Saturday, November 14, 2009

Love Song Auditions

Meet me halfway because I never tried to remember what I've forgotten until now.

I could tell you I've dated psychos but I think you already figured that out groovy.

All men look like boys in the face when they cum.

I have not yet received any emails about this.

That face. Put it on.

How difficult to find you even years later.

Is this about the time I visited D.C. and didn't see you.

Butter flattened popcorn.

Fifteen of us in a small bus.

Grew up streets of residential housing.

Different addictions obliquing themselves. Uncle Tom drunk over his turkey.

If we met because we met when we meet.

Stop boring me with muscle hair and bodies. I want something sensitive to anomaly.

For a living I listen to country music and I watch sports.

Someone who knows that inner star.

I realize that when people say men they mean straight men.

Around my hometown walls were turning yellow and gray.

Each time I went to Elizabethtown for french horn lessons I traveled the turnpike and I yearned for some outside noise to comfort me.

Wrap you in mailing envelopes.

And for me that means an extra day shopping and an extra day to be so cold because I am already on the road what would you like to tell me.

This mustard seed purr.

All the things I ever wanted were sent in the mail you are a large city you understand.

Friday, November 13, 2009

From Essex

Now is the time to take the song from your throat

and unbury the bone you've tasted for years. The flesh

of bones is that which unburdens the voice, the flesh

that feeds from the unspoken words in your throat

urging you not to pocket the flowers. Plunder

the scream of shades. Take the swarm of color

from the fields until the lack of color

forms a rupture in the sky and plunder

all unheard sounds in the night. These sounds

are yours. Your mind holds the morning back.

This voice whispers each word back

to you and each stone you gather slows sound

and light. The bleached day urges you on and the throat

of the lapwing burns blakc with still no sound.


-Adam Clay
Lilies whose syrup keeps addicting us.
You in dirty diameter
and we circle hungrily
the winning blue wrinkle
realizes no no just under the surface

sturdy absence
the static washes someone in sun

Tears dry fluelike on our face fluelike because we are riding our bike
third person familiar dear eyes sparkling. She says okay, I’ll be your friend.
But she doesn’t put down her hatchet

I’m drunk and want to watch a movie with you and eat Chips Ahoy
on my bed on all my clean clothes that need folded

As though lemons
whisper snip, then blossom. Remember my friend Jim who wanted to marry you and you dated him for a few years and he was hairy

kisses through mesh we are pretending a jailbait
who distinguishes new shadows from old

You are glossy wet when sad

I say okay, okay,
ready a set of fetters.
Let’s make meaning.

Letters still trees, clink brinks, kneel on wet leaves.
An understanding ignores
all this moon’s advice, eats hot & sour soup
comes highly recommended

face noun or verb yours or mine
your legs and arms
among their roots I long to kiss
sure through you
time makes God sound like us
along sour neurons an outside silence I can taste constellations against the sky
once a chaser, always disposability. I am talking about
being in the closet here, Mary.
it’s so obvious Memory is a bitch no matter how green your eyes no matter how glittery
To me it’s an eclogue the way your mouth moves when I put my face there
to absorb your light crouch more
threshold than path
found a Polaroid of a naked black man his chafed looking penis swollen in his fist kept it tucked in one of my paperbacks of Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Cradle

let me twin and sprout wings
or horns like shells where wind spatters
I want to bet you fucked him now fuck me your guilt makes you harder
your having been in his scrappy body makes me horny
I can recognize me even in these ski masks
that oyster smiles
I recognize that as a man I blush
an aura
precedes my relapse: the smell of patchouli,
rust, an old red wine
time snapped shut across some depths of lake. cartographies of color that only you noted
this testifies to your character:
you call toilet paper bath tissues

I name my band My Friend’s Band
if opening for A Bridge, sway. if for
Little Stallions Under Glass, pretend you drive stick.
Who snorts rare silver transparence ?
As If Any Addiction Ends

Flying Ants Smell Like Lemon Until You See Them


You bend back the trees
to reveal the river’s
weakness.

