The boy from sand and dry wind - a crab or camel - saturates and dissolves; the corrosive agent, the mark slithering in water. I'm not convinced one must do as the snake does.

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The time that has passed between languages,
the correlation to lovers.

I've burned entire alphabets.

Al Iskandariyah

He bled my chest dry;
every drop a mile--6 thousand--
pooling at my feet,
running into tributaries of denile.
I crackle like drip dry creek beds;
these wasted intricacies.

Maybe I search through old photographs to see where everyone was looking. I found one of my mother in her (vegetable) garden, shielding her eyes from the sun, soil smudged on her brow. She left before the plants came to bear.

Her senior portrait inscribed to my dad:

Remember. Remember. Remember.

Don't forget me.

I can't remember what I wanted to say.

Censorship?

No, this is all wrong.

His chest panels open/close. I withhold his breath, his voice dangling over my throat, teasing sound.

I pluck my chords--out of tune, my voice cracks, fails.

My restlessness chases the warmth.

I tie my tongue into knots--the wrong words. On the couch, I curl into myself, her knitting needles click to heartbeat time; she tells me it's just my nerves. We blamed the thaw and all of its agitated inconstancies--fickle breeze tangled in my hair. The difference between the air and my skin. I tapped my finger in rhythm with her needles.

We walked through midnight soaked fields, through wheat grass teasing the backs of our knees to feel the cricket songs reverberate against our skin. I showed him how I navigate the sky--each constellation a former love: the Queen, the Hunter. He apologized for the burning spheres, for my loss of language. His lungs, fingers, eyelashes will become dotted blue traces, pin-point pricks on my character--my navigation. Kings will keep my guard, and I will sleep soundly beneath his face.

She lifted the blankets, gesturing for me to crawl in. I curled against her warmth, pressed my lips to her shoulder, wondered if I was born of restlessness.

She explained different levels of seraphim; I listened, feigned belief in effort to please belong inside of her sheltered walls. She said "cherubim" and I remembered when she didn't have breasts and I felt closer to her heart. She asked about my day and it was the only way she was a part of it.

I track my days with tiny pink pills. The weeks are left as ribbons tangling between blue lines--a tired litany, an escape through my refusal to acknowledge his wars in/away from home. His face is that of the mother he hates; his voice molded by her inadequacies and haste.

Ich bin, aber ich kann nicht.

I watched him sleep, wondering which parts came from long-forgotten gods; wondering if anything I felt for him would translate so well into black and white. I could only form the words that would close his chest.

The wires snapped from their poles--
wind-whipped and furious.

I stopped sleeping to make sure the days come and go as planned:

31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 31, 30, 31, 30.

275.

The plucking distance stretching tight, tugging my skin and veins, thinning my blood. I retain my heart in bits and pieces, shipping the rest like postcards--vague and insufficient. I sign my name with pens stolen from motel lobbies; a running travelogue of cautious goodbyes and eggshells.

My pangs of longing are rife with bad timing.

Appomatox?

I want to be born of the River Fog and move silently through the night; to be a whisper upon the water, harboring secrets--my calm reflection.

North Carolina

My mother didn't know she was driving the wrong way--north to Boston, to a psychic fair/convention to ask about her grandmother (deceased), me (alive), and my brother (?). I told her I was going south to give R----- my blessing to kill people who want to kill him. To give him my goodbyes and my blessing to live or die.

I keep up correspondence. My fingers inked and pressed upon stationary colored with butterflies. A log of (new) scars acquired while trying to be domesticated, in the kitchen with a bull. Blade-burns, I should have been born a boy or not all. The bull glares--my biology is the mark of evil. Spots of red--my vindictive rage--a pipe that needs repair. I've stitched my lips tight, blue-black fingertips, the thread tugging my tender mouth. My letters silently coded. How I've changed, or not at all.

Do something.

I don't know how to keep it consistent except to consistently not try.

I asked him about his army and the hundreds there within.
"They don't know they're all apart of me. I carry them all on my back and my sleeve."
His eyes twinkled at the very thought.

Miscellaneous notes from my composition book

1. Plateaus (indifferent)

2. Loops

3. Matter vs. Anti-matter

4. subterfuge?

