I Don’t Get Home Much Anymore

Cancer stink on interstates through Missouri and Illinois
No dreams induce sleep

Home
the word

represents
what’s closer to grass and trees
a mind away from smoke

The home I lived in
all the streets coordinate
paralysis in a shot of strychnine

Now I prefer stoned mountain roads
I live in a box in the mountains, yes
but my parents don’t cry in
their words there

I broke their mouths against my door
I locked myself inside with my daughter and her laughter
the shotgun I hold to my head

My light-crazed head
grins in the trees
shining through the window

I’ve been told to stop talking about light
To think money language
To think military-industrial complex squid children shudders
To drop drones everywhere

But light, friends, enters through the windows without breaking anything
Light makes the trees and light makes my daughter laugh

Not a weapon
my daughter
when the world is made of light

guns and money made of light, too
and everything made of light dissolves in light
salt in salt water
glows a thick light

Mind glows its own solution
Mind not like moon, not reflecting

But origin, a child
laughing when her daddy laughs

one bird laughing after another

I don’t go home
What fire alights has burnt out
What has resolved in its ash foundations hardly holds anything

A house will not stand after emptying

Places away from the disasters
let me breathe out

I open the door and let my daughter
run down sidewalks full of commerce

Wedding Party

You were at my wedding. You stood
in a doorway and smiled at me. Music
was playing in another room, and a
huge white cake, the size of a fat little
man, awaited us on the table. The phone
rang and you answered it. It was
the priest looking for money. We
tried to get him drunk. Night fell
inside while day raged outside.
We noticed how ridiculously long
your sideburns are. There are
no photographs to prove any
of this. There is no way to know
what really happened. We drank,
we ate, we danced a waltz. We
fell asleep in the hotel, and when
we woke up thirty years later
our friends were old people,
with, like, white hair and health
problems, and the entire country
had fallen into ruination.

Panopticon

In the panopticon we lived in tunnels, and the smell of petrol was pervasive. Food consisted of small hard rolls flavored with onions and potatoes. There were beets that smelled of tragedy and scraps of fatty meat that was hard to identify. We had not known seasons for years. All the papers were forged. All the fingers were blackened by ink and smelled of something pungent that may once have been alive. Alcohol was plentiful mixed with slices of lemon and lime. Everything was delayed. Cells were alienated and wouldn’t knit. We didn’t know the rules for touching.

In a room we could not see into, a woman looked down at us. She had trained the world to regard her with importance, and the world had changed. People pushed back at her after a point, but the point kept shifting. She resembled a cat with thin lips and a nose flattened to a button. Her hair twitched nervously as she hopped from foot to foot, her dead eyes waiting for a moment to pounce. It was surprising how compliant we were. In the dim light, we heard dripping.

I remembered a man on a train who was standing against a pole with his large suitcase and a smaller bag stacked on top. His hair waved off his forehead, framing intense eyes that were also kind and lost in thought. The seat beside me became vacant, and he sat, and I had a chance to study his long fingers with their wide nails. His skin was a little rough from long-ago acne. It heightened his beauty, allowing a space to enter. My life was like Chernobyl in that I could see but not touch the ordinary objects left behind. Flowers were growing up around abandoned things. Nature was coming back. It was coming back different.

In the house that traveled you woke up each day in a familiar place. In the house that traveled you could not be exact about appointments and the truth was harder to turn into a weapon. In the house that traveled your old life looked like girls getting dressed to go out. In order to be heard, you went deaf. In order to study at a university, your body ceased to produce insulin. There were people on the train and people who let the train pass. A woman wrote that people, naturally, consider suicide, finding the world too cruel. It was never going to stop, so why not step away? You heard something. You heard scraping.

As we approached the origin of our fears, we lived in several time periods at once. People of the future could watch their earlier selves in movies, and the various selves could communicate through a scrim that felt like foreboding or déjà vu. When we didn’t have language for something, the feeling was a shudder or a smell. It was what we did, bringing back the dead.

like this

when I burnt my fingertip
it was because I wanted to turn the candle
into a tiny trashcan. because I don’t know
how to make people pay attention to me
without acting like a wastebin set on fire
outside the park

like      people need something
for people to swerve around
and then video with their phone

like      there is a voice inside you
that you actually can’t turn off
by arching your feet

the lamp I ordered from eBay
turned out to be a dollhouse lamp.
you have to order a tiny adaptor
to make it plug to a usual outlet. it sucks.

I still want to be a doll though

birds in the engine

I don’t feel that hopeless

Dropping my luggage
with reckless abandon

Isn’t it funny that there is a monk in the airport?

