bucketlist

I don't have enough paper to excuse myself. cricket sounds, alone on your stoop. too date to, too summer to. L H D C. I met my date's unknowing mom today. I walked into his house expecting to find nobody and there is his mother sitting stooped in the kitchen seemingly hairless with a hat & shades & cane, and I introduced myself as my date's friend and she introduced herself as my date's mom. I went to the bathroom & thought wildly of laugh-saying, Oh so you're my new mother-in-law haha but I just said Excuse me and It was nice meeting you, afterwhich I afterwished I would have said, It was nice to have met you because I think this is a far pleasanter way of sharing the sentiment. I am not mad anylonger, feeling unjustified or afraid anylonger. I was talking to Chad last night about how I worry more that I am incapable of feeling Those Feelings anymore that maybe I am trashed & shredded more permanently than I'd thought, anymore. the feeling of not feeling being sadder than any feeling. that maybe I am a sad incapable husk of humanity myself, then. I think maybe I am just losing steam on it all, on everything & maybe I get whiffs of it back often like when I realize that my date has not one but two pianos in his house. & his cat eats my dog's food & my dog eats his cat's, etc. his script on his french homework. his tall bed. underclothes, wet from river, draped about. we're both buying blueberries, now we've only too many for a blueberry pie. I'll go extra & sadly to the yuppy store to buy noodles & corn & squash for you through my hate for the place, parking my subaru legacy outback, parking my collie at the Temporary Doggie Parking Zone. walking past the old white ladies lunching with biodegradable packages. my date has dad hair, I told him there was a fine silvery one & he wouldn't believe it, asked me to pull it out to show him. now he is whitehairless. I've about 9 different pretty iridescent hairs coming out from me. his record collection endearing. there are long shoes, the kind I'd have worn should I be stretched out longer. maybe I am tired from it. in my fantasy hotair balloon basketride. in my I'll make you dinner when I get Home. in my parents' house, and they say, You don't have to leave! We like you here! in your arms & you subtle say, Don't go, just stay & live with me, with your insinuated shared invisible chuckle. I'm blowing kisses at everyone these days. Amanda zipped it away for keeps in her pocket. my date caught one across the alleyway & threw up back to me. John Shinn & Bri stored theirs away like best friends can. I can see actively the shortening of days and my dad reminds me how shitty is Boise in November, that might I just leave then? a year ago today I was fastened to Matty & Kyle & Brittany & Nickey in sweat, blood, pus... oh, tears. it's all the same to us. I quit my job in Portland exactly three years to the day, yesterday, when I quit my job here. But I was out of town on August 4, like planned. that was then, when my buckets were all full. my future was inflated, helium'd. & now it is a solid wonder, but I'm sunk at the wonder. maybe my organs have flown grown away. thought I'd my heart back by now, but it's a wash & my wickerbasket is a frayed mop & I'm moping away in my girl reflection.

cruelbod

the teens are sitting on the bleachers at the highschool
but they aren't teens, anymore, basically 30 now
kelly is arched back in a vermilion haltertop
and tad lays flat, looking at the stars.
she graduated from highschool
and comes & drinks rose on ice
on the bleachers
she does reverse cowgirl on the bleachers
tries to pee between steps
as latenight athletes run the track.
God, why aren't YOU running with them, she accuses tad
who exhales smoke
and sips rose, ice clinking in his plastic cuppy.
I know, right
kelly sat with brody
on the highschool bleachers
when she was pushing 30, a couple of augusts ago
she was wearing a white dress and a denim jacket
and brody was drinking a big beer
he was trying to convince her to just drive with him all night to nevada
so they could get married
she thought that sounded like fun
but they'd just met the day before
and she knew they'd get sick of each other halfway there.
she never sat on those bleachers when she was in highschool,
just after she moved begrudgingly back after years away
and it was only twice, and past midnight
with guys named tad and brody.
kelly only fucked brodys, now
she was done with seths and aarons and todds.
she is feeling pretty superior in her vermilion haltertop
she is looking good, teenlike
she tells tad about the jeremy she'd been harassing
and tad tells her, kindly, that she's been humiliating herself.
she is gleeful
she doesn't care, has nothing to lose
she claims a lack of cruel organs in her cinnamon bod.
but she's a liar,
and pathetic,
and she's alone in life and she's mean
so she smokes & she chugs
& she takes her shoes off and pees freely.
she's got those good strong outside peeing legs.
she says Whatever
I'm Me
never growing up
just justifying her moves
with evil eye glimmers
and secret, hopeful tears

