January 2012
1 post
How awful it would be to not miss you.
December 2011
8 posts
Supposedly a yawn signifies the transition between different stages of arousal; one yawns when a body is sliding between realities. I’ve been here for three weeks and I feel, today in particular, a sort of suspension. The sense one gets just before they realize that gravity is trying to push them earth-ward. The feeling of waking from a dream only to find that all of your spider-webbed...
For days I wrap myself in your stolen words, in your hidden moments, captured and wrestled into my world. I want to respectfully stand on the side of your home, with an arm and my head sticking in through a window, glimpsing and feeling blindly, roughly at all of the beautiful jewels you’ve accumulated and created over time. I want to knock softly on your window in the morning to see if...
Heavy perfume billows from the night bushes each bloom breathing differently removed of clothes sun and visibility heat and noise exposed and raw they contract like sleeping women or children or men stripped of their conscious guilt they whisper into you in every tongue of love and comfort and each wine-soaked petal is a finger longing for a hand
Acute pain under my rib cage where you used to put your fingers on the shortest nights I’ve ever lived. My eyes still moving from when I began to count every hair on your head, like a nervous tic to keep the dawn from coming.
Crystal moon over the La Sal Mountains and I’m tired, tired from staying up all night watching your face turn and twist in the sheets. You’re just a voice now. Far away, somewhere in the snow, you echo out of the rocks and bedroom walls and somehow I hear you and my chest opens up to inhale you. The elk stand out against the snow and I’m tired of missing so much.
External forces pushing my bones and skin out of line with each other, creating within and without me a distorted figure of self. God, who am I? The time will come when that won’t be the only question on my mind.
Taking wide, giant steps across the earth
of myself
thousand mile stretches
hurt good in the calf and thigh
long drive to Dallas
eat some corn beef and soda
in the car next to Elvis.
Walking away from it,
a three way mirror and broken steps
cold walls in the winter
and twenty-four hour supervision.
Abuse smell like sweat
and hair when it gets too close
and scared.
I’ll still love you, even when you’re in Bulgaria.
November 2011
40 posts
You stepped into the room
with the door slightly ajar in the first moments of morning
a billboard said it best
“good things come to those who wake”
Our tongues curled up together for 11 months. We became sinuous in one another, our arms long and growing to stretch out only. We became time, fleeting and flexible. We became lust, carnal and nodding the ways and waves of our bodies against each other. We became sick, with apprehension and the transformative power of love and gracefulness. We became sad and happy, all at once. We became until we...
I’ve got a hunger deep in my heart for something. You or food or God or play. Something, down there, lurks in wait for something to love. Why can’t it be myself?
I am an animal, panting in the heatwind of my home. We have signs enough; signs to speak love, happiness, eternal sadness, loss, goodness, compassion, let’s get a burrito, all compact within the inner sanctum of words lost and never thought. We are compiled of ancient symbols. An open mouth to tell of nostalgia and bittersweet anxiety happy. A closed palm to indicate dedicated resignation,...
As I slept and the snow fell in my mind, I became a million tiny little threads. And I flew to sew myself into the rest of human experience, all torn to shreds just to become something.
“At times I feel your voice is reaching me...
I drove through snow.
Your smells made an impression on me, indelible.
I drove through snow.
Your fingers like fire on my neck I am transformed by pain.
I drove through snow.
I wove you into my back, each swallowed emotion digs knots.
To feel so unreal, to feel like a toy, this is how I am. Oh whispered moccasin whipped along the roadway. Oh poor merging. A roadtrip of ineloquence.
Who said that if a millet of grain were to fall, the noise of every granule hitting the ground would turn into a thud of impossible noises? An audible impact of one thousand silences? Is this to say that in silence there’s the intention of a thousand words? Is silence merely the impact of all spoken words?
I can exist. I can be. I’m reading the inflection of your voice by the color palette of your iris. You strike a fire with the connection of our clasped palms and this sun-stroke cripples me. I’m flying as I’ve separated myself from this place and space and I can feel my relation to the plummeting cosmos. Does the Universe move? Are we swirling, constantly in motion? Or are we...
1 tag
I creak my existence open with the flat smack of my palm, I bleed profusely from my pores, time pours out in the cupped portion of my hand, navel, and chest, and I move into the world, like a subway through tunnels, groping in the dark.
What makes me the man I am? What makes me the man I want to be? What allows me to live? The singing, silent love love love that gives me hope and gracious flowers to wreath and wring my hands in. Give me love that pours out of my hands, like fountains and everlasting flues that dart in and out of homes nesting birds eggs and clean, deep soot. Give me that love and allow me to give it to myself.
I told you I loved you as you told me you were leaving. That’s the theme of our relationship. Loved and leaving.
I read your face in everyone I come across. I can’t help it, you’re there. Oh you’ve gotten longer hair. It looks nice. Oh you’ve got a new mole, it’s beautiful. Oh, you’ve got a little mustache. I love it. Your face blends together and molds into the structures of new and foreign vessels. I see you everywhere, just to see you.
Today, bring me beautiful joy which my heart has need to see and feel and hold and cultivate. Today, bring back my youth which has been squandered and eschewed in dark places and unholy hell. Today, give me love to give out like coriander and flax seed to those who need it most, those baking bread or curries without their heads about them. Today, give me you, today give me me, today, I need so...
