Hard to break any Distance with that which feels Normal

The tis’ lit that’s okay you can
cry yourself to sleep
the can of light beer—were you
smiling!—and you touched on
the shoulder when you sleep I
can’t touch you
you smile I forget
you believe
cry forever? No, but
when I say I
think thank and cover
your shoulder under two blankets
the back of your
bra will surprise me
Next year we’ll be drunk, us
both, hang
up sharply

Even more tiring than new Yorker Poetry - sloopy middle aged men and their thoughts at night - promise me death before such an end (page 53), Mother

crescent shaped Wordsworth
 who did you fool on your
Tinturn Abbey? your flaccid member
  droops in your lap perhaps
to be convinced of heaven?
then your soul should have sailed
 as fear fell to sagery
a pleasant trump by some pleasant trees
and not come back again
many things are composed in a day
  but ne’er resurrection

from just moments after, when you have your breath back, if only to write a little something here or there

and – in these moments
of grinding – affectation
your head and your heart
an – awkward system

later there will – be time
to read this to pieces
what you could have waged –
into those little blue eyes

The moment is – escaping
the present: giving it the slip
and pegging reaction – on
dark foreign momentum

is the trick – against your
bones is the - thick against
where – your heart – should be
no, you’re wrong: there is time –

she said

national poetry month

mrup rup rup rup

do you know anyone at risk?

A Scene From A Classroom: in Under 1000 Words

She’s devouring her wintergreen gum, just leaning into it. She smacks it up and down, flips it over, and then plays with it against tongue. This tongue move, among others, is designed to provoke me (I don’t think I have to go into what else can be done with a tongue). But I’m not going to look: I’m stiff with my eyes forced forward, hands occupied now with a pencil, now with a cup of tea. It’s suave on my part – I’m drinking the tea like I enjoy it. She’s trying to trick me into looking at her; or, worse yet, smelling her. But that’s the worst part, that I can control my eyes, but not that which rolls over and over my delicate nasal membranes. Of course, I could plug up my nose, pinch it up with one of these superfluous hands, but then she’d know she has me, and in front of all of these people, they’d all think, just like she’d think, “there, the girl takes a little shower, puts on a little something something in the way of perfume, and he falls to pieces.” So, no, I’ll play her little games, but I won’t look at her – and damned if I’ll let on that I smell her.

She has taken a shower, recently - a brilliant ploy on her part. She gets to come in here, sit down, and sit back, while I squirm imaging that soft, frothy sponge ensconcing every nip and tuck of her white white skin and those little playful beads tingling here and there, rolling down her back like the gum across her tongue. Dark hair playing this way and that. It’s almost too much. It’s almost more than I can handle. Fortunately nature has bestowed upon me a rather abnormal amount of constitution, most likely a merciful gesture of compensation for my uncanny powers of observation.

But I’m suddenly gripped with an awe-imposing kind of power – my breast suddenly feels swelled and wrenched up with a kind of inhuman strength. And I’m not one to push against inspiration such as this – no. “You’ve got to live life when you feel it,” is what someone told me sometime.

Still looking right, I swing my left leg hard left, leading it right into something that I imagine to be her skirt (which quickly leads me to any number of other imagined objects) right as another sting of scent strikes and wobbles every bone in my body. I think I caught something of her neck in that. Luckily, I still have the strength to retract my left leg, to finish off my retaliatory move. Nature has instilled me not only with a sizeable constitution, but with flawless nerves, as well.

I’ll wait a second on this move (as numerous books and men’s magazine advice columns have advised me – I am quite a student of human nature, as well), also to catch my breath. She couldn’t have expected that one – no, not in thirteen million years and the Kingdom of Heaven!

“Sorry,” I whisper as I turn to her.

Now is the time to hold this little bitch right my gaze, hold those green eyes steady, show her what her little plays have come to. “Melt,” I believe, is the parlance. This will, naturally, ensure my supremacy in the relationship, and also ensure the consummation of any number of wild sexual acts, the likes of which people write alternative songs about. Some of these acts, I am sure, even though much has been written about them, I am sure to be the first ever to partake in, as it is simply beyond comprehension how one could both imagine this act, consummate it, and write about it to boot. (this paragraph will, obviously, be stricken from the record, but I did have a fun time writing it).

