give me a title

Echoed through a shell, the ocean, how I miss you.  I muse on my self, abated on the back shelf of my mind.  I remember walking at night through the thinning trees to Boulder River; I kept thinking of old renditions of the woods as being sinister, mystical, and the thought of it excited me.  Skinny dipping, we three youths, our pale places glowing in the moonlight reveal our whiteness, our tender drawn blinders, yearning quietly inside, the shivering bow string, waxed to a sheen.  I mean to step intentionally, with reverence for the rhythm, the water’s brim non-existent, and I step on eroded rocks still vacant in the bed, entrenched in the death of it—this recollection that we do not ultimately know what will happen, that place in which we exist before our conception.  Are we an afterthought and a stale condom?  Dried out like human jerky, a man in Joppatowne confessed to eating his roommate’s heart and brain and we make jokes about the zombie apocalypse.  This moment is reserved for Latter Dei saints and child Jesus’ mischief: bee stripes are the rings in His eyes, golden glimmering harpoon blues over navy night of Nazareth.  Each city chooses its own form of humanity: children dancing in the spurting splash of open fire hydrants, laughing, clapping as airplanes crash into twin babies born a minute ago.  Israeli bomb-sniffing dogs and forgotten goldfish—you will be my lucky goldfish.  My memory is stored in the cellars of the Shakespeare Theatre in Paris; all anyone can talk about there is the bed bugs.  How can you say all that in so short a time?  Such partings are indicative of our top hats, our telescopes aimed in the wrong meter, stressed syllables, unrealistic as Hosni Mubarak.  The body language, the interaction unspoken between Obama and Putin, human rights violation, misuse of misappropriated funds and managerial discomfort trying to appease us, replicate us into coffee filters, stacked together neatly fit inside the last one so that sometimes, accidentally, they take two or three of us.  Slips of paper, birthdates drawn from a bingo basket by a disembodied hand, unholy placed on a TV screen—your friend just died.  I am sick of the lies but I am guilty too.  I have my brother’s blood cupped in my hands, settled on my brain.  In the cornfield behind our house I used to chase cats and meow at them.  We had whole conversations while we were naked in the woods, ribs sticking out in angles of our tightened skin, our first son born on a Tuesday—it’s always on a Tuesday.  On Sunday mornings, instead of church, we have sex shouting holy fuck me get the Devil out of me, he’s swimming in my head, knotting leather threads to my bed post, making me French toast and green tea in bed while he shows me tintypes of Edith Wharton.  The archive of my memory runs thin and weary but ready to take on more sand bags, sand bags, stack the sand bags—the levy breaks and Robert Plant yows at me for stealing his songs, writing him into my poem.  This is not a poem, he says, it’s words on a page, where’s the rhythm?  Riverside gamboling about the tide, the rising energy welled up in my bosom, my country tis of thee, everyday you shit on me.  I spit in your general direction and I thank you from the bottom of my rhizome, rising from the center of the Earth to ground a tree in never mastered cadence of my own damn language.  Here I am: hanging from the ceiling fan with a belt around my neck and a cigarette in my left hand, revolving random word choice and juxtaposition of my own thought process with what is going on around me: a woman’s brown flip-flops stretched into my periphery, feet jittering plainly as a silent film, a man at a typewriter alone in a room above the city.  An overture: a Rembrandt woman, yellow soft intoned. Fitzeraldian youths, reclining by the river, classic nude rendition of beautiful privilege, to come of age.  It was 2012 and we were on the brink of existence.

12 Words

naked tongue

barricade:

window stuck.

crumpling bones,

you, shrieking—

thankful for sound.

