VENUS

my evenings in summer. I couldn't smoke at Kari's when I lived there so I found the clubhouse. when I'd ask people if they wanted to come there they'd say yes and we'd zigzag sharp upthe hill through the sages and past mellow pink & graygreen donkeytail succulents and we'd wedge our ankles into seats to prop us on, and they'd say, I thought there would be an actual house, here. I loved it at sunset 10:30 at the tip of summer mountain standard time, when up & to the right there'd be glowing venus. I can do anything I want to now, here, so I sit on the balcony in the trunk of summer at sunset around 8:07 central standard time and up to the right there, thar she glows. familiar as ever. if I were in Idaho still I might lament that the trunk of summer radiates nervously, that days shorten at not my wanting, for I've no doubt the same sun sets there, too. I share a timezone with you. doesn't that craze me? meaning makes me crazy. I'll always think of the sultry air surrounding me at this moment, forever I know it. I might not ever quit at saying so. time changes, my zoning mutates. but I've my forever promises & my familiar footholds in any muting sky of summernight. I'll die with some imprint of a silhouetted palm behind eyelid quakes.
there be no doubt in that.

big rubby

sitting on the front balcony in the wet wet wet wet we're buggybodied
insects
sliding legs against wings against hair! in wave clouds, soundclouds
  like little pour cloud passing over the house
solid mists between
biting my sunset
the significant gray lavender
rubbing hairs with a gray butter peach
  where we are,

hotcruster

a couple of women came into the coffeeshop
one wore a shirt reading,
  DUCT TAPE HAS 1,001 USES-
    toilet paper isn't one of them
she carried a tote bag
on it was printed menopausal wine puns
LIFE IS A CABERNET
LIFE, LIKE WINE, GETS BETTER WITH AGE
and
LIFE'S SHORT, LET'S WINE
her huskyvoiced buddy tried to order a rum & coke, but we don't serve that here
so she
asked for a glass of chardonnay, as she puffed on her electronic cigarette.
today a lady complimented me on the grubby bandana I have hanging from my neck
I laughed, thinking she's
probably never seen something so dirty
but she can't smell it, so
it's a nice statement (her words)
I went swimming last night at 9
topless, in the 109 degree sunset
the air cooled to a temperate 98.6 degrees
the same as a sweltering jungle
but for me, it was only perfect
I sat there, with friends
with a corona, of course
thinking about being 30 & loving coronas
& being 30 & loving the eagles concert I'll be attending
I said goodbye to ian
until we take our northwest tour
to olympia, to portland
to goodbye the rainforests
but right now I can't keep open big dryeyes
I like the heat in idaho
in july
it's 106 degrees
I like the sad you
but that makes me sad
it makes me sad that I want you to be
because I'm the jerk
want your asuffer
I want my friends to visit me at work
the sad one, with the sad life moment
and the tall one who makes me feel Good
the superficial kind of Good
because I've given up on That, for now
& I'm cool
with just swaying timelessly through the heat of the days
my claws withdrawn in cottonball paws
but I want to get scratched, a little
through the skin beneath the surface
in the ancient long nights
in the grass with you, on blankets beneath streetlights with you
because I like to be surprised
to be given a feeling of any sort
an alive kind of sorts
trying to keep my big eyes big
so no crust to calcify me shut
I won't shut
up
until I bleed
in some eventuals,
and I will
I will
I so will

hazetime

last night we went to the clubhouse for sunset with two copies of t.s. eliot's play, the cocktail party. the sky was going from brevity storm purplegray on the northwestern to fuschia to magenta to oxblood, the temperature & low glowlight perfect on our drowse skin. we each had to read the part of three characters, which proved awkward when one reader had to act all parts in a conversation for pages, throwing accents back & forth. the dog tramped, kicked up soft brown dirt for her shape hole, eventually settling in the dust. but first filling our shoes with the good clubhouse earth. she raged up & down the hill after other bad dogs here, after a covey of quail there. comments on existence, on the devastations & impermanence were made, our mouths sounding out eliot's words like those coming straight from my own. characters giving one another the advice to wait, to just Wait. & I'm learning to. after the first act the northwestern portion had changed to some expensive purple, and breeze whipped around the sagebrush. down the slope, stopping at the plateau to view villa norte & the bare green foothills & the lazy citylights. caught my hair & tossed it around. we ate salads & scapes & cheese, and I opened windows and made myself naked in the mufflenight. I awoke at 3 am & since can't write read some hemingway stories, passing out before flicking through darkness the chitinous body of some invisible bug. I heard sounds & managed to fall into a waterfall of dreams. o to be the satisfied one, once more.

