When I write long songs I will create them out of others’ books of poetry, in this case from Refuge by Belle Waring

He’s got me thinking of cucumbers as “earth-apples.” Eytmological heart-digger, I want to be a ringer. A tide has dropped me on the faux shore. On the gold-dug shore, on the want of something neat. Broken windows, wings, open the weather eye above me, gentle bird of prey you’ve taken my best friend’s puppy. Loud, this is problem poetry. Too gentle, too unwrought, too muscular, I found myself cumming all over your edges. I found myself lapsing into harmonics, vibraphones hung with chandelier-shaped ears.


I’d like him to hold me until we both fall for doctors. Because, though we won’t get married, he’ll become a successful clinical psychologist. Thank God I’ve already eaten, Goldfish and whole plain yogurt and a banana. My scar is through healing, it’s wanting its own Lifetime special. Grainy pornography, how you make me want. I saw black and white cookies, frosting, glaze, ceramics in your bedroom. A glass of milk is craving our mouths. Wanting to plural its hormones in us, I want to drink your infanticide right out of you, I’ve wanted inheritance too long.


To remember you is a shot of bourbon
too soon. I forgot to drink myself to death, who knew? You took my bedsheets and drowned your little dog in them. I never knew you had a little dog, the little grave, a gavel I gave you for Christmas so you could better judge me, our outfits unwittingly coordinating. I bless myself in Hamilton, Montana with being cruised by a just-out-of-jail youngster and his mother, shopping in the thrift store. So many gays in such rural places.
So they catch me—Who cares? You should see the smile on my face, and the grin on his dick, the chocolate kiss. O the round apple flight I cut the rump with a taste of sasstacicity. Green apple, dun almond, rope and flight and trumps.


Breeze steps out for a crack of cold air off the street and realizes its done being bitch to smoke. Done being the landslide no one remembers, election year hazy from all the mustard. I wanted to click on you, hard as pavement, smooth as warm sand. I had texture all over you, my skin cracked in want. I have long longed for you, your warmth, your sand the hand you hold above me, vowing to crash.


When the old man made Kays eat her name, I told myself naming was out of the question. Who am I to tell Adam he should be Jacob, how Biblical we all were, naming and capitalizing ourselves. If we were German all our nouns would be uptight and so tall, so brown with histrionics, I sought crime, I sought the Nazi background of my ancestors, I just want to know if my grandparents were considerate. I hope the ground swallows up whatever pleasures I can’t absorb, knowing how hungry I am for color. Knowing.


Last winter the birds dropped frozen colorblind, socked a whisper I pleasured myself on the pleather cloud couch. The blue heron was watching me from my bedroom wall, my cat gratified herself beside me, nothing storms like the sage of the rain, I brought myself to the wall of my heart and it was beating without me, without you, for me, for you, for the tires we sought to drive one another terrible wild and gutty.


Isabel tried to warn me, to tell me in my dream that we were shattered. We could never allow one another peace. So we left one another, I took west, you east, and we split the country like an almond, we sat down in our respective carriages and sought. I sought my heritage by running as far away from it as I could, my memory bad enough to remain unspecific. The morning was rueing itself in my hair, the hands of crossing the hands of tired melody, the grog of morning was gutting my mouth, frazzing and rounding and laving mad.


Breeze has a neighbor who’s real hot
though I’d never believe it coming from her. Everyone knows Breeze is a terrible lier. Remember when we were in New York at the same time and didn’t know one another yet? That was terrible, too. We were in the same book store, even, though maybe not on the same day. I know something’d been wrought there. Your footsteps are warm on my brainpan.


Last time you woke up pregnant and it was a dream, induction to the hall of mirrors.


Only a slug would read without the required salt. The rest of us need scrambled. The rest of us need eggs.


For years I have been depressed enough to tell you it didn’t matter when my friend wrote book after book about boots. I told you it didn’t matter when I was shot in the gut with my feelings. When I was accused of martydom, accused of my own rage and pent-up killing. A sprain went up in the gut when communication faltered.
It always falters.


When nine planets queue up in Scorpio this book is out of date. There are only eight planets now, though more moons are discovered as we speak.


They roll their eyes when I walk in. Late. Though space and time don’t really exist. We’re both here now, an illusion. Can we elude to sex through a long space, through bodies that have never existed together, the way I fucked Beethoven as reward for his Ninth. Don’t plaster me with chivalry.


You smell of ginger root and sage, and I want to lick you until you smell like bubble soap, like carbonation, like salt spray after a summer beaching. I want to want to want to memorize your caw.


This morning an asteroid just missed
our torture. If we could arrange a fire,
would we?