Balk

If you find the mire has surrounded you

Invent, for yourself, a plank filled with holes

And climb on top.

This way, we feel the warm dampness

Of our lessons

Within the brink of learned remorse.

When even the space between is kindling

We built ourselves within the fire:
Twiggy legs uproot the scalp.
Kerosene soaked veins.
Tinderbox heart.

The rules of the waterproof children
Amuse those who simmer.
The blouses they tuck within
Their unforgivable pride.

I calmly palm the cheek
Which once burned him in five directions.
If he were as awake as his flames,
He would know as much as yesterday.

Backhanded compliment

When the fist is your refuge,

The bloodletting is

Your dangerous wish. He

Likes to turn on his side.

Likes to make you wish

He would yell. If only

To be mistaken for violent compassion.

Your hands have coated themselves

In tremors. A reaching

For some sort of salience. They

Want to be worthy of their love's

Worth.

They feel too easily cast away.

You hate yourself

Because you know you would

Trade the silence for a tirade

Of door handles to your cheekbones,

Of matches to your palm;

Memories that your departure

Was feared.

You have met these women. Held

Them. Men. You would have freed them

If they would have allowed it.

And you hate yourself.

You wonder if there is worth

In this.

A glassful of broken beauty:

Unspeakable in its deaths.

And just once...you carefully

Place a hammer

Not wishing,

But at peace, comfort

With the recovery months of hug

And coddle.

2

I am sorry I could not remember
The name that you stole;
I have never been one to swallow rain.
My fingertips were holding tight
To my palm. I believed that to fight this
Would win you over.

My body likes to make fun of psychics like this
To prove that it can lose its own battles:
Nobody will tell me where I wind up.
Not until someone can tell me
Where I've been.

Tonight is a new kind of savior.
My breath is held
My knees are begging me
To stand.

The ramblings of the loved.

I sometimes pray

That my mother and father

Stop believing in me.

I feel taken by the privilege

Of their love.

The shaky scribbles of their hands

Etched in the small of my back,

My shins healed in scabs

From fences they did everything

Everything

Each thing they could

To get me over.

Sometimes I like to pretend

That my "I Love You's"

Are received with the intensity

I feel them with.

But I know they are not

Because nobody has yet responded

With, "Ouch.

What the hell did you do that for?"

Nobody has broken into tears

And so I know

It has only ever been

A sentimental trust.

And I can accept that,

But I don't want to.

On occasion I wish

That the children of this world

Were taught

That beauty is not the thing admired

But the admiration.

That flowers and perfect bodies

Are only created out of necessity,

While the sneaky moment silent

In trusting these things

To be filled with the beauty

They demand,

This moment is where holy begins.

Once or twice I have demanded truth

But truth is like puce;

There are so few people it looks good on

So I like to take funny pictures of truth

I like to discuss it when I am drunk

And pretend I will ever believe it.

Teach a man

And I have taken to filling

Your bedside table

With matchboxes.

I have filled them with my memories.

Wait for you to strike the strip.

In your sleep,

You wield a flint-tipped sword

In the likeness of a future.

Your horse is unmasked.

There were self-proclaimed

Heroes before you;

Each with his own voice of truth.

They each played siren songs

And handed me pounds of fish.

The ignobility of these men

Was shell-shocked

And filled with practice.

You walk comfortably

On feet you own.

Wearing only the t-shirt

We one-quarter stole.

Cast your shield aside,

Strike upward and pull down

Ignite the piles of hushed tears

And mistaken promises.

The night of bitter coldness

And its draft.

Let us set the night on fire

Let us be baptized

In the sea of flame.

Cardinal Direction

And you begin to fill your mouth with birds

Hoping to pick their faults through your teeth

They do not beg

You do not speak beak

If your mother taught you better than this

She is now forcing rice fistfulls down her throat

If you beg her

She will swoon

Do you remember her perch from some morning?

You have forgotten how to take her to the sun...

Your fingers are feathered

Your wings are clipped

&

When did your pockets

Begin their emptiness of fire?

I like to think

You were taken with the ocean

But my arms are lined with clues

That it was the wind

Which stood against you.

You have all of the answers.

You avoid the difficult questions,

And your feet

Frequently strike upward

At your beliefs.

You talk of bliss

Yet sing songs of the ill.

Your eyes were baptized

In ivory.

Your tongue was wet.

