Walked up to the store
for a little more gin,
caught a car passin,
jumped in front of it,
"WHAT THE **** IS WRONG WITH YOU?"
All that honking aint nessary.

****,
Imma have
a few more drinks.
Found a ditch;
an empty
drainage pipe;
had a few more hits.

Lit up a Marlboro
and I'm back at it again,
jumping in front of cars,
yelling at *******,
stumbling the whole way,
falling like frogger
in the ditches,
passing out for awhile.

I'm just tired of being
here,
tired of being,
so imma get drunk as hell
and tell my ma
that when I'm gone
I'm gone.

I wish
I could have been alive
that hot summer day
when that yellow dress
clung to her
by surface tension.

My mother said

they sweated alive.

Sweated
arm to arm;
elbow to elbow;
limb to wet limb;
all crowded into
Mount Morris Park
waiting to see her.

To smell her.

the tacqueria's
and fish fry's
were going
and the air was filled
with grey smoke
to make eyes sting
and noses clench.

Babies
that looked like black marbles
bobbed
to the surface of the crowd
escaping their mother's arms;
perched on shoulders
screaming
into ears
not listening for new life.

"it seemed so far off."

people fainted.
One woman
fell down beside her.

A hole opened up
to let the paramedics through.

A long ****,
where her fingers,
hanging limp from the stretcher,
slid across thighs
in the closing crevice
in her wake.

"She was old anyways."

The hole closed.

The new world
formed
in her place.

Onstage,
a yellow dress
warped
in the sun.

From the back
my mother
heard a voice
like thunder,
close thunder,
thunder
like the roar
of the universe.

Nothing else was present that day. Nothing.

Just the yellow sun
and it's yellow birth of black
spinning,
sweating skin,
and a lilting thunder
like the roar of a universe
coming from
the black earth
at the neck
of that yellow, clinging dress.

"Hello."
the thunder said.

Her voice is sweeter than its path.

With so many berry leaves latticed
into the chain-link fence,
it sounds like millions of feathers
tinkling.

Her eyes are in Arizona,
in impacted zones of clay knuckles
punching their way outwards
into the redwood bone of the earth.

Her smell is wet limestone; baked apples; hungry petunias.

And the sound they make is a train,
a reveille
moving away.

Heather tells me about a recent trip to Los Angeles;
about forms of travel
that don't move on tracks,
where there is no discernable distance.

I tell her I have been here all along;
I know where you have been
and how you sound there.

I know the heathers of the world
by the berry in your mouth.

Today there were two
people talking too much
and too loud
in the library.


Guy says,
looking down
nose moving with his eyes
over the Times New Roman legs
of a book.

"He broke up with her because
her ***** smelled like ****."

The girl across from him
has tiny fingers with no knuckles,
fingers that make tacking noises
on her Macbook.

She smiles,
in aquamarine
as the screen dazzles her pale
face.

"She probably had a yeast infection,
or something."

There are too many people talking,
but what rights do I have?

The right to laugh with them,
to be a part of it,
to be a comrade
to be mad because they're talking
while I'm pretending not to listen
and agree?

I broke up with a girl
because her ***** smelled like
an *******.

There are too many people
full of double-entendres
and irony.

Driving down a North Carolina road
An hour after dusk,
A nice buzz drifting through my body
watching the fireflies dancing across two-lanes,
and the smell of grass a delightful hint on the air.
A warm breeze with a slight chill at the end
drifts through my open window
Like a cool kiss laying you in a warm bed.
And mac miller croons
His soul full of understanding
Of the messages that stem from depression.'
A couple of the quaint homes I drive by on these winding roads
have already strung up Christmas lights on their quiet porches,
because we Carolinians love a peaceful joy.
And I just know
That this is heaven.
And I know I ran from home
to escape my pain,
but to return
is an inescapable epiphany.

My mind is a tornado,
trash whirls in the attic,
temperaments
change
and
rain
like mercury falling through the cracks.

Little pools of glass
shimmer
and then vibrate madly
in my ears.

Where is that ******* riff,
whimpering up the scales?
where is that glacial voice
that used to break
in my ears?

