summer.

lying on the floor listening to music
reminds me of being seven
(tom petty the pretenders i found a picture of youuuu)
i'm ready to be a child again
love, warmth, cigarettes inside
turning the ceiling yellow and brown
i want distraction destruction
caliFORnia
CALIFORNIA!

midwinter haiku.

snow on the trees
makes me feel like a child.
our white still bodies.

the ceaseless why (this much i know is true).

being.
this much i know is true,
the crumblings, the bit-ends of life,
the frothings in the sink.
the lather at the end of the day,
between the sheets.
i am consumed with these, infected.
dirt on the doorways.

love.
this much i know is true:
a dark love.
the tension in our bodies, your memory.
you imagine
(did i keep you in a cage, hold you in my palm?)
the sea waking you, unlike i ever could,
whispering sonnets in your ears, i never did.
i plucked your eyelashes and kept them,
blowing them away one by one, something to lose of you,
everyday.

pain.
this much i know is true
when time wraps me,
another skin flayed slowly,
another blanket on a stifling, gardenia-laden night.
searching for the horizon, time.
how i desire dark mornings and obedience.
the agony of free will.

apocalypse.
this much i know is true.
a red sun, a dark sky, an orange moon;
who told me this was the first day of the end of the world?
i tried to name all the everythings,
all the words i held softly, carefully.
did i protect them from fire,
these crumblings, from the harsh light of catastrophe?

pdx, 11/11/08, 7:24 pm.

i sleep in a t-shirt and no underwear,
rainwater tea, hardcore dreams.

green hair, the internet, chapped lips, cat hair on my sweater.

the still-you scent of my room in the mornings,
till i open the window and grow goosebumps on my legs.

puddles and wet slip-on leaves,
cars that make that whirr sound as they slide on raindrops,
late buses and getting the wind in my face.

not enough pillows;
when i sleep i can never find the right way
and one cheek gets red from lying on it,
and sometimes i don’t know how to not scream when i wake up.

stretched-out bras and falling apart shoes –
i pick at the holes in my jeans but line my books up carefully,
like so many soldiers in a row, formation in the morning.

things get dusty here,
with inlaid fingerprints
and notes from my piano that linger in the air,
sheet music, books that are too old to be overdue.

white and bare,
though i try my best to cover them with
photographs and words i paste up on the walls,
to watch over me during the night.

faces, horses, green words,
the eyes of my cat reflecting carlights from the windowsill.

drawers that are full of things i’ve never seen before,
and my roommate’s image, passing, in a mirror.

hair clips, bobby pins, dimes, bottle caps,
mugs of coffee and the dregs of spilled wine found behind the couch,
and dust balls and cat toys.

plugs, posters, and curtain-ties.

venetian blinds along which i like to run my fingers,
leaving them clean and gleaming to rattle by the open door when i’m asleep.

communications from the past: grandfather

my grandfather
tottering
wrote me a poem in capitals

wicker baskets and theodore roethke
(love like he’s experienced it
like so many years)

my grandfather wrote me portraits of a long life
(whiskey and hot coffee he says)

and the drum beat falters
old-fashioned handwriting and no-longer-memories in photographs

he can’t sleep he tells me
can’t sleep
(too soon to go into that good night)

choking on what he’s said and now just waiting
my grandfather wrote me the scent of his cologne and pressed shirts

(i can’t escape my family no matter how hard i try
he follows me
the scent of someone passing)
letters on fragile paper
frail love

arithmetic.

she has thirty-two bullet shells on her belt,
twenty-nine notches.

twenty-one patterns of scars on her legs and
the four slashes of a knife.

she makes sixteen different phone calls and
searches five clubs - glaring music –
three drinks at each: she’s too drunk to tell pavement from sky.

there are seventy-six smiles on sixty-three days
(counting late morning sunlit eyes)
one hundred and three bedroom glances.

she has four limbs and no purpose.

thirteen steps up the stairs and
one knock on the door –
two-six-two.

one swig from a metal flask with
seven dents. three thousand five hundred fifty-four hesitations.

one shot, eight hundred and forty-two drops of blood on the wall.

two days and three more bullets.

trashcans, hairballs, fantasy world.