Synonymity

Rest assured,
Young observer
You are filled
With your years.
They hunted for you.
Know that there is now
A poem written
On your behalf...
If you accept it
As your own.

If you love it,
It is

An incredible poem.

Synonymity

Rest assured,
Young observer
You are filled
With your years.
They hunted for you.
Know that there is now
A poem written
On your behalf...
If you accept it
As your own.

If you love it,
It is

An incredible poem.

Waiting for

Laced with sun-dried tears

And a scalding message from the moon

The secret of you

Lies dormant.

I will use man-made claws

And the spine of a bear

To pry the untold story's end

With eyes closed.

The secret must be saved

But never revealed

Unless I can remember

Where my own secret wound up.

Mine once wandered like an avalanche

And it slipped through a crack

It made for itself

The sweater it wore in July.

Yours smells like pine

And the child aching to escape me

Is begging for a tiny handful

Of its light.

I have a dangerous but exciting suspicion

That looking into the secret of you

Will see it wringing itself of sweat

That its scent will be adolescently familiar.

Oakes

Sip the tinted pill they demand;

Tilt.

Feel your freedom like black-blue sand

Palm it

Squeeze

And see how easily it is overcome.

Make the apologies you wish for.

You are the bigger man

If you believe in forgiveness.

You have a padlocked mouth

Filled with keys

Each named in a number

You somehow know.

The beats of tongue

To temple

Of righteous

To hand-picked by sisters

This is how you were delivered

And I pray you the healing

I know you now need.

I once more embrace you,

My brother.

The morning I was forty-five seconds late to class

With all the majesty

Of your lore

I found myself taken with hair.

The bright crispness of it;

It's impeccable worth.

This pillow of a chest

Is both manmade

And natural

And it smells like a correct answer.

If the morning were any brighter

I would have to lie about it:

The brilliance of your palm

Will always take precedence.

The Inadequate Guilt Of Troy Davis

I am no better
Than any citizen
Of this country.

I am just a man.

A man without a gun,
Bullet, knife, needle, or
Yearning to find revenge.

And I wish to stay this way.

I am just a man.

No better.
Hoping to be contested
For my proposed sameness.

To the boy I used to believe in

You have finally chosen a life

Which allows me

To fall out of love with you.

Thank you,

It is a needed centripetal force,

I could never have overcome

Myself.

My fingers used to ache

Within the memory

Of your locks.

The likes of which

I am now free.

I wish you a smile,

Clarity,

And an avoidance of the judgement

I cannot offer

Myself.

Before you leave

Into the forever of my hindsight

Please know:

I did love you.

Your goals were attainable.

And the two were never

Mutually exclusive.

Hard as you tried

To make them so.

Backbone

If, somewhere, there are poems

Written about your smile

I do not want to read them.

I am too scared

To find out

Where it will end.

Withdrawn Jupiter

I complicatedly want you to know,

Brother mayhem,

That tonight I wanted

To fuck you

As if God had given me

A gift

Which he would now judge me on.

I intended to score

A perfect 10.

But your pretenses were un-vacant.

Your mouth belonged to a sister.

Our paths were,

Inevitably,

Beginning to part.

The Tightrope Walker

Was it her intention?

Did she mean to end

So many laughs

When she bit that tightrope

Clean, in-half,

And reached to hug forty-seven stories

Before she fully embraced Earth?

The woman,

This town starlet,

Had finally failed.

On the inverted flight

Into the traffic skyline

Sons seem pigeons.

The mayor's speech

Is a bald-eagle's squawk.

The city tenants point impolitely,

Not having time to think

Of their manners.

In the next two weeks,

Before the tightrope walker's name

Is banished to crisp and tan

On newspaper headlines

In the backs of closets,

Children asked their mothers

Why the woman fell.

Mothers asked each other

The same.

Fathers started drinking

As they maneuvered the fine strings

Holding their families together.

It seemed as if the town

Was makeshift bound

By the rope;

Pulling these skyscrapers together.

Now, the sky seems to be

Crashing downward.

On the trip down

She rips her leotard

Clean off.

It will later be sewn

By a mother

To remember her daughter's beauty

Now seamed.

