New poem thing

Youth

We overdreamed the dream of youth:
running without hesitation,
an orgasm for every rose petal,
the necessity of white teeth.

Then the trick stops,
the outline of the projector
becomes visible for the first time.

And I hope you are ready to die
without mourning each second
that guides you like a sure procession
to what must happen next.

New Draft

Contact Comfort

His steady breathing eases
you into the night as a signal
of his departure.
No longer illuminated by sun or bedside lamp
the space feels like a territory secret.
Not a prize but bestowed by
some cycle of nature or
fundamental limit of stamina.

The late night rain hits rooftop
louder splash later pooling on the ground
does not wake up you but tells you a secret;
you realize what you’ve been missing:
sighs hidden in heavy breathing,
condemnation staring ahead.
Always staring ahead.
This is fucking romance.

New Poem Draft

Lunch Rush

They keep their heads down while moving
these midday masses
heat and frustration rising
until they focus solely on the pavement
while clouds
like orgasms materialized
pass from horizon
into shape
into haze
into invisibility spread thinnest.

They begin to
retreat to the routine.
The act of love
given up
without somber recognition
of what has passed.

Poem Draft

Thoughts on Housekeeping

When vacuum cleaners stop
filling your ears with the dread drone
of domesticity,
and the floor becomes a wholesome center
from which all the troubles of the universe
become possible to identify
that is when the coke addictions begin,
and a certain Mister begins to promise a pilgrimage to holy sites.

Some sort of generic lavender scent
coats things and asks you not to analyze anything else,
which is fine and great:
a mini-vacation,
and you had said you needed it.
Still you hide your face at the thought of what Joni Mitchell would say to you now.

Fun things coming up soon. I think.

Poem Written while Tispy

Two shot lightweight!

Boy who has fought in many battles

You slouch in your deskchair, defeated.
Nervous worries tunnel through
Thursday’s apathetic afternoon.
How can light be pale? is a thought
that can’t quite make you feel
comfortable with all of this.
As if answers were transport.
Understanding all of this shit
was never meant to make you comfortable with it.
I can’t even remember Monday, you think.
But who can?

So you keep combing your fingers
through ever-increasingly greasy hair
and the snow outside piles up,
the air turns over,
begins to taste like gin,
and the light illuminated the world outside
becomes flat like when you listen to the music
pouring out of your headphones
and the world becomes a flat mirror
held up to the mouth of the cave
that your hoodie has transformed into.

Keep bottoming out
and maybe some day you’ll get the courage
not to favor convenience over independence.
That one knuckle’s received an awful lot of abuse lately
but the hope lives that calluses will grow over time.

A cat throwing up is the sound of love,
whose name you will never learn
because selfishness has tied its hands.

You would turn out the lights too
if you knew how we looked from the outside.

New Poem (Surprise)

Who Remembers Anyone

Some people are afraid of cameras taking their souls. I can’t imagine writing about people to be any better. I write a description of you and you’re gone. You—not the description, but the real you—have disappeared forever.
–Unknown

New York
Jamie RUDLOFF and Christian ZUCKERMAN ran down the sidewalk, and asked passers-by to let them feel the holy.

Jerri BLAZE asked Loraine OBERRY to step into her purse. Ms. BLAZE later apologized for her “ineffable violence toward the statuary”. Ms. OBERRY has yet to officially accept the apology, stop drinking.

Last night Arlene MINK announced she will not participate in the 3rd annual Holiday Fundraiser Banquet unless a man propose to her with a ring of flame.

Never take photographs of other people.

Dona GOODLOE and Clayton SHEEN swapped glasses, later complained of headaches.

Beth MORA reportedly swept her stairs yesterday evening before her “Man” came home that night. It was observed that the Mr. MAN carried a briefcase and the weight upon his salty brow into the condo.

Eric BRADSHAW exhumed a corpse at the Williams Memorial Garden and Cemetary at eleven o’clock this morning. After the exhumation, Mr. BRADSHAW told his lover, James LAREL to “hop on in”.

Everything is sacred, but not yet.

Lance BAPTISTA wants everyone to have a “good fucking time” tonight & every night.

Antonio CONNOR ate one bite of his dinner last night. When asked for a comment, Mrs. CONNOR claimed that her husband has been suffering from indigestion, due to a high level of stress at his office.

Marcel KLARE stared at his own reflection in the pond at Corrick Park for an hour. He later announced to the small group of people that had taken to watching him watch himself that he was disgusted by their soullessness and wished to help them. At that time the crowd dispersed.

New Poem--Again

Aubid You Goodnight

I would rather my mistakes
should scream at me,
a constant drone of worry—
the clock’s last tick
never ended,
is ringing still.