Everyone is quietly trying to take his picture
without giving themselves up

Dove

I knew a boy named Dove
I never touched him

The rest in the park beneath
The shining bottoms of seagulls

Came out of the gated housing estates
Where nobody ever did touch him

Still the homegrown closed in on him
Their arms always came away with nothing

Oh how he would work a crowd of war daddies
With those Dove eyes he’d give a waitress

When he’d order waffles at midnight
Coffee and pie on the house

Poor Dove couldn’t help it
He’d say goodnight to the officers

To every convict and then to me
Good night everybody Dove would say

There’s no more to what I saw
What’s more is everybody went hungry

Foxxcan Suicide (Stylish Boys in the Riot)

La Anaconda. A hooded black teenager. Teen upskirts. Such happy spirits! Sosostris of da liver. Jaws yack beer around and around and. A 1000 little deaths over a pic of Mr. Starnbergersee. Death n’ obstruction in town. In’t town. and gown. Can’t go left! LIMBO! 3 p.m. 3.16 p.m. Sergeant Snare on Pussy Patrol. Keep da Game Genie far fence, that’s fo’ mensch. If your not rreading this. I juice wanna surf the nite away. Turn it over and watch what REALLY happens. 199*: did you choose something else? Sumfin else?

White man came. – Maiden

Apocalypse as hook. What’s your Legacy, Russell? Requiem***.

It’s so easy, but nothing seems to please me. – Axl W. Rose

The audience knows this by heart. The audience know this by heart. She got big ol’booty an’ bloodshot eyes. A black Blondie. Underage. Overage. Walking stick.
Die in your class, I’ll die inmine.

WE DON’T HAVE ALL NIGHT

Above us is the moon. It is huge in the sky
and it is bearing down on us
as though
there was no tomorrow
because tomorrow there will be nothing but the moon
up in the sky and looming
all ominous and heavy and bright
and that is just fine with us. Listen.
We could use a sense of menace around here.
We could use a call to action Or a house
Or a barrier. A magical barrier.
like a fence. We could use a fence.

****

Why a fence you ask?
Because of reasons, which are as follows:
demarcations, unwanted elements,
property values, taxes, building codes,
civic duty, creepiness, and bears. Dear bears
we built these fences for a reason. Dear reasons
we do not care. Sincerely, the bears. The bears
have learned to compose letters
and nobody cares. Dear food let us eat you
Dear ocean full of menace let us eat you
Dear terrifying ocean full of menace we mean it
Dear wolves we have already eaten you and now we sit here
by the ocean wearing your torn-off faces like masks
until the ocean full of menace gets the picture. Dear ocean
full of menace
we are right here. Under the moon. We are waiting.

****

(more…)

Winter Jewelry

She was thirty-four,
.. . .. .  she’d recently chopped off her right index finger

and she came to my high school for recess and lunch.
.. . .. .  I felt her before I saw her:

she ran her hand down my spine
.. . .. .  It happened so fast I had no time to pose.

Nothing felt better to me
.. . .. .  than being touched possessively,

without having to touch someone back.
.. . .. .  She’d pull my braid, pick lint off my sweater,

smooth my eyebrows, all while explaining
.. . .. .  saffron and fisting and France.

Once, she tightened my scarf
.. . .. .  and we drove to her rented cabin, until the road stopped

and we were walking through snow
.. . .. .  falling at inaudible frequencies.

She sang something under her breath
.. . .. .  (she said it was nothing I knew),

striding ahead in unlaced boots, her jacket flapping open.
.. . .. .  She wore so many layers, I’d never been able to tell

the actual size of her body, beyond the occasional ankle or wrist
.. . .. .  breaking the surface. Around her the stars spun like tops:

tops I knew she could pause with her fingertip.
.. . .. .  When we arrived,

she lit twenty tea lights and vanished.
.. . .. .  Then animals began to emerge.

Two patchy dogs from the couch,
.. . .. .  while in one corner, something nursed on something else.

There was a mirror
.. . .. .  the size of a record jacket, and in it I saw her

walking out of the bathroom toward me,
.. . .. .  her bandage half unrolled: the wound was startling.

I opened my beer and watched
.. . .. .  as the foam ran down my hand and wrist

and she flew—it seemed—to my side,
.. . .. .  knelt, took the bottle, and said

Put your mouth on it
.. . .. .  and when I bent she laughed

as a cat dropped down near her knee,
.. . .. .  from what seemed a great height, though it couldn’t be.

