady and looked towards me with his arm and gestured fingers— lavishing in the light of the sun by the side of the pool, covered.

3.

My father fought the unjust war. He felt the follicles of his friend's fur felt, flush between his fingers, feeling something lost in the lack of fluid motion, just a toss of a body into an empty plastic sheet somewhere overseas— another nineteen year old is thinking he'll never forget the scent stuck and sunk into the ridges of his skin, stuck in his nostrils. He flew a helicopter, this is what I knew so far, until I found that the furious scent fit him in a place where watching someone smelling a rotting corpse on popular television, a common function, frazzled him. shot down, couldn't feel the left side. He came home with shorter hair and right handed.

4.

All the Jews mix in now. But she knows I may be KIND OF one and I know that she IS one. We talked about the killing off/of too many of us— without talking TO each other. I can touch front deep. It was alright. I'm such a fucking fake. My face does not belong to me. Where the fuck do I find a new one? I'm not really anything.

5.

My mother met my father while mouthing the words to Cat Stevens in a bar in the Bronx. They went on a double date, and he played handball with Eddie on the courts by the zoo. Do you love him when you see him floating into outer space? I felt I could live forever in the tales I was told. It didn't matter where they meant or how, just that they did right now, I can see all of my hands disappearing away from the pages, and my traces lifted from the edges of the poems. I didn't make these words, but I can make them dance for me. My father was a great dancer. It's all that I knew for now.