two pulls. that’s all i had;
just two pulls of someone
else’s joint, and four
overpriced beers,
and i’m more ****** up
than i can ever
remember being.
flat bloodless faces
stuck to the walls
won’t stop looking at me
and i think a girl
is looking at me too
for the first time
in a long time. and there’s
a woman talking about
her feelings, and her voice
comes in threes and
sinks sinks sinks
and it’s all so important,
so important that
the vignette strangles me
more than it ever has.

somebody’s talking about
how she should stop going
to bristol. and there’s a guy
talking about getting fined
and my skin is tingling
where it usually dries and flakes
and it feels like the ******* i took
two years ago is seeping
out my pores and balling up
and i’m getting real quiet.
and there’s a trans person
talking about bleeding
on the bathroom floor,
i think, and they’ve lost me
in the words. i’m too dumb
to understand the not-basic
language they’re using, and
probably too dumb to know if i’m a
man in a man’s body or
a woman in a man’s body
that is just attracted to women.
******* weird, man.

for naǧí

you naǧí nudge my cheeks

with verbal finger stroking,
dumps down all around
but you find favor in some
madcap quick dashed scrip
coaxing muscle moving,
****** muscles returning to
an etched groove ready,
all in the shape of a decidedly
U
(a capitol you!)
when U

you naǧí nudge my cheeks

the land was a slumbering bird that had not yet opened
its eyes. the morning roared like a thunder

cloud and i gazed at the sky with her cornflower blues
and orchestral flutes, her dark bones whitening

in the yellow-threaded light. silence wrapped me like
a shawl, and love settled on my shoulders like

a bird. it was too early for the swallow to return
with its spring-tinted wings, the winter settled

in the nooks and crannies of the earth, sweet
as your mouth, crisp and cold as the ashen north.

and while you lay beside me, warm, nocturnal
and dreaming of the sea, i kissed your lips

and told you to hush, not because you had spoken but
because night had been so gentle to you that i

wanted to keep you wrapped in her star-scented arms.

.for all the fires i’ve put out
.for those i’ve failed to
.for the embers that i will never seek to extinguish


.for _

it’s 3:16 am, and NOW that the
the key detail has been deposited,
rather, posited, let us venture inside
a madman’s mind, and retrieve a
semblance of resemblance to the
dispersed purposes of reveal &
revelation

two or three excellent poems flittered
through my fecund mind some hours
ago, but they failed to photosynthesize,
i.e jive alive and be recovered, recorded,
you’ll have to be satisfied that I rarely lied
more than twenty tines a day, snd especially
to you, late at night, when oratying and
com-posting verbal suppose~itories of
theoretical poems about physics
but they are gone gone gone ~ a word
that always sounds better when repeated thrice, and thus We must musk be satisfied
with this preamble to a ramble through
the crevices and lamentations of all
mind decaying, with all deliberate
speed

Thus the flitters havr flown, and the
filters of/if common sense and minimalist
verbosity have flown the coop,
gone back to bed, you are stuck
with me-and other F words

wrote a poem about women, so raw and honest, it refused to be born into the firmament of this earthly planet and
returned to the heavens

F word

wrote a poem about forgiving and
forgetting, but it refused to be forged,
but it had something to do with
which is human and which is divine,
and I may yet return to it someday,
unless I keep forgetting which is obviously
a divine intervention

F word

F inally, from my fund of fortuitous
but pitifully small piety, shall cease and
desist from further foundering on
the shoals of fractured displacement,
release myself from any furtherance
of disturbance of your goodly souls,
and wish you good rest and pleasant
thoughts of
immortality

3:58am