a song for love in the new year

songs with women's names
the number 14
the light of the moon, near full
I avoid it!
 I don't avoid it
I avoid the urge to
my ring slipping round my finger,
  maria        laura        marlene

a train   choos

   10:53 pm, tomorrow
(this time of year, the nights fall longer)
so let your beard grow round your neck
and your torso
and past your new boots
and down my throat

make me toast

        read your fortune!
        little new-year son

I always have liked
the german pronunciation
for marlene

the soft lilt,
the forgiving!
                         (do you remember proclaiming
                           that you'd never love someone
                           that you'd never love someone explaining
                           that you'd never truly love someone
                              who's never caught exclaiming)

  oh, me!


       hello, little new-year babe
        hellow, last smoke of smokes
       hello, pretty whistle
     of pretty, nearby train
        hello, sleeping city-that-won't
                                        the oh-she-won't-quit place

                               dreamy babe,
                              I've never said this to anything
                            I've never been that guy
                              But I wanna die in You

      and, therefore
    thereby

    tinkle
         tinkle
               tinkle
                      little bell, ring
                                           ring
                                               ring in me
whistle past our bedscapes

decembme

with a whimper. I put down the meusli, I put down the grapefruit I halved (done right) because it tastes bad to me, or it's from texas, or, or, the beans in my stomach making puff puff at me. I think all the herbs from all of the world come into me through the nostrils down the throat. I lost my appetite because you thought I might drive round the crescent to fetch you at 8:30 drop my hat, take you to work, did you stay up too late? oh no, did I should rescue you? I am not that me, anymore. it's december, let's get up. this is pretty real, in me. growing back your bones, we see with it in them now.

anymore

I miss having fun with you, do you think we'll ever have fun together again?
I wanted to have a cocktail
at this poshplace, I had an oldfashioned
at the bar
and I sat next to this bearded guy
who I couldn't look at
 and who left instantly
I feel like if you want to live here you have to be in love
with her
here
I feel it in me, it's not devastating
I wonder if I will drown, here?
or get up?

  of course we will
be laughing
and nice to each other
I don't know where my   space    is
  it's everywhere

I got pulled over last night
I don't want to drive anymore
I get nervous
I want to put an e in nervous
I want to spell nervous with molly

I don't like to be a  thing
in your freedom thing
your venge
isn't mine
I wish we could fuck loudly for someone else's benefit
  I don't tear up that
  just makes me shake your head
  it makes me a judge where I don't want to be

my throat hurts
my head is filled with coffee
and with shit
and with chocolate scone
and with a nap
  I think
              I won't tell you everything
anymore

in me

it is a body heart
a panic muscle
my lungs, yours
full up to the throat.
I talk too much
everyone seems better memory
repeat my repeats
rememberize me.
it hasn't been
long I am
afraid of the big
I am afraid
to fall out
of love with my city
with my girl.
how much room is in me?
to quiver in me?
to pulse & pound in me?
will I shiver me off
around over through to finished?
will I kill the gapes
will I fill with sound, me?
I want to
I want to give it
I want to give it all away
I want it celebrating not
cursing
I want to course with you
I want to birth
it not
death it
I want to steal the
deal
to spark my wordless mouth
my fullbellied, worthful mouth
I want to spout the right ones
at you on
you in you
, in me
  I want us safe inside
we're unsafest. world fastened.
harnessed.

hungover

I can't tell if I'm straightup being ignored by you
I don't want you to leave, am I? where are we going
I don't want Kyle to go back to Nebraska, it makes me feel like I'll never see him again.
I don't want to never see you again.
I did too many bad things, I lost all of my words in one paragraph
I lost all of my tears, down my throat, backwards
I don't remember getting home
to your home
you interrupt ignoring me to ask me if I know what time it is
I don't know how to find the things
the people-things
I've lost
I'm already gone
I'm trying to be capable
I want dates
but I am so sick on dates
I don't know if I impress
leave impressions of, on

I like your face
I like your beard face
I like your profile & your mouth
& the way you point instead of speaking
I like that I'm in your kitchen
& I'm writing about you
& you're moving about

and you just handed me a black ricecracker
with hummus & pickled okra
it was really pretty

