o

night recedes like an end and then
crashes. beneath its waves a lightbulb
blinks, flickers out. gravity pulls the ocean
back, pushes it to collapse
over my head. i'm a satellite
orbiting a flickering moon, a lightbulb
buried beneath the waves, a planet's lapdog.
i'm an astronomer with a cracked telescope,
and the universe is fragmented
and the apocalypse is coming.
and the moon i orbit is revolving
around a planet whose only focus is its core;
it is always rotating
into itself. the waves recede
and crash like a beginning.
the stars are infinitely fragmented.
i crumbled them all into the sea and slept
when the sun came up. the satellite signal
went dead, a mechanical laika. and beneath the waves,
the pressure of the water broke a flickering lightbulb.

SONG AGAINST SEX

and the first one tore a picture of a dead and hanging man
who was kissing foreign fishes that flew right out from his hands
and when i put my arms around him, felt the blushing blood run through my cheeks,
and an eeriness surrounded when his tongue began to speak.
and he said, "boy you are so pretty,
enough to wrap tight in rice-paper string."
and when i finally kissed him, the whole world began to ring,
much like a bell that's tipping over with two cracks along both sides,
and i knew the world was over, so i took a look outside
and watched the fires that were reaching
up to the weather vanes and the tops of trees
and the waiting scene and the sunday dream,
they're all waiting here for me!!!

deli markets with their flower stands,
their pretty girls and their burning men,
hanging out on the hooks in the window display
and i took out my tongue twice-removed from my face.
across a bridge and across the mountains,
threw a nickel in the fountain
to save my soul from all these troubled times
and all the drugs that i don't have the guts to take to soothe my mind.
i'm always sober, always aching, always headed towards
mass suicide, occult figurines,
and wasted gas station attendants, attending to their jobs,
and a nice drive in the country
finds a nice cliff to drop off.
oh, when this life just gets so grating,
all the grittiness of life,
but don't take those pills your boyfriend gave you,
you're too wonderful to die!!!

and the last one tore a picture from the pornographic page,
and all the pleasure points attacking, all the looks of love
were staged, and it's a lie that you've been given,
that just hurts you every day. so why should i lay here naked
when it's just too far away
from anything we could call loving, any life
worth living for? so i'll sleep out in the gutter,
you can sleep here on the floor.
and when i wake up in the morning i won't forget to lock the door,
cause with a match that's mean and some gasoline
you won't see me anymore~!!!

it's so embarrassing to need someone like i do you

out of a crowd of people as thick
as the sun's breath, out of the elevator shafts
that cities hide in, out of hearts
that are not empty but whose contents are instead
transparent,
nothing spilled over the edges.
and the crowd of people calls itself
a crowd of persons because it won't ask
for what it needs and, in not receiving what it won't
ask for, it calls itself cruel.
just ask,
and i will give us all everything.
and the elevator shafts don't collapse
into hell, only into places where there's no
air conditioning, where the lights speak like flames.
the cities aren't burning; they are screaming
with the illusion of burning, and when they have screamed
enough to forget that the world outside is pulsing,
they will sleep.
and each heart
reflects in upon itself, sees its own invisibility,
and believes it sees into the hearts of all.
and it hypothesizes that the hearts of all
are empty, but it only sees. it never reaches in
to realize that its own heart is full, never directs its sight
outwards to find that the hearts of all are ready
to spill over.

and a single drop out of the sky,
the sun's inhalation that cools the elevator shafts,
it falls into a heart and everything
spills over and sleeps and smiles,
and then asks,
and i give us all everything
at last.

there's no snow laying out its hard breath
against the ground, but the bones of statues
are shivering in their sheathes. the statues ache
like stones, constantly sinking
into the earth. their empathy
is knotted around gravity, and they groan in orbit.
but the earth is always pushing back,
and constant rejection blunts their features.

they had hoped that carving themselves
from granite would grant them protection.
but their hard limbs are brittle,
and each year cripples them a little more.
until the day comes that they are piles
of dust in the dry grass,
their bones keep on shivering feverishly.

happy birthday to me (nov. 7)

my mouth is a sobbing violin with a story to tell.
a whirlpool starts up in my calves and the strings
in my throat draw tight as my muscles stretch
and snap. the corners of my mouth
split and my teeth rot out to make more room
for words. my pregnant tongue gives birth
to a thousand starving children.

my audience collects around a campfire
lit in a forest of lost trees. there are scavengers
masquerading as rusting leaves, barely
clinging to their branches.
my eyes catch the glint of the vultures' beaks,
the feathers of the seagulls' wings.
a whirlpool starts up in my lungs,
emptying my chest cavity.
when my tongue is sucked in,
that's when the scavengers will alight from their perches,
and start to consume what's left.