Ginza

In a bowl of Miso soup there is only Me and Not-Me.
That which is not molds the mushroomed cloud:
myself. I raise the constellation to my lips and tiny tofu logs
emanate like empathetic icebergs. My reflection tastes muddy,
as should be expected, and reminds me of my kelp forest youth.
Chewed by urchins. Suspended in one blue, other’d
by another. Chewing on seaweed only serves to hunger,
and suddenly I realize: I have existed solely on dead things.
Jazz plays airy overhead, little to do with the day or décor.

This is not a poem.

Atrocities actualized resemble equations:
How many hands divided yield tangerines:
Sometimes people walk to avoid not walking:
The muggers don't breathe when they're into it:
You never heard of a roach reading Focault, have you?

Untitled

It terrifies me to think there have to be others.

I have never cried a day in my life

The self is a slippery slope.
Sure, first you're man; but then
mischief, lank, and bloody knuckles.
Boys will be boys, and cocks remember
simple things. When climbing the oak I fell
headfirst because decades ago someone said
I wouldn't amount to more than dirt.

Well, dirt has its uses too.
The springs of a flowerbed, for example;
the candor of cosquillita, underneath
a peach heel the night you left
your boots gaping with the index;
the silence sprinkled
on the bridge of your father's
nose as they lay you down.

Forget Genius, Give Me the Average

Judging by the way the lemmings run,
I'd say I'm on the winning team.

Judging by the way the shadow smirks,
I'd say I've felt more than anyone.

Words are Symbols for our Hands in the Dark

NOTE: the formatting on this thing is awful...so i'm going to have to present this in a much worse way.  Damn blogs.

We can still see our outlines underneath
the covers.  That’s not right.  We close our eyes.
It’s our last time, and everything needs to be
     perfect.
I reach: pelt you with feathery queridas, cradle
your breast inside the cup of my palm—That’s my
     thigh.
O, sorry.  I’m not sorry.  Everything is going as
     I imagined.
A home isn’t beautiful until the builder’s hands
     are bloodied.
A birdhouse isn’t a birdhouse unless the squirrels
     can creep
inside.  You are telling me this.  Your fingers
     slip
Morse code into my chest like ballots.  They trail
across the bridge of my sternum, tracing animals
into my ribcage.  O, it’s a canary!  O,
     it’s a bull moose!
O, it’s a salt water crocodile!  A finger sinks
     into the sponge
of my lips, and then, shh, another.  Is it yours?
 It feels different.  Did I get it? you ask me.
Something is rubbing my stomach.  Almost, I offer,
try and dig a little deeper.  You dig.
The finger that is not yours wrestles with my
     tongue.
I swim my hand through your hair.  I put my
     pointer to use:
this is you, it laughs: this is the pocket of your
     earlobe;
this is your shoulder blade; this is the
     circumference
of your wrist.  This is what it feels like:
like a bare heel pressing into mud; like diving
 into quicksand and springing skywards in Jiangsu.
A hand, yours, grips my buttocks: Is this me too?
Now hold on a second, I say, I feel something. 
     I do:
someone is nibbling at my side.  Are those
     your teeth?
They don’t sound like your teeth.  No answer.
My heels touch down somewhere in the dark.
I am confused.  I am alone.  I stamp my feet
against the sheets.  I roll around in the mud.
I pick up the remnants of you: here is the shorter
of your arms; your left hand.  Here is the eyelash
     you could never shake.
Here is your tibia, spinning circles; your uvula,
     resonating Mi.
Here is the last thing you ate, a still-beating
     heart.  Here
is a fractured memory: your forehead pressed
     against another.
Here is the tent you preferred to bed, the palms
     you preferred
to pillows.  Here is the drum of your ear;
     Someone’s  voice
trilling into the drum; hands pounding the drum;
hips massaging the drum; kneading the drum;
here is the drum and needing the drum.
Here is the only part of you I’ve never kneaded.
Here is the only toe I never named. Your littlest
     toe.
I think I will call her Esperanza;
I think I will take her home;  I think I will
     leave her
on the dresser drawer, and on the nights I refuse
     to sleep,
we’ll lay there, together; imagining the rest of
     you, sobbing
her, not me.

