your birthday
is this month
i remember
telling you
about how
my ex always
texted me on
my birthday
(we usually
laughed)


but now what
do I do when
we're so close
to that wound
do I just not
say anything
at all?

there is more to it all
than running away,
which i have always
and never done

i used to cap my
bones in steel
wash them over with
milk, stand at the river's
edge and feel myself sink
in the pierce,
without ever wading
out,
you could call it a somatic
symptom, as if blowing away
were a disorder--
and yet feeling heavy
enough to sink a thousand
ships but they
should know i'm
no Helen.

this message has
been on my lips
a train of thought
stuck to the tracks
woven between teeth
a mesh of necklace
lodged behind my ramus
a chain of words working
into my tongue
i am convinced there is
less light than I thought
that i have never smoked
a cigarette in my life but
i am blacker and deeper
than any ravaged lungs
made of  about as much water
that sees Atacama
on a good day
and I am

raging.

i am your

                                                  arrow


r­elease me where
you
will

we were out on the porch
on an abnormally warm december night
with little glow florence off to the west
and he hadn't said much of what was there
because when he says nothing he is, with
his words laid out beneath pearl snaps
scrawled down his stomach--I would know,
i've seen his the tyrades plow, resentment
run thick, angry words rampant in his veins--

so he says nothing, and I know.

often times he is an open door and
i am the wind, in billows or gasps, rattling
hinges, finding holes, peeling paint or gathering dust
a spool of thread wrapped around stonehenge to remember
curls of foilage, svelte figureheads on galleons, I tell him

that I want to be with him and he says nothing. won't even look at me,
he's somewhere far away, drawn into penrose like a soul sunk in the
dirt, I say it again, and he tells me we should go inside


so i want to ask if that is all i am,
if that is what this is, if i am only good
for one night or two hours, in bits and pieces
limbs and moisture, if as a whole i am too much
but still lacking, if the warmth of my hips is
all that's needed but the grand luminance of a soul is out of the question?


But I say none of that, just follow him inside.
A hundred questions trickling down my spine, gathering in my femur, my calves, gusting into my lungs, I don't know how to be more than this and less, I'm opening up the cavity of my chest and pleading this

this is all there is.
I am all that I can be

He said I was an
Arnold Palmer
but there is too
much lemonade
in my bones.

he kept asking why i was
making the face

what, you don't believe me?
no, I don't.

in fact everything he said had
a metallic ring, everything slid
too easily out of his mouth,
workin his tongue like it
had a slit or flossed his
teeth with thin fibs
don't take off their
boots 'cause they
know they gonna run

and it's funny 'cause
that's what I'm trying
not to do,

well if you have
to write a song about it
is it lifted from your heart?
did you press yourself
between the pages like a
daisy?

I did,





I did.

I keep having
these dreams about
you, (I keep having
these dreams about you)
i have nothing to say
a lot of redundancy, mom, why
is it taking me so long?
was it because of the
night in the barn?
I dunno, I tell myself.
I can put on a pretty good show,
i guess, I'll sit at work and
reprimand myself behind the
fax machine, you told him you were done
but that was really for the greater good,
and I think about how to him, everything
has the potential to be fixed--
like people are brick buildings or
wooden shelves or long pipelines,
he's been fixing everything for a while
welding all his wounds shut and shootin'
the rats that find their ways into his room--
that doesn't change the things he said--
that I won't bother repeatin'

redundancy, like i was saying earlier.



that doesn't fix the dreams
how I changed a little with him
that I feel a little warmer with
sweet tea, with milk, with the
old men that walk into the bank
all watery eyed and spotted,
who I have to yell at so they
can hear me past half a century
of haulin' hay, i dunno,


i dunno. Dakota brought
out something good in me
the way streams wash out
little flecks of gold


i'm okay


I think.

All drafts
too many

edits

I'm only made of silk and sometimes I tear easily

It might be beautiful when I do, when I break

Elegantly, in private

Wake in the morning, half swept in fantasies

where my fingers have only touched those in dreams

the faces I could never kiss outside

I might even fall in love with you

no one taught me to read before I read.

I've always held the propensity for
unbridled curiosity, i'd have thought
that was obvious--
how many questions have I asked you
in such a short time?
and I saw the things she said about you
and broke into a dozen white-hot pieces
against your skin, probably sunk through
your spine and landed in the bed of your truck
burned a hole through the casing and smoldered
into the dirt--
I didn't quite understand the hurt, I guess,
but i imagined your name leaving her lips
like a scowl, so few syllables wrapped in
an unwarranted viciousness, there is still so much
i don't understand, so many things I want to ask but--

your name could never be so wrong
if only defamed by such a girl
and I realized I couldn't make
that better as soon as you
said I'd dug up the past
but matthew I just want
you to know that

you're too beautiful for these things
too good for these people,
i've seen your heart, you
can lie, you can lie, you can
lie, you could never speak to
me again but i'd still know
the truth--
tougher than the rest
come out swingin'
bare your teeth
hold your breath
you're still
softer than them.