Posted up,
Trap Keeper's
what
my girl call me,
a few baggies
near my belly button,
and my 6-inch demon
below it,
when I hand you something,
I hand it from the bottom of my stomach,
imma make you love yourself,
for a few moments
Imma be the most beautiful thing you've ever seen,
you might even love me back,
might even love my shirtless
breast, the way my tattoos
swirl and alligators pop off the letters on my chest,
I might just swallow you whole
and make you another part of my arsenal,
another inch to the sixes.

When things were going great
we'd eat transcendental dinners,
we'd take livers
in rainbow saucers
and ladle them
in tartar sauce
until our mouths
were full of salt,
sometimes we'd go to Thai China
and make interstellar fighters
out of the wise guts
of
cream-colored Starships.

But the nights when we went
to Burger King were the greatest,
we'd have simple dinners:
99 cent burgers
and fries like elephant ears,
we'd sit in our booth
in the corner,
you farting ketchup
out of like
twenty packets
into a red **** pile,
and I farted
like
twenty farts
out of my ***,
but I like
simple things;
they are natural
even if they don't sound
that way.

I would like to go to a place,
where people want to be,
the roads running
and bleeding notes
in the gutters,
a place
where people
want to remember they've been,
and fold their music
to be pushed across a rivulet
to someone across the street,
a place that could be called
a lime of abundance
or a lemon
of love,
someplace bitter
but sweetened
with just a dab
of sugar, a place
where I could become
a crystal
and dissolve
without pain,
I would like to move
out of the US
to a place
where people
learn how to talk
again
because they don't know how to talk
when they are at home,
I would like to live
in a place
where I could talk candidly
in a bar,
where I could yell
about the things
I want to yell about,
I could go somewhere
and stand in the street
and read poetry
and you would walk by,
I would be invisible,
I would be
unknowable.
I want the wheels  to come off,

I want to expect
to be blindsided by a bus
and wrap my arms
around broken headlights,
as I feel
love in her arms
in a place I have never been
and a creaming love that does not fit
into Jersey dresses
or bleached Jordans.

Now he left you with scars, tears on your pillow and you still stay
As you sit and pray, hoping the beatings'll go away
It wasn't always a hit and run relationship
It used to be love, happiness and companionship
Remember when I treated you good
I moved you up to hills, out the ills of the ghetto hood
Me and you a happy home, when it was on
I had a love to call my own
I shoulda seen you was trouble but I was lost, trapped in your eyes
Preoccupied with gettin tossed, no need to lie
You had a man and I knew it, you told me
Don't worry bout it we can do it now I'm under pressure
Make a decision cause I'm waitin, when I'm alone
I'm on the phone havin secret conversations, huh
I wanna take your misery, replace it with happiness
but I need your faith in me, I'm a sucka for love
sucka for love, know you ain't right G but yet I'ma sucka for love

I will rip
you
the **** out of me,
go through my chest
right to the back of my rib cage,
rip that ******* string out
like God yanking the lights out on the world,
I'll ******* make you dark
and hateful,
I swear
I'll just rip all that love
just to get to the naked
emaciated soul.
Rip whatever shreds
that thing's clinging too
with bony, skin-loose
fingers.

Make it all wretched,
ripping the string of you
out of me,
like the ****-string
of a shrimp,
for the world to see
I'll rip you out of me.

It's not going to be pretty
or romantic
or tragic,
it's going to be the ugliest ******* thing you've ever seen.

I make trips to the corner store, at 12 in the morning.

Calling all cars to get the **** out of the road,
I'm swerving.

Calling all lights,
blink and be gone. Streetlights,
stoplights, lamps, lighters,
blunt tips, cigarette butts,
all lights be gone.

Dear Earth, get low in the darkness.

On my first trip,
I was accosted by rabid dogs who drooled shoelaces
and I could tell they were being hounded
by the kilter of their angry maws
and sawed-off minds.

They barked like guns.

And they saw me--completely irrelevant---
popping caps off Lokos
taking sips that could **** up an Orca,
completely swimming.

I had to kick them home.

