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.