before the maroon 5 concert
chaz said his mom wasn't home
she had stripped his mattress and
put everything in the wash
and I only remember wondering
why it hurt so much
and the silk threads of the seams
catching on my bra straps--
I had thought it was
supposed to be so much more
than pumping and churning
like pistons in a truck,

the difference was you
stopped when I asked
shiverin' above me in
a warm sweat
and all i could do was
run my fingers through
your hair over and over
stay silent and move slowly
because no one has ever seen
me like that, wavering
and rocking, working my
way up, using your hips
like training blocks, stretching
my thighs out over your bed--
lord I ain't ever asked for more
never bruised nobody 'cause
I wasn't thinkin', he's got
these welts i don't even
remember, he sayin he let me
in like he left the door's open
during the storm and I was
rain, hail or wind, a noise,
a knock, just me.
but I opened the windows,
the basement, the attic
pulled out the chairs in
expectation, I have nothin'
to say for my fears, they're
there and sometimes they
shift gears and gun it
but that don't mean
i didn't look at you
and wonder about
things I shouldn't
or replace my daddy's
name with yours just
to
see.

Do you remember the splinters
from the tanbark, your whole
body burned

Travis stands outside the grounds
with me and listens while I recount
the past two months, several times he
sighs and knocks his ball cap up, takes
a rough palm and wipes it down his face,
holding his jaw briefly,

he's smaller in frame, my height, makes eye contact
and holds it, takes you in when he speaks. He's been
treated pretty rough from what i hear but still keeps the
back porch open for visitors and I guess I am one--
twisting the cap on and off a tube of lip gloss, we
talk quietly about his brother who is in and out of
the swinging doors, there are so many men with
blue plaid shirts in here and I can hardly keep track--

and when we head for the Dome, I maneuver through the
old carousers and dark drunks who lurk in plain view, men who
murmur of course, hermosa when I gingerly place my hands
on their shoulders and inch past the doorway, I am searching for
you, for your blue sleeve,
but instead find Travis' and we dance a slow song--

I think he understands how I'm feeling, might be the lack of a poker face, we two-step and I trip over his boots, and when we're done he
kisses my shoulder lightly.

If I wasn't so affected by the warmheartedness I'd tell you I'd barely
noticed, but I am, when people are good, they are much softer. Their
intentions are palpable and tender--
and maybe I find comfort in touching people which i don't do too
often--and for a moment that was all i needed was a hint of
kindness after being handed off
from man to man, from feeling
intensely right with your arms
looped around my waist
with my fingers loosely settled
in your palm--to stranded with a memory
too many times where
you walked off and
i still had so much
more to say, like,
I truly love you,
maybe.

More than less I
am sick. Of writing.
things about love.
when I know nothing about it.

oh, but it's alright, matthew.

I have seen small flowers go
through concrete and morning
glories uproot trees,
I have wasted so much
time being angry and I am
done,

buried myself
beneath the aspens and
hunkered down for
a while,

i won't haunt you
because only ghosts with
ill wills linger and

I am softening myself
like warm butter or
sun-tea, melting down
into sugar or caramel

I have a few mean bones
but they won't
be around for
long.

so it is alright,
to do that, or be that
if they bring you peace or strength
then so be
it.

we are much different now, aren't we?

I have fled from this profound
sense of loneliness my entire life—

Nothing has ever felt right, good or
Safe. I have hardly found another person
that seems to speak the same language,
Am I to be a single aldis lamp in the night
flashing across the great sea with
nothing but the stars to

twinkle back at

Me.

have you ever felt your body?


have you ever felt your body?
a mellow clay mold sitting in the
bathroom, filled with pops and
quick ticks, i've often searched my
veins for pains, and they manifest
when I do, so I wonder--

about that.


and when I think about it too much
my belly starts to buzz and my chest
thickens with a warm afterglow, yeast
rising in a far clavicle, in my kidneys
and spleen--when I focus on the sounds
I can hear the pin drop of my soul, a tiny
bead on a string, a group of pink seashells
on Newton's cradle in a room shadowed in
broken evening, clicking against each other
softly, a lilliputian clock keeping time from
another century--

lost in twilight, in dawn, skipping the day,
my spirit always sinks into the everglades
a flighty anachronism, a homing pigeon
caught in telephone wires, beneath bus
wheels and modern dating--

ah,

out there?
hello?
forward message.  
I am here.

all i've wanted is to sleep

to tip over and land
soak in distilled whiskey
like arthropods preserved
in amber, except me
lost in an extended
trance, dissolving
into resins, ointments
oils--

i don't want to feel trapped
i fear me leaving more
than anything else,
me leaving to beat
the traffic, catch the
train, board the bus
to Abilene
a roundtrip
god I'm
tired of tryin'
so
hard.

when you are travelers
your conquests are
passages highlighted
in yellow
dog earred pages spoken
in pictographs
but when you are conquests
with velvet letters painted on your back
rooms filled with red thumb tacks
girls with names scrawled all across
their thighs, passport stamps carried
from country to country
milling about with scabby knees and
raw elbows
a noh mask to hide your shame
and not your face
a push pin on an unlisted county
barely within a three mile radius--
he's a photo up on the shelf and
you're just another notch in his belt.

i like to remember that
waves still form in part
due to ocean basins

that my intuition
skims along the floors
and only reverberates
all that it finds to the top,

so maybe if I better
understood the reasoning
the seat of my heart, the crux
of why I am, this turbulence
would come a little easier,

the combers,  though heavy
and unyielding--predictable,
navigable, waters I can
sail on.