i think we're presenting

What is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen? I was asked and I have never been asked. Once it was your eyes, a most boring blue. Because they looked at me in this way. Or because they looked at me. Now they are not. For awhile I thought I would only love a blonde. I like the translucent skin, to see organs and veins. It makes a body seem brittle, like flesh to be ripped. I wanted to look for Scandinavian peoples. Like the tall strange-faced ones, like this was it. The crawl up a long body to some exaggerated feature. A bulbous nose, small bead eyes. A long thick neck, scar tissue, adult acne. A touch on some underground pustule. If you can, I can. If only while you are a mattress for me. I'll wish you'd read the line from Song of Myself      not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar then the rest        I wish you'd read that over & over as I have. This is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. Where were you looking, just now? Erase JUST from a vocabulary, replacing it with ONLY or BUT or FINALLY. Which of these words is oldest? Guess ONLY because it has to be, english is only just but finally slightly old. Ancenned is the old english form. Take your justice back to the century, be better off. But you won't have your common comforts. Finally would be french, you'd never be french, you'd never go to france, you wouldn't leave your flat pocket, would you. I had a french boyfriend once, only, but he was my amant français stupide and he had the most slender hips & hairless body, and I gianted, and that was beautiful. Sunken cheeks and brown sad eyes. The brown-eyed are saddened darkfolk. It isn't the lack of pigment, it's all of the world's pigment like a vortex for all of the sads of all of the worlds. Lighten my load. Look at my very eyes. Match them to yours. I'd trust you less if you were trusting of soap. I'll plunge all of my buds into your dirt, familiarizing your everythings with your everythings else. This was a beauty. Dancing toward me in my graveyard. After my destruction, the wideset green eyes & giant bones I cast to the wind for my own downbringing. Dance toward me. This wasn't as beautiful after. I hate promises, but they can be the brightest beauty. Apologies can drop holes in you too often. I'm jaded by the landscapes, now. Unless you're my landscape. My face makes you cry, I am too terrible to look at. All of this is true, justify my text please. Take my picture with you obscured behind. If only an easy thing to delete, it was. A memory can be a sad beauty. You tell me you've broken up with your girlfriend, you're in my body & you've forgotten me, but I've remembered that I love you forever. This is the bluest pretty memory, looking into a depthless pool. You are a pretty cruel. Memory bones. These are what I used to imagine as the Truest. I pull my hair out for it, when I was young I had very beautiful hair. It never got brushed so sometimes that was a discussion. I can take part in the tedious with you. We'll talk later, we have lists upon lists. Only once to open my eyes and be unable to count them all. 

things we do to damage ourselves

   put your head between the two speakers & lay upside down so your organs can slide back, loud as you can
   hold the knife blade in, but gently
   never quit
   never quit
   never quit
   take drugs that half the time urge you to kill yourself
   tell your friends you want to kill yourself
   let music & only music hold you
   lament the past efficiently
   get pleasure from tears
   destroy yourself for crying
   give up
   forget someone you thought you'd love forever (a celebration in this like your very last birthday maybe)
   starve
   stay up
   fall in love with your own heartbeat
   let your own heartbeat drown the world out
   isolate yourself in you, as if you're the best hiding place
   dislocate
   disavow
   distrust
   promise
   expect
   forget why you came, pretending you never intended to
   keep your heart a secret
   keep your brain in your throat
   keep your mirror as a pet
   wish
   hope
   look behind you with watery eyes
   call the best poem you've ever written a tear-stained page in a diary
   forget your own beauty
   call yourself a genius
   call yourself a retard
   kiss anyone who holds your hand
   make truth out of whatevers
   say I don't know
   tell someone that you do, and they won't
   watch yourself go
   write bad poems
   thinking they're like a bath
   thinking they're just words
   try
   stone face smiling
   ignore
   revenge

lemon bag

When I was last there,
inside sad cave london room, with the rooks on the roofs
Why isn't rooves the plural, by the way?

When I was locked in that room I started drawing with a tiny paintbrush & india ink
pictures of the Olsen twins
and I'd find their photos
attached to the livejournals
of anorexic teens.
this is where I learned the term
 thinspiration
(an expression not found by the iPad)
and I looked at selfies of knobby spines
and clavicles sharp enough to cut cheese
and I read advice from pro-anas
to struggling anas-in-waiting
about how to get skinny
and someone wrote about drinking lemonade made with maple syrup
and I thought, damn that sounds good.