I was always a sucker for sun—

I hurt all day.
Be more than I can imagine and take when I’ve done and future it.
Well my conduit is broken. Language doesn’t flow through me like a sieve. I am more a jar and sometimes I pour myself out
Movement implies
herring. Wet. where
they land. has all the hallmarks the man with the handsomest
of bad porn
you list in the sun
of course I am tomorrow’s child
the supple bubble butt
it became a lightning rod
I’m racist and I’ve lived mostly with other whites
and I’m white and male and gay and alcoholic


one of my students when I gave her portfolio back to her
and she’d earned an A in the class but didn’t want any molasses cake
looked like she was on speed
I like the sound of violins am in therapy
I heard people in the hallway and became ashamed
think about the phrase language arts long enough it will make you bitter
is just reason for us to band like geese
I wish I could fly through cathode ray tubes
and into your pale arms
I want to be large and delicious along this series of fences
like a bucket full of ice cream
dirty dishes on my dresser
it’s my job to write postcards
because I know that people suffer
I want you to look up at me saltily
feel a muscle in my back ding it tastes gray and shifty
your root smell like a snag
turns off streetlamps when we walk by
like a first roast duckling I want to feist myself on your hairy chest I want to suck your back I want to bite you I want you to rip me a piece of me out it’s all the salt reminder you’ll have
a dam beaver nest all blown up with hummingbirds
there are terriers in my pajamas if I had pajamas
me fucking me with teeth and green and yellow arrows that are aimed at snagging you because I’m unsatisfied Why would you bring awful soda into a library. Or coffee or your bad hair cut.
I wasn’t painting. Well, maybe I was painting whelks, but other than those yellow white contusions I was not painting at all
I am waking up again and again to myself. I can never remember who I am and that’s why trinkets rather than dead birds are coming out of the kitten’s mouth
believe in signs sometimes I do
I want you to put your face into my asshole and get it wet
I feel a twinkle there for you
it’s a black asterisk and only you can dot it white
with your stuck in me juice




I am lazy
You are red
We’re ready to date




But it takes forever to be loved




I want to fuck you so hard you’ll have yellow glitter coming out of your ears and I will think that’s so sexy that I’ll fuck you harder and then green and blue and purple glitter will come pouring out of your mouth and then that’ll get me going and I’ll fuck you so hard that when we both come we’ll shit gold lame stools so large we could dry them and sit on them out on the porch when we are married and old and cute and not fucking quite so much.




about my black rubber calyx.
I’ve been beating myself with it.
I got it at the porn store because I couldn’t find any at Michael’s.
I know it’s shaped like a dildo but that’s because they’re probably not allowed
to sell rubber flowers at the porn store.





Let me into your condo.
You call me crazy.
You get me some scratch-off lottery tickets because you love me
and want to fuck me
but are afraid.
Your cap and cape are hanging on the panels of my brain.
I want to bake you a closet full of scones,
I want to bake you dry things so that we can get out the lube,
we’ll have an excuse,
and fuck.



But would it scare you, the depth of hunger I wanted to show you. I am showing you how hungry I am for you.
You are a railroad. You keep me from you. You keep me at a parallel distance. I hate the distance. You are seven hours. You are seven hours away from me and I want to hold you every night and watch you fall asleep. I want to see you relax.
I don’t want to be kept from you. I will hurt the roadways. I will trust no one. I will trust only my heart. I can’t trust my hurt parts anymore. My heart wants to hurt yours, to heal you.
We are, indeed, a series. Nothing is here resolved.



Would you?
the wet burn of my thigh

From Figures For A Darkroom Voice by Noah Eli Gordon and Joshua Marie Wilkinson

Here's the mechanical garden with its watery flowers & sparks. Here's the bull's hoof cast in something like iron, leaving footprints in the shape of broken clouds. Here's a dresser carved from bone. & here inside is its good cocaine scent asking you to punish the parts of yourself closest to the piano in construction, furthest from persistent woods in each fairytale that propels us to misrecognition. If you enter them do so with a year's worth of butcher birds to seal your steps up in the muck.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

I want to thank you. You and all the rain you wore to find me.

Pulse is nothing like a houseboy
memorizing a room of purple and white flowers
who will not apologize.
I do I feel their influence.

Stadiums of Lust

The glove of your mouth importunate.
Bring yourself to the bud of your body.
The jar is half empty.
I lean obscure allergic slow stand
my pulse a grandstand standing
in me boy the moon is lean
at risk.

My furrow blisters so had
it sizzles the thermometer bent
swollen with honey
rain mitts the sand the consonance
(Is love when you eat popsicles if in bed the slim leaves of Whitman inflate)
the salt my blister so so
rub it.

