getting older

growing less poetic,
and more professional

the places we leave the ones we love

i don't want to play the part
of your beaten dog
tied to the neighbors fence,
your puppet on display
under a stack of plates
at your weekend garage sale

haiku

still finding your hair
between the wooden floorboards
we once walked naked

to tell you the truth, she said,
no matter what, it changed me,
and maybe its for the better and maybe its for the worse,
but i've got pictures of horses
and i don't look at the bridge that way anymore,
haven't since i moved in

a summer spent alone in 1310

Indee said they feel the sadness within the brown walls and makeshift bed sheet partitions of this halfway home and they had to go.  I stay alone letting the cockroaches roam freely in the kitchen while I explore the unimportance of “I,” staying stagnant like a small glass containing what passes through me.

Understand the consequences of exchanging energy.

The cats come and go through the windows. They press their faces against my shirtsleeves, purring in the morning and drawing my blood by dusk. “We all take what we need,” says the foam ceiling tiles pushing their way down to the kitchen table, offering our appliances to the sky.

A gold heart is painted on the empty bedroom wall. Scribbled inside is, “I love you." "Mostly." "Maybe." "I love you sometimes.” A black marker X covers the uncertainty and I’m still not quite sure what it means, a comedy or tragedy. The ones who came before me remain a mystery. Those who follow, they will not know what we have made and destroyed here.

I am always looking behind my back like a paranoid vagrant, wondering when someone will wander quietly inside. Each room is a long hallway. This house is an ongoing rumor.

The adhesive connecting the bathtub to the beige tile is loosening, revealing the dirt beneath our dirty feet. This house is tired of balancing on the stilts built to keep us afloat, slowly sinking unsuspectingly. The floorboards are as disconnected as those who tread them. The decay has not been discussed. Our mouths are heavy with pride. We are sinking and we find it trendy to wear our bright colored life jackets daily. We are not sustainable and why should we be?

Inside the refrigerator, the shelves are weighted with the water that seeps out onto the muddy floor. The small black spiders and young cockroaches take comfort in the moist cold of the insulation, crawling over molding food like hikers conquering mountains. The kitchen floods. We all flood, indulging. An orange extension cord sits idly in a brown puddle. We crave movement. A frozen fish sits in the freezer with its one eye always looking out and its mouth wanting one last say in this world. I am a frozen fish waiting. 

The pink salamanders keep to themselves, running along the corners and cracks of the baseboards like guilty bandits. The ants and maggots migrate along the sink each morning. Some of us have licked the honey from the table and we carry our sticky shame inside our pockets. We’ve all turned paranoid. I press my breast against the front room window, watching the neighbors surely watching me, embarrassed in my lack of movement. Insects crawl out from the shells of the insects who came before them. This house is delirious, clogged with soul searchers guided by false prophets and romance and ego.  The windows stay open, but the metal bars stay fixed.

who am i?

who am i to say i love you with a quick tongue
who am i to smoke in yr bedroom and blood stain
yr sheets so quickly
i am a mess but i
always call back and cry to whomever
picks up the phone
i sing again and again
i am better off alone
but i don't sing on yr message machine
won't you leave
and let me wallow
by the rocks and the waves
stay afloat a few days
there's an open invitation
to join me at the bottom
of the Mississippi
suffer silently
sink into the clay
who i am to send a letter
i know better
i already
linger like driftwood
in yr sheets
i don't change the tide but i dirty
the scenery
i am a limb looking
for my tree
you are missing from me
who am i to send a search party?

can't let go

i can't let go of the South,
the drugs, i think,
i can't live without

can't let go
of yr feet dangling from our window
last spring and
yr homemade earrings,
i'm pulling

at yr lobes,
i can't let go of the empty Pimm's,
skeletons, who needs them,

and dreams, what have you,
i can't let go
of words that have no meaning,
i keep searching, searching

through broken things,
yr ankle, three places,
my empty Miller cases,
this place,

i can't let go
of the smell on yr pillow,
the idea of home
and the songs we sang about it

i can't let go
of the water, the trains,
the tracks that lead to this pain
i can't let go

the innocent pains we cause and the crimes of lacking passion we commit

i've figured out the pattern of
letting someone down
in 6 easy steps

1. give someone your heart (fall madly in love)
2. get let down (experience loss)
3. hurt (wallow in this step indefinitely, continue to step 4 simultaneously)
4. take someone else's heart (in hopes of a savior or a distraction- you are mad here, you don't know any better)
5. continue hurting (classical conditioning in preparation for next step)
6. let them down (unknowingly)

step 5 is a blindfolded reaction
the innocent crime step 6
step 3, well, it never really ends
sometimes we don't see the pain we inflict
a rabid dog kills with a lack of understanding

i do not know what i am doing
i have not been sober for
a long time now

it is much more complicated
than these 6 steps
but i am hurt and turning mad

did you know tears are also effective
for cleaning wounds?
did you know
it is human instinct to suck the blood from a cut?

