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.

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.

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

Rape in the Toy Aisle

You said the blood was sweet like a weapon. I want to sharpen against you my sense of irony, Dear Loved One, my olives dripping their brine on your face from my marigold mouth. When I told you I wanted to touch your Germany, I was being sarcastic. I wanted to touch the deep reptile of you, sock your handcuffs back out, be inebriated by your attention until I could no longer swallow. What else would we stuff. The blood was sweet like a weapon rotting. Sharp with the taste of the freshwater-filled creatures that grow in salt. The undersea vents that test us like disease. Take the dripping hold and shut it. Be a boat, okay. Be a boat and wet yourself on the underside. Provide anchor for tiny mulligans. Be a blood caboose. My face is wet with tearmarks that you paint over with a watercolor brush made of sable dripwet hairbelongings. The elf is dying in me. The inside of me is the blood that terrifies. I am afraid. I am afraid and I don't want to show it. Tell me your safe word so I can break it. I don't have any desires that don't direct me. Direct me.

Thesis

Favorite me, Mom, somersault
sweating your pockets. Whistle lit sugar
skeined in figure eights a rainbow of skims
of blue and blue. Your soul wants to burn
down the lower staircase or a bedding
throat. How we eat with no lips
of light by the fur of your drapes
my wanting wanting.
You think, silver had to thaw
flesh so awkward come to mind
when ducks dial underwater: A pause
in the universe's cold. We don't see
where the wild fours grow a chrysalis,
your pieces flush
with Venetian blind on the painted wall
above the cubing jewel of the shadow
body, thirsty and searching
for a clock. The disordered
bones of night cough up
a yellow spotted frog, fraught,
that my face transforms. How I become
a block a block forgiven.

dapper


arrangement


six then eighteen syllables
slut against me


erupt


you
bloom
swallow
bed


new
board

tend


remind me
to speak German


anvils


chippery

go

clipped

undead

No. Orleans


beardish


bed bugs

go


forbid me
and I will


go

undead


chicory



stolon
stamen

pilfer
dent

dendrite
blowsy

grail
stale

musty

fierce

entire

"many builders perished"


release

meatly melt met me meant measure mass must mast melange

deeping

figurines

clay

boxes

yard

slump
lines

born

epicenter

cave

meat

able

running



tabula rasa

white jade

bone
slimming


an eye on the thumb of a finger

rooted in the sacrament

name your characters


salmon bone

shilling

corpsy

insist
love
cell
lift

dank

show
repeat

peep

grabby

enamored

inamorata

hunger

deus ex machina

pharmacopeia

politics

grief

peckish
dance
salad
concupiscence

science

write about seedy things

transformation

pretend sleep

hocus pocus hanky panky

hillory pillory

pumpish
pumpkin

Erlkoenig

exchange

sultan

plum

potatoes

smash

ceremony

brand

lamely

fingerprints

why we have

plinth

oblong

true

pugs

grabbing

parting

wash

panda

shard

gussy

oblong

grabbish

he knows nothing about it

underground

ability

sidebar

parnting

landing

ice

tarp

gussy


a body

split



peach peach peach


shark


hork


fog
kidney


cut


precious
school

When I asked the girl from Alaska if she'd heard of Lebanon bologna she hadn't

"Milton I need to speak to you in confidence"

You could tell she put the sticker on her check pretending it had come there by accident

Please sit

I'm a widow now

"I just wanted more than I thought I would want"

"I can think of someplace if you're serious"

He has a weird relationship with women

A young blond man if you were going to sell him

What I heard about different spellings for the word blond

"It's my husband"

Let's divorce

I want to tell the world but it's too beautiful

Where else can I allow myself to repercuss

It's you


A FLOWER

in my morning together with my perception of you and (ring tone up like a seive) (up a sleeve) my perception of me