I'm always asking so many questions
so people shush me & hush me
when in bed & I'm talking in my sleep
I forget sometimes to not read your
poems and then I can't tell if I'm
sweating or if I'm crying

there's a golden retriever wandering around outside
and I feel this weighty terror
& a terrible jealousy at it

as if you'd notice

It's early, it was sixteen minutes earlier when I wanted to write
I have been up since even more before that
I have smoke coming out my ears
I have nothing in my throat.
I am not a good friend
      to anybody
I go to bed before it's dark
& it won't be light for hours
I don't know how I feel about caffeine
and I'm halfasleep
with a project in mind
that could be dismissed as art-therapy for teens in distress
or it could be adulated
for its tenderness & honesty
and maybe it will be up on the walls
or sent on a plane to another country
between two mountain ranges
where I can burn it all up

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

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

the runs

When I was 24 I moved to Portland and lived with Jessie (& it's her birthday on tuesday) and Adán and Jon and that weird blacksmither who was into fractals and TOOL & made business cards out of razor blades. Some of us drove to Battleground, WA where we met four ducks & we packed them in wire duck cages on newspaper. It cost us $40 for the four of them. They shat all over the newspaper on the way home. We'd built them a pond with a heavy expensive tarp beneath that we covered with rocks and took days to fill with water. They each laid an egg every day. The young ones would lay in weird places, underfoot sometimes or hard to find in the blackberries, and the older one would push them into piles with her beak & try to hide them from us. I started waking up everyday to the quacking of Candace who was the bossy one, big & mottled with shiny violet feathers & she'd quack & nip at all the others and take all of the food. She was the one who liked to push & hide all of the eggs so we couldn't take them, but we were hungry. I found her one day sitting on a nest she'd made beneath some scrubby bush with 18 eggs neatly snugging beneath her splayed duckbody. I left her 8 of them so she wouldn't feel like it was all for naught. We ate duck eggs every day. They had such a strong foul beautiful deeprich flavor. They had the biggest yolks, goldorange yolks that greased all down your throat & oiled up your palate. I nearly choked every time. I used to like running yolks, but those were those of the meager chickens so I never know what a real yolk could be. They kind of ruined me because I like really strong intense food but the duck yolk is far stronger & tougher & more rich & foul than I'll ever be.

fuckturds of the world be gettin it ON

last day of july

& why? Where are you going this weekend? It isn't to where I be going, is it? The lady with the vermilion fro walks in, sandalled, with sparkle-gold bag. She drinks the beers on the half-off, and writes in the little spiral-bound. & I am up over here, tryn to get hung, and the buzzing happens, and it makes my stupid aggressive heart swallow in my throat

oregon

I am a bit, a lot. I am often, and it an obvious lightsource. This is somewhere before never been, at least records of, nonexistent. In a lush green, in an overcast still lit somehow. I remember many things before, and februaries before this. Because all of this. A chirp, a subtle stare from a dog on the floor. The run of water makes the bird cry. Dressed blue in tiny feathers. Just the little bell tinkle too as it quakes cage encased.

A sweet heart next, bodies warm in proximity. A twelve green stairway, slopes and peelings from ages gone. Bygone, gone by, the scent of a strong tea in me, the feeling of many, a breath through the nostrils and in the throat the right of which is sour, sore. Pour a rightside hot down with liquid to burn & scrape making soft clean health around. Health abound. Many little rosemary fronds for my forward, I know it.

pretty again, little again

pretty little, one


I remember now… I am not asleep and I am not aching; I am aberrant in my sitting tiny at the table. A white fog sits rightly back with me and, departing from accepted standards, we both exist meanwhile, cramped in an apartment. Anxious we seem overall; but inside we're something amazing, deviant, abnormal. There are doilies everywhere, conifers in the backyard… Maybe now to listen: it's atypical, anomalous, and we're talking over the television, over the whir of the ceiling fan.

Hill-less, the fog notes, sidelong glancing out the window.

The sunset is careless, without any sense of only four hours of red. The unpleasant brown cat is perched sometimes of sleep. We're entranced by France as a tiny situation. The time left until awakening is a sterile state delicately centered on yesterday. A clean bed is an ornately crocheted doily. One of those, feeling it surely isn’t.

Maximum homemade from pale blue days. Feeling like to die until I can find a way solemnly, turning pages, to be done for. Wondering softly, electricity. Wondering how, a belief about anything else ever. Today once more I’ll wake up, claim this voice that’s arisen. Grip on my doing & why.