my paws are sore
as i tread on your chest without feeling
my nails in your skin
too preoccupied with my own feelings
to let anyone in

poems about you

everyone falls in love with me

except you.

blood orange

i took you in pieces,
my blood orange,
your bright colors
still scattered 'round my bedroom floor

my dog teeth sunk right into you
my swimming fingers peeled you layer by layer
naked, i sucked the life right out of you

your citrus scent still hangs from my high ceilings
the taste of your fruit hides under my tongue
my hands are stained red
shame-faced
and we both know why
i can only call you my blood orange

self same

at 11:11
i wished to be healthy

how narcissistic,
it's 11:13 and i'm giving away my wishes
inducing my own sickness

i am Ouroboros,
uninterrupted egotistical cannibal

i never stop talking
to strangers on the street,
men in bars

can't stop drinking
like i said i would,
keep dragging on these scars

Goddamn, i go on and on
listing reasons why
i can't move on

"i didn't even believe in the death penalty, but oh yes, oh yes"

the bodies fall like days do,
quickly, in the blink of an eye,
my, how your baby has grown,
my, how you've always wanted the best for him,

string 'em high up in a tree, with the rest of them,
remember the first time you noticed his fingers becoming calloused,
the first time his knees bled, and how he ran into your arms,

he is your baby, in the name of the Father, he was blessed in the water,
oh, how they've chained him to the chair and set the locks on fire,
oh, how you tried to save him from this city, covering his face,
always covering his face when you carried him,

the day you lost control, don't you ever forget it,
his puppy dog eyes wet and blackened on the courtyard,
your sadness and frustration, and how you wondered,
wondered about the other mother,

the verdict is unanimous, the boys are animals,
they have ruined our city, and for years you held him in your lap, watched it on the TV,
hang 'em high! hang 'em high! no one will never hurt my baby,
we are all anxious for death, we are all angry

now, in the waiting room, you are shaking,
thinking of how gentle he looks when he's sleeping,
he is still just a baby, your baby,
did everyone forget, we all carry the weight of our son's bodies?

remember the day they put your rabid pup to sleep,
how they called to hang him, never looked in his eyes, never saw him as human,
they held him down and quickly tied him to the table,

we are all so anxious for death,
we are all angry.
but you, never forget those eyelashes, those first steps, those tiny pairs of shoes,
look deep into their eyes, never forget the weight, look deep into their eyes.



---
"I have seen people who were hung and that is not a sight I would wish anyone to see. I often wonder where does all the savagery originate in these young people, the seemingly endless callousness that allows one to take a life so easily, and to end their own if caught. There must have been a point where fighting and forgetting about it ended and picking up a gun and killing a person replaced it. Where someone gave up on being a good father or mother and decided to be a criminal. I feel sorry for them because being a father and grandfather is the greatest part of my life."

i, flightless bird

stranger, will you mug me?
stranger, will you take my body?

i'm always looking for him,
always comparing the length of your
eyelashes
to his.

are you the hawk,
and these my feathers
strewn about the yard?

Saint Anthony and Other Ones We Trust

1990, when, as a toddler, i swallowed my mother's pills beneath our kitchen table
and our yellow-ish Volvo station wagon (or maybe not) sped down Old Watson Road
at ninety miles an hour
the car was airborne to Saint Anthony where i was pumped and charcoaled

we call these miracles

Thank Blessed Anthony, the same Saint
who cut the insides of my throat with a dirty knife and left me to die

Anthony, the same Saint,
who pronounced me dead on arrival,
who left me drugged spitting up my mother's blood for three days

we pray to Who.
We ask, where were you?

what heat did i let off
running around the morning school bus
and what of those home made videos
age eleven
already angry and self hating because
i was not "she"
and no one ever told me

what of the millennium Sundays
we prayed to God and stole from the children's church
we excused ourselves and kissed in the bathroom stall (until Grandma made us stop because (i think) she knew what we were doing)
when he and i climbed on top of that shed
you stood a few yards away eating potato salad and defining judgement
i lied still and quiet while he rubbed against me
just a kid already angry
because no one ever spoke up
we just prayed to god