I am the raw starfish morning,


GARGLING

predator prying myself open bivalvic

a fresh breah (but with my occasion irregularity) in the mist

assault

peregrination


HICCUPS

in the rocking chair


I came down to the water then I sang my chockcherry lips part weapon

I put out the other dollar signs and the sound of the beach was crying

allow another standard of living

allow which other connection

I glanced up to Lake Washington

the glance was the thing

it felt like Greece at a similar elevation

is sea level the same everywhere and how long does it take me to make decisions

I'm going to leave you soon

I cannot answer any of your questions I can't even hold a piece

no starchy vegetables at all to back you up

Paper Towel Commercials

I rumple my window
wine will lock my quiet

oh beautiful trap
the uxor of sleep
beyond the sun
is a Cheshire camel
and a ghost its hand over its thin forehead
the gamut
dianthus below the bleachers
in red bleat
the hole is too beige

wine will lock the door behind my quiet

I will guide my forty-five gills

through the luxury of hot caged sleep

rotting apples and the gamut

my stallions a cheap breakfast for one and all

the rotten smell of wet dry sand wetting and drying day after day in the sun

tv is an effective babysitter

I am a network of neurons though you can't tell me exactly what it is that you feel

all the holiday traffic

to help my own release valve I am my own summer house

the fucks have it

I bloated a ten-gallon

my own sweet Caroline

calming like ink through fabric

a hankering for shoo fly pie

get ready for the onslaught

my own new blue shoe

what stylish garden shears

make certain to leave the state early

the sun lightnings a sandy meadow

there are more than five hundred variations of the traditional dart game

fearing in flocks enough company

seeking sticky-armed man

why have flavors

her friends grew up poor

my sweet tooth insufferable but water should calm me down

bamboozled

chocolate covered cherries

the galloping minds forget to worry

tamed

to be the leisurely version of myself

I have been here at my own throat

tictacs and whitepink grapefruit flesh as offerings

stars land like lust tasting grit

carry a child a plate of hot peppers

alive with patterns themselves like mice

the gardens of stone tiger from siblings

a ballerina stomping machine

the option to be a cracker maven

the hole itself too big to feel

had it become the desert stormy little window plastic

the face was targeting me

I put pens in things so that I do not lose my place

oh beautiful trapper

schedules of fruit today

to feel strange asking to let you know everywhere in these small North Carolinas

I couldn't

I was too sad

even in dreams

impulsivity and who is going to pay my bills

sprout for me pornographic fantasies

beyond the sun is a Cheshire cat and a thin ghost with its hand across its forehead

though I'm glad the men make a field trip of going to pick up the bleachers

end the season

what are some of the things I love about Laporte, Pennsylvania

fireflies on a summer night

the sweet smell of ferns

no tv

the sound of the Loyalsock

newts

deer feeding on blueberries at dusk

I love all the spiders here and the way the forest looks at dust

I love moths and flies and dragonflies

I love the dianthus and the day lilies and the fresh asparagus growing in the backyard

going barefoot

the sounds of the bullfrogs at night

the birds all day long

eating meals on the wrap-around porch

fresh flowers on the table

sweet corn and plums

tomato and cucumber salad

I love blueberry and peanut butter sandwiches

the cool mystery of the forest even at noon

brooks springs and wells

the smell of the land after rain

we had corn and went for a walk to catch the sunset like sherbet before it melted

a butterfly a photogenic one at that

Mom's junk was everywhere but my junk was everywhere too

hot day salad: baby spinach, red pepper, tomato topped with pomegranate juice and olive oil

it's red to beat the heat

words are bloody lipprints

eggshells make the best and shiny coffee

it rubs your teeth the wrong way

Mom how many men do you think your daughter has slept with

and your son

what did you think we were doing on all those sleepovers

sit down and be a troop

doctor's orders that I fatten up a bit

about our dad

I find myself being the harsh judge of what a father should be

about your near-miss was it with the law or was it more a debacle in personal hygiene planning

there was an island village and on it were some faeries named Thelma Rose and Hodgkins

give them juice

they look famished

I really wanted like a seashell to reinvest in myself

the joys of paranoia

to be gay in a small town

it's a strangle

without one another the nap before the storm

I always feel like I have to have funny stories to offer up as though my presence was not enough

