Congratulations

The new thank you

How to talk about reading

Without talking about actually reading,

The active searching,

Without admitting that I actively searched for the words?

The active searching for response?

How do I boredly respond to yours

That makes not a quiver in me

But just the subtle pang

The good old jesus christ

The, that's all?

How do I even wonder at my reaction to your reaction

The emotionless chill

The chilled emotionless

The chilling emotionlessness.

The phone wants to Autocorrect to

Emotionless ex

Which is a laugh-out-loud slogan

Better a laugh-inside slogan.

Thanks, phone

Thanks, 'net.

Thanks be to god

I am no better than you. I weep at my own words tumbled from my fingers

I weep at the screen with dryer eyes.

This is how we see each other. Through all of this

shit

Just the most least of the worst of the best of the shit. Still nothing less or more than just

good

old

shit.

About waiting

I'm waiting in the airport for you.

I went and ate oysters and listened to people read poetry behind a bar and I sat next to the train tracks in the gentle rain and almost said nothing.

I laid down on the chaise lounges in the departures area.

There's jazzy Christmas music playing still.

I feel really excited to see you but I feel empty.

The emptiness I feel is so unrelated to you.

All of the bathrooms have been closed for cleaning for 45 minutes.

I don't know if we will have enough quarters to pay for parking

I liked a lot of heard words today.

I liked the rain near the tracks.

I don't like driving in the rain.

I don't think I will talk to you for at least two more years, if ever.

I don't care if it's a few years or if it's never.

There are only cops here, and me.

I think sometimes we rehearse things and they evaporate when we're faced with the opportunity to go there.

 I guess
  Don't feel sorry for us anymore 

somewhere

I am a little beast in here, a beast for you 

babe.

who has fingered me? don't stop touching on me. don't use your words at me, leave your swoll fingers afar from. I'm grippable. take my city from me, push it out my holes, fill my brain with other-fluff, the stuffs of else. I already knew, read ahead in all the books of this. once I was at your house and we were fighting, I was in the bathroom and you put on fade into you by mazzy star and I started to weep. I thought it was an example I could grip, of you connecting to me. and you hadn't any idea I felt your playing this song to be a reaching out for me. I started to cry because it felt like we were in the same place for once in awhile. you were hearing & responding & sending it back out. but then you changed the song in the middle, and I looked at my tearface in the mirror and the illusion was spoiled. welcome back, I said to us. but always remember, to never understand should never be a surprise maker.

acetaminophen

there are so many other words I'd have used

let's get real

it's still thanksgiving

you know thanksgiving, the whole day you're thinking how you want to break up with your boyfriend. do you ever look at yourself

and not out of self depreciation, or self pity

you look and you think, now honestly

let's be real

how do you like me? what have I for you? and there truly is something, then, isn't there. isn't that something. so driving around new orleans on a cold day, and tearing up with headcold, and disgust and fear and hate for someone to love, and the streets are bare and cold. I like that everyone seems to have a place. too many places for us. it took hours to finish the cranberries, the green bean casserole. aunt sue always calls them greenie beanies, which I'd forgotten all day. 

I'm going to wake up tomorrow    a  new   woman   I think

I can be so mean, I can be so very ugly

  you're right about that

when I die bury me in the liquor store

I'm sitting on Luke's stoop listening to Nickey's birthday track, it's pretty loud. Drinking an Outlaw IPA not because I'm crazy about it, but it's a pretty good IPA and I taste IPAs all day sometimes, but because it's from Garden City, and made by an acquaintance from highschool, I never had a crush on him, but I guess I'm trying to be pre-nostalgic for Idaho because I truly am leaving it tomorrow. This song doesn't make me nostalgic, just makes me think of Nickey but I'm taking her with me. I mean she's taking me with her. We're taking each other with each other. I'm going to Dad's for a final Dad dinner, and I'll maybe sell the dogcrate for $50. I made $55 selling my synthesizer to Britt. I was going to sell it to another exboyfriend, but I like Britt better. Maybe it's because he was never my exboyfriend. I think I like the music he makes more. No I know. A giant man in a BSU tee walked by with a golden on a leash. The golden was wetfurred, and peed on the tree in front of Luke's cute yellow house. Ida didn't chase it. But I was gripping her by her aqua bandanna. It's not too grubby for a bandanna. For a dog bandanna. Or even a girl bandanna. I said goodbye to Brittany. To Chad, to Gray, to John Shinn. I wanted to say goodbye to John Shinn again. I've said enough goodbyes. Everyone's like, Why aren't you gone yet. And we're like, We know. Because we've got to pack the car up, and I've got to clean my little messes I've messed Luke's cute yellow house with. But then, maybe I won't. Maybe it will become real to us. Maybe I'm more excited than they are. Maybe later I'll write long words about long skins to miss. Long bodies pulled tightly down over a butter yellow bedsheet, long feet dangling. Can you dangle straight. I have hours left of goodbyes, I know. I will be saying goodbye forever, I know.