At work today,
Someone got caught stealing five pesos worth of food,
and got threatened with a felony,
but they've got some lint in their pocket,
and knew how to keep it cool.

My girlfriend operates in ideas.

I've been at work for so long,
that I yell and walk around,
like I'm in the shower.

Love is a universe of sorts,
in many ways
two people can become
galaxies
on a collision course,
their arms waiting to wrap
and warp
around each other,
or one will be smaller
and less bright
hungering to be consumed
by the supermassive heart
at the center of its lover,
or one lover
is a comet;
the other
is a sun.
the comet burns
against the corona;
it lets off a trail
sweet and cooling,
and against the sun
it feels like the beginnings
of a nova,
the final cool-down
and planet-consuming explosion of it's outer layers,
but instead,
the comet uses the sun's gravity
to slingshot into deep space,
and the sun screams
in engulfing bursts of light
as the comet trails off,
leaving behind a dissipating gas trail
in its wake,
tugging less and less,
forging an ice-road into eternity.

There should not be
a fiddle of pain.

The chords should not
strenuously
vibrate up the line
from love
to highs
of depression.

Touch them
feel the strings,
feel their strength
and breakability.

There is nothing
more touching
than empathy.

And when the final reside
becomes a resurrection,
put it in your place of empathy,
not hope.

I put you
over my shoulder
like a spooled
rope.

Twisted too many
directions,
a little tug
and you might go
anorexically
thin;

too taut for me
to yank anymore.

And when you come to me
drunk,
a *****
of yelling,
I think of those times
when we sat close together,
barely touching.

In those days,
we were both drunk
and bitter over forever.

Beers chased liquor
over steeples;
we dropped dimes of pain
over smoked ****
and bleeding anger.

Time languored,
and eventually
or anger
stymied.

When you cried
twisted beyond
compare,
I held you close,
sniffed your hair.

People hurt each other because they can,
and we lay
on a mattress of your canned hopes.

I would never be a prince charming,
even when I groped
you;
when we were tossing each other,
fighting like ghosts do:
bad jabs,
quiet knives,
softer moans.

So, I curled you
over me;
beneath my earlobe,
as your whistled tears
drained energy.

Our synergy was syphoning
each other's
pain;
coiling nooses around our hearts
and kicking out the chairs
holding up our underneath souls.

I have dreams
of taking
friends
on suicide missions.

Missions gone wrong.

We place ourselves
in the arms of destiny.

We pit
hope
against
Hades.

When the bullets
are let loose,
and their voices
are as blurred
as tears
it makes sense to say goodbye.

But to **** the evil?

The ignorance?

It seems we die
against the murmurs
of both of them.

A dark night
where the reaper
gets his fill,
where my ribs
are picked dry
until the vultures circle
the ****.

I don't know if pain
is eventual
or just a residue.

IF love
is a black hole.

Because I bring my friends into it,
I take them down
to the blackest deeps
where Ahab still stirs
crying over the white whale
as he disintegrates
into krill.

So,
I
have
dark dreams.

I dream of Judy Greer
and ******* her
until she's dead.

Dream of covering it up
with plastic tarp
and love
that won't return
even when it itself
is so ready,
it's almost magnetic.

These are nightmares.

This is waking up to sweat
at
3
in
the
morning.

The sadnessss$%!&!!
Inside is barely assuaged
By the makings of a new day,
The sun filtered through the river of clouds,
The love curtain hanging from my window,
To my cheeks is barely alive,
Barely breathes morning,
The room shrouded in this lifeless glow
A gray, drowned pallor
And i didn't get drunk last night
And blast the night with fury
But my sadness$!@@#$!!! Kept me
Up
All
Night.
And a true friend doesn't just keep you down,
They get down with you.
And in the morning when she is gone,
The sun does not greet me,
Merely a showing of face.
A courtesy. A head nod.
A flip of the hand.
Flicka da wrist.
A wraith hanging back in the mist.

When you boil it down,
really get down to the flesh,
bone;
marrow;
mitochondria;
I am nothing but a fizzled
thing
pushing
third-rate
pulses
out of a fourth-rate heart;
that's why when I ***** you to me
in an impermanent cowgirl;
chest
to
chest;
a good, running thump
is answered
by a
descending blip.

the heart is not an easy
thing
to
devour.