I have those green eyes in sight now, and I bear down – this is the point at which she’ll “melt” – it will be the moment commemorated in innumerable emails and phone calls to good-smelling girlfriends. “What should I do?” and such. I have you now, you little slut.

But she looks at me as if she doesn’t know what just happened, as if she understands neither why I am ostensibly apologizing, nor the function of my analogy in the greater context.

Then I realize it – she is good! Sweet Christ on a Blood-Cross, she is good! She’ll have me knocking on her door at odd hours of the night yet!

In the sudden confrontation of her maneuver, I can do nothing but back away, turn away, and try to keep her smell from rolling, rolling over me. But I realize it is hopeless – she must have made some sort of movement with her body, specially practiced and then executed, whereby just a touch of the rawness from under her arm wafts over, slips under whatever that body lotion is.

I have nearly had it. I am crushed. I’ll need to make one hell of a move to bounce back off of this – most likely looking her number up and calling it from payphones. The time for advice from magazines is over. The took me off of script the second she made that brilliantly “puzzled” look. It’s all instinct now.

God, I can still smell her gum.

And I’m about to punch her, I’m about to turn and crack one good right upside her carefully arranged temple, maybe break a bone or two in my hand, when I realize the day is over. They’re leaving, all of them, and I am now to leave. The day is over, the sun is down, and now I nothing else but this constant voice, when it gets dark. And the only consolation to the hours of monotony, heat ahead, is that it will all be without her wintergreen gum, and the smell of her neck rubbing against that white cotton t-shirt.

We read poetry about the hollowed moon
 whispering - we read mine
she was plashless    lonely    her - disconcerted rapture
     dead
filling the grooves we  believed - with -
                    ugly softness
was love   she said
was love   she said

I'll unwrap you like a present
little blonde girl
There will time for sorries
later, trust me

1998

insomnia continued

There’s always that feeling, eventually, that feeling of sinking (before sleep jumbled up non-consciousness), gently melting down, forgetting, when it finally comes, sinking and floating blurring together. But: I get all anxious anticipating that feeling, jittery for its sensation, and I play tricks on myself, imagining that it’s happening, its consummation through my body, sending me right through my sheets and mattress and sticky wooden floor. Pretending: Oh, yes, here we go! and here again! off we go - off to sleep oh boy it makes me sick. Just tricks, foolishness, making everything even worse, these neck muscles think they’re doing fucking pull-ups. When you’re tense it does not come. When you shake it does not come. Wait, am I shaking? What would somebody think if they watched that look I get in my eyes during insomnia? Probably try to take a picture. Yes, it’s all my neck holding me above the hewn-hewn material I must wrap myself in, all the dyes and chemicals that now seep through porous skin and run the follicles and leak. Perhaps tomorrow night I’ll sleep wrapped up in plastic! Just me and my sweat. Then an observer would really think I had gone fucking mad, and the sweat would be held against me instead of whisked away, half evaporating and half clinging.

On My Fears: presented to my internal stadium audience, with respect

that room is for incubation, the growth
of ripened flesh, porous—none of us could bear the heat
For we, the skinny and winding who populate the colder
halls, confused without the steady radio noise under the
tall sails of ceiling, shuffle hard and pinkish
adrift: the poetry on the walls, losing papers,
finding more under our translucent skin
In order to eat, piss we must pass the Room, listen
to the heady conversations
We wanted to talk like that, but the room stays
sealed and we are always
short of breath We would have broken down
the door long ago but for the unspoken law that keep us
giddy in the hallways, racked with bones
or more, like lonely children, it's
The Rumors of the Hook-Up Scenes
which tempt us each week inspire in us the
will to write to each other Once the
lights went down and we crowded
about, hoping to hear something of zippers
From that Monstrous Beading Flesh or
catch some of the smell in our penny
jars and there was some sound the
best of us maintained - even when we sleep with the beautiful
maids we Are Bored (for why would a maid
happen here or have interests in more than a coffee cup
you ask and in the possibility of your asking
we learn that words help to make memories but not to put your eyes out)
And Now, enlivened with the promise of
Tomorrow Morning
When the glorious object of the risky Nerve-endings
will flash brazen from the room, fully-grown and dull-eyed,
steeped in his own brimming essence
(we hope, too, and exhausted)
And we’ll be able to settle again in the
lost tracings of the warmth of
our calculated lives with or without the radio
noise or just a drop of it
An hour or half-hour at a time
But this is a Romance so they find each other!
And stay, sealed as we watch,
a picture to ensure we never move on, the frame,
and we - filling in the details.