i'm the kind of person who lives in the in-betweens,
the space between the refrigerator and wall,
under the couch, in the pauses between words.
i hear hoofbeats and think alligators,
i'm never the simplest explanation,
occam's razor was sharpened on my bones.
i'm the cruelest person you'll ever know,
and i'll scream at you my rage
(all of that that swirls inside me, whirlwinds, jealousy)
but you'll never hear because
you're yelling what at me over the music
that i played too loud or the thunderous harsh noise of morning light
that is too bright streaming through the window.
i can't rhyme, i can't form my words and smash them into molds,
i can't be like everyone else and i don't know my stuff
i just make it up and cut it with a dull knife
like pie dough that's too cold
from the icebox that doesn't work all the time.
and my sneezes are like gunshots, fast, quick, loud
(just like you don't snicker) and
my fingers like god's hand picking out adam and eve
and all things that walk and crawl and fly.
i'm the person you don't want to meet cause i'll look at you
and see right through you, in fact you're not even there,
all i see is brick and glass
(and it's so much better to be a window than a door)
and when i lie on the grass and see the sky,
i can't resolve it,
it's just dots like impressionism
way up close where things are just blurs.
i don't breathe sometimes when i'm watching people walk away
because i forget and my lips and fingers turn blue
like the ocean i can't see and i don't like making similes
because it sounds like a cop-out and
my eyes are too dry but i hate crying all the time.

nicole.

i never see her wearing jackets
and her clothes smell like smoke and food and blaring television.
there’s change in her hair
and dimming fires in her eyes,
warmth banked in the cool cleft behind her brows.
she’s never cold so she dances at four am
and she smokes pot in the rain, staring at car lights till they blur.
movies play over her skin
like never ending memories of better [fasterlonger] times.
sometimes she’ll stare at you until you turn away
and you’ll feel her watch your back as you walk
and you don’t know where’s she going until she’s disappeared.
she painted her own room and came to school covered in drops of red
looking like she’s bleeding from her pores.
she wears rubber dresses and keeps condoms in an altoids tin and lighters in her purse.
you can see her in the early hours of the morning
driving a dirty white car with peeling bumper stickers
winding ways back from beaches and stars and the moon
with her head leaning against the window, her hand tapping out an empty rhythm.

do you want to know?

i will show you fear in a handful of dust.
i will drizzle it through my fingers in the dry desert air and watch it fall into my footprints.
i will show you death in a cupful of sea-foam.
i will watch it bubble and fizz and slowly evaporate in the salt-sea wind.
i will show you hatred in a bottle of raindrops.
i will boil it and spit it and spray it, painting the walls with scorch marks and heated steam.
i will show you envy in a bowl full of soil.
i will throw it into your face, and watch you wipe it out of your green eyes.

kings.

no one wears a crown quite like you.
what faith i hold in you, my saint, mi amor.

now i can see what the dark looks like.

all i had was the fastness of your body.
the castle of your hand.
nothing is left but the sea, and the sky, and my pride.
am i to overcome you?
am i to reach, and call everything by its name?
count the gracious grains of sand and the pinpricks of the sky?
as well count the cells of my body; the words in my palm.
who am i to say i love you?
leave to god the naming, and the knowing.

i desire only to count the aches of a hundred years.

will i become like the sea?

oh, to be unconsumed by you.

and float the rivers of identity, understand, know, mend.
to glue myself back together (burning plastic, doll-yarn hair).
but then, ah, the ecstasy of shattering in your presence,
swept away, like glass shards.
you wouldn’t put me back together;
but you, you would take the glass pieces of me,
lick them with your tongue and the soft edges of your fingers,
bleeding until you soak into my pores,
an endlessness of you that overwhelms me.

shall i become as the sea?
rounded, blunt edges, opaque from salt lashings,
colored the muted tints of a deep, slow river.

there is much to be lost in you, i think, much that i will never know.

to suppress you,
to turn your current back,
moon and wind against the earth and sea.
we are not fire, you and i.
we do not spark, or crack,
or light the presence of those around us.
no, we linger like the moon in daylight,
half-full, waxing and waning as we orbit,
coming together oh-so-subtly,
until beyond a thousand years i lose my own gravity
and there, you, tempting (we become).

grief, the river, melancholy. thus, what we find.

there is a species of later,
the silence of two weeks, two hours, too long without words.

my shoulders bow like the willow over the river,
horses grazing between my breasts,
ducks nesting on the stretch of my stomach,
shadowed by you above me.
who am i to say where these things shall go,
where you shall find me, (where the parasites shall live)?

am i alone according to the lives of those who’ve lived before me?

