You're waiting for me to speak to old facts.

I have 2 teenagers myself.
I try to disregard them as much as possible.
Text me when you’re 30.

When I was 9 years old, I was a creative kid.
Burning Hot Wheels in the backyard with my friend.
I was lucky to have a mother who believed in The Plan.

The moral and ethical implications of Larry's character

1.

They don't need the pills; they don't need the stuff.
You get 4 hour erections? I don't.
A ridiculous thing.
So awful to everybody.
I must've taken a nap during your part.

Something more important than the money--
really hurting somebody--
shows they really loved each other.
How could he not know she got implants?


2.

I grew up in the Bible Belt.
I don't even know a good cuss word.
Well, now that I'm married I know a few.
I once performed in a Synagogue,
and I died a death.


3.

We're in the anti-chamber.
My mother is in the next room,
laid out,
very gorgeous
like they always are after they die.
You have a career, you have a boyfriend,
and now you have a dead mother.
Hates his mother.
That would be considered the don't
except I laughed.
Don't try to out-do the family's grief.


4.

We don't just believe in God,
we believe in everything.
Vampires. Leprechauns. Big Foot.
The Exorcist is a documentary.
That happened to your auntie.


5.

We look like the last two minutes of It's a Small World.

I could tell you something to make this ok, to take away the oh-fuck-what-have-I-done. There are little worlds, like bubbles in honey, sweet and nostalgic amber. You can never reach those. They'll crystallize and lose their urgency, like photos of people I just had to take, just had to document their souls somehow tangibly. They crystallize; now I can't remember their names.

Chasing after a firetruck during the first torrential downpour of the season I thought,

this isn't my life wake up wake up wake up.

I can never reach that.

I know a guy who likes firetrucks; he's far away, like things I've never finished. Little worlds like honey. He told me you can cut anything apart. There's nothing in me to cut, but

when I sleep I feel I could wake up in a thousand pieces.

He's somewhere in the woods, and I'm in the city not wanting to be in the city anymore. Someday our paths will diverge, and I'll be left with all his old beer caps. We'll be stuck in thick amber no longer breathing.

I said my bones are splintering driftwood,

you said, no stop that's not true.

where were you where were you where was i

We can't live like this, but we can't seem to die either.

Car talk

1.

People have been drowning in those rivers lately. I don't know why you would swim somewhere you could drown, and I've never known anyone who drowned, at least not in a river.

2.

Haven't I paid my dues? Bleeding all over the place,
what do people say?
like a stuck pig.
That's gruesome. That's why I don't eat meat.
That and hazard pay.

3.

I spent all morning reading the myspace profile of a dead guy,
"last thoughts." Not knowing he was friends with his murderer and he fucked her. Maybe crimes of passion. His status still says, "is stitious."

4.

I could've saved more. If I don't write things down I'll forget. I forget I've been to Virginia and that I slept there for days. I forget what it looked like to lose my virginity, but I remember leaving my shirt behind when I hurried out at 3am.

5.

I wish I lived underwater. I'm a what-can-I-do-really kind of girl.

6.

weird that parents sleep naked

7.

[Inaudible]
citing irreconcilable differences,
but I always thought of it as a domestic plague.

We fall in ---- at the most inappropriate times.

You jump on planes, over oceans.

This feels something like having my veins tugged.

Stretched out, snapping back.

Tangling varicose.

Rivers splitting your country.

My body is nonsense.

We don't ask questions.

Dear Desert,

You've coarsely eroded

my fingers and lips,

my heavy skin,

pitting my bones--

I drowned

somewhere near Iskandariyya--

for the sake of making a point:

I am not your dusty child,

and this tawny trophy

you pulled from your dirt

and gave to me,

well, you're taking it back.

Egypt

We've gotten by with less.

That is to say,

we've drifted continentally.

Somehow we're united by air.

I said, isn't it funny how 'united' and 'untied' are just a mistake apart,

and you said, let's not make this emotional.

The ocean is a nauseating swell. Something between us.

The biggest part of you, like the Semitic cursive I compared to

tangling seaweed.

A language stuck between my toes.

You'll speak it to me if I beg,

and I beg,

so you curse me

with curled tongue,

saying I only want what I can't have,

and I find it incredibly romantic.

He kept me sour on his skin, like a dog

in heat, like a ravaged girl.

I got him with knives,

needles; he got me with sulfur and fire.