re liable

last night we went to our clubhouse,
nickey, chad, ida following the sunset path
through the sagebrush, past the aspen
and the pinkening donkeytail succulents
to our place between the two pines
on that awkward slope that sores legs
or jambs toes to sit on.
just in time for that first star.
we talked abt what new orleans is like
abt a fantasy mansionhouse
and our brilliant year-round gardens.
a man came up from the house below.
we met him the night before,
he told us we got his curiosity up
bc there lives a family of fox
and a coyote who chases the babies around.
he thought we might be them.
I think abt fox & coyotes a lot
I think how I'd like to join them.
last night he came & sat with us, this neighbor
he was glad to hear there were some liberal people living in the stepford houses
he told us that we were saved for this time,
that we were reserved for this moment
to carry the future. to teach, bc we have the structure
to teach the careless generations beneath us.
he told us about his world drums, slurring his speech,
ice jingling in his plastic cup
he invited us to his sweatlodge.
I was looking at the fullnight sky, by now
envisioning you, flipping your hair
miles & miles away
I was thinking of what I'd say to you had I been filterless
promises I'd make & keep
drives to take. getting you at me.
I am not a wish
  but I am a big future
and I committed to the notions of
  gratitude & accountability
     for my good fullfuture hands
I like the wild dog path we're taking
past the sucs, past the aspen
and I like the certainty that I'm contained, somewhere
there
in a promise to the selves I will undoubtedly keep

new orleans

the universe is trying to tell me

the universe is telling, urging me

that here, it only gets bad before it gets worse

that these brainjolts are the spark

because, come on now I'm an engine

  so

let's hotbox the cadillac

let's mildly check that sunset from a cornereye

let's put those rugs we found in the upper upper cabin bedroom

  on the 200 yr floors in our new apartment

let's ride the goddam streetcar

admire the great muddy

crack exoskeletons in the dingy dim dreamed-of divebar

curtains of smoke drifting lazily

we'll sit around, sit about

we'll sit all over the place

fantasize about the escaping from city life

eating sandwiches on pontoons

we'll meet fat new bugs

and that rich-weather

the I'm-holding-you-now weather

let's choke on humidity

on coffee by the emptying

let's fishtail around the festival goers

and get wealthy on bourbon

let's get tall

taller than whatever buildings

and we'll crush the catacombs & crypts

slaughter the sarcophagi 

mush the mausolea

turn bones to dirt to under our fingernails to our mouths in our gullets

& reproduce it all through our skin

respirating 

and then we'll watch a jazz band

  and we'll make fun of the saxophone

and we'll hear some blues on the street

  and look wildly about, calling out names

and maybe we'll drown

or blow away

or 

or

or

maybe 

  maybe we'll really like it there

crushed velvet sausage

'90s dads

mine wore black raybans

with lightblue croakies

the saggy kind

rayon aloha shirts

with wooden buttons

so you can leave your shirt open at sunset

when you're on a boat or on a dock

having a gin n tonic in the breeze, I guess

tassel-shoes

or as dad called them,

fishy little loafers

meant for working

spandex bikeshorts

& a hotpink tank top

with a babyblue bandana tied loosely around his neck

and those raybans with the blue croakie

this is what my '90s dad was wearing when he met my highschool boyfriend

who thought dad was gay

for the next few months at least, though he didn't tell me till later

we renamed dad

Steve the Stud

which developed into

Steve the Two-by-Four

because every friday night he'd get us a papa murphys pizza

and some blaxploitation films,

and he'd put on a nice cornflower button-down

and he'd ask me how he looked.

Sometimes I would tell him to change his shoes, or to get out of those black socks

and he'd leave us,
with castration-scenes and rape-by-poolstick

and we would get really stoned
& drink the case of natural ice the river man bought for us

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.

twitch and turn

yell, hello through a sunset pink towards cloud. It, a foreground to a yell, a pale dust blue infinity. The yell a hello, the cloud a wisp wandering waywards, still (not at all), but temporary. (These eternities seem never temporary). With the words read before, thoughts before still (no never), just moving timewards. Like a moment of pink cloudwisp and a backdrop of sky. Spied before, bits just the same though this time all just to never be repeated. Once and once again. Once and against, this same old different infinite sky.

This time my view edged with pinetrees, like the pines are lash edges of my eyes. Like a screen around a vision. Like a little curtain underneath.

And the cat, all precious, and the weathervein, and my own veins pink blooded and my selfmade weather inside all edged coniferous. My coneforest looks out through twin eyes. Embolded and southbound western wed, sunset engaged and all matrimonious in twilight expectation.

viper in, abundance

I is waterslides, you is equivalence. The terms I learned, the songs into which your mind sank. My hair and the captivating sunlight of your glance, your own little watergasps, trails & streams of and from, a rocky path gathered back from the side of the road & into a little round opened from a mouth of yours. The pretense burns and the little man on the wrapping player, lamplit, snowdry.

a burning sunset fill s the nostril s. Scampercat across fence. Pale amber tree silhouette, casual stop-time.

I and the slipnslides, you and the remember the backroad, to the place on the riverbank, one could crawl gasping into the clear freezing cold; naked best beneath a summer sun. ? Remember the beet of a taste charm? And the bright & its shadows!
Small beat, small salad. Little root of fuchsia. Just a colored remembrancer. And to think I thought thoughtless of spelling.

I cut from the branches of ancient jade two tiny limbs, one sick, one gifted, both gifted by & to and for proof, I claim

oh, around your face is the sunset on snow for all a dream effect.

patrimonies

Oh my little butter print...

I remember that all is another 12 years, before anyone could articulate anything. I love a lobster like I could a wet sunset/ just nearly evaporated...

oblivionward