english class was like jumper cables

my mind moves reluctantly, like a boot
entrenched in mud.
sluggishly,
and slathered in ennui,
it stirs, blinks itself into focus, and almost
settles back down. but it doesn't,
and instead it creaks,
emits a sad rusty screech, and resumes operation
at its lowest functional capacity.
some of its edges, when touched,
crumble. some of its gears,
when summoned, remain locked.
pieces of it fall away in unbroken chunks,
but the heart of it is restored
and repairs are under way
and it exported this,
which may or may not be better
than nothing at all.

1 line break!! one!!!

there were still clouds flinging crumpled drops of rain at the earth (failed blueprints sketched out in molecular structures, flooding an unimportant wastebasket) when virginally pink light began filtering through the trees out the window, coffee for the eyes. the light aged and faded, gathering heat as my bed gathered dust; i had left it unmade so it could pretend i hadn’t left it. sleeping is cheating. the house is heavy and slow like a steamroller, empty like the hollowness between walls. the light gets hotter, and evaporation kicks in like a safeguard. passing time in the hollow places is an art i have perfected; i treat the sequence of my motions as a flower arrangement and i keep my thoughts minimalist. the humidity star(ts up. not such failures, after all. the sun picked them up, smoothed them out, made the necessary changes. presented them to the clouds, who accepted them gratefully and swelled with pride. bound inevitably to
fuck it up again.) a pair of seagulls swam past my window; i don’t know what they were doing so far from the ocean but my eyes are too tired to figure it out.

stephen's

this is

knees breaking
bones scraping
neck jerking
body trembling
eyes racing
speech slurring
spine cracking
paint dripping
words lying
sleep dying
life freezing
love living
lines drawing
flames whipping
tears falling
love dying
family drifting
noses flaring
cats fighting
canvas ripping
holes absorbing
cigarettes burning
lungs blackening
days waning
moons reflecting
suns exploding
dolls bleeding
leaves crackling
screens glowing
flowers growing
fall dawning
love growing
paintings warping
tissues crumpling
furniture inhabiting
smoke filling

our hearts up with glory
and the noise surrounding my eyes
cannot be seen or heard
but the smell is starting to kill me.

II.
these words

are pulsating upon my screen,
just like lust pulsates in whores,
and nothing sates this insatiable desire
to be and belong anywhere i am;

i am great friends with nowhere,
best friends with isolation,
and whatever i do
to myself
to allow metaphors
to control my body,
and to break bones
(and bridges) when neccessary.

you need to walk a mile in my shoes,
feel this internal war wage within the jumps of my synapses
spaces between cells (sells)
sells myself short.

III.
and then i said

fuck white noise.

lorca

song of the seven-hearted boy

Seven hearts
are the hearts that I have.
But mine is not t here among them.

In the high mountains, mother,
where I sometimes ran into the wind,
seven girls with long hands
carried me around in their mirrors.

I have sung my way through this world
with my mouth with its seven petals.
My crimson-colored galleys
have cast off without rigging or oars.

I have lived my life in landscapes
that other men have owned.
And the secrets I wore at my throat,
unbeknownst to me, had come open.

In the high mountains, mothers,
where my heart rises over its echoes
in the memory book of a star,
I sometimes ran into the wind.

Seven hearts
are the hearts that I have.
But mine is not there among them.

neruda

me again

I who wanted to talk
of a century inside the web
that is always my poem-in-progress,
have found only myself wherever I looked
and missed the real happening.
With wary good faith
I opened myself to the wind: the lockers,
clothes-closets, graveyards,
the calendar months of the year,
and in every opening crevice
my face looked back at me.

The more bored I became
with my unacceptable person,
the more I returned to the theme of my person;
worst of all,
I kept painting myself to myself
in the midst of a happening.
What an idiot (I said to myself
a thousand times over) to perfect all that craft
of description and describe only myself,
as though I had nothing to show but my head,
nothing better to tell than the mistakes of a lifetime.

Tell me, my good brothers,
I said at the Fishermen's Union,
do you love yourselves as I do?
The plain truth of it is:
we fishermen stick to our fishing,
while you fish for yourself (said
the fishermen): you fish over and over again
for yourself, then throw yourself back in the sea.

neruda

conditions

With these moody negations
I said goodbye to the mirrors
and gave up my profession:
better a blind man in a corner
singing songs to the world
without setting eyes on a soul,
if part of me is so like the others!

Nevertheless I kept trying:
how to look back at oneself
to wherever it is one sat blinded
when one's total condition was dark?
There was nothing to show for my singing
in a blind rabble of singers:
but the harsher the street sounds became,
the sweeter I seemed to myself.

Condemned to self-love,
I lived the exterior life of a hypocrite
hiding the depths of the love
my defects had brought down on my head.
I keep on being happy,
disclosing to nobody
my ambiguous malady:
the grief I endure for self-love,
who was never so loved in return.

neruda

summation

I am glad of the great obligations
I imposed on myself. In my life
many strange and material things have crowded together--
fragile wraiths that entangled me,
categorical mineral hands,
an irrational wind that dismayed me,
barbed kisses that scarred me, the hard reality
of my brothers,
my implacable vow to keep watchful,
my penchant for loneliness--to keep to myself
in the frailty of my personal whims.
That is why--water on stone--my whole life has
sung itself out between chance and austerity.