What is duplicated from nature:
a mechanical red light
runs through the streets
with a hand over its heart—
the crowd gasps.
Someone anonymously pees,
moans lynched in jaundice air.
They reach out like hands
of hermits in wells
grasping for a patch of grass.

Nervous energy poured into celebration.
Lungs fill with laughter
before lips have chance to break
to reveal diamond pimp teeth.
Giggles echo in Summer swamp ether.

Darkness into Ocean:
general darkness as quoted by the Bible
gropes in a veil of sweat
for articulation in hands & mouths.
Its act of fucking
becomes an act of possession,
becomes reason to hold
the blade up to his throat
and ask how the morning will come.

New Poem

Inversion

The living shuffle swiftly
in sleeper’s dreams,
soft and on time
like the spinning
of the escalator’s grooved tread.

They have husbands
that stare at them
while they cower
from building to shopping cart to bed.

These men have the
dark faces of TNT.
Mouths like a window pane
with a hole punched through.

In therapy,
the living and their husbands
fight taking turns:
moth exiting flame;
scissor mending curtain.

What dreams
didn’t the alligator eat?

At 5 p.m. the roads disappear;
roll up and vanish
like the ever-replaced top stair
of the escalator.

Beds fill with couples,
the smell of their fatigue
like the rough sound of
dry hands moving down the sheets
near the places
they will hibernate in like reptiles
until the dreamers wake.

New poem (Draft)

Muscle Memory

The choice has been made.
We must wear our language,
make ourselves up in it.
From the development of vocabulary
comes the anticipation of situations,
and I find myself wondering if
the mad man who walked past me
teeth chattering in insult and obscenity
would have preferred the thrust of a knife
or the image of the thrust of a knife.
Our tongues know their movements too well
to unlearn embedded choreography.
Our minds, too, grow weak in habit:
with this poem, for example,
I meant to kill you.

Draft of new poem (will revise soon, hopefully)

Moon Bounce

The day you become a homosexual
is quiet and boring. Maybe the sky is overcast,
maybe you forgot to put deodorant on. The realization
most likely hits you in the afternoon;
it almost always comes in the afternoon,
just as you are about to write the day off
and decide—confirm—that you are to lounge
about the rest of the day because nothing
else seems worth doing.
Once you say yes quietly, in your head,
or start to cry, or blink quickly to feign
ignorance yet again, you’re done. You
have finished a process you thought would
take the rest of the day.

Though accomplished, you
still have some doubts about the whole business.
You fear you won’t be able to love any man
the way your mother loved you, and that’s troubling
the same way architects looking at the Parthenon
feel about anything they might do. You might not even
love yourself that much. This is the punishment
you feel you deserve for seeking independence in
your loving, and that fact stares you in the face
and makes breathing feel more like panting for awhile,
the way you would feel if you lived on the moon
your whole life and suddenly had to move to Earth
and learn to get used to a higher level of gravity.

New Poem

Sunday

I only ever feel powerful
when I type the words
“will understand” out
and watch the letters appear
on the screen, like a
new combination of
letters and words
that has never been seen
before. That I have
never seen before.

At these times,
invariably on Sunday afternoons,
I change the font size
to fifty, and consider
printing off two hundred
copies to hand out
to people or to tuck
into their pockets if
their hands are already full.

New Draft

The Death of the Future Lies in Eggs

I have been eating a heart-
shaped lopsided chocolate
cake every night
for the past three.
It has deflated comfortably,
its consumption as
predictable as decay.
I wonder if instead of eating
it I have given it over to
a colony of those Amazonian
ants capable of carrying
away livestock, crops,
unattended infants.
No,
there are no ants.
There is only my mouth
and fork, which I can now
only think of as a weapon.

Last night,
I pulled the cake box
out of the fridge.
On its way, it pushed out
the carton of eggs.
If they could have
they would have tumbled
to the ground. Maybe
they spun slowly
in their Styrofoam homes
while events beyond comprehension
but within sensing
took place.

I watched them land,
wishing about salvage,
saw the yolk floating
on top of a clear flood.
Part of me
wanted to see what the egg
would harden to
when out of its shell,
but I and the eggs
wouldn’t have been able to come back from that.
So I speculated they’d
look like amber with all
the bronze history sucked out—
dull like the way quartz seems empty.

Spent the next few
minutes on my knees,
Rubbing a 10¢ rag
of a washcloth
against the carpet until
the clear and the yolk
just sort of gave up
and disappeared in between
the surface of the
carpet and the bottom of the air,
asking me:
if you were green and shattered,
wouldn’t
you be disappointed?