Welcome

Trust in me

Broken comb part my hair

And

Breathe deep the memories

That have hardwired themselves to my cheeks

Now ebing and flowing with the sounds

Of those gaudy mechanical things

Called lungs

That live to let your heart do its job

Twine your spine around itself

And get a better view of this moment

Where all the poems about

Trust and the love we want ourselves to feel

Is being played out

As we skip the sixty broken hearted promises

That eleven minutes after eleven

Offers people who cling to hope

Like transients

We do not need these wishes anymore

We found that trust in this night

This is not sex

Binocular piping baristas

Fresh off the shift

Turned voyeur might call this sex

But this is not sex

This is not making love

As much as it is

Creating it

Hard-boiling lust and straining it clean

This is the night

Where we turned off all the clumsy switches

Of the world

The labels and the terms

Opened every door

And shouted that tonight had happened

In a language that only people who had learned

What we have now learned

Now know

Both translators of this language

Now find themselves smiling

One mouth too dry

And full of pillow to speak

The other too wet and understanding

Trust in me

Like I was someone you had stood

Shoulder-to-shoulder with

And had entire conversations

Finding eye-contact in the horizon

Like someone who had skipped a date

And the chance for sex

To sit shoulder to shoulder with you

Watching a movie with too much blood

And too little plotline

Like someone who listened

Face to face when you said the things

Girls were too much themselves to understand

And boys were too much themselves to care for

And mined a new type of love in that

Trust in me

Like I know you

Like I was your brother

Like I am

Like I could watch you sigh

And not wonder about the breath parting your lips

As everyone else in your position would

Trust in me

Even from the beach of your tomorrow

Trust me

So I don’t trust alone

Once More

He tried to tell me

That leaving the light on

Would mark a mistake.

I asked myself

If the mistake I made

Would haunt me.

Yes.

Sometimes

Sometimes

Sometimes the love

We stupidly choose to feel

Is grotesque.

This way,

We do not feel the brokenness

Of avoidance:

A self-sheltering.

This is how we remember

Not to forget.

This is how we remember

We can feel.

Harder in the presence

It feels more broken

For having felt your fixing.

In a mixed up way

The bruise is a reminder.

You were always so good at that;

Breaking things

In the process of mending them.

In losing and not minding.

Help me remember

How to remind you.

Nighttime is both

Beautiful

And treacherously hind-legged.

A dystopia we wish for

On the backs of tossed coins.

The coming year will be.

A waiting mortuary.

And then it will multiply.

Welcome home

Under the neon ruby glow

Your skin

Almost evaporated.

Damn you for reminding me

Of your mortality.

My lungs yearn for something

So much more wholesome

Than this pang,

They burn with

The salty memory of you

Inhaled.

I do not make my excuses

Anymore.

I do not need to.

I do not forgive them,

Either;

I must mistake myself

For someone with virtue.

This is how we survive.

We avoid survival.

We turn fully toward memory,

Hop three steps backward,

Finding solace in a moment

We forgot we were standing in.

A breathing room

In the likeness of a you

I used to know.

End of months

Paint that smile on,

Or steal it from the Past;

They need you stronger.

Brutish

I am so sorry.

This is unforgivable,

To leave you

Trapped inside the airtight

Box of my smile

Or kindness.

I never asked enough

To know which

It was.

When we parted ways

In the airtight room,

I thought the door was unlocked.

That you needed some

Time to think.

A floor,

Four walls,

The lamp,

And the two parakeets

I reluctantly forked over

For your trouble.

As with a poisoned mine,

The birds were the first to go.

I would have never

Closed the door behind me

If I knew you would

Be trapped.

I do not think.

You can't help

But to imagine

The shape of my stomach

Upon opening that door,

New prospective occupant

Nearly underfoot.

I heard him run

From the sight of it.

The smell.

But never turned my head

To watch the retreat.

Here,

The lamplight still burns.

The floor is caked with tears.

Gritty, gritty tears.

Yours always had a way

Of sticking around.

The walls have started to crumble;

They too have been kept

From breath.

There are footprints on the ceiling.

These sign reluctance.

You fought yourself for survival

In the last moments.

You convinced yourself

That indigence laced with delusion

Would uproot an answer.

You inverted the solution.

The corners were what got me.

Three of them

To be exact.

The other five sheltered cliches:

Your hopes,

A crucified hand,

Another crucified hand,

A yard of moleskin,

And your signature in firefly blood.

The other three really

Caught me by surprise:

Your Past gazed at me from the bottom left.

A child's beg.

It took no shape

But that of two precipice-eyes.

They well

And remind me my shame

In carelessness.

Your Future glared at me from the upper left,

As if to remind me,

"You never carved a spare key."