– a blue period, name-tattoos; i know so little.

grief.

not everything has to mean something.

leaving-season.

these summer days are
march and green, redwhiteblue and
no longer able.

heir ist kein warum.

gray and eyes-downcast, sometimes,
all-times. turning skywards like i should be:
the thing between rather than the thing itself.
something greater than myself,
(dreams are harsh but so is history,
the scratch of god’s pen upon the world).
like the sky, and my pride, and my humility.

namesake.

mountain ranges, singularity by singularity.
the mesa
(table-top),
mesa, the edgedon’tfall[singularity].
rangers,
horse by horse,
rangers and the light above

– see (too far too far and i’m blind already).

love with two feet on the ground, or proust never says hello.

i knew a girl once,
she called me ---
and i turned around,
for the not-name in her blue eyes and blue hair.
it was enough then to believe,
but you don’t love me anymore and
i smoke unfiltered cigarettes in the rain,
the residue and smoke like the lingering of gods.
your smile: new worlds of hate
and the thick dark line between love and loathing;
i walk it slowly like the curb into oncoming traffic,
like three facts between the clouds and me.
i turned around,
the muscles in my back flexing (unborn wings),
i bit into a madeline, a hundred pages later i blinked and said that’s not my name.

revolution.

fucking revolution.
strobe-light revolution,
black-eye black-flag black-heart revolution.

pretty boy revolution,
pretty boy wave the flag,
you wave the flag (burn it) revolution.
fucking revolution.

here it comes, revolution,
here’s the wave,
the start the end the climax to our fucking revolution.

pretty boy.

loud, boy, loud and rude
(smells like babylon)
here’s our fucking revolution.

beat it, burn it,
stomp revolution,
pretty boy
(black-heart revolution)
black-heart black-heat slave revolution,
run, run wave the flag (burn it) revolution.

pretty boy.

grenade revolution,
napalm (march it up and down those hills) revolution,
napalm burnt and black explosion revolution.
the fucking revolution.
make it, be it, wave the flag (burn it)

fucking revolution.

do you know where you are?

love like crystalline,
like mahogany,
(polished wood).

voice like gravel,
guitar like the end of the world.
voice like barbed wire,
like fingers on my skin.

you, writ large.

midterm haiku.

midterms suck, but i
have a timeline. i also
slept with your mother.

anarchy.

create chaos and i will join you in the bed.

salvation.

i tell you to walk on, but he can’t talk about it, crying,
such violence and i’m laughing, crossing myself.

resurrection.

this crucifixion is in the shape of a lie, the slip of my story, words formed where actions never happened – all talk and no movement; a heady proposition prefixes a quiet night.

doc martens in the sun.

i lace my boots to leave and step over the thousand words and line and letters of you,
all smelling of ink and iron. crowned the king of blood and salt,
i waver in between this and that, passive and demanding all at once,
making you blush (stains on your sheets indict us).
i lace my boots and leave, your hair smelling of me,
paper crinkling on the floor where we rucked it last night.
everything is messy but you like it that way and i like you, not complaining that the rug smells of the sea and plastic and the stale wood-smoke of a forest fire.
six feet away you’re beautiful, but as i lace my boots to leave you wake,
turning into the alpha, the omega, the sunset on the first day of the apocalypse.
i lace my boots and leave as you turn,
legs waving: gregor samsa and his commonplace death.

dan, why are you smoking in the rain?

i met you in the tunnels of the subways,
warm heat and damp hair drawing us together,

safety pins and the blue in your eyes.
we stared down the lights and winds of the trains,

and i watched you out of the corner of my mouth,
thinking how unnaturally the red hair matched the blue in your eyes.

threading your fingers together,
you smoked a cigarette,

uncaring and absolute, and,
dropping it, still burning, on the floor,

you smiled and blew smoke at me,
the blue freckling in your eyes.

you were playing with fire.
again, i can’t look away from you.

striking matches and letting them burn out,
i want to run fingers across your coat, and

wipe the water out of the corner of your eyes.

this poem is a line from transformers.

use 105 shells.
bring the rain.

after midnight.

poor, sad boy.
poor, sad boy, curly hair and
you can’t talk straight,
you can’t walk straight, white hands fluttering,
folding like paper flowers after midnight,
magnolias on their trees.