Acknowledge Your Sources

It was a sky-draped year. We collected data like habits,
stockpiled information to have something to look into.
We were all about identity. Our primary theme was abstraction –

I know, right? With small words we touched it, and with big words
we brought it home. At a right-wing party’s office, a bomb explodes.
At a leftist rally, something something. It was the year Heidegger

walked among us and seemed especially deep. Like, at the bottom.
A little red light signalled some really important shit.
As a gift to individualism, I eschewed the individual.

As a gift to myself, I learned to hail a cab like a flower
bending towards the newly departed. We kissed strangers,
stayed up late, depended on discipline to save the day.

That summer Justin Bieber insinuated himself into your heart
like an undercover agent. The Insurgencies of Love topped all
the charts. It was a good year for wanting and my stocks did well.

But you thought I’d gone all art deco in the mind
and the four-roomed apartment we’d claimed as ours
was a little too …something for you.

You were raging for pastels. You wanted to move. So we spent
those eighteen months in a mid-sized European city whose transit
map, when crumpled, resembled a once-popular cognitive theory.

We tried to avoid cancer like the plague.
We wanted a sky the colour of a painting,
any painting, just something you don’t have to think about.

One Saturday God went out, left us $20 for pizza
and said He’d be back in the morning.
The point was that we could have done anything.

Friends stood before us like a porchlight that night
and we fought over who would ring the doorbell.
You began writing letters to Jennifer Aniston

but in a really, like, political way.
As in, between two people.
Dear, no one’s mind is right.

But then you left exactly how all the sad songs said you would
and I moved into a hotel the way a fastball chooses the mitt
it’s tossed to: the glove’s there and there’s throwing to be done.

For a while, the world was everything in my suitcase.
The morning rose up like a Parisian mob, made unreasonable
demands, then settled in for an afternoon coffee. Or café, as they say.

In terms of currently accepted physics I was pretty fucking sad.
There were birds. I made my heart into the shape of the moon,
or perhaps it was the other way around,

but you must have seen my longing in the sky
because you came back. God helps those He really likes,
as Benjamin Franklin used to say.

I was coming down with something.
Beset with symptoms, I gave up style with panache.
That is: with panache, I gave up style. I tied my tie up tight.

Is there a doctor in the house? Drumroll, punchline, drumfill.
But, seriously, is there?
Because I’m finding it hard to breathe.

Oh There You Are I Can’t See You Is It Raining?

1.
Supple with incoherence, I have not
learned how to people myself.
Lose any hope. Above all, lose any hope.

2.
I’ve never enjoyed a party in my life.
The meaning of this hits a little too deep.
The only women for me live a tonal complexity.

3.
The biggest fact about anyone is their mother.
I know this is getting a little complicated.

4.
Art school students love art school students.
There is something unutterably terrible
About art school students.

5.
He likes it when my nails are short and clean.
Since it’s love there’s nothing easy about it
so I threw my wine glass at him.
Old wounds and their flatulence.

6.
No one told me it was problematic to be a woman
until I started getting treated like one.
I Googled ‘Why are all Aquarius men jerks?’
I wasn’t the first.

7.
When I try to describe you
my mouth gets an E for Effort.
I invite you for a dip and you think
its an invitation to drowning.
Find some bearings
then ostensibly learn to keep them.

8.
Obligatory fun is ostensibly fun.
The project of the intellectuals.
Don’t open an intellectual
unless you want to be killed.

9.
To lose those I love most.
What other lessons are there –
how to make a perfect gazpacho?
I still believe in forces.

10.
Anger is one of my charming knacks.
Also panic for no discernable reason.
I remember things with my whole body.
Men like it when I ostensibly behave.

11.
Supple with incoherence
Art school students are
terrible
at making the perfect
gazpacho.

12.
Obligatory fun gets an E
for Effort. When you’ve lost
those you love most,
your only hope is in
charming knacks.

13.
The biggest fact is a little complicated.
So throw your wine glass at it
then clean your nails and Google
‘ostensible women.’

14.
I invited you for a dip
then you treat me like a woman.
Google: ‘old wounds
AND tonal complexity.’

15.
Getting killed: obligatory fun.
No need to get all emotional
and intellectual about it.

16.
The project of the intellectuals:
the terrible fact of
women and flatulence.

17.
Everyone’s mother is problematic
trying to do something about
feeling unloved.

18.
Art school students’ projects are parties.
Be on guard for the projects of art students

19.
Men like when my whole body
is ostensible.

20.
Remembering things
is an invitation to drowning.