as politic

what we will not hear
makes marks upon us
the facts ignored to fit
our picture frames, it's
just how we like it,
there is nothing else

no, nothing but
the emptiness of a room
that swells with silence
and i've had enough
of it,
no desire to wallow in
its hollow symphony.
all i fear
is being left alone
for too long
inside,
wanting just to touch
anyone but myself
the body is political
as politic,
none of us will admit it
although
we all know it is a battleground

city boy

the sheriffs clop by
on horseback and i can't picture you here -
not in the back of the truck
we are driving, or
standing in the fair
watching livestock. you'd
be more horrified by
the horse shit clinging to your boots.
country as you are,
you grew up too much
of a city boy.
no one had you weeding
the gardens,
shucking bushels of corn
in a front porch rocker,
snapping ends off the beans.

that was my life, and it
wasn't even our farm, but the
neighbors' grandparents, who
recruited our wild child energy
and took us home
bursting with vegetables, not
that any of this matters

although i still can't see you
among the 4-H and canning prizes.
when we took in the fair,
you briefly paused for sticky sugar
spun into a cloud
and then we whirled upside-down
for hours, held by
metal bars
and gravity,
shrieking wildly into the night.

transition

the more i think about it,
the more i have
the feeling
that the first thing
that will touch the next book
will not be words,
but blood
and i am trying to find
a small part of myself
that cares enough to stop
that fact.
but i have become numb enough
that bleeding seems such
a trivial pursuit
worth nothing more than
momentary distraction,
but also
nothing less.
and the only thing
i have the energy for lately
involves forgetting, if
only for a little while -
and if bleeding is
just another thing i can do
to forget you
then i will pull
on that lifeline
as hard as i know how to

for Timothy

the fiddler on the corner takes minor
chords and bends them to his will
as we squint in the sunshine,
he because he makes a living,
and i because the music
is amazing and it's warm
in february
and i must soak in as much
as i can before it flees -

feeling like gypsies, camped out
on the concrete,
listening, watching
the heat and shine
dance off his flashing bow,
and i wonder where
home is, when he goes.
the beer i abducted from
the fridge at work we
split, talking of school
and its hypocritical
uselessness
the irony
of educating someone
who still cannot make a way
with all their skill.
but it's okay, ale
in the warmth of the sun
cool and delicious contrast
to the stones
of the streets,
the concrete beneath
my feet as i walk away,
a jig
dancing its way into the air

february snow

falling so thickly in
large clumps it
would be magical but
the street slushes it
as soon as the flakes
meet pavement.
just a little too warm
on our ground.
so it runs
and drips off the building tops
and down the rails
for the streetcar
in grey ribbons,
which might have once
held a spark of the
mysterious blanketing
power of pure powder like
what trapped us snug
in our houses
for a week in december -
the thirsty old brick
laps it up
like sandstone,
and darkens.

personals section

and yes,
we really are that lonely
and desperate for connection,
you'll see it in
our faces, smiling too hard in the photographs
and our overly-optimistic words,
knowing even
as we write them
the types who read these ads
for a brief connect of some kind
will be skipping
down the paragraphs to the picture
or the part where i tell you
my bra size
so any person genuine enough to tell me
something that isn't pretty
i will drop a line,
if only to say,
your ad made me smile

the pathetic loneliness that comes
from our insular social patterns - to work,
to bar, to home and from and repeat the
same motions until
all we know
is the constant momentum
and a nagging sense of something
essential missing
when i page through
looking not so much for
someone to date or fuck,
as much as
the hope that someone
who finds me appealing will continue
to do so,
once pixels
become flesh, and blood

the difference between

outside the snow blankets everything
like a crutch
and it will fade,
by morning,
in our constant rain.
meanwhile, i'm resting my head
against the windowpane, not
as drunk as i could be, and not
as drunk as i ought,
holding the last beer of the carton
and wishing
the snow would cover more
than just the tops of cars, houses
& fences so i could feel justified
in sleeping through the next
few days
without appealing to the excuse
of mental illness
which, at this point
seems a lie
as i can't seem to find
the madder side of me, even with
a little prodding.
can't decide if i miss her more
than dulling myself with medication
is worth, or at this point
whether it matters at all.
so i watch this snow blanket
cover us, it's 3:47 and all
i think is that somehow i must
document,
for surely
tomorrow
everything will face
and i'll be left wondering
if i ever even saw it at all

waiting for winter to end

the snow silhouetted in
the streetlamp falls
thickly, but won't stick
so i know
tomorrow will have
only slush
and grey concrete
dingy wet sidewalks made treacherous
by what will soon
turn to rain, or
maybe just fade away.
so i'm waiting for the streetlight
to blink out, and
obscure everything
it might illuminate
in shadow.
and i'm wishing
for the dark to come and cover
what i am sick of seeing.
even the trees bow under
the weight of the wind
that keeps the snow dancing waltzes
in the air as if
when the lights go out
their world, too
will sleep

what lies beneath

i don't break words,
i shatter them
and meld from the shards,
scrape the shrapnel out of my scars
and pile the dented vowels
into a heap of things that could be whole, but
aren't.