5. Insult: "

6. Jennifer*

7. chimerical ethereal tenuous illusive

8. In the offset chance I go into remission

9. Abide: to put up w/, submit to, carry out (promise, agreement, rule)

10. need is need based

11. cans of ink. bottles. his mother.

12. "Here lies one whose name was writ in water" --John Keats

13. I wasted days believing him instead of

14. "To Betty Kessler, from the world's luckiest man--her husband" (inscription, Prince of Tides)

15. No one ever believes they could produce an ugly child.

16. Wie schlafen sie nachts oder wie schlaefst du nachts?

17. Studies in somnia

18. She pressed cranberries into her lips--a color well suited for

19. callow pared jejune

20. apologies sorries condolences

21. (I titled them)

22. 2:25 250 Script music

23. Homeostasis? found 2/20/06 10:30am

24. Colors? Textures?

25. "I can't feed you."

26. Kitsch?

27. Zebra Elena Janey

28. Lars divided by Andy

Anthropomorphic Character Sketches

1. Lucy is scattered marbles about the floor--37 glass balls, clashing kinetic energy, idle pieces of an insoluble whole.

2. Liam is rod-iron: dividing/subdividing terms: you-me/them-us. Rusted gate clang.

3. Madeleine is pulsing tea pot, boiled blood. Screaming steam(heart)engine, evaporating, metal racking.

4. Harold is broken phono- broken phono- broken phono- phono- phono-

5. Roy is a velveteen sack with rich folds undulating in shifting light. Sole keeper, protector, empty with purpose: lost his marbles.

All along we were preaching to ourselves.

When I lived in her womb, I might have understood her insides. I play ignorant now; she feels guilty about the wrong things, holding everything in but me. I pushed out days early to make room--a vain enabler. My late nights are distant attempts at comfort; her insomnia is my blood. My mother will wake for an all-hours walk not unlike midnight feedings. Slick asphalt glows under steel blue streetlights. Fog wrapping around the naked trees will make her think of me. She'll remember how I made her hold still to feel silence. She'll hold still and breathe. The fog is her breath I'm driving through.

He told me to stop writing about sleep; start naming names.

He. He. He.

My back is breaking

The notches in my headboard are for nights I haven't slept through the chill of January drafting between the seams of my panes. I list all the names I'm sick of--the names I'm sick from. It's a list that never has to be written. At the top, a former love who traveled and returned a mute. He looks at me with the disappointment he felt in the pit of his bowels after every time we fucked. He reckons there's something to reconcile, but I've grown accustomed, fond of any look. His hands are rougher, calloused; I stare as he picks dead skin from between his fingers. At the top of alphabetical notches, his name fits like the pillow beneath my head.

I had every intention of writing good things.

Skin: absorb/repell
on/off

He lays on the floor, reading--his back angled over a combination of elbows and pillows. Nothing short of usual: the living room, but I'm picturing a fireplace. Turning the pages of a wartime memoir (Vietnam, 19--; the bloodiest battle), while I pretend I'm small enough to fit between his shoulder blades.

I sleep naked on the nights that I miss him and I want to feel his skin. Few and far between, and I reason the sheets will suffice against mine. My legs dissolve as I lay, melting; cotton fiber absorption.
Sinking. The draft from the window kisses my forehead, and my last thoughts are of words that are letters apart.

The closest I can get is hovering.

My father called to say he'd been praying for me.

I don't talk to my friends like that. But we'll stay friends.

I have nightmares about people I've left behind. The curly hair. The hands that couldn't open my jars.

I screamed all night, damning the cracks in my plaster walls,

forgetting which bed I slept in.

My friends never made curfew. I hid behind the couches they shared.

Walking in and out of dust.

Five years I screamed.

I know the mice are in the walls, refusing to be caught.

I'm close, I'm cheap, I'm the king.

I'm afraid that when I lay my head down nothing will happen.

Ireland

He'll leave tomorrow. Drinking at cheap bars, I'm anxious to see if I'll notice.

If I'll sleep better.

I'm not so small. Pound for pound. My tight grip.

He'll be sent off with the cookies I couldn't stomach. Used charcoal I couldn't handle.

My mind races for sport as I sleep upon piles of clothes--folded, sorted--that never quite made it back home. Maybe they're in transition--finding a new home because the old one turns their insides like weaves. Because the old one is too small to sleep.

All the wrong people kiss my neck.