I take it like a man,

Knowing I had bones to carve:

Bones I chose to keep.

And the bottom right corner

Of this room,

This room which gasps for breath,

Somberly snatched the wind

From my body...

Your Beating Heart

Languid, but stoic,

Had jumped from your chest

And run to you.

Like a half-life miracle disaster,

It had summoned breath

To coat your throat

And beckoned you to safety,

Or something akin.

I had never seen anything like it.

The body broken,

The heart a saviour.

This,

This is truly survival.

With an opened door,

Discovery of this magnitude

Can even become life once more.

I carved this doorstop

From a bone in my wrist.

I wasn't using it.

It is no key,

But it is yours.

Discovery Of The Self's Broken Past

Take two for the pain,

Three more to forget.

Wake yourself

One backside of the knee

To the corner of the mattress

At a time.

Thrust your heels

Into the broken evening

Scattered across the floor.

Walk.

Toe to heel,

Miss that off-kilter floorboard

Lean to the left

To keep this man

Asleep.

Break the banister,

Or trip down the stairs.

Alongside either

Make sure

To grind your headache

And snort it.

Remember your mistakes

As an impartial observer

Of half-truths

And dizzy daydreams

Come to pass:

He tries on a pair of sunglasses

Like the skin of a man;

Simply for the sake of it

With too quick a realization

Of the self.

Specs stolen to a night.

The town.

In the evening,

The clock towers

Lie for miles.

They are moons to be sheltered from,

Omnipotent bastard children

Yearning for hope.

Some for another drink.

None to remember.

If he glances upward,

The two-handed screams

Will blind him.

So he digs his fingers

Into his thighs

And wishes they were holding

February 2009.

He wonders

If that date was right.

He knows it was not.

But I'll be damned

If I don't make

The same mistake

Tomorrow.

"She" always forgets

How to pretend

In her nightgown.

"He"

Has never

Been there.

Lay Thee Down

Hands aching,

Knees locked.

This is your refuge;

A complication.

His mouth is full of years

Your back has retreated.

Without some sort

Of knowing,

You have lost trust

And refuse to see it so.

Birchwood

She sips herself dry

Of the warning.

Her breath

Is beating

Like foghorn.

If she gasps

She relapses in fault;

The schoolteacher memory

Can break her.

But he chooses her

As his plaything.

Mental monogamy.

A winter she cannot misplace.

She never found

Her glove.

He keeps the teacup he offered her

In his top dresser drawer:

Her bright pink lipstick has caked,

And she wears darker shades

In the skin she now rents.

She learned three things

That semester:

Conviction,

And the yearning to fly.

Sincerely

You are your signature,

Though you claim to be the page.

Your wrists are white

And bumpy;

Your palms feel balmy

And smell mangled.

I reduce you

Like a misguided rectangle

Into the square it was meant

To be.

But you are not evil.

The horns in pictures of you

Are drawn.

For that, I do not

Apologize.

I do ask for understanding.

At sixteen

I reported my palms missing.

My fists hid them rather well.

My eyes

Never

Looked down.

An open sore on my ribcage,

Now a gorgeous story

Reminded me

That to leave you

Was to know you.

I cannot believe

It took two cancers;

One I could feel,

One seen retroactively

To love you again.

With each overturned chair,

The contemplated swan-dive

To leave my unmarked body,

The hours of head crown

To the inside of a locker,

I cursed your name

As a bomb.

I wish you were your signature.

I do wish you were

Your signature.

Perhaps you will find this

Cruel

When you inevitably read it.

When you see your blood

Pumping through the words.

If this is the case,

Hold your breath.

Kill them

As they can only be killed:

In silence.

If you find these words

An attack

And see them stand erect

As your heart

Beats

Faster,

Then you are not your signature.

You are the page.

Surrender

On the night that you leave,

We hug.

I tug so hard

That my right arm,

Stronger than my thigh,

Severs at the shoulder.

The stump bleeds salt.

It remembers your name.

Your mother is watching,

Her back turned

Without acting a shroud.

I imagine she clenches a fist:

Her teeth.

The wound does

Not acknowledge itself. It is

A lady. It will not

Beg.

But, if you loosen your grip,

You will wreck me.

The blood will find itself

Difficult to plateau. To cake.

To remember its name.

It will try to drown

The tear-soaked carpet.

You will spend years

Hovering with mop bucket

And fine-toothed comb.

Without your mother.