When I Am Alone

I am not meant to be connected, tonight, or any hereafter.  I relinquish all ownership of words and Katherine said, women have been doing that for far too long and she has a good point but I never thought of it in terms of being a woman.  I have issues with the word wo-man, like whoah, man, dude, bro check out the titties on that tight little biddy swishin down the beach, tan, no pants, Huntington yoga dance, teach me how to stand, how to take a stand, want, to take a stand when it’s all going to hell anyway.  I afford myself a sense of musicality when the words escape me, I try to let them come to me, I can hear the first syllable and so I go to the dictionary and scroll through the words that begin with that syllable until I find a word it could be.  I play with it.  Tickle my nipple.  Lick my clit.  Good boy.  Boys and guns: I will never get it, and they will never get me not getting it and that’s okay because that’s how it is, time, resemblance to former selves I remember walking down a wooden hallway and sawing my arms off to fit through the doorway to my bedroom, the steel trappings of war haunting masculinely every time, the remembrance of time, passing, ticking by the time we had a time, by the time you respond to “what time is it” time has already passed and you are a liar.  I am a scientist, strip teasing tantalizing seductress of right wing hedge funds.  Go study abroad they told me but never told me how much it would cost me and when I found out I said fuck that.  Fuck this, all of it—I know I will—nervous tender hold on reality slipping away from me before I can find somewhere to stow it away, carry me away to Harford hay stack corn field, honeysuckle night thrumming humming on my thyroid gland, does memory stand a chance? Does God?  What if we told ourselves we would meditate on no words for every year and day in I pray that it gets easier, I seek selfish relief from self endangerment, I am a bad influence on my friends and Drew returns the favor.  The month before I left home, David and I smoked blunts every day after work, driving around the same sets of back roads, loops around divisions in our society, spanning centuries of hegemonic destruction of my uterus, we dance for justice and sing psalms of nature’s cadence, river running muddy after rain storm after rain storm and thunder, humid sunder, Sunday, sunny day dreaming of the opposite coast of existence, Western resistance to Eastern mortar, order, for poor people and blood hounds and slobbery executives widgeting new apps to correct my sentence structure.  If I could muster up the courage I would be honest with you and tell you that I sold my self and got a new tattoo with it, a Kookaburra on a tree branch etched with the words “the king,” she liked the idea of she being king, no being able to replicate her flute tonguing instrument, categorizing stuntmen into leagues of fourth base running infidels, citadels of Roman art, blazing wooden cart started burning miles ago and is not turning back, I will not turn back, don’t make me turn this car around.  Miles, and I, spun around the gothic rock bar bent organ pipes of Adam’s Morgan, the D.C. dance web, deluge fusion of sense perception.  In the case of synesthesia, I am well versed.  So is Eric, apparently.  I complimented his spider-man shirt last night and he said, “thanks, my friend gave it to me on the condition that I trip while I’m wearing it and I have done so twice.”  You’re a good friend, sir, I tell him, and then go to find my seat, my skeleton chair skirting noisily on the awkward floor and, I have been afraid to speak too.  I am afraid that people might see me for what I am, a small town no town simpleton, scared of my own shadow if it didn’t bite me, attach to me precipitously as rain, my head unsteady on my neck like a wooden pillar, they don’t take kindly to my type at home but somehow it was easier for me to play that role instead of being in a room full of my people who are all stairways above me, rendered motionless, is not the same as being immobile.  We were all so American, our loud clapping a disturbance to his cadence and verbs tied together, words extended and vowels elongated, nasal inclination of French precision.  We are all sloppy here, we don’t pro-nun-see-ate our words prop-er-lee.  Goin downee ocean hon, and miracle whip and wudder ya’ll if’n we was to have ourselves a shindig would you wanna come get it in?  Bum a jack, flick a nickel in the gutter and call it a trainwreck.  I am a trainwreck.  This poem sucks dick.  I suck dick, sometimes, I want to take out a rib so I can eat myself out because I bet that I would do a better job.  I don’t mean to offend you with my overtness, I can’t help it sometimes.  Secretly, I enjoy being offensive, so David and I went around The Tower on Main Street on Saint Patrick’s Day this past year yelling sarcastically about guns and bibles, guns and bibles, and some big ol redneck dude comes over and says “hell yeah, you’re a woman after’n my own heart.”  Oh yeah, I say going along with it because I don’t have the heart to tell him I’m being an asshole, yeah, and global warming isn’t real right man, I say.  “Damn straight,” he says, “to hell with Al Gore, he fucked that shit up, huh-huh,” he laughs.  The same man in a poet’s body outside the Laughing Goat, young man goatee daring to state his own manhood on the street, he said to me that there is no male or female.  I have issues with the word fe-male and I cock my eyebrow at him, mine’s bigger, I think to myself, I don’t have to say it out loud, I can read it in his voice that he knows I am the alpha moon.  Too soon, I start thinking it’s all done but he takes my hand and leads me back inside, we stand inside by the barista making café latte no whip decaf mocha monkey mayonnaise and Max is up on stage tearing it up like a demon, a fire breathing rhythm piercing Pearl Street nonsense, a bellow of undeniable resistance.

Mirror Wall

   

spray painted 

memory, murder,    

confine 

of space 

and fragmented 

ordering  of events. 

 

the moment i stop   at the page,

i loose  i am in the

nap.  

a skeleton chair

makes her shudder with friction, 

impeach nixon, 

clinton, 

new york city.  

I wish i could eat myself out.  

she called us alpha females. 

i struggle with the word fe- males.  

goateed man laughs there is no male or female. 

i beg to differ, sir.

To Quibble

i could write a novel about about my lovers past and present but I never will. i don't have the patience for adequate character description. i prefer to keep the memories as they were. it's easy if you let it out first and then try to write another verse about attraction and standing near to it without touching, electromagnetic pulsing between arm hairs. it was just him, and a room full of beautiful women, he never noticed the other men sitting and why would he? never mind our minds and there is no soul in buddhism. i have largely misunderstood the world around me and it is only beginning to not make sense. there is a bowl of rice and then there is no bowl of rice and then there is a bowl of rice again so eat it. when in Boulder, do as the roamers do, this convergence of peoples where my existence has commenced.  religion in my life has meant Catholicism.  after a lifetime of church-going, my grand-parents have chosen to stop going when the Father started talking about Obamacare on the pulpit. now they sit at home every Sunday and choose a passage of the Bible to discuss together on their own, they have their own form of worship. i think of Sister Juana de la Cruz and Anne Bradstreet, i think of Lady Mary Wroth and Shakespeare's sister makes me shudder with counfusion; they wrote about being vessels for God's word, that He worked through their hand and the words on the page were not their own. i see it the same way only not so Christian, like its more of a consciousness that is floating around independently of us and I am like a radio box, channeling all the jumbled waves through my innards and translating them into something other people might understand, or at least be able to recognize as their own. i have no ownership of anything and i find material things weighing. I toss pebbles into Boulder River sitting in my gone-swimmin underwear on a rock, the only reason i brought my phone is so that we would have a clock. i struggle with time-telling and with money, their existence, the resistance of my soul to fly from a half submerged basement. the chance that we would have a flood rise to the second floor is like the strange weather patterns, since i got here it has rained a little bit every day. sorry guys,  i brought the Maryland with me, the neighbors who fly a Confederate flag and call it southern pride; i can't lie about this stuff, even if it does seem obvious, like most of what i write, i am lying naked on my unsatisfied ass.