I Macbeth myself around the house, playing gay, putting on my pretty slippers and fuzzing up the floor. I’m a pom pom, I flit, I act exasperated when someone says something intelligent. What’s that, first in the yard, the pugs I adore, the little wuvly pugs I call names in babytalk and shush with my herringbone lips. This winter I knew it’d be cold so I wrapped myself in ermines and royal purples to keep in the blood heat. For you and for the moon so you could feel comforted, both reflecting your light off my sateens. Toys in an attic, I tell the nature poet, to see what she’ll write with it. Then I tell her let’s play make-up housewives together. Missoula housewives take their blond hair on a walk. Honey gums my fuzzy slippers and I am marooned. Honey, I call, please remove me from this poem. It’s sticky and getting deeper. And if I stay so sweet a dog will chase me! I wish the woman poet were my man. I wish I could entertain myself so swiftly as the dogs chase me, my little pugsy wugsies and I stomp the honey off. I am a strong lacuna, I tell myself. I tell myself I am my own lacuna. And that if something’s not right it mustn’t be attributed to my lack of attention to detail. I flit, I shop, I am gay in my tights and boots I found on sale but bought them full price anyway, for the story of it. A certain figure transposes itself inside my brain. It starts as a full pot of rice, is licked, and becomes magic. A magic Bridget Riley I want to take into my orifice and kill for her adorability is unacceptable here. There is only one speaker, there is only one eye, this poem is for Lucie Brock-Broido as I respect her hunger but not her methods. I am eyeing her niche in the futureworld and telling my slippers to seek it. Run, feet, run. The birds this morning remind me of my nature poet, I’ll name her Bridget Riley and I am bipolar about her. I am running myself into the bridge I dreamed about and have been writing poems about since I began writing this morning, fuzzy slippers ajamble near the gut of my hips, I bon bon myself into American society an American blue holiday wherein gay men in their late adolescences and early adulthoods drink themselves to death. Unless they’ve killed themselves with shotguns or found themselves pinned to an IV drug and HIV positive, bareback and with no elders to look to. Tell me it isn’t so, my slippers whimper, I whisper back, it’s true. This is a Fort Hood that’s been going on too long, too slowly, too many gay men dead. No sociologist will touch me. Two novels I’d like to write involve the serial self-destruction of gay men. It’s not limited to us, I tell my slippers, it could be anyone denied. Nature longs after a voice, expresses itself in trees and when we begin to kill one another we defer nature, tell it it's almost time for peace. What about the dead. What about our grief. And the names of those who have killed themselves show up in the newspaper as heart attacks or unspecified. The family is ashamed. And may not suspect their loved one was gay. In the afterlife they criticize us for not stomping out of our slippers and caring. What is no longer demanded hurts all of us. The criticism the breeze picks off is not loud enough. Gay love poems were never enough. The gay couples I look up to are not monogamous. They are the only ones I see together. Montana is rife with heterosexism. I can’t hold my boyfriend’s hand in the street so I don’t have a boyfriend. My sick slippers are off my feet and heading to bed. This is what I want to do. This is where I want to give up and stop. This is where my dead friends are remembered and I don’t tell anyone that I feel sad. This is my shame at the grief I feel for my dead. The dead men I don’t know who died of AIDS. All they got was this stupid quilt. Fuck off, I tell myself, but maybe I need to hear it. In that movie where all the gay men die of AIDS. Oh, we’ve never heard of it. Filmmaker, make it. In that song where all the gay men die of AIDS. We’re still being born. Stillborn into a society that doesn’t recognize our pain. Untitled performance artist, would you stand up in mixed company and tell a message. Will you couch it in rhetoric so people don’t trust it. A tree in the backyard echoes my grief. I have never been able to express it. I couldn’t cry for days. It’s physically exhausting. This poem is a distinction I’m making to myself for my own laziness. I’m lacking the resources to do anything but write this poem and be angry. I want to be angry at you for agreeing with me. What does it mean if you agree with me. What will any of us do. I can’t bring back my dead. I can hardly remember.