One time,

Perhaps all at once

(I can not remember),

You set my arteries on fire.

You liked the sound of

My heart.

But you liked racing it more.

And you wanted to ignite my life,

Waterless.

You could have scabbed my forehead

With your careless first kiss.

Its teeth at the lip

Of regret's precipice.

You are not a box filled

With sanity.

You are just a boy

Empty of his years,

Reeking of righteousness.

In a way that can only come

From faking it.

The mother was wet.

Her pattern flossed giant men

With their faces down.

Sunset

Every time I turn transatlantic

I try to make sure I fly eastward

Getting as far away from California

As I can

Because flying over Inglewood

Would put me only thousands of feet

Above Ray Charles’ body

And if his ghost is soaring as high

As I think it is

As high

As a piano

Injected with helium

Coercing through its redwood

I would meet him in the cabin

Of that Boeing 747

You see

Ray holds everything I am not

Behind those ray-bans of his

The truth to the secret I cannot tell the world

His retina scribes a test

Pushing poets to their best

And throwing failures out

Like last weeks top billboard hit

All Ray would ask me

Is “What is a sunset”

And aside from some muggy

Water-stained rendition of a faulty textbook

I am not sure I could explain it to him

But with a smile

Like a quarter-crescent moon

He would encourage me with his silence

As I would stand there

Watching my reflection dance in the opals

Begging me like Oliver for an answer

And I would be left with

All the metaphors maintained

By a matchbook notepad

And all the moments I never had

I’d say

I guess it sort of looks

How an orgasm feels

But only at the base

And only if you subtract the metallic taste

And the clouds are every non-biological

Maternal figure you ever let hold you.

The sky is still there

Like the baseline in a Guns N’ Roses song

Only far fewer people

Throw their tube tops to manifested men

To it’s rhythm

And if you catch it at just the right moment

It’s the color of that time

You asked your mom in the checkout line

For a Twix bar

And she promised it with her next paycheck

And a hand on your shoulder

And there are rays

Ironically

Which shoot out from the base like

How it would feel to hold the hand

Of the bandana’d vagabond on the train.

Only the sunset will let go before you do

And if you see it

Or don’t see it

With someone who can see it

Or not see it

For everything it is to you

The sunset is a one-time sun-roof

Set in the shape of god’s hand

Binding you two

Until seagulls go home

To read their baby seagulls

Bedtime stories about a man named

Jonathan Livingston

And Ray and I would lay down

With an enthusiasm

Held between my right palm

And his left

In the middle of an airplane cabin

Wondering which of us was blind

That damned birthday just kept making you cringe. Your mother wondered if you would ever notice your freedom, but you insisted upon your faction shackles. If you blink, you lose the moment. If you yawn, it will be obsessed with your reluctance. Blow out those candles, familiar brother. You are unjustifiably wanton, and tonight cannot beg your admittance. Wreck the blockade of these years. Free your spirit as a luxury.

Wyoming

This wind

Will melt you

If you allow it.

Winter was our refuge

From the lonely fist of man.

You,

Fence-bound and bleeding

I,

Unaware of you

Until too late.

Why did they take your voice?

Rip it

From behind your tongue

With their miles?

With their sunken brows.

And how?

You are famous.

And nobody

Is happy about that.

