slowjambs 1 (5/12/13)

your touch is so wonderful
your touch is so marvelous
the joy that I feel when I'm with you
it feeeeeels so good
I'm so glad yer mine
know that I love youuuuu
make it last forever
ya ya
give me kisses
oooh love me
hold me
squeal me
chimney
you know I do
oh oh ohhhh ohoh
mmmmm mnnnnn
you know
know that I loooooooooooove you
hoooo
prettertnnnener
oh io
never never never
make it last forever
I want our love to last a lifetime
I lovey lovey lovey love you
got to make it
ohh honeyy
I I  i I I i I i

half a man

      if I only had one arm to hold you
      I would hold you at arm's length
I did cry a lot yesterday, this morning
I was a baby, it was probably 100 degrees when I woke up in your bed this morning
I was a baby when I left the bar
because I couldn't find kyle anymore
but he found molly
just not, me, molly
just the right molly
and I was angry that he left me there, the ravers allover the place
I was in the alley and I was walking and a guy chased me down
and said, Can I walk with you
but I was already done walking
so he said, Can I sit with you
and I said, No
and I was thinking, in what world does this make sense?
when does a girl ever chase a guy down an alley to ask if she can walk with him?
I mean, what?
some other guys sat down, and I let them talk to me because they had whiskey
so I drank a lot of that
and I wasn't so mad
but then I had to leave, and I was drunk
and I was sobbing, I had to take my glasses off because I couldn't see
and I was yelling a lot at myself
I was pretty mean to myself
and I was mean to kyle
and I was mean to the others
so I went to the other bar to see what I could see
and I got a cocktail & put it into my jar
and I called one
and he said he would meet me at the river
but then I got caught by some conversation
and I was laughing, not crying anymore
and the basque man followed me
and I gave him my number
so he could text me the most offensive things he could think of
because neither of us gets offended
and then I did chase someone down
we were walking the same way
we talked about making espresso
and about art school
and then I went to the river, and found that one walking toward me
he'd been waiting for half an hour for me, I felt badly about that
we went to his house
we went in there
and we were in, for hours
and I was glad
I had stopped crying
until this morning, when he got out of bed
because he is passionless & silent
and I was wondering where all the feelers are
where are the ones like me?
I left, he didn't know I'd been crying
he doesn't know about my bad brain
he doesn't know anything
he doesn't know that I write about him sometimes
and that I am more than I let on
but I'm glad I got some human touch
some human struggle
some interactive strangers
some surprise journeying between tears
and it's hot
so I'm going swimming
and I think the tears
are done for the day
WHEEEEWWWW
thank my brain is starting
 to grow back a little

where are those good izod boyshorts?

I just came out
  1 in the afternoon
being
on birthday
ima birth this day
ima birth ima birth ima birth
I wasn't alone, fuck it
  I have a headache, we can't find our underwear
  but who needs it
we're virtually 30
  I said fuck it & you smiled pretty face kiss-me-mouth
  and then you said happy birthday, molly
 
nickey says it's weird to cry so much when you're getting madeout with
or when you come
  but I think it's more strange
that no one else thinks it's strange
  they just kiss tears off a face & don't ask
   maybe that's what Poets do
   they think in tears & come
   so when someone does, its not a shockershocker
   or maybe they think I'm tender
   or sexy, when is sad sexy? AM I SEXY, NOW???
  I got out of the car at 5:23 this morning
& I said fuck it
my birth
   I'm soft
touch me leaky
tell me happy birthday
tell me you disgust yourself
tell me you're a disappointment
tell me you're alone
tell me you'll never leave
 
  fuck it, I'm virtually 30  
    let's just do

summer in you

I wanted to write a poem called

I'm having a better summer than you

I was sitting by the river

after having sunk myself in

you know, the short breaths,

the regular too cold for you water

and I am warmskinned, pink,

imagining how you're not  

we noticed the sand

smelled so bad that

I would eventually say, I have to walk home

because I thought a hot day walk from raniers

and doritos and the slow moves of summersoaked kids

laying your head on my pelvisbone

soft of my stomach 

quaking with laughter

under the big tree, spring leaves falling on my body

which I celebrated & you mocked me for it

a lone walk home could be.

but then they all said, it smells like shit here

let's leave

gross beach

dog eating wing

you rubbed my head, my hair which was

just it

more human touch, I am a touch-me sort

out of the muck sand,

I moved a bed to the backyard

but no one bought it, or

I knew I wanted to sleep outside

I made it with quilts & pillows

and Nickey & Ida came in & we talked how we talk

& we smoked & drank whiskey in the dark

and a pine dangled over me.

It was the best sleep like windows open everywhere

I was in a breeze, and everything left 

but I always have the best summer

even when the birds don't wake in my ear

even when I leave the elements alone

even when I have to drive a car

with one window down

because I like a long distance

& something in summer is 

always to be looked forward to

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.