The black of darkness
is a black
that's not easy to conquer.

And you have
brought troops
with superior artillery,.

And she looks at me,
and I know,
it's done.

And she looks at me,
and I know.

The worst part of it all,
is that her eyes look the same
now
as they did
then,
but she just doesn't look at me
the same.

What a shame.
A **** shame.

And She looks at me
seeing all the things I've done,
and there's no going back
now.
And that's a shame.

Love is a shameful thing.

Nights
And brain cells
Wasted.
Twisting and turning
Down roads
I know won't lead me home.

Why can't you hate me openly?
That would help me internally.

Easier to be the bad guy
Than the beloved,
But worse to be the abandoned
Than the forgotten.

How many nights
Did I pour myself into oblivion?

Shot after shot,
Burning my half-lived
Half-lifes
In this radioactive wasteland.

How beautiful,
A glowing, broken heart
Always ready for fission
And you so safe
Behind that picket fence
With Mr. Right.

I'm older now, and getting older quicker
And yet,
I still lapse into the days of
Late nights and burnt pancakes,
Love songs and flea markets,
Ferry rides and indigo sunsets,
Whistling wind and your lovely lips.

I've been stranded on this island so long.
I hope you've been getting my messages. I hope somehow the abyss has a voice for me and that you can hear it and be broken too.

Battalions of rust
make war
on the Old Ford pick-up.

It becomes a sculpture
of
sunrise.

the heart is not an easy
thing
to
devour.

The black of darkness
is a black
that's not easy to conquer.

And you have
brought troops
with superior artillery,.

My
dreams
don't
dream
themselves
lazily
to sleep.

They
thrash
me
with
truth.

She's
been
cheating
all
night.

She's
been
crying
all
night.

I've
been
crying
all
night­.

I
wish
I
could
go
somewhere
where
the
sun
shines
the
whole
nig­ht
through.

a man like me
needs you
because his heart
is broken.

Sometimes
I like to think,
that what we had
was part of
a dream.

I just want to hold you
even though
you've travelled across
broken bridges
before.

I like to come back to you
in the swirling clay
of night.

When purple clouds
make my pain
seem all right.

So, I drink
to you
constantly,
because if I don't
I'll forget me
in place of the breeze
that rustles
over my rattling lungs.

I could never sing
you a song,
and I could never
drink
for
so
long.

Oh,
touch me once more,
let me feel your tiny hands,
those black fingernails
and their jaundiced
finales.

So much smoke
was wasted
over
our love.

And it makes one
go crazy.

Like pent-up rage,
a demon
in its cage
hungry for
a mouthful
it has not
had in days.

a mouth not
its own filled
to the brim.

worked on

I had so many purses
of night
that i couldn't sweat her.

I couldn't feel warmth
even in the embrace
satan
made
when he held me
in his sweater.

Hell could catch me for a thousand reasons,
I might be a sinner,
I might **** a man if need be.

But my heart
is made from a century
of hate.

A century of racism,
telling me that the white girl I loved,
was probably getting *****
when we ******
and made love
on the side.

So what can I say,
when I go on journeys
against Hades,
trying to pull life
from the depths
like Orpheus' stupid ***
couldn't do
for
Eurydice.

I'll never do it again,
this is where
the heart the begins.

In hell,
trying to make
sense
of the devil
and calling her
to make amends
for my sins
with girls
with a ***** smell like vanilla.

Blandness is a disease,
I can **** a thousand of them
with ease.

Ease is the son
of lazyness
and I've gotten careless.

New things,
New emotions,
New places,
New,
New, new.

So old to you.

All I'd wanted to do,
You'd already done.

No magic in flipping through
the pages of last year's edition.

I just hadn't read it yet,
No spoilers babe,
Please,
don't ruin it.

But you did ruin it,
somehow,
The way that lovers always do.

Without words,
But even more brutal.

You laid beside me,
As our bodies burned in the tumult.

You stared at me glumly,
As I hooted and hollered,
Energized and convulsant at the pleasures
Of the newness of each moment.