The Street Sweeper

The Street Sweeper

Only sleeps

After the mockingbird reminds the world of his name

He sweeps the streets clean

Of glitter and sweat

And he likes to remember decades ago

Here, his still Greenwich home

Was a catalyst for change

Decades ago,

He sat atop the hotbed tabletop of a movement

A movement which would soon forget him

The Street Sweeper likes to pocket

Patches of camouflage corduroy

And drop bits of gold and nickel

Likes to give back to the streets that made him

He drops his mop

And races the rattle of his eardrum to the ground

Anxious of the clamor

It sounds almost like gunshot-stunted footprints

Named Stonewall

The Street Sweeper hums melodies that sound

Like gravel topped black top

And the stop signs they would hold

Were they painted green

This pavement is still shaking

In the meter of 1969

When a lady who called herself his boyfriend

6 days out of the week

Took her place at the front line

Glass in hand

And a face that took days to paint on

On that night,

The Street Sweeper’s cock-sure Concubine

Uncaked the gold mane her pupils proudly poured from themselves

Cast a courage-emptied bottle

Full-throttle at the band of blithe badges

That bore the continuation of her trauma

And she begged them to demi-perm her eye shadow

The Street Sweeper shines a light post

The light post stands erect

Where starry-eyed boys

Forty years prior

Hid books empty of them

And changed into themselves for a night

Where there was darkness

This street now exudes

Where there was silence there is now a faint buzz

A buzz begun when the Street Sweeper’s muse

Fused her fist with her past and put her father’s

Memory to use

When she raised it to Dionysus

When she called for Carnival

And a contract that she could love

Baton browed bastards

Ripped that fist from its growth

And plastered her last linkage to her father

Across the wall

Like a crimson cascade

Where the Street Sweeper now naps

When he gets too tired of dancing for dusk

The wall she peered up from

The day they met

One and one-half limp-wristed fists fighting back their feelings

The wall that refuses to break down

Even after her T Cells fell lonely and done

The Street Sweeper

Only sleeps after the mockingbird announces itself of existence

And he only sleeps alone

Because he alone

Fights the crusade

Against the monster of a world turned

By forgotten sacrifice

The Street Sweeper sweeps his street

Until the mockingbird remembers that he has a name

The street he has chosen to remember

Because his force-fed freedom

Was bled from these cracks

The Cross-Atlantic Swimmer

The Cross-Atlantic Swimmer

Was not born into her namesake

She loose-lock keyed herself free

From the wrong side of the line

And made a swim for it

Two days and a slue of clanked doors later

She found herself beached

Breathing hard for the first time

And hoping to learn to live without her gills

One of the hardest skinned fish

I have ever met

She gnawed the bars of her new home jagged

And sawed the scales from her skin

Here,

Rib raw and smooth

She looks just like the silently armed men

That take her from room to room

Insisting she grow legs

And learn to speak through the flaps

She once used to breathe from

These men make their language ugly

A broken beam of light

Which should fill rooms and create

But instead blinds

And forces a seclusion it refuses to allow

The cross-Atlantic swimmer

Has only a handful of her past

A picture

And memories of a home she hoped to rebuild

Back of the wrong side of the line

She stole her son away

From the shark of his father

Spilling red wine

From the tooth-broken taught skin of her leg

She stowed him at her sisters

And made the break

To take back the freedom she

Wasn’t even allowed to fake

On this side,

Sanely contained

Behind bars

The cross-Atlantic swimmer

Screams asylum

And falls on ears which refuse to unplug themselves

Here,

She knows only

Cactus-wrapped love

And no gloves

She sits frozen and foreign

And stands to be called both

The cross-Atlantic swimmer

Wants only for her son

To know that she can still wade in the water

When she is granted the chance

To know that the shark

Did not drink itself drowsy on the wine of her leg

But alone and shackled

She can only tell the story

To outside legged and gilled visitors

The cross-Atlantic swimmer

Will sit silently broken and gasping for breath

Until we stop capturing the broken

And the hopeful in America

Until asylum can become itself

Instead of the ugly mane of reluctance

It now knows

Until we treat the swimmers of the world

As wine emptied victims of sharks

With stories what need to be told

If we refuse to swim

With these women and men

The cross-Atlantic swimmer

Will have to stay

Wretchedly creature

Until she paddles her way home

Remembering how to breathe

And in disbelief of the day she can live

Chances are

I will be the goodbye

To your hello.

I have gained

A century of pounds

Since that first day.

Weathered hands

I refuse to accept.

Love learned roughly.

Love maintained

I have, regretfully

Taken idle.

Paint my life,

Let us try to make the

Most of our time

My promise:

That these remaining days

Will not lose you.

Remind me

Until that future day

Mother, Father.

Strangle The Misanthrope

Somewhere you are brushing your teeth.

Or you are not.

Your polo rests unbuttoned,

And my mother is still ripe to your face;

The likes of which

I do not stand audience for.

I know you have a name

Because it is on the tip on my tongue.

My dry and simple tongue.

Your clean-shaven and foggy face.

Do your palms sweat?

I've imagined them sweating.

The clammy drip reminds me

That this need not be easy

For anyone. Do we

Have the same maker?

If the truth is caked

In shaking necks,

Don't worry. I am not here

To judge on the basis

Of deity.

I have never been that kind

Of star-catapult culprit.

And I can not blame him

For clinging too long

To something so perfect,

Afraid another attempt

Would stand

Blasphemed.

If the sculptor of your clay

Does not approve of mine,

If he is an outcast among the crafters

Of beautiful form,

We will assign ourselves capulet sashes

And make sin a beautiful anomaly.