the consonants get left behind,
like younger siblings of famous folks
smug on the rug, smiling nastily
at the vowels trapped in their tower of fragments
they don't try to fuse, anymore
tired of dismemberment, and
the vowels' persistent inability
to commingle

they no longer walk in stride.
confabulation
disintegrating into the silence
most define their lives by, the
taciturnity that turns
and bites at those who try
to demolish it.

willamette

i am 'heart'sick
and cuntsore
of talking about love
so let's look
at what's surrounding
the 'finery'
bearded men on the buses scraggling trash bags
of empties behind them,
leaking
beer in incontinent dribbles.
the college-educated
or[myentiregeneration]
working some deadman job
with holes
in their shoes& knees
of their pants patched
with scraps -
i mean, contrary
to popular belief, this ain't quite
no fashion statement
it's called poverty

around us our neighborhood sports 'storewideclearanceclosing'
signs, yes
and this is what's left
for us.

at the mall a delicious pen shop
houses a man who works
in three-piece suits&
looks like Sinatra did, forty
years ago,
and he remembers my name
every time
i'm by.
i wonder what he is thinking in
that deserted shopfront&if
there's anyone
for him to go home to.
i want to ask him out for drinks sometime, but
maybe that would be creepy,
coming from me, or maybe
desperately lonely, which
i am
and when i smile at strangers on the street,
it's because i'm wishing i
could make some sort of connection with anything,
even

the bums that root through garbage buckets
for bottles or cans with a 5cent
deposit
and i would wonder about where
they go, but
i already know
they huddle neatly in sleeping bags
on burnside
all along its accompanying bridge,
squatting out a life
suspended
over a river

for the poets who wrote in latin

i smell like hot
twat&i like it
a lot, yes
it's delicious
breathing in
the scent of my sex
diffusing through the place
&when i clench into you,
and you
fill my senses
cupcake sweet and tangy,
woman
we reach through the room
with grasping fingers and a sense
of entitlement, yes

this is my body and blood
which has been honed on you
which has been lapped by[&from]
your lips&labia
[lesbia]

i think catullus&i think sappho
would have been proud

after all they burned her poems&we're
burning now
so
she knows what it's like to taste fire

to lick it from the curved lower lip
ah,
goosebumps twist my frame
&we roll face-to-face
how is it
i've come to be here,&you
how are you faring
in my precarious bed,
young one?
does the yaw&pitch astonish,
or terrify?

white trash news

it's only monday night,
eleven
&a game shop owner's duct-taped
two teenage
would-be thieves into the closet for the cops.
meanwhile, a house has exploded&
no one knows why.
just boom - ashes.
meth-watch watches the
non-profit anti-meth guys go broke,
or maybe
it was a bust, or maybe they busted
the organization, it wasn't clear which -
i really don't care cuz next
it's on to cockfighting!
then later, UFO's in texas,
as small kids
run deranged in tin-foil beanies, like
demented hershey's kisses
i want to hide in my room already,
but wait!
we've still got
octuplets and shortages
on oxycontin, DEA's fuckin
with the street dealer so now
everyone else is paying instead
food poisoning the people, yes
so now just lay off a few thousand more
and goodnight, amerika
watch it spiral
down the drain
and go
we're all going somewhere,
especially
down

obsession

it really was an accident, this time,
though
that hardly keeps me from fixating on
the oh-so-minuscule cuts
on my wrist

i dropped my knife while slicing through
plastic packaging and the serrated teeth
tore tiny holes
which transport me back years,
years ago maybe
six-or-seventeen, with my watch
belted tightly to that wrist, hiding
the flow

i've got tattoos now, over most of those scars
but you can still feel them, and now
a hard knot
of scar tissue's raised, again
visibly
slight infection resurrecting
the feel of tender tissue
over bone
with those small scratches
i can't stop staring at
flaming triumphantly
next to my tattoo

carpe noctem

and i do

foggy and 32 degrees

waiting for an apple breakfast
outside the corner store
fifteen minutes before its opening,
hopping foot to foot
hoping
kinetics will involve
heat of some sort
while steam seeps from my mouth
and my wet hair slowly gets
cold enough to freeze
and even when on the bus,
my hands are too cold to touch

just like my feet in their protective layer
of boots as the rest of me
will slowly freeze, the more silent you become
at the other end of the line.
being busy only goes so far as a valid excuse.
meanwhile i am planning
to become as busy as you are, so when
i don't believe you, it's because
i have done what you are doing,
only while working, also

standing outside a co-op waiting
for the doors to open so i can manage a breakfast
from the bruised fruit bin,
yeah
there is more to life than poetry,
or homework, or
using the above as any
sort of excuse.