When I couldn't eat I knew I had to put something in me
my body was 21 years old
it was young
but it was a bag
there was nothing left in it
I was shriveling away
And I remember looking into the mirror once while I took a shower
because my housemate thought it sexy to watch oneself bathe
and I had grown so little
like a teen
like a teen with a blog
who could advise other teens
on how to let their skin tighten around their sad little bones
But I didn't like the girl I saw, that shivering little teen
because she wore her devastations like foodservice film
clinging to whatever was leftovers

So I drank that lemonade, like what else could I do? I drank it every day, all day. I drank it so much my urine was lemons, my shit was maple blood. Tapped, juiced. And my organs drifted out through the  holes left,
and I had all of the energy
of all of the suns,
and I was thinspiring the universe to bony tears

we listened to yo la tango, remember them?

He will bring all of the candles

he said chocolate helps, jsyk

and she bought a bag of tiny tangerines, 

and I can see myself diving right into them

like when Amanda opened that tiny clementine

and she told me to look at its puffy section

like a little slug on her leaf hand

and its shell 

its pith a neon orange baby foam

and I put it between the rows of my teeth

and I teethed
and I teethed
all night

when I was 18 I listened to yo la tango a lot

in the tall dark dormroom

and I festered

(I asked you yesterday, as if this is a question, what do I do now

and you said,

wait

wait, and brood

and I said how can you wait for nothing?)

when I was 18 listening to yo la tango

I knew what I was doing

but I used to sleep till 4, when it would get midwestern scyscraper village dark

and now I am up at 4, before it is grey spring western light out

and I am very aware of the mountains,

big fool rocks

the continental divide

the crying light where the tears flow down east or west

and some get to your rivers, and some get to mine.

Maggie Nelson said something about waking up with your weeping, don't write me anymore to tell me about it

because she knows you're so in love with your weeping

or something like that.

And maybe you truly are

but I truly am not

I am not the type anymore

when I was 18 

I would scream into the bedclothes

I would rip & sob & cling & claw at my smoke hair

and my young face

and I couldn't now scream on the patio, in the livingroom, into the couch clothes

and throw up the young foam

my young brain foam

as my throat makes a sieve for it

and its goop pushes out, around, tries through the cheesecloth

to be swallowed, into the mash bod

or to be vomited

in bubbles & sobs

See now I'm 28,

going on 29

in about 20 days, I guess

so my brain is still there, it found my head again eventually

and my heart crawled back

slunk back, eyes downturned, embarassed,

out from where my bean stomach lives in struggles

and all of the organs 

fell back asleep

in their gooey cradles

I blame my parents

I think the last thing I wrote was a list, not the list of vocabulary words but something else.

A list of reaches, desperate

my mom came by last night, she dropped off some lemon fettuccine with shrimp

it was delicious

& perfect because I've been craving fettuccine since three sundays ago.

my stomach rode cradled in my pelvis

my brain was in my throat

my uterus had dropped & splattered in the steps of my feet.

but I turned upside down, in that bridge move

a real yoga move

and I stretched & my organs sort of congealed back to their places forawhile.

she said, do you have any idea how much I love you?

and I couldn't possibly,

and that made me cry

and does she have any idea what I think? what I've thought?

that I have the smoke of a thousand cigarettes for hair

that I have walnuts for a hand

that my fallopiantube legs were withered, so it was difficult to walk

and I tried to spring with just my feet

but they're too small

and the shells of my fingers turned to stone, they were all numb when I woke up.

she didn't make me all alone,

but I think about how everything funny is sad

and everything sad is sort of funny

and I wonder does it make that everything

devastating, tragic

is hilarious?

and then you said, no way, what's funny about your relative getting shot to death

and we both laughed so fucking hard at that

she didn't make me all alone,

but she knew what she was doing

she had to go get a reverse tubal ligation

& dad had to get something done, too

his sperm count was low

too much yellow 5, dad?

doin the dew?

they knew what they were doing. he was 29 when they met.

