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

sexy

guessing what comes out? melancholy & sanguine.
sometimes sacred. mercurial baby
  bet on that rocket
  rock me asleep, stone me
    to death. print me with letters
      talk me out of it, talk me into it
close me up
  close up beside me
     close into me
      close, into me
maybe it's the weather
maybe I make the worst weather
  tengo mal tiempo
I wish I had allof the world's balloons to ride
  back to last August or July or someplace
    to some preplace
      when I was just a kid in the sun
         with a different kind of weather
I'm sorry I've been a wrath
  I hope I am honest
  I hope I am a trustful
bc I can sleep through the nights, now
  I do things before bed
  I draw those flowers
  I let Kafka in my ears
& my melancholy blood
  it is a pretty lot still, me
    I mean, I could be a graduate with this mind of mine
  I could muster the strength of many men up in here
  I could rally
    my virility
       I could smoothe her hair
          caress her down
  make less lonely how-it-is
I wonder if I'll get fired for taking all of these breaks
  but I'm trying to get true broke, see
    bc I've heard that sometimes you need to break it
  to snap back into place
       

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.

so many questions I know how to ask anymore

I am talking to myself today? 

what day is it

how many days is it

is it 77 degrees outside

why did I ruin this skirt for me

will it make an appropriate mini for you?

why can't I cut straight

why is there glue everywhere

why is the paper everywhere

why am I not a perfectionist

why do I say I am a perfectionist

why do I want to throw away everything 

why do I want to throw away everything when it's perfect

when did you say, "men are perfectly     Okay"

when is it

when is the last time 

when was the last time?

do you remember the other thing you said to me?

why do I want to tell you so badly what you said

why don't you remember so I don't have to tell you

why do I want to tell you

when can I tell you?

can I tell you something?

who made that decision

who is spontaneous

who is uncertain

when do we take turns, why do we take turns

why is it so easy, now

will you write back to me

will you tell me soon?

why don't you ask me questions

where will I put all of these things

what do you think of craters of the moon nat'l park

what do you think of idaho

why would you go to idaho

why am I in idaho

what's my excuse

will you cry tonight? you said we would all cry tonight if we're honest, will we all be honest?

why is my brain such a pretty brain

why is my brain such a pretty brain, is it

what do you think

what can I show you

when can I show you

what if

when was the first time

when will be the first time

will it be the first time

old relevant

I don’t even need to kiss. But I do anyway? & I showed late to a dark lawn with a poet reading from the scrolling light of a smartfone. I was quiet, in ambience. eyecontact unwavering. And sitting next to me, introduced, and lovely because from us the conversation then readily flowed. In the grass with jars & cups of wine, like oldest friends sharing knowings all together too easy. Maybe it is easier with a boy. I haven’t met anyone like that who I’d like to just sit by and keep talking to; the girls I know in some sorts because of how easy it is for us to just be. But he it was like a lost brother of mine. Then breakfast, sleepless, and it was a depressing breakfast, in that the breakfast was depressed. Eggs in a weird isolated pile, a couple of biscuits that didn’t fit anywhere, some sad potatoes. We only go places for geriatrics. And hopefully will. It is exciting and we can’t be. We are a secret, a secret shared with bars & the heavens & some select northend streets. Our bicycle seats & our diaries. He asks me questions. No, he just listens. We can’t talk anymore about the good that feels, or the beauty of faces. I can’t think about the feeling of a hand pressed hard against a low-back, or the clench of small arms. Golden beard, Nordic eyes. But our smiles! the best, contagious. Not for those long distances and uninvolved. I got through a day of clenching my lust-carved jaws, of hiding my heartattack chest. And just the saying of the bare-minimal, just that I like it, I want to be best friends, I want to. I have blood-filled veins, after all, and a heart that shakes and pounds, and legs which want to wrap around, and a mouth that kisses with all of itself. I am not there, there, there. I am older now, smarter. I am not in love, I am in love. I am in love with every second, sometimes. Since Sunday night. I am in love with time elapsing, with an everpresent future, with the thoughts that a body feels! The movement, the passions, the lust embrace that I KNOW isn’t gone, has just been hibernating, has not been there, at all, real. It might not be he; he I like so much and feel so connected to, really, like everything is just there and so honest & obvious.

It’s 28 or never baby.

efflux

In the sentimental morning. Finding the sheaf, I know the fact against the facts. A mentality sent  forward, sentimentality pitching & yawing. If it make sense. Today I have a lower tolerance, the head more honest & on the neck. I like it, as if the versus are all laid out, my own nighttime verses retrospectively humorous. The morning this way that, why because. One or other. Through & through and out and done.