Not knowing that I was being seen through.

A placeholder.

A parenthesis.

An interesting afterthought.

That I was the means to an end.

The work-around.

That you were thinking of him.

And the countless pages ya'll had written.

But, I eventually got wise.

I saw the blank awe
For augurs:

The listless staring,
Limp kisses,
Lonesome nights
Too easily won fights.

It was written.
Written like this poem
And
Meant to be erased.

I want you to always think of me
When you think about what you've done.

And I hope it makes you smile.

I've still got the dog, *****.

This is the time of year
for lovers to break,
for rounds of applause
to burn
the
lives of millions
into a caucophony
of happiness
and unity,
for the sun to turn
over
in the sky
and get closer
with the Earth
becuase heat
is drunk love,
for clouds
to fall
and get skinny
as they writhe on the earth
and the earthworms
wiggle to the surface
for a drink,
this is the time of year
for maggots,
for destruction,
for putrefaction,
for decay,
just becuase it's getting hotter,
doesn't mean its getting cleaner,
the vultures circle
when the smell of meat
travels on thermals.

This is the time
to make plans
in order to break them,
when we make love on the beach
and get sand in our genitals,
it is because we cling to each other
far too easily,
and this time of year
will remedy
our attachment.

Spit it out, why don't you,
say that this time of year
is better
for self-loathing
and hatred
than sunny skies
and ice cream that drips
for days.

We dine off of  hearts
goaded from the sea.

Hearts drawn to dead promise
and
cold hooks.

The gills
taste metallic
and the flesh is sweet
with mercury.

The haul is yanked overboard,
and the tuna fly
like angels of vengeance
to our dinner tables
where wine
condenses the poisoned bodies
into forkfulls
of pleasure.

The meat is sweeter
than anything we have ever tasted,
we hope that it puts us to sleep.

Not wanting to ****
or cherish
the bones of each other's bodies
has led us to gorge
on these fish,
these harbingers
of comas
that we are too awake
to realize
are the dreams of the stars
filtered through the
diamond-studded
rollers of the Pacific.

The blue and cold Pacific
it pumps out
the fuel for restaurants.

Restaurants
where we gnash our teeth silently
against oily meat.

Restaurants
where I have a drink
and you have a drink
and we have our fill
on vicarious oceans
that decay in the parties
of our bellies.

Tonight we will sleep
because we are drunk
with poisoned meat.

Robbed meat.

Catastrophic
is the grinder of your mouth.

A goaded heart
is an atomic bomb
and we have our fills on them.

Until we no longer want to ****.

The mercury
courses.

The waiter
dashes back and forth.

The cook
slices and dices.

The fishers haul in a line
ten-ton lines of bycatch.

All for a single forkful
of the most sugary
thing
two people can share
when their bodies
are useless
and wheezing for the oxygen
of a purified love.

The impure line
of your 1950s body
is all curves and no nonsense.

No holding back those valleys of flesh
the pools of sweat lambent in your thighs
with the reflections of a thousand firefly's eyes.
No pain in that extra
on your pelvis.

A few pounds more,
is a few roses less, less bulllshit.

Sometimes your lips become chapped,
caked by the dryness of conversation
and the impropriety of self-consciousness
and I like to kiss them,
because mine are chapped,
and i'm so self-conscious,
so worried about that other couple
in the corner.

When we are in the dark room
of each other's arms,
and I could kiss you but don't,
or when I could grab your ***
but won't,
I keep my arms around your waist
and pull you tight, warm, and close,
just to taste the sourness of
stale deodorant,
washed away perfume,
and your old milk breath,
because you're gaining some weight
and I want to savor this heat
for licking away those lambent pools of sweat
on your tiny back,
grand piano waist,
and the crack of your ***.

Ecstasy. Ecstasy. I'm losing it
just thinking about Cosmo burning.

don't drink
like you don't mean it,
drink like you want it,
like you want no more
sorrow
and a ****** is in dire need,
put your lips
all the way to the cusp
of bitterness
to the very vector
of unhappiness,
let your tongue
loll in
the shadows
of your mouth,
let it droop and kick back
against the acid wash,
but don't hold it too long,
sorrow is a monster that likes
to creep in
at high tide,
when everything is under covers
and restless.