A force to be reckoned with.

A bitch with connections.

I can not wait to encapsulate you

Fully clothed.

To remind you what you have forgotten:

Your worth.

Beyond the flesh:

That cracked and stumpy artifice

Which can decay.

Your beauty is indelible.

Friend,

Where have you gotten to?

It is time to find the home

We will not question.

I am sure you are preoccupied.

A mission trip,

The tough-as-nails defense

Of your mother,

Your back-breaking research.

But please be gentle,

Remember

I am waiting.

The lift:

Palm to Jesus

Beg for notice.

The heels are printed,

Taped from within,

And Chicago-December salty.

Unlike that which they shell

They were made

For a woman.

Lips unstained,

Mascara scarred fingertips,

And a violent hip.

Just one.

Like a moment frozen

She does not feign this.

Her mother forgot the anniversary-

Misplaced that microphone.

The song, once popular,

Is now a memory for its own sake.

Dresses have come and gone.

Littered the floors

Of the seediest bars.

She once scalp-shattered a beer bottle

On a skinhead

On a whim

To prove that she was sharp.

Heel in arch

Back in arch

Stiff calf

Breasts upward with truth

Smile painted to the ears

Hair grown;

That sort of commitment.

Sometimes

We are bred for this beauty.

Sometimes we learn it.

No matter.

We all have pain in our hearts.

Here You Are Allowed

If the light finds you,
It will be difficult
To avoid the tendency to find shade.
Avoid it.
Inject it into your wrists
By way of tattoo
And scar.
Ambivalence was never
A good color
On your kind of righteous.

But the flower did not bloom.
Not like the others seemed to.
This flower was a different shade
Of punctual and mis-reliant.

I sat crestfallen,
Wrapping my wrists in ideals
And making stuccato
Their inner beats.

The flower hated its water.
It rejected mist and prayer
With the flick of a stem,
And ran downward to rejoin the earth.

I wrote you a eulogy,
Belated and far too long.

I hope you will not fault me
For finding your bible,
And assuming it as my own
Without practice.

You, as the story of my hope,
Seemed to gain from its weather
And I, reluctant mortal
Am looking for osmosis.

Like lighter-fluid to water,

You lit me

Taught me how to feel breath.

This was more than a moment,

This was how I felt myself

And you did not yet know it.

Take your notes to aphrodite,

I will sing my melodies

To those who can embody them.

Yours is a faint rose;
A mother to mayhem.
Your blockade fades,
Yet pushes its roots to Brutus.
If you cannot find
My centered explosion
Release your two-handed smile
And sever me.
This is charity.

XVII

The afternoon hangs

Like a swollen willow suicide.

The dog does not bark,

She does as she is told.

Your hands can cover mouths.

They do.

They can not fight forward.

They try.

This trust was battered

In a seventeen-layer crust.

I do not know

If your mother hugged

Her typewriter, that day.

If she had one.

If your father was not

A lark.

I do know that they injected you with teeth.

But my jawline broke its back

To forgive you.

Ten miles

And a lifetime of hours

To walk them.

This was your gift,

You starry-willed monolith.

You forgiver of self,

I traced your name more than my own

And plagued my ears with your story.

Escape is not bred from captivity,

But from the relinquishing of pain.

And so I have not escaped,

But I am free.

The sky is hotter here.

The grass less green.

You are very much alive,

So I hear.

The Pen of The Tongue

First person
To reconcile the self,
Second person
To reconcile the self,
Third person,
The self to reconcile herself.

We do,
Each of us
When presented the chance,
Curse our maker
And beg forgiveness.

My promises are not lies,
They are your wishes,
Succumb to their remission.

Conversion. Therapy.

When the Shiksa blessed you,
Tongue in cheek,
Your eyes rolled upward.

This was not of
Your mother's condoning.
Your father sat
Stocky,
Malignant.

She asked you,
"Are you ready for dinner?"
You asked her,
"Does my tie
Feel a bit heavy to you?"

To this day
She has not blinked.
That moment
Like a Dahmer calling card.

Winter fell over August,
The dew ceases to vibrate.
Your pockets are filled with hands,
Mine with letters
I could never keep from you,
But did.

Only the wind remembers.

The earth is destined to
Disarray
And broken promises.
A safety depleted to fortresses.

His back could topple towers.

His arms refused
To breathe the foundation away
Though it was their destiny.