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

I'm not in love with you

I am not in love with those who don't love patterns
with those who don't love onions
with those who don't smile
with those who call themselves boring
with those who don't want to come
with those who litter
with those who don't think I'm sort of beautiful
with those who won't constant clutch at my bod
with liars
with those who don't cry
with those who don't ask all of the questions
with those who write as badly as I
with those who drink from to-go cups
with those who don't love my dog
with those who don't love language
with those who don't get drunk on words
with those who drink too much, too often
with those who say, I don't care
with those who mutter, I don't know
with those who deoderize
with those who make excuses
with those who hide
with those who deny
with those who don't give it
with those untouchables
with those who don't hurt honest
with those who won't ride with me
with those who don't sleep outside
with those who watch me & aren't okay with it all
with those who
  just can't hang

sitting by the river being all proud of myself (truth)

I am homely, driving in my car
             waiting
how many words do you think are in my vocabulary
how many words do you think of me
  I'm too something to something
  some pre-you pre-yous I'm doing, I'm after
I'm tired
I'm sprinklers, I'm sprinkling under summer
I'm sorry, I'm out
my car will die
I'll need a jump
I'll dry eye the night
but I'll
  sing at the tops of me
Truth
  with its un
recognizable
bassclarinet
     goodbye
         I'm asleep
            & truly
         from the mist
         from the most severest place
       are my apologies

flirt journey

  I want to
overwhelm your mountains
  hey, girl
  I am a dripper of coins
a pouch for you, stain your sheets with copper and nickel
stick to your summer fur
rub me behind the earfolds, makeawish
  sit around outside in dark dark silent summer
  or lay on your stone, on your back, shirt pulled up
   pale stomach
   constellation-lit
  my constellated torso
and
  longlegs
crossed at the ankles
  be my best friend at nighttime
    urge me coquette
   try for me to call you through a flirt, a longdistance wink at-me
   so I can fold my wings
   under my down spots
    in my own bod
     to wihdraw from your touch-words
    the threat of
    the hum of
  your mellifluous murmurs
it might be on the way, or a thousand miles out of
  on the way
    the pacific, almost reaches
    or canada, it nearly touches me
  get me in your forest climate,
    I want into your urging dense
      your fat ancient wood
    making me a small thing,
       an occasional thing
    my spot body for your moss
  to cling to
      give my suctions little flirts to grip
    and temporary promises to sigh about

"it sort of seems like we fell in love"

  or,

"love is for lo$ers"

  

   I don't know

I mean idk how to put it?

                      now, how would you put it

you fell in love with your own image from across the street

you fell in love across a table, mussels

I fell in love with long bones

I fell in love with stringytough muscles

you fell in love with the sound of your own voice

you fell in love with the rain

I fell in love with attention

I fell in love with those grips on me

you fell in love with regret

you fell in love with the frozen future

I fell in love with possibility

I fell in love with bedding

you fell in love with disappear

you fell in love with surprise-I'm-sad

I fell in love with hazy hair

I fell in love with the mouth of the world

you fell in love with let-me-break-your-heart

you fell in love with the lovers

I fell in love with memories

I fell in love with booze

you fell in love with booze

you fell in love with what

I fell in love with pain

I fell in love with me, again?

you fell in love with poems

you fell in love with I'm-not-writing

I fell in love with trying
I fell in love with crylaughing

you fell in love with giving up

you fell in love off the overhang

  I just think we fell in love, totally

   and that we're scratching our ways back

     to whatever dregs we already were

       before we had to look up the words

        in our well masturbated dictionaries

heartline

a man came into the coffeeshop wearing an old new orleans tigers hat
which I found a little serendipitous
he made me sell him $1 worth of bulk tea
I used the scale and a flimsy cellophane bag
and he said, Your heart line is so bright you could roast weenies on it
I asked him, What the fuck is a heart line
not in those words, exactly
and he said, Your joie de vivre
he told me, It comes out your eyes,
and your smile, especially
and oh, your rosy cheeks, too
and I was thinking, either I do have a carefree enjoyment of life,
or,
this guy is fucking dumb

I'm sorry. I guess I must really just be good at my job
or maybe
or maybe I'm just a shining lovebeacon
  pretending I'm not
I should have insisted that he give me his cap, for my new disguise