At the first step I
counted four heads, you counted 5
in praise of you the upward
swept in places rounding
their faces in mock
precision we hold hands and
you, gladly, want to share
(what I have taken from you

that a wielded sacrifice is not
a sacrifice atall  for
you’ll endure without listening
 repeat like counting
until we all have our numbers, crunch,
   I write poetry, too

I don’t understand
 my arms wrapped
 switch wise through
tubes of marrow
heating blood we’ll
feel it pounded awake
after finger conversations
you give me a fairy tale
you say - you say
candles melt down the
  sinew to a joint
that sparks and whiffs
   in strange smoke:
to contrast our eyes

Frantic Boulder birds beat  time
in heaved tree dancer
   and dawn de color scheme
is East and brown is dirt
Birds like paths find drawn
    breath unsatisfying
Crack out   in lit desire in
  a bar of half-recognitions
  for they have eyes
beer bit swallow-fulls: jam
branched full the words
    are like candy – long practiced
in indomnable sleep but
birds are the shrill light
   pricking corners
  against my better cheek
  birds hum on the relay of wings

night over the Park brings such adorable little fantasies of what I could have said differently

I'll grind you up and
send you hot up my nose

I'll burn you to the base and shoot


I'll peel you down
with lemon and glass

drink you down neat

in two

A scene from Manezhnaia

there,  the old woman talking to
the statue just took a swing at
the young girl with short dark
hair tried to talk to
her, and now she's wearing
blue gloves, staggering between
  phrases with clenched cheeks
deep lines, the light
 and lips, like she's
waiting?  the statue is Zhukov,
I'll agree, terrifyingly calm on
  a solid horse, right hand
raised to drown the spiraling streets,
  the still of history, parades,
and concrete she waited and
steadied herself measuring
concentration with a thick
plastic bag, and more passed her
these not concerned because she wasn't
   talking anymore, and then picked up a bag
in either mitten, walking into the steadiness of tourists,
Russia, while three or four of us watched

2000, Moscow

Sunday with head two time the wiser

God I'm hung over today. Mixing champagne and vodka always seems like such a good idea at the time. As does playing the cowbell until 5 am...

Untitled. Or: Trying to care about poetry has me down

I don’t even know you heard
of a painter yesterday “long of
my heart” painter redrainbow blood
understood more 3 dimensions of cruelty
O the inspiration the driven madness!
begetting steel soft inspiration  found
love “long of this blood”
Losing what to know of darkness
  “Painting suffers
    in love          and   torture
          (said the writer who knew the story)
       driven the beast/  chesting
with what rage one can muster
> cutting off ears and whatnot



you know the feeling, kids?

trick the girls
to justify your life,

knife counts on the wall -

Oh,
didn't
work this time?

baby I'll clean that up.

2213 A

gloom and hem - have swept the day,
tracks across - the Lawn -
settling - edges bend to dusk -
as pitch becomes the - Dawn

god there's so much more to say / beyond the obvious questions

What can't find this
terming in a song?
Or just afraid that
you're all talk-

tooth-bit bought-broke (and what ever happened to that third line?)

Tooth occurs a soft element
When compared to the likes of steel

- -
Knowing I do nothing for you

It's just a Rut - Man has adapted to Worse!

my sock - is Gone

Somewhere in your
sheets -

The coffee tastes stronger cold

You put on your jeans

casual-quick

we'll lose more

where that -

came from!

Stomach licked and
tongue-tricked
wound in the Blood -
against Toe!
Take off your make-up
one more time
Here's how
that rub can go!

Bleach the Taste
of Palo Alto sky -
blots out
all that Blue

Something - about those hips
Friend - winds me
To the - Bone

In April /

In April
   broken heat
  stinks rising from
  the tool-wise
 pavement up-up
by a rounding  deluge
  to swallow wind
pregnant as wine
  blushing
is this air: In April
  sounds drop a
  ring  for lush
 garden green hill scenes
  pastel picking bare, no -
this is fog
  eyes to be piked on
  newly found
 hollow nasals
   and gritty
smelling glands
 night lamps share no
fog above the
 breeding April earth
 My red tongue is earth-wet
 and pelvis, vorpal-dead -
even feet are
sloppy in April