Kick that **** to the back of your throat,
kick it to the bottom of your heart,
the top of your soul,
the end of your salvation,
the tipping point of your love
and the blasphemy
of your hate.

Don't call out to her now,
she isn't listening
and you're not even close
to being finished.

Noisy
Noisy
Nosey
You hate to know
But
Love
          It


               Still.

When there's that couple
Sitting in the bar next to you,
And they are
Yammering
Yammering
Yammering

:0 :0

You want to scream
IT IS NOT REAL!!

...but don't
Because you have pushed away all that is real...
And don't even know anymore.

Once he's out on the open road again,
the glittering lights
devastate him.

Reminds him, too much,
of the woman who's left behind
nursing a half-glass of wine
on the porch,
eyes glossy and red,
mascara the gauntlet runner.

She's finally saying goodbye
to his sorry behind.

She hates him. Cut and clean.
"Get your ****, you need to leave."

"If you stay here, I'm calling the cops."

She whips out the phone, taps in the number
shoves it in his face.

She plays no games,
no ***** given today.

A baby bump, bumped its ugly head
into him.

Sleeping some nights, on the soft shell,
he could hear it too.

A murmur here, a murmur there,
a murmur everywhere.

She dreams of the days on the beaches,
the crystals on the clear blue,
the screeching silks careening through the sky,
the canary diamond cradled by the waves.

The good ole days
before disgust
ruined her heart against him.

The gorged days of Fall,
burning, passionate nights of Winter,
glorious victories of Spring.

One night, he flipped out,
left the house heaving
and didn't come back
for awhile.

But the nail driven
couldn't be un-driven.

Before he turned the ignition--
for thirty minutes--
he picked a blister on his thumb
until it bled.

I am
a memory,
like the sweet sugar
of justice.

The tiniest droplets of my presence,
raining down from this frozen sky,
are so insignificant to your tongue,
as to make me important.

And I wish I  was.

Wishing like
a flower,
a seedling underneath the permafrost,
hardened against winter,
harder for summer.

**** the *******
And all the noise
That harrowing guilt
It holds you down
Flowers!#@ always wilt
Always lose patience
For the sun
Love me now
But love me not
:] :]
We truck through
Just to truck through
:l :l
Love just to be loved to
???
It's easy to love
Uneasy to be
Loved.

:l
:l

The horn moans
inconsequently
like a train
baring
down
on a car with no wheels.

A bass
can rumble
across my heart
like thunder
rolling across the sky
in circling f-16s.

The trademark of war
is loss.

The trademark
of peace
is complacency.

I would rather
drop bombs
on your heart,
than rest in the obesity
of redemption
and graves.

So when the jazz
begins
in the jazz club,
I feel nothing
but war,
no peace,
no knowledge,
just a war of teeth-*******,
mind-*******
drenching
limb-*******
hope
that
I
will
see
you
again,
when I know that no peace treaty
has ever been signed
without a loss
on
all
sides.

What peace is there
for a love-sickened heart?

What dreams reside
in the memories
of kisses?

I've got a date
with the devil,
she never wears stilletos,
just a pair of chucks
and them lee dungarees,
if I order a drink for myself
I have to order one for her.

"Are you going to drink that?"
I ask.

It's just been sitting there for awhile,
so warm and hungry.

"No,"
she says,
and her eyes are already pocked
with burst blood vessels,
already glassy with my soul,
she's got it now.

So I take it,
and take everything she's got to give.

Which is a lot,
considering.

Today drunks got up,
on an upended axis.

And wobbled
on driven souls,
driven to ****
and let the hate loose.

A drunk walked in mud
to work,
and his boss sported a smile
of sad pride.

He had done a great job,
and no one knew.

When they were sitting down
on the couch,
cracking the air with laughter,
the country man
looked up
and saw
a daughter of light on the floor,
slitted through the blinds.

He wanted so badly
to cry.
But didn't.

An imp limped
upstairs
and down, back again
to the basement,
and his old ma
heard him sparingly.

