17.
people break people
that is human nature
it’s never expected
but comes as no surprise
loyalty has no clear definition
and it’s division at it’s finest
tearing us apart
piece by piece
taken advantage
at our weakest
You can watch, but you can’t stalk!
(me, in a restrained command voice
when she gets too close to the window.)
She turns with a look that says,
and I quote: Cant you see
that I’m still a cat?”
I haven’t the heart to ban her
from the bird room. Since the feeders
went up I spend hours there
and when she’s not sleeping
she likes to keep an eye on me.
If you start to quiver, I’ll shoot!
(me, a little firmer, water sprayer
in hand.) And she counters:
Why don’t you tell the birds
I’m just TV?
“I’m just a notch in your bedpost. But you’re just a line in a song.”
—Fall Out Boy
Go on then,
without me.
If I am to forget you,
let the process start today.
Don’t string me along for another day
with false hope.
If you’re not coming back,
let my heart grow cold towards you
now.
What is this unique hell you put me through?
To feel so cherished
and then so abandoned.
To get me addicted to your taste
and then take it away.
What is this death by silence?
There once was music
and every song was about you
and me.
And now there’s nothing.
You were worth waiting for
until you stopped responding.
I am alone again
and it is worse
than never having had you at all.
I guess the first hit is always free,
but you pay for the last one
with your heart.
You were my drug,
an easy danger to flirt with.
I stayed high on your love
as if it were real.
Now I’m just another junkie
left in your wake.
I will go on,
without you.
I will heal from this wound.
I will find another you,
one that doesn’t deal in illusions,
someone who plays for keeps.
And once I find him,
I’ll never think of you again.
sunrise incinerates the darkness
There once was a poor sex ed teacher
Who couldn’t be bothered to feature
Parts, condoms, or scabies;
Just don’t make no babies!
(And don’t mention s-e-x either.)
On a unicycle she balanced
with spinning plates
bowls on her head
Ready to risk another
Self-help books from the ‘90s
Have kind of dated themselves
The exercises seem to waist paper and ink
I could do them differently
But I won’t
I’m all about the crayons and imaginary scenarios
Up until it doesn’t apply
A fantasy childhood for me
I would have to erase it all
Change my family
Change my mental health
And move away
I’ve done a lot of reparenting but it’s exhausting to think about
How much work I’ve done on myself
I don’t like to think about it
Maybe ‘90s self-help books are not for me
She was old when
my brother, who was twelve,
shot his toe off
by accident,
conditioned as he was
to place the barrel
of his single shot
Stevens on his shoe
to relaoad.
At the clinic,
she was the nurse.
When the doctor came in
to remove what was left of the toe
next to his big toe,
my eyes were glued on hers,
for my brother was between us,
blood spurting straight up.
It was easier to fix on her eyes
than on my brother’s misery.
When she was old, wrinkled,
and we were in the same restaurant,
she asked me if I knew who she was,
and I said I did without hesitation.
She thought I knew her because her voice was
the same, but I had forgotten that voice.
I told her I recognized her eyes.
She was sore surprised.
I retold the story about my brother’s toe.
She had forgotten that–all of it.
A
Polishing broken stones we’d sieved
from the Dix in a sporing spree of splendor
splashed
in celeritous breaststrokes
slashing impressionist’s cat’s paws,
scumbled petals of murmurous bee’s backs
splayed and playfully pooled
against gaping grooves
of grandly warbling coral
cracked and whisked
among motley froth
as a nacreous argus winking
slipped beneath glistening skin
of a riverbend’s elbow
raw and worn with
wriggling spangles,
opaline irises yawning
in lissomely rising hymns,
in mercurial mead
of ineffable hues
and tones that strum against
stone-shod crystals,
creatures recalled amid ageless earth,
this whispering web of cerulean, verdigris, jonquil, violet, rose, and bittersweet,
inchoate crystals flouncing
gayly and lithely as tumbling gudgeons,
dash and twist across
quietly skulking stones
some shiftless limb among hulking stocks
must stir and steer around slavering hummocks’ slumbers
I
Bunched up in a buckling husk
of culled and cross-bred ore,
some slipshod sled slid limply above but
skulking schools of suckling molluscs
mashed against rusted flints and agates,
innumerable slews of nameless runnying rocks—
what pitiless, fricative furrows drawn,
those honed and harrowed thews of a
sallowed tongue, ribbed wood blocks
beaten raw and bald
to a tyrian fume of integuements
cracked and crushed;
such illustrious smokescreens splayed ‘long silvered scrims,
wan wiggly greaves and gorgets groped like lightfast strokes
upended, stripped by a painfully blushing star;
like stars uncoiled through crouching clouds
echoic of godling’s radiant lashes
reaching deeply descending ephemeral limbs
like morning glories rifle up slumping saplings,
pinning a frail and celestial hair piece
(sere and scalding skin of a cadmium nimbus)
lazily lobbed around steel-wound cheeks,
sharp scowl of some coldly salubrious glower’s
gleeked and straddling probe that’s hatched
across glaring vents of a snowblind visor
cocked across caulk-like glims (some whey-caked
gleeman’s lambrequin spun from a soiled shirt
or a sopping surplice cinched round itching steel
and esurient lichens ruddling chattering joints
and consumptive mail);
pearlescent burls embroiled in bone-braced stocks,
ophidian roots like frozen falls reformed
round slack-jawed slabs of knock kneed, shinnying
limestone stabbed ‘twixt clenching toes;
what ossified hunches huddled in murmurous
cysts ‘long splintered chines of pine, down
dearly deserted and nervous aspens settled,
alas, in Chinle’s shards.
To trade its conspicuous scleras seized
from chillingly ore-licked sand
with restively roughened, ruddied, and ferrous cherts;
to summon contemptuous grafts unbound
or splintered in urgency’s surname scraped
and cracked across warted shells of sugary citrine,
brittle and bright as a kumquat—