Just to be safe, we separated into a thousand pieces and never called home.

1. I've burned many tongues.

2. I wander the house in the dark.

3. I laugh and laugh and laugh.

I'm losing my touch.

Flood waters churned chocolate milk; the trees drank up, over drank, drowned; the telephone poles toppled, but didn't drown, and the wires snapped from the poles, wind-whipped and furious. Electricity surging through the streets made us feel kinetic until morning when the firemen put everything back in proper order. Sporadically in his bed are wet spots that could be from one of four places. He changed the clocks, placed buckets to catch drips, dropped quarters into jars.

The dream you had about running your tongue across your teeth and one-by-one they fell out--it wasn't real, but when you were patrolling quiet streets and found teeth mixed with gravel like common rocks you had the fleeting thought that they might be yours, and you began counting your teeth with your tongue.

In New Mexico I found a tooth in a ditch near where a man cut another man's head off with a meat cleaver.

[Cut is probably the wrong word. Reports say the cleaver was dull, and his accomplices say he struggled to get the damn thing off, and that they were scared shitless, and that the guy wasn't beheaded all the way, but beheaded enough, so "hacked" is probably a better word.]

I kicked the tooth toward a spot where it looked like he might've died, if it was his tooth at all. A friend told me that in Albuquerque you can get meth, blood, and semen by the bucket-full.

The great ironies of war are like digging through vapor. I can't explain how, but there's this: baby's breath is slow to die, and when it dies it still looks alive.

The citadel will crumble into tiny yellow flowers. The hero-worshipers will dissipate like blue smoke, and the half-helmets, bits and stone will erode vaguely in sandstorms and become old teeth. This is much like saying, "I'm fine". This is how ruins are made. This is, it's hard to say where home is, and when he runs his legs feel like giving out but he doesn't necessarily feel a thing.

His sleep is an empty cigarette carton--stale and flimsy. He shifts tectonically, grinds his teeth and dreams of desert gravel. There was something about body bombs, blood jams spit, spit on blood?

but they're crumbs of a language I never spoke.

There are these things called alluvial fans. They occur when a river gets stumbling drunk and deposits/blows/ralphs its insides at the feet of its unrequited love--the delta. In this regard, the delta expects it. The delta exists for it. There aren't many things for which they exist mutually. You say they can't be what they've always been, but symbiosis is all they know. In this regard I'm wrong because alluvial fans occur when the river abruptly decreases in velocity, or even stops, causing silt and sediment to pile up in said love's mouth which is a ravine, you say, and not a delta. The difference gouges deep. For the sake of argument, I'm the river and you're the ravine, and I've been dammed, but this isn't funny to you.

On fate

I asked someone who knows me very well if he believes in fate. He said no, and I immediately stopped all beliefs in fate. If I kissed your knuckles, that was me and not fate. Tickling your sides till you threw me off the bed and bruised my thigh yellow-green and gray--this was us relatively and not inextricably.

It's impossible to tell how exhausted a language is. I've spent years on a single letter. They have names and I sing them into the wind. Long gone and sing-songy. They're erosive elements that wear down my teeth, but that was me not knowing. You can say you're sorry, but the wind gathers the names.

Year of the ox

Every day the damp air knocks the wind out of me. We were a late winter bloom. Something magnetic in the air says yes, says I wanted to be kept, says you should've known. If I had a lime green taffy it would taste like the first time I wanted to kiss you, the first time I was sure of it. I took to talking to brown bottles of wheat ale, and they don't laugh at my jokes. They taste like you, metallic and chilled. They smell like the yawning blue dawn. If I had enough of them to clank together, they'd be the space heater warming my cheeks. If I had enough of them I would find this all very hilarious.

Last year my dad said, "this is your year." Year of running and lunatic cackles. I drew a line of dark purple pastel down the county; it separates the midnight from all the ground we stood on. It makes iridescent all the snow I brushed off my boots. I did silly things. I lived and died, but I did alright. I loved and left, but that's alright.

The Pleiades laughed at us uncontrollably. You said, "It's a cluster-fuck" and I smiled because I got it. I said, "In Japan they call it Subaru, like the car." But you were looking at me and not it, and I was already gone.

Some day I'll tell you everything. How the waters advanced through the trees and approached us in our sleep. How we drowned with our heads above water. Soot can seep in through your fingernails and toenails and other vulnerabilities. Your own blood carries it like stumbling stones and deposits it into your stomach. This is called fluvial transport. It's not enough to make you sink, but your stomach doesn't know that.