So much happened to day,
so beautifully
sad,
clear, and azure,
that the masks
of nails
spiking our faces,
slowly wore down
against steel skin.

When the sun went down,
aching for pain again,
they took the first swig,
then a second.

I just wish no one
would know
that I'm crying.

That i'm inside
this lonely house
and I'm putting on different suits
just to get through.

I just wish you'd take me back,
just wish you'd give me one more chance
because you've got a hold on my heart
and it just won't let go.

Touch me with a kiss
or hand print on my soul,
I don't know know what it means to love,
but for me,
it's defined by the threat
of this super-massive black hole.

You **** me in,
and I want to let go of my light,
for the last second
of my life.

Love fills me up
and I water the garden
desperately.

With dead petunias on the floor
I crawl on my knees
just wishing for them to grow.

"Where do you find
these
broads?"

I don't know.

But i find them
so that I can love them.

So that I can love them
until it hurts
and I am left with a stinging
pain.

So many wasps have stung me
before.

I have placed the royalty of their stingers
in the waste
of heart break.

The knives are finally out,
I swipe at a million hives,
until I have finally cut the wings
of one.

*******,
The spider said.
Evil, evil thing to say,
To the fly stuck in your web.
I'd be gone in an instant,
If I hadn't been bitten,
Paralyzed,
Paroxyzed,
Entanglyzed.

Those shimmering beautiful eyes
And delightfully sweet and spicy aroma of your juicy *****.

My lips
Knew a thousand ways to make your legs curl and your body shrivel. To make the web bounce and thrum.

But it was you,
Charlotte,
You who knew the fool in me
That loved to love.
You, Charlotte,
Whose beautiful shimmering eyes and plump body
Fattened me up for slaughter.
And I loved you for every minute of it.

Even as you devour me now,
I close my eyes to the sound of your poison coursing through my veins,
Thrumming along,
Music to die by.

I miss you
like the tree and the leaf.

It is inconceivable
that I have been given to you
and you to me
without the generosity of fate.

i thought you were
just a pretty white girl
and my ignorances
was dashed
upon the rocks
by your voice of freedom.

nature could not conceive
of a purity of a secretive love
more than you
have given to me.

There are a lot of yous
in the world,
and yet there are none.

I have tried to propagate
the same seed
in you
as I have
in black girls,
puerto rican
and irish
that I loved
who fell for my rico suave ****
so easily.

And that is not to say that
you are as easily
enforced
by the landscapers
of love
as them.

Love is love,
but I have not
felt a seed so
irrevocably
as your seed
that burns
the root
so easily.

And in me,
I have never felt so crazed
because i have learned the bias
of flesh
that wraps my heart
deeper than your skin.

Trust me
in the depiction
that I have
constantly visited,
that your flesh
is numberless;
your cheeks
so
fleckless
yet with so many scars.

I can eat a thousand
worms in a day,
I can devour
the whole of the earth
with the roots
of a player.

But there are girls
and there are women,
there are leaves
and there are seeds.

The leaves browning
in autumn,
the seeds giving in spring.

And the colorless
gender
of night
knows no bounds,
because there is not a race of love
but an insanity
of love.

So to the black girls,
white girls,
puerto rican
and italian
that I have loved,
I am not color-blind
but blind
in the dank night
humid
as your voice
with no name,
no race,
no label,
no gender,
no reputation.

You fall in love with a man
who's in love with his disguise.

He wears a black suit, black tie,
covers himself in glory, his eyes the starry sky.

In his bed, the book is written.
faithful lover, he authors your prison.

You cling to the book of his love,
singing its melancholic words.

In his black suit, black tie,
his scorn covers you in bruises, blackens your eye.

But the book, you still read
even after he leaves, and the love is dead.

You're disgusted by those lines,
losing faith in all of mankind.

You'll find yourself in time,
but one day again, you'll become the man in the suit and tie.

E.J. pulls the last one out of the box,
slowly now,
with his forefinger
and thumb.

The fore
is square.

Almost cut.

Like he'd taken a box-cutter
to it after inhaling
all that BUD Light
in that dangling,
shimmying
hose in the truck.