Concerning Construction Paper Found in a Parking Lot

In a drawing of himself
there is only
Boy and Not-Boy.
He bores blue through outlines,
wishing he would never end.

The Sky Fell Down in Clumps

At first we thought it was tissue paper,
and the world wept. The earth was peppered
with strips of cerulean voile. Bulldozers gathered
them into geometric shapes on the horizon.
A great scientist appeared on TV. and told the world
he never really believed in the whole rational thing
to begin with. So, that’s it, you thought,
everything is just a gimmick. As the overhead emptied
out, the rules became lax. We enjoyed a drip of morphine
underneath an overpass. I thought it was important
to remember there wasn’t any pain. I tried to explain
it to you. How things were better than before. Next to us,
the clouds gathered, kneeling in the dirt. Go on, get out of it,
you shouted in your sleep-state. I curled next to the cumulus.
It’s important to remember they always felt like us.

Preludes to Shaky Voice Syndrome

I.
I get the urge to rip the grass from my chest when you blink in succession.

II.
When I am in love, I lilypad your thighs.

III.
There is a certain hum--not your hum--that make me cup Tse-Tse flies into my ears.

IV.
When you walk backwards I am convinced I am a train.

V.
I clap my hands on occasion; this has nothing to do with you.

VI.
Grab my wrist and I'll imagine someone groping for the light switch.

VII.
The off-shoot dance involves empathy and underwear stuffed with pinecones.

VIII.
No one appreciates bold; gesture in italics.

IX.
Your molars are real life too.

X.
The landscape is made of treadmills.

XI.
When I run, I spin the world to reach you.

At the End of Progress, We May Consider the Blackbird

The final dilemma of our budding Utopia turned out to be
a leaking basement pipe in Enterprise, Alabama.
Thousands had gathered to take part in history.
Dissertations were written by famous Harvard professors,
theories of what it meant to finally achieve the perfection
we always knew was rightfully ours. Spiritual revelations
were promised. Divinity, expected. The crowd circled the small
southern cottage with a general impatience:
it was about time the universe conceded to us.

We watched on the television.
The cameras zoomed in on the pipe as it was tightened.
Though it was you who pointed out the plumber’s wrist,
his veins, pulsing blue, seemed to parrot the water
droplets as they fell. I counted them; tapped out
their pleading into the valleys of your palm.

The plumber put his tools down before walking
off-screen. There was no applause, I remember that,
and I had counted nineteen when everyone dispersed.
I remember we were holding hands, and then we weren’t,
but I can’t recall who lifted the first finger, or who was first
out the door. The streets filled with our neighbors,
everyone marching slowly away from their homes,
away, slowly, from one another. Nothing to guide
their steps, they moved in arbitrary waves, silently,
dull-eyed, you were soon lost among them.

I was walking too, though I was looking up.
I watched a flock of blackbirds flying overhead,
and wondered what they made of the chaos:
if, from their height, it seemed we were all
moving in the same direction.

Buoyancy was Never Measured by the Pound

The dog snores loudly in the living room.
No one notices. Especially you,
in the dining room,
reading.

What are you reading?

No one's written anything
in ages.

No one remembers what it's like
to swim the Atlantic.

We have machines for that;
they were made of ice
and now
they are made of paper.

The dog tramples an imagined rabbit
in his sleep.
You do not know this, you are turning
the page.

Remember:

Dead things float,
not words.

I Often Think of that Fourth of July

Continually,
the stifled fireworks within our palms,the arm rolling loosely along your hip,the hip softly bulging against the hood of a car,
the wrist bone protruding with sudden purpose,
the call of the crickets cooling our skin.

I try to emulate their tone:
the tip of a tongue against the small pocket of an earlobe,
the sad hump of moist breath.