You Look Like I Need a Drink

My father would find this sacrilege: putting ice into my beer, but they've been sitting in the cooler since two thousand miles ago and they were straight hot. i thought i would want them at the end of a long day of driving but all i wanted was sex and sleep, both of which were much needed and appreciated.  drinking alone is highly underrated, especially when unpacking, which is always harder that packing, the excitement gone and replaced with sadness about the way your clothes used to fit into your closet at home. you can arrange them the same: jackets, skirts, dresses, shirts, but it's still different.  the walls are waning instead of red and i found a red flask in my suitcase that i forgot about. i've lost myself and found some of me scattered across the country, much of me in Colorado, the next greatest majority in Baltimore, sitting on the rocky lip of Sparrows Point, the orange lights reflecting on the black water, black eyed susan nonchalantly pissing on the edge of oblivion as i make small talk with a former Russian lover, our most recent tryst being utterly disappointing.  the problem was that we always did it mad drunk and this was the first time we fucked sober and it sucked.  I know part of my memory is blurred from the alcohol so maybe i invented some of the awesomeness but i also know more of me comes out after a few beverages. i become some kind of less glorious, cornered Aphrodite.  I own up to it more now, stroking my own ego, my metaphorical cock hanging below my knees, which is really unnecessary as i'm pretty sure no cunt in this world or the next could swallow all of that meat.  speaking of anatomy, my friend john the other day found a tick attached to his left nut sac, no kidding i cannot make this shit up, that's what you get for walking around with a hole in the crotch of your pants. do not drink strawberry beers. i just tried one for the first time and it sucked dick, such becoming language for a young lady isn't it? another transgression of etiquette, I poured all but one sip down the bathroom sink.

A Place

The last time I went there 

to Deer Creek--

it's a hell of a creek,

almost river status--

I could have mooned up

and jumped in

but the water was mad cold

and muddy, you couldn't

see anything, so I didn't.

To Orient

It is not the first time that I have watched a man pack his ruck.  Usually, he is the one leaving home but now it is my turn, and a good man at that.  I stopped keeping track of where my mind is and often it leads me to brick walls where I end my childish waffling, wining, baying, Chesapeake forever tugging my hair when he hits it from behind, and a firm palm, open, worn.  War sighs from inside his eyes as he neatly folds a civilian wardrobe, sleeves of his hoodie doubled over to fit the square indentations of small pox inoculations, dozens within one atom in my fingernail.  We teach animals in the bathtub how to sing about marriage, how to buy groceries and find the best price.  Domesticate me, wife and mother me, belittle me in my great-grandmother's knitted afghan, burgundy stripes and grays.  The sky in Maryland is heavy but weight has nothing to do with it.  My constant questioning of myself is coming to a halt the moment I realize I am.  The complex relationships between men, and the women who walk behind them on the sidewalk when someone is coming in the opposite direction, who hold their emotion for fear of their own explosion, surging Atlantic dirt, and the red sea-grasses.  The last time we passed each other only briefly, never said goodbye or come over, another why, uttered motionless across the roving floor.  The bank moves despite the tide and for itself and nothing else.  I struggle to put words to the momentum of my brain, fluid build-up rain splattering down the concrete puddle, the dark muddled perception on the precipice of clarity stares me into buckets.  This fuck-it mentality gets me no where but too obvious rhymes, and the following words all suffer.  Summer's countenance fawns over my yellow, wanders, bellows from Baltimore's belly below the Harbor fish sink, slick self-service gas station attendants eye me through the glass.  With all these mouths around me I presume too much attention, should find myself a rabbit skin to hide my hands--call us livestock, milk and meat--holes, where armor used to be, locking hair, and tongue to pallet, wooden crab mallet banging claws apart, rip the lungs out with my fingers, the fat mustard curdled inside noble crustaceans, their cobweb resistance to change, is a good thing, if you want to be dualistic about it.  A walking meditation is sometimes with my hands, my feet crossed dormant on the hearth of a white oak, speckled toads burping in time to scratchless pen needles.  What I lack is true direction, my mind passively stated to let the world happen, as if it all matters.  I cannot always have circular thoughts, and I leave room for more prescriptions to deal with reality, the sombre morality of men who carry guns, and the women who cradle their boot wings.