they knew that there would be a baby would be a human

and it would have to live

in the future

in this world

and it's a big place

but there's nothing bigger

than being shut up in your brain

which is still throat stuck

& choking

aloneless

I woke up with a lot of you, and was most thrilled for Maggie Nelson and this copy of Bluets I had in my backpack, Kyle's, signed by the author, because what she'd read gives me the runs in my mind, and I was sitting there sweating in the corner of this strange room while she stood in the brights behind the orange & blue podium framed by the tall gold pipes of an organ. I sweated & didn't look anywhere, she faced me. But seeing her wasn't anything. She had a slight lisp which carried me through more maybe. She mentioned the root of the word etched- to be eaten. Etched in my heart. & I was thinking of all the things we've said, I've said & written over & over, and the songs, what they say,

  you own me

   you have all of me

    you can have all of me

   you have my heart

  you have a hold around my heart

                    so do you have two hearts in your chest? is that what makes you so loveable? (delicious)

After she read friends addressed me and I averted eye contact and said I don't know. Are you coming to have drinks? I don't know. They looked surprised, offended. I walked through the back of the gallery. Collages of matchbooks. Giant plastic windmills. A cyanotype of a bike, I yawned. And I calmed to chill outside in the sunset, where everyone smokes, and it's a smokefree campus but everyone's a poet or an adult so I smoke too & start hugging the women I love, and can't talk about what I'm thinking how I'd like to crawl inside of her mind & live there & have her pet me and this just from a brief forty-five minute rainy brain hug. We went to the river, same place I was with you when we missed Alice Notley & Jeff Mangum but didn't miss each other, and I sat on your flat rock, and I had a beer and watched the light on the water & thought about how I could write anything or read anything and that I wanted to be a knowledge tampon and a thought sponge and I wanted to vomit up beauty & honesty. & I did become very honest. Don't touch me, I can't be touched right now, okay please touch me I am ready for you. It got dark & we rode to the same bougie bar where I'd have the same sazerac at a different table, & you wouldn't be there, but the weather would be nearly same as when you were. Someone offered to buy you a drink but didn't. Someone asked what I was drinking, Jim with a Greek surname, & when I asked him for his surname he looked at me like I was too classy a broad no maybe he looked at me like I was old fashioned (which is at this time, what I was drinking) or British or old or young or beautiful or wasted. I didn't get a free drink, because he only wanted to buy me a pbr

                    
                 he asked me what I did in school & I laughed, and he said, why does that make you laugh and then I felt like crying.

Outside on the cement fence in front of the hotel. He said Maggie Nelson, if she'd wanted to, could have turned everyone in the room to weeping. Can you imagine having that power? he cried. I told him if he ever got the power to make us weep everyday to let me know & I'd move in & stay by his side forever.

He told me he schemes for love. And I said you fall in love for six-six-hours-at-a-time. That you told me once no one can ever break your heart. He doesn't remember saying that... two people have crossed his threshold. Physical pain at their nearness. And I said, I know you love me, I know I'm important to you, but why is it that I'm always checking up after you & you rarely ask after me? & that you're so easily distracted? He said that he & you, most of you, are better at communicating through the written word... which is an of course, so why even ask

                      

       It was a full moon & I was honest. I would have told you anything, if there was anything you'd want to know, and some did, and some didn't. I like what is conversational, the meaningful ease of listening to a lisped voice in a muted microphone, she being available through her writing & words & explanations & interrupting herself and the moment her voice failed at her last sentence. I still like what I do & how I do it, the true it, and I do take a compliment that I am such a fucking beautiful person because to me it means my heart still pumps gorgeous in my chest, that I am a whole. But I must also forget the lovesong cliches & the notion of being inside of someone else, or losing my organs to another, of being eaten. I have doors & they're open so many of them in my house that the crossbreeze sometimes makes my hair stand on end.

in the middle to explain what I'll do

prettylittle 19 - 21

In the middle, I spied him. How I do, & does everyone, remember us at an early morning escape, ascending from all between & this that in the dark. Driving that night, in from the drunk-stench, wearing black knits. But now as always... aphonia. Your father’s long journey home with a poolstick as prop. I suppose this loss of voice, I think of it as explanation. The only song is organic, & so we were. I feel like I recognized him. He looked on my nerves, as functional disturbance. Driving down, that’s worse than staying nervously around, wondering symbolic. The vocal organs, late at night. About this, persuade me from the feigned passionate speechlessness. 

It was in January, simple. Having to enter, that sadness expressed by muteness. Days after we met, staying nights. Loss and apoplexy, and I, sitting over there. Of course he used longing as his sudden loss. In the passenger seat, be tempted, and see someone, relate to the song. Body function turquoise if he comes. She has since asked him never to. To all the impunity we were listening; we asked him to leave, return, and he agreed. Nothing but things I doubt presently. I know, knowing it. I’ll throw approbation. 

