To Someone Who never reads this.

an effort to supplicate
nothing
so close as this cloth
my life held on to
and so sick
of justice
never the same twice

not stopping to bellow
only telling
a short breath
my heart
a raw egg
runny,
clear.

think then
of beds
think you us
a sadder tale so
much
the sheets twine
tomorrow into
a now

we long for it.

the crest
of all
flying low
dipping
emasculated
a books pleasure
only

in the who knows?
places
stop wandering,
I cannot go in after.

Compatibility Report

When words began
to pile up at the corners
of my mouth,
I oozed over to
see
the city and its
night glands
throb
before choking.

Nothing much
was marching
when she called,
and she had so many
sonnets
like glances to squander,
I felt like
buying tattoos of pearls
or ropes of glossy wheat.

It was all
the way time
grunts,
shifts its weight:
a recognition of
kindred,
a hazy sameness
that loves
sitting by the fire.

I was in swoon
over courage,
a red
American
heart soaked
in letters and cities.

This the sort of night.

This the sort of night
where words fly down
in parachutes of water
blooming hard into sweet
phosphorous oceans,
no trenches of sound contained
therein.

This the sort of night
where my face is hot
and my skin shrinks
jives
and throbs
under the docks of sex.

This the sort of night
where against my will,
which is wilting
I wait,
an ever penitent
reader of looks that must
carve the map of time, and
crave
the route of lips.

This the sort of night
that shouts angles
in the curves of vowels
and the sort of dark that
screams at light to make it’s
get-away
in trails of rotten color.

This the sort of night
where I read out loud
the books you taught me,
the rough-hewn letters
like sand on the sheets,

I practically scream the
words of making,
I yell the ‘come-home’ cry
out into the widowed stars.

Daughter of Paper

Where were the fathers
the day that I found
a universe
of casualties so lovely, so vast?
I was a small child when I found you,
a vast ocean
in the lap of my mother.
Remember the cold clouds around her waist,
and even
in the green of gardens
the past knows how to find you.
I felt drunk before I even knew how to get that way.
I am the daughter of paper:
I dreamt pinks, or
wild golds crashing themselves
into greens into blacks.
Remember the blue
the vast, unstopping blue
of learning
and find for yourself
child
the soil of language,
and don’t forget when I was
a sky child,
drinking dust
before the time of art.
Where is the riot of the self
on the page?

Let me hold you there. Let me hold you there.
I was your baby, your first baby,
and it was you
who showed me how
to create the world.

I look at the horizon,
a sky coarse through the
grass,
dancing off,
washing the bellies of
birds,
making the backs of
horses heavy with joy:
Blue joy, pink joy, yellow joy.

Two-ness

Two-ness



Rushed there,
in a pocket of the city
or the yelping quiet
of forests,
the boy/girl-ness
has been walking
toward the moons.

I found you
squatting in a patch
of sound,
a servant of highways
and wolves,

the whiskey brother
of a more wild memory.

Surrounded in cornfields
or concrete mesas,
we met weird sisters
and French rappers,
smoked resin out
of dolphin hides,
danced the blood into
our limbs.

Make no effort now,
the quiet has come to
hold and weave
the two-ness
of nature stories,
the dichotomy of
need.

The Gift of Tongues

The Gift of Tongues


Where were the mothers
the day that I found art in her lap,
a universe
of casualties so lovely, so vast?
Remember the cold clouds around her waist,
the angel moments,
calling tongues wrapped around tongues
the trumpets of the devil.
Remember the blue
the vast, unstopping blue
of learning
and find for yourself
the soil of language,
and don’t forget the time before when I was
a sky child,
drinking dust
before the time of art.

Where were the fathers the
day that I found the touches
of flesh on flesh on fabric on flesh
and knew the truth
that was mantled in hedonism?
What ramparts were climbed
that were just beds
to see the heat heat hot
pulse from me, and I ask,
what show of god
glimmered before the peacock
sky to tell the little planets
that they were once only
flesh,
they were once only
rib
they were once with out
songs and colors?

Bacchus In The Neighborhood

(A thin veil
between us and the Gods
is lifted by the paws of dogs.)

The heat heat heat
made in the pot-stills of moons on the
lakes of nothing else to do
but think of trashing
the thinking, leaves you
in the summer the summer the heat
bottomed out.

When they play
the ones with the heavy heavy beats
and the still cloudless nights,
you’ll see your own
mom and dad
drinking beers on the porch
listening to Springsteen.

While you
vanish in the bushes
wild at 9 o’ clock, the sky
telling you just how to live,
or stopping the zoo from
running to your arms again
for comfort.

Tonight
is the party the llamas have waited
all year to spit at.
There is no language for weather.
They know it in
summer,
there is not a way to tell about the afternoon,
the tan lines of thighs,
the plastic of air
the hopes of leaves
the wilt of your face in the soaking
sprinkler pool sidewalk glamour show
lemonade stand drama,
the garden planned to meticulously
spill over while on vacation
to other parts of summer,
(cheating on your own fun).

Your face a Bacchus riot,
slamming the dreams down
on the table like coins,
all the while
panting,
all the while
shimmering,
screaming that
there is no way to talk about
reality.
There is no
speaking of the weather,
the space of time
stretching like a runners leg.

So there is only panting
after each sip,
a tongue lolling out of
each mouth,
trying to howl the gossip
under starry trees
as busted fire hydrants
shamelessly display their relief
in the streets.
A black-out, black-top
world, harbors an
always remembered
time.

Goodbye summer freedom.

An Afternoon

An Afternoon


Document: a portrait crumpled in the brush of night
Anger, the belly is smooth, tempting.
Before the bed: a corset of blankets,
You undo my laces.

And rising all the time on
Tip-toe,
I am old enough.

Or, we were old enough
transiting love longer
the bleep-bleep of telephonics
and flesh games, a space in which
I am forever seeing myself.

Brighton, Michigan.

When
enough of you is
Seen
Launched
Festooned
In the coffin of sky,

Lavender shouting
names of the dead,
(the suicided before
birth)
jumping from cars
high-speed and wailing
in the tall summer grass,

you found yourself
knees smashed into the
carpeting,
beggar words gurgling
from your mouth

while in the next
town over,

all the farmers
slump in their chairs,
(now suburban)
hacking up memories
or lives.

The ADD of buying
Of selling of breathing
Flecked all over your face.