The thumb is normal.

He lifts the Pall to his lips
with the deliberateness
of a crane operator
laying the last brick,
before the whole thing
burns to the ground
in fluttering, liquid ashes.

The fore is useless,
so square
that the **** dangles
even when he pinches it.

And E.J.
looks down at it with those watery
fire-choked dog-blue
eyes
and
exhales a
spectre.

Saw a ******* on the border.

Looking for fireworks and something
To keep her busy for the rest of the night.

I was shuffling through black cats and m-80s.

She was in a pink spaghetti strap shirt
and  a black ***** belt.  

Brown eyes
like cut-down bamboo.

When she walks by, a little kid
steps on my chucks and trips.

The kid was trying to squeeze in between
Her and a dude who was trying
To talk to her.    
                                                                                                                          
The floor
Is littered with plastic broken fuses,
M-80s and a texture sticky like
It had been mopped with *****.

Too me she was beautiful.

Not seen or heard from
you
in awhile.

I sat on the bus today,
with the strength of vinyl,
and a girl slinked by me
in a flower-print sundress.

Her plastic bra-straps stradled her shoulders,
akimbo
and slippery wet.

And the man in the front seat
almost lost his head,
when the bus rolled.

Not seen
or heard from
by some other woman.

Took a drive this morning,
ate my cigarettes,
inhaled gasoline,
put my feet on the curb
leaned on my hood,
and not seen or heard from
I waited for the movie to start.

The bobcat yowl of an NSX
pronounced the night
as quick,
and your serrated memory
cuts
like it should.

Not seen or heard from
you
in awhile.


I bet you smoke
with the other waitresses
and waiters,
busboys,
hosts,
hostesses,
managers,
line cooks,
and
chefs.

I bet you have a good time
in that tiny cafe,
where you run
from table to table
with that wild hair,
and can abandon yourself
to short-term memory
and long-term

loss.

Not seen or heard from you.

All the things that make a person
Feel home, not unamused,
Not Bewildered, not beholden
To another place and time,
They did not come back with me on that plane ride,
Maybe i thought i'd dropped a peice of me,
Over the atlantic,
And i'd get it back coming home,
But no, i am there
Not here,
My stare is blank sometimes
I know,
there is nothing there.
I laugh, for all the wrong reasons,
I am not here,
Not present,
I'm laughing at tragedy,
The tragedy of  self left behind.
I drink, to get drunk
And let loose let loose of everything.
I drink to rage it out,
To yell, to cry through madness.
To fight and be fought.
To lose and lose again.
To not have anything,
And think i'm deserving.

It is not enough
to stomp on our hearts;
It is worse to stomp
on the ground we find beautiful.

Randy was drunk and high
and skipping school.

She'd sipped on a few too many sips
of crown royal,
and that wasn't the reason
but she says,
"that didn't help."

Javaughn picked her up
beside the chinese place.

"You want to go back to your place?"
he asked.

"whatever,"
she said as they passed
a fat blunt,
fat with the demise
of depression.

They wound up in her room,
him taking her clothes off,
her saying no
in her mind.

So drunk and high
she couldn't say anything
but saying no
in the asylum of her mind,
the peaceful place.

But she said no.

"I gotta finish," he said.

NO she yelled.

But it was colorless.

And she receded into a space
of novas,
a space where bodies exploded
into a web of elements;
a web of objectivity,
of lost usage.

He pushed and pushed
and it hurt her more and more
as she saw his nostrils bending
more and more.

He continued his huffing,
no she said,
placing his hands on his chest,
no,
she said,
placing her hands
on the echo of his heart.

But he continued,
he had to finish,
and he did.

laying there huffing and puffing
human
he did,
as she lay
with a t-shirt still on
and ******* wet with pain,
crying in her mind
of the cosmos,
the paint of objectivity
and lost humanity.

He left,
and she stayed,
locking the elements
in her heart,
like the trapped carbon
of earth.

And so she cried
and I held her
as she told me,
because I did not know
what else to do.

What are we doing?
Why must she cry?
Why can't everything
be all right?

Because it is not.