Pretending Yourself a Crowd

Make up with a rainbow
stem out and cotillion-slick
having seen the swollen night
and my palm on your skin
drawing blue flowers
into your body

Of the Moon Hidden By So

That sick grin
running a personal
and your blindness gains my
side like my own up your face
a love a little girl throws
and runs under this morning
painted to match the sky

I look at the water to fire ratio and sun myself
so rangers caressed myself

Gray Not in Color But Feeling

The rasp simple
we both answer
when asked behind which we pour
affection
the one with the biggest salute
from the bin of winks

You are a cup I am a manacle
scabbing your face
the pears of your eyes threaten cringe

I want berries’
purr in our mouth
get the cliché drunk
like soap
in the mouth the good idea turns bad and foams

Lover Are You the Lamb Along Unkempt’s Leap

We called it practicing for girls when we would bluntdick one another

What I knew might put my hand in his pocket
search any clavicle naked as prom night
brilliant in the air as sails questioning my motives
stretching my hips towards my head to practice the suck have you ever thought
sadly in a blackout you made pornography
everything through hiccups
boys jog past your window thin as sunburnt
smiles
are going into your body short and frothy
down at the lip of the underground well want that smell of blood in my house, the blip
the seconds threaten

One bodybuilding magazine showed a man with his penis angled and skewing hard and strangely orange out of his posing speedo, and repression is a powerful cycle

Let me be glaring here embraced by many eyes on windows cool
pretty please pies
of wet cane and snowmelt anything
mending its miles

The Most Beautiful Are Blemished

Suppose an eyes gimlet with praise and hanging
a nice long integer on a movement of quiet
as if in sympathy for a smell trying to diffuse
in a small closed space which precludes
a cushion standing in for the leading role
green and skipping and interested and formal
quick and sour here with me ma’am
Boys With Long Torsos


and butts
not droopy
but as though
each cheek
were resting
in a cup


Wait For the Timpani to Resolve Themselves


and pick me up out of the moonstone rainstorm theory
the idea having delayed itself against the rain I see
that walking where we go it’s simply stunning
the tree where it has split your flower hasn’t took yet
it took and then finally it took all right
boy oh boy do I believe you


We Can Be Sure


we sunk having found out what embarrasses us we are in bed
and laughing like a skunk out the window in the lilacs canceling
one another like the stock market years later told you you had stock
you’d forgotten your grandmother was dead and practical if you would let her
name your trust in your body a turret a neck of crows define it
thus we size it


Like Mint Kitchenettes


was snow packed tight in your iris your brown eyes that changing their clovers shone man at me the yellow corset of lather abrupt in season a few darning
eggs I only kept in hopes you’d be back so few hours later and now
high moon shaking
I slack
my tenderness I hid until you


My Body Sympathetic


pieces that pass first test
first test being believe it or not sitting down right dead drunk
small cold and absolutely broke
without crying when all the characters are leathering
advertising themselves as red cold ribs
flexible and sad


They Chase Me From Inside
Time Doesn’t Exist

except as vessel for desire



Bore

of little stallions under glass



The zipper of sun through the windshield

the way your mouth moves



Whistles taut and right

a quince tree silvers the sling of your back



The red jay tramples

advertise yourself as red



The whorls of your fingers repeat on the tablecloth

a single match worn away



Quick and sour with sun

handsome and scabbed with wind



Is a noun presenting a beautiful woman who allows herself to sing

clumsy with whisky



A plastic bag full of plastic bags

put everything back



Among us willing to sprint

does it register as someone you’ve been desiring



Is the fun that is done though I'm sorry I haven't had much time to belong

swallowlight sounds nearly soundless



Sat against the sloppy memory where starlings swallows

spread red thigh



All those kitchenettes stuck

spoons castor against my skull



When the lamp shone though was bitter

how steep embodies steep



Light and pillow and a butter pat collide

stalks empty slippers



Now to have more lightning

if I feed whitenesses moss



I harm my spools against you

the mirror effect of water waiting



The river is causal from this height

wind blooms against my fingers happiness



Mention leather and whippets stand on their bellies

colors I know you might prefer my laugh with a cut lip



The spinning jenny spun

flesh



Who built the floor which holds the table

curious flesh with shut blue hands



A ceiling anticipated

such yellows spin tires on commercials for tires



I wore a pillow as a body

or maybe a cat to a disinterested passion



Half a hard hard candy tucked in the chip of your cheek

the drip a red red symbol



Whereas metaphor made me an iced tea

you transformed you



The location suggests the meaning

astronauts lonely in your hands



Grasshoppers woke my pillow

with fermentation with lightning bugs



Until I’d suppressed desire I saw pin-black specks of blood

ticks smashed sidewalk flat



A dirty air

farmland flirts with itself



Thinking of you last night a spoonful fills my apartment

I come back and you’ve taken a job on a fishing boat off Alaska



I know a bridge is a kiss

finds you wet along the skin of the pour



When I see wool I sweat

when you see wool do you



Your honesty teaches me for this present

limp is no indication of how I was raised



Does

away from being silent together



Another lay green flute drawn

against tongues we forgot to tell



Water and strange machines of ellipses

waiting frames sleep



And we bow

to blue the banks slant with noon



Giving recognition though clearly through bad sun or drip

as I’ve ever felt pennies lifted by the handful off my belly