poor, strong boy,
dark hair and long words.
rubbing eyelashes into your cheeks
(my symbol of longevity),
watching the curve of your spine,
poor, strong boy.

poor, strong boy,
arms like steel and the wide green sea –
wine-dark, but nonetheless beautiful.

poor, sad boy, purple and green
like a bruise and the marks of hands upon your body,
purple and green, blue and the colors of long days of sadness.

poor, sad boy,
ripping you apart with my teeth,
white hands folding like origami flowers in the rain,
origami flowers opening to the sun, sadness and wilted paper.

do you want me: a sort-of haiku

and now i say yes without hesitation,
when even then i could not answer truthfully.

i’d fuck you, and slide in your arms,
and hope you’d tell me something beautiful,
and then it would be worth it, though it was already.

paper flowers.

i cannot dream or linger anymore.

waiting rooms: a sestina.

i have only ever heard this song in waiting rooms,
he said, verse
falling ungracefully, naked,
from his mouth. lines
of creation
are not as easily opened as my window

in the rain, as easily broken as the window
in my wallpapered room.
i have only heard this song in waiting, he said, creation
twining in his hair, verses
of a song accenting the lines
around his mouth. unadulterated, naked

instability balances carefully on the bridge of his nose, naked
and walking in front of a window.
lines
fill up the page, and i have only ever heard this song in waiting rooms.
[the chorus and verse
of plot twists back and forth.] i am creation

she says, i AM creation.
i have never heard this song, says she, naked
and angry, her verses
breaking my fingers and cracking our window.
she crams this room
with words, punctuation, lines

that float above our heads, dream-like and cremated. lines
of ash coat the floor, creation
animated, and we have only ever heard this song in waiting rooms.
naked
we fall, covered in soot, windows
smeared with twisted verse.

passages and verse
surpass me and the lines
of his body echo the light through our dust-covered window.
i am creation
she states, watching us twine, naked,
and she has never heard this song, in any room.

our verse, this is not creation,
but she screams within the lines, broken, naked,
and watching through the window. we have only ever heard this song in waiting rooms.

sometimes i see silence in your eyes.

i want the shape of your toe,
i want the cheapened glance behind ten dollar glasses,

[she should be he]
and you say he's attractive.

all i can do is write today, all you can do is talk.

my eyes will trace only
the lines of your theories and the pathways of her knowledge.
my mass culture infiltrates the way i speak,
seeps in between the gaps in my teeth, splitting scenes into moments,

strobe lights and the revolution.

your skin is too pale in dim light,
and i want to shut the door and twist my words back to you,
these words that spew in revolving themes, gilt-edged doors in twilight.

skin

skin, like words. skin, like words. (like conversation and soft-touch fingers) like straight-line gs and stencil-letters, looking up my name in the encyclopedia, like stale tears. tears, like skin. (like torn pages of books and pinholes in the wall, licking flames of firelight) too many words and the candlelight. skin, like moonlight. like soft pale glow, like fingers moving hesitantly, like the first touch, like it will be okay.

three lines and everything.

i wake, feet huddled together like two spoons,

star-clumped lashes, the smell of you in my hair.

i never imagined this is the way it would be.

i don't think the ira ever ate thai food.

i smell like pad thai and cigarettes tonight.

sexual tension is worse than nervousness,
the palpable difference in the air around you,
and the way he apologized late last night.

the rug smells funny, grease and lighter fluid, pipe bombs and dirty hair.

cigarette butts scatter my floor, looking like ireland.

so many rainclouds

i see you bowing, figures in the mist; wordless
lullabies, wordless, timeless

(don’t remember when you first heard).

i see you leaving, figures in the mist


– remembrancers –

nothing’s real quite like
the books you’re carrying, figures in the mist,
eyes raindrops and the weather doesn’t match our mood

(there’s nothing we can do).



crescendo.



the faun and the full moon,
the figures in the mist,
today’s not human;

i no longer follow that moon,
i am no disciple of the tides and my feet are not quite on the ground,
all saints, carefully.
buck teeth, all saints
(she’s named after a church)

sing the wordless lullaby i’m no longer on the ground,
remembrancers my seers of the past
[look back instead of forward, the woven
ground of history so unlike flickers of
every future]

but no more do my figures dance in the mist,

so many rainclouds

softly.