so when i'm worrying
because i'm not bleeding when i should,
and i don't know what to say
about that,
or if it should be
any business of yours,
other than your involvement
in the potential making

so i'm running a test
and
with the results
i will decide if i should let you see,
and decide
what the fuck we are supposed to do
with this mess,
whatever we are
calling ourselves
lately

overcompensation

it's a strong point of mine
i'm waiting for my phone to ring
but it's you,
so
that means the phone will be in my bed
with the ringer off, and my door
shut.
and where i'll be
is the living room, blasting
music loudly -
which means i will finally
call you back around an hour
after you finally managed to dial -

otherwise it would be my hand
fidgeting the phone open&shut,
staring
as if my action could somehow alter
the timeline of your making.
i've learned what enough is, now.

enough is pretending
that you won't call, which
is a pretty safe bet

so if you ever do
come through
i can imagine it
as a pleasant surprise.

at this point

i don't even know if i want you
anymore,
rationally
when drugged the right amount,
and cynical enough i'll admit it
i don't know how i'll fare
with someone so blindsided
by life.

rationally, i mean, there's nothing
i'm really leaving
so it's a pity i've told rationality
to fuck itself, there
is nothing rational
in what lives between us

what with all the ways we've tried
to make it die and
failed, it's fine

although we look haggard
with our shell-shocked mouths,
which still dribble rubble
that means less and less
the more we say it
no matter how many times
it's repeated,
the constancy of assertion
will not bring
any more truth
to your tongue

so let's move on.
we've bombed the place and yet
we linger still.
among the hills are pristine places
and plenty of new spaces

in which, if you really prefer
the chaos,
we could recommence
the countdown

hump-day

the bad sign comes
when you stand to leave
and your center of gravity shifts
the bus ride to work's spent
head lolling from your neck against
the back of the seat
because you're too dizzy
to open your eyes
and you realize
how drunk you were the night before,
because it's approximately
how drunk you are still,
so walking straight
is a dicey proposition.
you'll spend the day looking ill
behind your desk, when
you aren't beating a path to the bathroom
to be briefly, professionally ill
hoping no one will walk in halfway
through, and find you crumpled
on the tiles, cheek pressed
to the wall, hoping to absorb
the stillness

maybe saturday

yeah, of course it's full of maybes, like
maybe you will kiss me
when i walk in the door, this time
or maybe i just won't show up
at all
or maybe i will drag
out of bed early on an unlikely weekend morning
after failing to sleep
and wear a path into my floorboards
until the coffeeshop is finally open,

maybe i will leave before you ask me
to stay, or
maybe you won't ask at all, out of fear
that i might

maybe if you lay out all
of your options you'll be
able to figure out how to focus
instead of wondering blindly because
you don't know
what else to do,

maybe
if you weren't so fucking caught up
with what-ifs and you could enjoy our time,
maybe yeah maybe
i'll just
get caught up in this questioning, too
and maybe when you are finally finished
with your dissection of all we do,
maybe there will be
enough of us left
to create something
from our ashes

a little constructive hero worship

we [whee!] sing
i fancy/frisk/frolic/fuck
with words too so you’ll have to
look [LOOK] look!
closer i’m
trying to tell you something

[tell you when my mind is wholly occupied with
beating a path into the pavement
and not breaking my stride, breaking
beating my brain over things
i cannot change i am
slithering down the streets]
tell you
about running rapidly shifting me
non-sequitously when i’m straddling
two worlds where i
don’t want to be

[i mean fence-tops are for alleycats and
the weak ones,
my dear and we
are not part of their number] i

don’t want to be here,
i want there
i want delicious holding arms, yes
[sliding over my face and breasts you, darling
must know all of what lives inside of me
to know how to touch me so
oh]

whoa

droll

i'm the youngest person
in the place
& the only one
not clacking at keys.
i wield
my pen with long-practiced ease
long companions,
i and she
not much satisfaction's discovered
with plastic tapping keratin.

i've callouses on my fingers
from my tool,
which will not eat
my words but saves automatically
whatever i am scrawling onto scraps
that will be stuffed in pockets
and hauled out, eventually,
like the days' catch.

i mean peripherally i'll be
mining myself deeply
all day,
to find something worth preserving,
a taste of a frame of mind,
a mindset so thick it molds
between your fingers,
so fresh
it still bleeds when you apply
a bit of pressure on the wound
i'll open to public display,
after all this is what writers are made of,
exhibitionism with eccentricism,
mixed with solipsism,
a pen
full of ink and twitching,
or, i suppose,
if you prefer, the clickity
clack click clackity
click

click