Remember me as how I was

Before my eyes rolled up.
before a madness rolled out erratic, arachnid, before
my hands, arthritic, crinkled up into webs
and the spider of my brain escaped all over my body.

Unsuited

My God, was I inelegant.

I sat down, elephant.

I had to roar.

Thank god for volumes.

There is no tomb. It's solvable

by the light, and the deep years.

It's true, this new thing sways

your hand, and the way it stays.

But my God, the way it stays.

distance=privilege

On a beach begorged by seagulls
glows a fish with teats,
a seacow.

She is dead, her body

opens, pours a thick white mess
the froth laps.

She is there, I haven't killed her,
but I cannot fully witness. I'm ashamed
but still resistant. What's to say?
The truth? I love the dead. I do. It's said.
Save their intolerable red.

death and others

1

poplars,

winter.

a deep bare death reaches out

from the ground, a stretching tree.

when I go down in stone when

the cobbles click a cold red robin

will perch upon my stone

2

resist, tame:

kissers, fighters,

banshees, licenses,

skillets, the angry,

beauty in a ditch, country clubs,

and all that does not warrior

its way toward darkness.

3

to be whiteblooded

is to rely on every

thing, except the heart.

sufferin'

I don't mean to sound creepy, kid,

but it's not long I can last here, being in a bed,

knowing you're out there.

A haze comes over me like I've looked too long at a snake. Hypocrites

hate sickness, or claim to. Thinking of you lowers a throb into the folds

around my slit of a cunt, makes me push three fingers through thick hair into a fruit-like mush of myself, where something perfect rises

and hulks. To solve this: humping down on the side of your leg,

or pressing my cool whole curvy body against your side.

I want what you promise,

I want your infinitesimal strokes,

I want your adjustments,

I want to fuck sensitive, fuck wise,

for you, fully clothed, to turn your head toward my ear and slur,

describe the way you store yourself.

I would grip down for that, I would be good for that. I would not fight then,

just continually unwind and be fully body.

Only seeing to the mind I've glimpsed would I be fully body.

NICE DAY

so tidy, tame,
the lawn's terrific.
Bugs go down a blade.
In ordered rows,
the push of sprouted things
beside the shade.

ON SIN

my lesson is to keep a nit,
to let it feed--
then bury it.

another clerihew for the road

Adam and Eve
had no one to deceive.
They found a bunch of apples worth a tryin',
'til one got Eden by a lion.

Consensual

Chris, look.
We both want a picnic,
but first we have to get out of this field.

Why fight? We both know
you bit the wrong animal.
The venom's been circulated:
you are beloved.

A hollow's been thumbed.
When I speak your name
it brings a bird,
a thrum.

In truth, you are not present
except as my present gift to myself.
I think you, too, should take me
and look for yourself.

New York/Central Park

A terse man leans
from his child’s frown.

A little dog leaves
and a bench is clear.

Clouds in blobs.

The pain impresses me.
In fact a line rises from me.

In time my body will lessen.
The remains of the day will be the total
of what I’ve chosen to count.

The Pistol and the Honeybee

were from two different countries.

she slept in an iron, and the bee let loose around the farm.

her light filled with water,

and the bee loved neon.

but her hardness was simply for smoothing,

and the bee pricked.

Police Report

I feel haunted by the incident:

Last Wednesday afternoon, two unknown men walked into our house.
My roommate was upstairs in her room, with her door closed.

Two unknown men made noise downstairs. They rifled.
They went into my room. I live on the bottom floor.

My roommate lay reading in bed. It sounded like an awful lot of noise.
She heard me or Virginia come up the stairs,

until someone opened her door without knocking. She knew we would not do that.
They locked eyes. He swore at her, then descended fast with jewelry.

He kicked over my guitar as he left,
she said to me as we sat together on the staircase.

She told me they definitely went into my room.
All the gaps in my room radiate a violence. Our house has bad air.

We speak from a deep place about the violation.
My roommate is at home with her parents.

For three days we must walk through the house, stunned,
and then we can start cleaning.

Activist reaches out to Frankenstein but nothing doing

“Poor green monster. You’ve separate women.
You lumbering Lenny. You keep the kids in.
A brainclot of a master, an anti-Mister.
Raise signs with us. Deserved.” (Disaster.)

ownership

I once protected men.
I canned them, or
replaced my long soul with flags of them.
I feared their death asea.

Tonight I am roughing through chemicals
and full of flags to shed.
That's allright. Patch on, Rosie.
Work during the war
and grow cloudlessly lovely alone.

A terrible thing swept a small town

A herd of cows, goaded by fire,
stampeded downhill in a blitz
through some open legs of street
where they exploded across people and dragged them.

Interim

The animal way of love is bitter.

It often returns me to my lovely long rope that cords up to the moon,

where my climbing is small and sad, sexless, secure;

where I do not care for a partner, and there are no ugly questions:

How can I make myself spare,

and immediately vulnerable, and just enough?

How to confess sexually, how to lay out organs

tastefully, how to patiently come into each other?

How to respectfully and lovingly narrate? How to

bring tea? How to knock so quietly all the mice in the door

relax?

the neurotic narrator's eternal hypocriticism

How to clatter onward?

How to bliss out?

Instead I fawnpatter.

Instead I spout piss.

love

hollywood is

a city of chums.

glam nails. morocco. a killed mandaddy,

a dead woman fucking

, and fame, that yellow mollified star.

foster (a love poem)

my goose, excuse me,

god bless it but your eye is up.

you are magnificent and prey; you are alert and magnificent by the bookshelves,

watching me advance

from just one side of your tall white head.

Boss

Boss o boss,

your voice is the red pen.

and certainly loopy: I see it herd, it lassoes them.

Your face is lump.

And when you smile

the cheekdough rises.

Boss o boss,

O show me the picture

of your baby again.

griddles

let's bludgeon the dry skulls, and marry the sweet.
let's stick to the meat.

sharks

we murder the flood, we cramp down
to business.
we are a clean knot of sheep
gathered over
a dead wolf stink.