The pains of sleep. I feel deep in my body a rumbling need yet cannot fulfill its call for blood and sweat and terrible fear. It’s hard to put yourself down to bed. But necessary I guess. I just swirl in disjointed confusion.
So much death hanging around my legs, tugging at my clothes, makes it hard to focus.
Goddammit, I miss you.
I go everywhere sowing these seeds of dissent. I travel like a salesman. I reap what I sow.
This sadness settles into my bones, like alcohol, soaking the muscle, the lactic acid, the raw marrow ready for something more hopeful.
I grasp at sentimental subtleties. I miss, dammit, I miss.
My rotten guts pray everywhere, always. They pray for peace. They pray for time. They pray for hope. They pray for these faces in front of them which make them beat. They pray for everything, everywhere, always. And they get sown back together but slowly, shh, slowly, watch it grow.
I wish we still knew what the fuck we were talking about.
Imagine I just said something beautiful. Smile like I finally said the right thing after missing and hurting for so long. Imagine I said something to lift all of this weight off of our shoulders. Imagine that it all feels big and open and hopeful again. Imagine that I’m not fucked up. Imagine that and know that it’ll be that way again sometime. I think.
Oh I’m sorry, I forgot how to speak, I forgot how to put two and two twogether, I forgot how to keep us together, I forgot how to put that into words to string up over my window like prayer flags, wouldn’t that be cool and hip? Informed? Wouldn’t I be so fucking cool if I could spit out cloth, sticky wet cloth, and spin it together into my own wall hangings, wouldn’t that...
My rotten guts and my rotten teeth. My spleen swells comically, and is tender to the touch. I’m tender to the touch and continually punch myself in the temple.
I asked for it, but you cutting me out of your life was like scratching open a sore. And the tremors, and the music, and the meds, and the cigarettes, and the writing, and the reading, and the shaking, the shaking, the shaking, the shaking.
I started taking quinine to offset the lithium I don’t know if it’ll work, but I’m shaking so much in the middle of the night, the day, that anything might help.Why I’m shaking isn’t the problem anymore and that’s a problem.
I’ve been crazy with grief for us for a long time now. For long enough to know I need to be better.
I am macabre and rotten inside. An itchy, pustulent sore. Feculent matter; an irrational fear. I am bilious and foul. I am skyrocketing. I am falling, with wings wide. I am a dead bird on a car windshield. Cool in repose; final, like a sentence fragment. I spread this disease unwillingly. When will love leave me alone?
Scars on the insides of my mouth, I love the smell of tobacco on my fingertips.
I see snow on the horizon, buttressed in the mountains, held up briefly before it moves down to us. Or maybe it won’t. Maybe we’ll miss it. But either way, the feeling of being hemmed in is pervasive. I am in confines; of my home, of my car, of my shower, my room, my couch, my mind. I have lost much in this pursuit of myself. If you don’t lose something in that pursuit, though,...
A yell as thick as vomit tears itself loose from the insides of my throat. I watch it go circling, spinning through the air, its contrails drifting in wafts. God, I’m sick of this continual humiliation. God, I need a break. God, I want to break my vocal chords in half to watch them steam gut-string words in this pre-December fog.
The fleeting feeling of hope: one’s got to grab on tight, anchor your sticky fists into that macaw’s down because it’ll slip away so silently while you sleep, leaving you with rust and indigo hands in the early morning.
The cigarettes complete themselves.
Thank you for this love in my chest, and the holes through which it leaks like water from a spigot. Thank you for open mouths. Why do mouths say so much and so little? How do we say more? How do I suck the soul off your tongue? How do I give, give, give? I am bleeding through my shirt, how do I give, give, give?
1 tag
We spent three nights together going nowhere below the mouth.
I started smoking to spite your memory.
You stayed a half thought in my mind.
We would hug across the car.
I started biting my nails to spite your memory.
I chewed your name in long, slow sessions nightly sleeping with you crushed up in my gum line jaws and teeth
you can’t sleep alone
I gnawed at night.
I can’t ever...
1 tag
We as humans live in a world dictated by binaries. We alternate between states of sleep and wakefulness, the lights on or off, the living water or death water. We must ascend past this. Take these mystic-sounding words at face value. They are cities written or they are not. The problem is in the mid-range vision, when both collide and we are awake asleep or water dry. Hungry full. Angry peace.
I want to take off my shoes, my clothes, my clothes, and run into the cold to feel the overwhelming blankness of winter. O that I were an angel. O that all heard my wordless voice. O that I had no needs or wants. O Israel. Snow dots the car and I see it from two distances. Self-destruction and whatever else.
Mes reves ces sont inquiets contraries malhonnetes heureses passagers euh aussi accables. Mais ces sont mines et je ressens ce je reve de la bonheur ou si je suis un veuf a la fois. si jeune, nous etions si jeunes nous sommes si jeunes a la lumiere de la lune nous comptions sur la lac gele de nous tenir
October 2011
8 posts
“Do you ever get sad? What does it look like?” he asked her.
“Don’t you ever want to smash your fist into something hard enough for it to break? Don’t you ever stay up at night watching the passing car lights run across your wall? Do you ever feel alone? What does it all feel like, I want to know truthfully now.”
He said all of this and then turned away...