The Sun Bakes Me Into The Seat Of This No Air Conditioning Car

seven

colors

create

rainbow

shadows

clouds

seven

trees

windy

cinders

grasses

slopes

fields

trails

seeds

insect

color

white

lights

green

rainbow

shadow

greens

blues

violets

through

glass

inside

clouds

grains

hills

yellow

slopes

clouds

blues

ochre

cadmium

white

light

grasses

clouds

waving

whites

shadow

windy

stormy

dirty

dusty

bright

sunny

white

bare

the apples

offal

sharp sticks

ticker clock

dry rot

dry socket

brush

teeth

hair

stained from

breastmilk

raw egg blood

fertile

forest of teeth

stiff hair

know

not split open bloody but deep

dry ache

it is not my pain

warm skin

slick tides

blood

greedy eyes

not you not your

needs are no explanation

Grass Hair, Plated Flat: Shades of Sinew, Yellow

the sevens

the time alone

intense

a movement game

a stick of lime

ignore the response

abilites

march moon

april stars early

moaning no response

their response

the time table

water table

stick

figure me the numbers

tell

tailed

sloping

justify

read me out

order

time time

wait for

starry

in until

white

chalky

standing here in the glares

from windows

from eyes

gloves souls

marching

seeing me from all angles

no justification left

planes

no more

stars

tangled hair in gel of combs

black things

nets nest

nougat

monster

soaking acceleration

morning

moor mired anchor safe anchor haven fleeting

stoke the fire

ticker vehicular

stardust

music on the radios of you

dream you dream you dream you dream

days of clearance

up up I tell my eyes but they are stuck to that floor

the plum tomatoes

her pears bear her cactic nipples

dry dark tentacular growth

sticking teeth

into siblings' skins

cane

canned rot

that glass reflection

at the well not the bottom of the stairs

but somewhere near there

who's going to make breakfast

the children especially no

no no

well maybe but still no

fecund

dark hooting

are we outside the bed

did we learn of the abuse

yet

and if not then when because it was

every time

skin slough

hurt

all gone no longer

don't

we will not take responsibility

slender limbs

every one knows

any one can know

the knowing you know

stop

at the red

nails

Encounter with a Breakfast Gnome is the Sighing of the Goldfish Tank or Talking to my Brother-in-Law About Sexual Abuse

tangerine

time I mean

a bowel movement

yogurt

granola

pick up trash hearing

children's voices

the specific

voices of specific

children while trying

to fall asleep needing

hydration the high

fructose corn

syrup nightmares where

you wake up

no certain

temperature no particular

place and then you're hearing me

here

you

on the bellies of my nocturnal

night

shift on

my chest

and belly of it all tell

tell me why the lockers

are full

of rot

oranges and stick

tables why all that wet

wood soaked with

citrus and you

with

the combination

you said the morning would be ripe but my bed was cherry blossoms

and you

kept laughing

I can't

help

the bugs from taking turns the sand fleas

fear

the garden of naught

enzymes cultures

active yeast

brew a mirror to

my brain you

you

you tell

me of the desert

when you

think lemon

it is mid morning but we neither

know nor tell what is

dusted there

the carpetbaggers birth

family

toddlers

steam cleaning sugar

sugar raws the roof of my mouth

the chew the rinse the stare

crumpled

breakfast

some wild mushrooms

don't run the diapers off

a light a flashlight a saw

at night

the poison

needle

and mommy

why are all your names made

of grapefruit the syllables sour

and juicy sibilance

raw citrus

a mess

of

noodles

slippery

mirror are you

pretty

you beautiful horse shining moonbeams off your intuition

are you a unicorn

with the

long

and longing

Grandma

I hear you tell my sister her doll is ugly. It is. Cabbage Patch dolls are.

I have a garden and hedges and a hill and a sandbox and crabapples and crayons, ducks and small children around me. My mom babysits a girl named Allison I like because she is quiet and doesn’t touch my toys.

Grandma, you who teach me depression is unacceptable, crying in secret.

Solid synapses clap, the tripleting of the heartbeat tribunal, it makes my face blank the way your face is washed and drifts.


---------



I’d chosen the French horn because my cousins played it, and she'd sneered.


By then, I'd had tens of lovers. Her honesty taught me how to be cruel and loved the more for it.

This limp and hanging thing I present to you is no indication of how I was raised.

Told (I objected) as though you were the one I was scared to object but I poisoned your blind wet comb in a hurry against your body hair and my aphasia.

My pouts I suffocated in oatmeal so bridges I build move heaven in carriages to you and along your rimming perception I see and attract, me kissed across a coital meadow with your sex seating soot along my britches.

My haunches wear fear were fair.

Warfare I move to be at the new bridge looking very small behind trauma.

This means I hurry wet trees in almost lavender patterns to cite the peacock and fortress the bridge to grow it strong.

It could taste my mouth as my small running dream you almost spindle closed, the nose, my home, any utensils I use, the new moon to be away from you, trip then plant taste at your crooked running.

I post beauty, another post in the bridge treeing.

How can I build without wanting to sell you my chrysalis and lights so you can see me back at those old oatmealed bridges.

Are you finally poisoned.


I know spinning and work and tone and water is two wheeling is in this fell you kissed myself you were all you’ll wake I thought.

Conscious, I slow I take about you had better really calm and pout a Wonderland in it in my realm of couldn’t you’d better not hit anything on the head my condolences and I was the one treeing here I was that upset that when there were condolences they weren’t directed at me.

But it being not when but then it being then I manipulate you I believe you don’t object then when as I flexed I had read out to your uncertainty at the rain I created then and tried hard to brew rumors.