In the morning, annul sarcastically important points: A grand way to meet those beautiful acidulous nonexistents.


Sleeping in any year, any day,
girls or women sharp-tasting or sour;
good to sound with someone
starts nice
I should say
pleasantly
In aqua remarks.

Even with the sounds around.

Then begins congested as
though the throat turned-up,
tone bitter, cutting
telephone rings
and the bedclothes beginning
to ache, orange-freckled and
bitter at caller.

Never is it pure
and shoulders

Typically
perfect beneficial, most simple…
tall of speech opportunity, just miss
(I don’t) a wide, skeletal
poem possibility.
treasured find
a body bag smile and a
danish accent.
Word and future.
sleep and soon, I’ll not know finally.
Puzzle shaking, annoyed
rye for a reason,
from Paris with the shaved composition in which possibility embraces
that there’s someone else.
Plenty inspirational.
Certain letters in each line might stir
something from within.

I miss someone. I wish eyebrows.
Form a word still looking when I’m sleeping.
reason could explain the latter,
or words at alone sometimes… this!
Oh, is my favorite, acuity. So there you have
but who, really. I just wish it could
(with uncertain English)
(and sharpness or keenness of thought),
this one example.

I want to be there
I know your name,
a shy sweet vision
on hearing.
Who is taken with me
because I read it,
from quality.

An enlarged mass of absurd.
I will and do fall.
a highly possible in love with urgent you,
layered, often obstructing
breathing, liking
to you. frequency paid
for one atop the other.
Through passages,

Ah but a memory.
(I am unafraid of french,)
It’s possible we could move in
together, being
characteristically pinched.
falling into that
particular abyss.
Flight as my dreams can,
in the features and the looks.

I am afraid that I’ll fall, matching true.
to make this seem
worth the while, in and not,
too beautiful a boy. Drowsily
I contemplate my own
quality, using words like Again & Again.

beaver moon

and we wonder to see it through the grey, tonight. The air is colder and the rain comes down as if in prophesy. And I'm going there in gulps/ \just accidents. The sky from a window view from sitting here crosslegged with the left falling into a deep sleep on the beige sheets of 500threadcount egyptian cotton one lighton, to the left illuminating otherwise just that window in me, the textured sky now because of rain like a fuzz on a screendoor, mini webs built by mini spiders, microscopic chasms filled all-ways with silken threads too small to see or touch or be swept by...... The creosote in the windowbars, tree leafless for Autumn and nearing to december closer everyday. A horn beeps just once below, cars splash the walks, I anticipate umbrellas, even those of a lepoardprint persuasion, and then in later dates of future the songs I will write sadly to sing whilst idly a keyboard is touched, and training my own throat and hair and instruments. Only the warm keys beneath the heels of hands and pads of fingertips. My water is full of waves like the messy ones, ones which capsize a floatboat at the laziest overestimated swash, swishing it over upsidedownwards just because of confusing spell, slepp slepp slepp.

ringlets dripped down of wind

& the hot spicy tastes lingering awhile down my throat. This morning was looking too good could be true, I saw through dizzy fogged eyes out a window and through a fan, the orangeyellow leaves fluffed out a bit now, not drooping sad in the view. The sky a perfect ocean wash; I could see the tides breaking from where I sat squinting. Like a to be hot day on the coast, but during that time of pre-heat, (though in truth I think proves perfect out, and oh such fall. Autumnal in all its obviousness. I will never close these parentheses. My hair has little knots at its ends. I let the fan blow no matter the temperament of day. I like the slow accordion sound. I like the spicy herbs, dandilion leaves. I like the cold ankles, the anticipatory shower, & poems written for you, & the little documentations of love, & the secret smile at corners of my mouth (in regard), And those trees everblowing more and more orange everyday! Like to change the seasons, already! And the full hunter's moon, tonight, which is why then I stopped to bleed, which is why I urge vocally in silence for you to return to me, this subtle soft sour I have for you, to glean in these bright fields, to roam among my fattened deer. & something about the excitement, feeling heartbroken when hearing a peice of music or reading something tantalizing, and falling in love & dying in the same moment at the fear awe of something so bewildering, so great; and this all of this is a bit like that but without the right words to describe. Every minute & then again every week-end. But my moon is bright and my deer are fat. And my arms stay open late.