THIS GIRL IS ON FIIIIIIIIIRE

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

novelty

tear down that mtn, she does
we do can
there are tries alloverthe place
tries swarming around me, I'm swatting at them
I am in an apron I'm sitting on the curb beside the gasstation in the hot sunlight
in thick tights for summer
I am a teen, I know
but I am thinking abt new orleans a lot
wondering?
when, will we?
is it a novelty, now
is everything abt me novelty?
you fell in love with a novelty
it was too romantic, too impossible beautiful faraway to be anything
but
words, pics, drunk affections
like time pulled over
in the big novel countryside
and then the countryside shattered
into a million impossible pieces
and I was shown in the bustedup reflections
the impossible
our faces, bodies, voices crunching out
us, irl
the beautiful invisible novelty
that we were

alone in a room of people

a dream in which

i had to pull you down by your beard to kiss you

i'm on my toes gasping for kissing

and your mouth is dry like sand tongue

and i scream inside, so i know i'll wake myself up

but i wake up in a small theater

and there's this avantegarde comedy play

and i'm embarassed bc i went to sleep and woke myself with screaming

it was just rude of me

i kept trying to sit on these blanketed seats that weren't mine

and in an effort to make friends, i loaded a bowl

but the others took the bowl outside to smoke without me

i dreamed there was this new interactive blog

like cutlass but with cartoon skies you could go inside of

with little animated planes lying around you

and anything could be posted

it was being updated like every 30 secs

i watched words & sentences fly past me

and of course i was overdoing it

i was doing it like once a minute,

it was becoming annoying for some of you

was it i who said sleeping is fun 

well maybe it is bc i just remembered the final part of my dream
there were bigcats on balconies
giant shining gray foxcats
so pretty
and on all of the balconies in this depressing town
now this is what i sleep for 

squish

abdicate!

our minds have slippery sources, make slippery the secretions

they're hard to hold onto

I just gipped mine with dagger paws, tamping, tramping a bit

the jumpy little guy. Where you trying to?

I have a smile now, it's a lone one for me myself only. They listen to my words, they are my friends. They nod, I guess, but maybe they're stoned, maybe they've never been here before. I feel like my relations aren't hard to not. Can't you? Always begging the other to understand. Even if you don't agree... please please please understand me. I don't want to be a different language, a tongue tie. I amn't exotic enough to be the other. You're not exotic at all, but still you cling breathing your veil to be protected forever from things like me. I am. Wishful wait giveup girl.

shone me something

squinty little eyes on the shine, in that shine. 

my face is turning, growing into something

it's a little destruction planet. 

I blow out my teeth with my words

the words trip out my throat & 

the words tongue my tongue.

the sun tongues me

and my teeth explode 

and I gum the words for the rest of time

and there are palatal licks of sound

and alveolar outbursts

and labial laments.

but those dentals be damned, a toothless attempt

at getting across any desperate points

metalepsis

So all that's left is the voiceless acceptance

the gutterally giving in

the fricitive finality.

Take my words but

spare my sight. I want to die with memories in me

of the very things words don't do

glitter

glow

gush

weep

words might, but sight happens better,

how would they ever catch 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

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

list

chromophile

disavow

samsara

these are the words I looked up yesterday

what's the difference

between you and a chair

I would say I'm average tall

not short tall or tall short but sometimes someone 

just needs a chair

to stand on

I can't stand on shoulders, but yesterday I got a leg up

she made a basket step with hands so I could look over the cement wall

my friend bought a new house, and maybe it's my new house so we went to creep around the outsides of it, and it has these thick levolor blinds. a fireplace, carpet city

I like to live in curtain city

sometimes, 

but it's like the I have a choice kind of sometimes
& in a carpet city, we're choiceless

so one has to buy an expensive vacuum, which reminds me of

one of the differences 

between you 

& a chair

a chair can't buy an expensive vacuum

and you just won't

I can & have stood on shoulders, but 

I don't really need to

I live with a tall tall woman 

who can reach everything in the house.

& she puts things way up high sometimes

because that's where she sees

and I, I'm thinking

I'm thinking from way down here

I'm thinking how I don't have an arm like that

or a legs

like those

& I don't have a way to get up

or stay up.

so I ask for help sometimes

sometimes

if it's not inconveniencing anyone, I'll ask for a hand out

or an arm's reach

or a leg up

& then if I have to wait 20 days for

a handout or an armsreach or a leggup

I am begrudged

& I pull out a chair & climb on up

Some differences

both have legs, you have only two

both can have arms, but you have to

you have hair

a sad mouth

cornereyes

words

sweat

a chair has wood

a chair has upholstery

a chair doesn't spell it out

a chair is silent 

a chair don't talk back

a chair gets what it deserves.

I'm actually going to try to sell all of these chairs, how many chairs are there in this house? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 inside

& more outside, but I like it out there, I think you & the chairs both like it out there so we'll just stay in wait for the next 20 days. It's sort of hard to give them up but I think it's right, the deck is wet, the trees die & get wet & get up again, and I wonder how hard it would be to use you as one or a tree as one, and then I know immediately that it would be the easiest thing in the world