There's a lot a gut doesn't know.

We couldn't make waters recede or navigate currents. The dip-gushes bubbling terra-cotta and gray through tangled thickets of ugly nameless things that annually bloom unremarkably.

I could tell you a thing or several about poor circulation. This happens when your blood-grain is cobble-course. Another way of putting it: your feet think they're walking on gravel. The blood itself changes color depending on its depth. We could all be anemic depending on our depth. We could be dumb, deaf, or blind depending on how we cross paths. We walk dead in our mothers' shoes, damned to love too late and in absurd quantities.

A bad habit. People are asking.
They bring up your name.
I've always silently ushered you.
I felt guilty.
Christmas day, midnight,
wide awake in neighborhood bars.

You could list these things that never did you any good:
harsh chord analogies for loneliness or oneness,
yellow paint and purple shirts, bare mattress,
frost-bitten liquor,
ka cera, the sweetest sobriquets,
a month of summer rain
and the one or two color-ribbons it produced,
bottle caps and the Pleiades Cluster,
your shock at realizations long overdue.
You could sink to the bottom of the sea,
you're as heavy as stone.

The Blood Letters (my final portfolio)

1.

Arthritic hands, laced and limbless, perch the fog.
Blackbird mutters about the hollow men
plagued by syntax. The plagues come in waves.

The wind rattles with shells of brilliance
that cease to live up to mentioning.
Blackbird follows me, shouting loss, failure, loss.

Silence fails like the combative noise of trying.
I'm not a war criminal.
Blackbird mutters, moons are stones, too.


2.

The regression of my voice is nothing new to say,
like the unsupportive dress caught between my legs.
The regret of my tongue is nothing new.
I sleep like a ruin.


3.

The shrapnel—the was, the after,
the me-not-you,
splitting hairs like tattered shoes.
It’s something of an anachronism,

running marathons over cratered faces.
He fell deaf, supine,
gutted ink bottle,
and I taciturn.

See that shadow?
substratum of my legs.
It’s not yours.
I knifed my tongue into a dull chord.


4.

He marked the fall of a slaughter on his arm,
tombstone flesh honoring the stone-gray eyes
like moons the gods didn’t want anymore.
Cross-hatched egg tangled my dress
—a push, and my chest caved.


5.

Sparrow teases the device of forgetting
camel-lashes thick like the fingers that framed my face,

or legs treading indifferent plateaus,
large ribbons of ink veiling empty lines,
a broken pulse of thought, the tongue I’ve lost.

Sparrow laughs, Wer bist du?
Rivulets of veins; her eyes like a moon tangled in trees,
and a sleep jaw.

The innocent thrust from my body,
like lungs deflating.
My birth is weak.

Aber mich, Sparrow,
I am blank.


6.

Buzz clippers resonate louder, deeper than bombs,
and sharper than lonesome brick walls
jutting my knee caps.

My pen broke; it stuttered blot-blobs over thin greens,
continuous exhales under blue-black splatter.
There is just this one thing—

just these few things
I never liked about you, Sparrow.
Luxembourg,

I need a couch, to avoid the raid.

7.

A blood splotch blooms over
incendiary match peeling fiber from porous fiber
in a drum sprayed with graffiti argot.
A neutral void now,

and perhaps I am sitting too close—
tiny toes crack and pop in vacuous silence,
like my voice crumbling from my mouth.


8.

The Blackbird, the Sparrow
sparking steel dragged through the street.
Not the best metal, like fingernails
flaking, chipping. Mine belong to the days
when the sky never caught fire—
this drum never caught—


9.

My lost blood survives in turning graves.
The mountain spindrift and restless frost-blue sighs
neutralizing the ash and cinder smoldering,
the ocher drum of a rusted city.

This is the winter flaking onto our faces in quiet mockery.
We survive as statues abused by the elements:
in the spring we’ll awaken covered in mud
and forget that a part of us had ever died.


10.

He never speaks of sunset—
the hourglass dripping grenadine and lavender,
or the Autumn blooming naked ladies
with blown-back heads,
deep purple lips. He never craves color.

I’m the well dug straight down into the mountain-bowels,
opaque water sun-speckled.
Organic and stagnant,
I’m all gold and black pearls.