tether

anymore we can just ask straight each other
the anxious can pass, smoke
in an overcast bedroom
  chill
these being the words,
purity ring on repeat
well
may ends
well may birthdays are gone
well I have to move a mind again
  somber just doesn't justice

the flowers are so dead
  & so meaningless that I haven't bothered
  to destroy them
or to even throw them out
I just moved them from the table
onto the floor
  so I've room to elbow around

can it be managed, a life getting saved
time isn't what this was
the great length, big old distances
something so desperate
something so drown,
something so make gel bones
slither
  
   throw a brain away
   puff up a balloon heart & fly up in it
   trust only that
   your hands in the silk sand
   sands in your eyeholes, nostrils
  babybird it to me

I'm sorry my heart is an infant
it should never have arrived alive
it should have been stillborn
I should have had more to drink
  while it was parasiting, puffing
but now I've to raise it up
  nurse it
I can strap it to my back when I go camping
and I can toss it in its harness
  and pull it taught until it snaps back to my arms
 
come on, baby
    grow already

worth it

I came back
   the same
but so filthy
I don't want to ever wash my hands again
I am a touched girl
I have a sunburn or a cinnamon tan or something
I held the hair at its roots
  oilcan hair
  make that face
given me a corduroy elbow
given me your smokes
given me a double-sided noose
your dirt hands
that good clean mouth
  make my stomach muscles pain warmly from laughing solid for two whole days
  get it
under that big moon... there is some kind of agoraphobialike condition
  where people freak at the airport
  when they see how fucking big the sky is
I freak at that moon in ocean-sky
  around the fire,
& I just stared deeper
  & finally got it
we're finally burning sadhouse down,
  watch her ghost away

how to be

1

"J" wrote a book called the way to become the sensuous woman

and we're reading about the butterfly

and you can imagine the woman reading this little paperback

wedging it open in the free hand

propped up by her wobbly elbow

while she clutches carefully on his testicles

so as not to damage him for a week

and she's reading this tinyprint book which instructs

it removes the guesswork, which is sometimes a least favorite work to do