Before now I’m hungry for it, all terrible habitations. I’m serious this time, approving, and we both want sex badly. He wore black when I announced that formally, officially; we looked over to the left at the same exact moment. Sex loneliness at the risk of a tune. Praise the empty, even. Maybe I won’t as I don’t believe, I had the arboreal lot. Any sex that’s pleasure, chiefly empty (it was usually empty). Maybe the desire will be what they were. Right now animals caught our eyes, overwhelmingly. Not altogether uncute. I have made it, living in trees, empty, but filled platonic. He looked quietly in my trees; hundreds of you are thinking unimpressive. This was less arcanum, tiny, I suppose, still very pretty. But should one need a secret, a mystery lines up in rows to explain what I’ll do.

hello, beautiful

Why? Because my blood is thick. I have all these tortured organs, I know it. I make them whipped. They ache, but with smiles across them. My sweet little heart getting big on itself. Making hard itself. That tumescent little thing. My mouths filled with apologies which fall out and disappear on a breeze. No one will hear! not even my own opened ears. My filthy fingers reaching for yours. Your cups in mine. Mine own overflowing. The quiet cold, my heartattack building, the mossy breeches of the nailed fingers, traipsing, traipsing toward yours. Yonder fingers tracing over mine mossy knuckles. But this is love, no? shall we argue? Nothing in me is for an argument. I give up, relentless, restless, accepting, open, whole, heartedly, whole. The whole hole filled with heartblood, gushing, retracting, sucking itself off. Never relenting, never detumescing. The various plaids of my outershells, my chitinous fibres. My camouflage, our matching stripes and shades. I will be there, you know it. I will scrape you off, when you need it. I will sing when you like me, I will look when your eyes are away. And still keep it when they turn back towards, inevitably. Do you still read me now?

vocal organs

prettylittle, 19

In the middle I spied him. How do I. Remember it an early morning escape, ascended from all between this and them in the dark. Driving that night, in from the drunk-stench. But now as always, aphonia. Your long journey home with poolstick as prop. I suppose this loss of voice, I think it was explanation. The only song is organic, and we were. I feel like I recognized him. He looked on my nerves, my functional disturbance. Driving down, that’s worse than staying nervously around, wondering symbolic. The vocal organs, late at night.

About this, persuade me from the feigned passionate speechlessness.

tonight it's near to see

prettylittle, 67 - 70

Tonight it’s near, and how dissension nods his head. We both arrived; I found altercation for a minute. We were, that very night, attractive, contrapuntal. And how the emerald outside would still pertain. Picture me on a skylark, attempting, though repulsed by counterpoint. There. Can you, begrudgingly? Smoke the idea in music, composed. I’m wearing the yellow dress to dinner with light kissing melodies sounded; I remember this morning. Rust. But my love, it's an island to leave, I suppose.

A blast from forever. Whistles, rocks, and then the noticing cold remain true. Melody cliffs neglect the beautiful cold to him, the beautiful cold to my own fugue. I’m barefoot to take a snowstorm at last, it will be to violate. To climb up how he didn’t, too lonely and difficult to oppose anything at all. To contradict me I wish he would, a drop of airsnow, nothing like the ice I have. I think small and he holds my face of watersnow. This group of trees I’m climbing, those which the earth tends to unforgivingly deliver, will definitely make inner. I don’t slip and fall, dying beautiful white stronger, and I envelop brief silence things. Sparkling extreme of floral leaves. Anything happened, a snow everywhere; accusatory of a flower I wasn’t. Your mind at which I look, I’d simply love to live in.

A delicate texture I make, looking. I look around lovingly forever. Of a color other, that little peak. Be confused fearfully, too. Green, typically, that little tree on top. Your mind from across a slim whorl, I see. A piercing platform. We stumbled within, I see.

Be confused for a need to look upon sepals; that tree above right, straight at the garden, and enclosing. There’s a bird. Red chipped opaque sky, here it's rained all day. Reproductive. An eagle exactly in baby blue, the perfect midwestern call. Organs, bald like mine, a black winter. I find I know minute bodies, who every once in awhile be actively doomed. Cells in the water. And with a real winter. Too bright to failure, especially. Red blood is something to see.