paper kisses

what can be done with paper kisses.
they are small seeds accepted because
your legs are not nothing 

you redwood,
deep anchored enormous and
shifting perspective

from eight days away I consider taking the kisses you’ve left propped against the whisky bottle
and folding them into airplanes and sending them off to become pulp in the December rain
because there are many ways to leave and

then you swing through and up close.
but then up close 
next to you I am 

young and I forget everything else because up close everything is 
your thighs, your calves, your knees, your heat.  your stance, your hands, your cypress sap 
my tonic.

what can be done with paper kisses
small seeds of redwood accepted,
bodies of infinite and

I fold those two kisses you’ve left on the counter into fish and they swim up a waterfall
and become dragons in the sky,
free and powerful outside the current.

depression games

He asked me if I would rather
have thirty arms but every time one came near a baby the baby would die
or no arms and babies

I answered thirty arms, to his stricken face, then laughed
and said

JK!  Of course no arms; it would be hard to feed babies with my feet
but we'd make do and he said

JK!  If you had thirty arms and the babies died, then you would die too
but you would only have two arms in your coffin and everyone would think
you were a baby killer for fun.  You would be dead and couldn't defend yourself.
Now what do you choose?

and I said, I picked no arms!  I picked no arms and babies!

and I think of these moments that one afternoon,
and I think and think and can't stop:

You are in there, couched in riddles,
you are asking me to vouch for sacrifice,
to prove my love, to tell you the
exact price I would be willing to pay for you,
and the answers I give you cannot accept right now
and I am frightened by our game.

conversation

two strangers meet

pour,
pain, speak:
a cross burned on your front grass
those sinister dresses and pointed hats
and your dad.

pour,
pain, speak:
my impulse, my heartbeat
is chest-caged and free and I'm
one eyelash beyond amoeba.

sacred one

her eyes describing bloodshot lines,

suspect routes, connection sites
hackjob sutures cross-stitch town

and she checks through space
for the distance between our bodies.

the distance between their bodies
stands solid dark fossilized flow
but for stroking small gestures

midday screentime caresses
her towel dried fingers release

to type
where the fuck you at?
on a tiny keyboard.

two one none

electric stairs

to a pond of heat

crawl up double close and

breathe, breathe. i

inhale, inhale,

flip on, slide through 

so, how long did it take us to meet?
four lifetimes.  maybe three. 

you say in my eyes
you remembered to breathe

and memories braid the

literal, the figurative.

meanings of

two, one, 

none.
 

sacred too

she
glass shell, put to his ear, 

hear smoke whisper samba inside,

come move.

wide sea, carry on carry back,
hear snare drums and surdos inside,

come move.

so sway. quarter beat.

play she lips and he lips

so sway.  quarter beat
pull she to he hips

afternoons slow, the telephone left

on the desk

witness

i hear the geese

this morning and the cooing
of something much closer

the neighbor boy

screeches "Reid!  Catch!"

and then wailing

and with this blanket

wrapped around my legs

the sun has finally come up.

sunday risen.

open doors

look, i don't believe in god

so please don't pray for me.

though it makes you feel better
i would rather a cluster

of dandelions just past their

yellow, to wisp my counter top

and in their vase, 

illuminate the wishes i can make.

look, not god,

but the earth and weeds give me faith,  and 

sitting with the autumn leaves falling on

my chest, my heart.  i believe in the

rabid foxes in my back yard, and that

people will love me

like a boa constrictor loves a bunny.

don't pray for me.  just bring me bouquets
of empty spiderwebs and stalks of wild
and unwanted, fistfulls of skeletons,
fistfulls of lived, and
walk with me
through the door half closed,
into the universe.

so simple so intense **after William Carlos Williams

so much depends
upon
   
you and i
entwined

smiles with dark
eyes

beside the high
bed.

plain and white hindsight

it was joy, us.
beauty:  fragile, evanescent
fulfilling our own
function

(i think of williams' red wheelbarrow

and the drop of rain that glazed it,

and made the base shine, and

lovely.)

now you and i.

our touch: cavernous, small.  furtive
function.  only: feed.
and death, alive

(and i think of williams'

bird that, plain and white,
made the red clear, so
starkly.)

mis-additions

sure in her body, finally confident

in her skills, on her birthday she counts piercings and tattoos,

pounds lost and men tossed,
unhad babies, unhad marriages,

unhad dreams come true.

and fool,

she sums up her life in one word:

rejection.  and cries herself to sleep after

singing aretha at karaoke and winning trivia with bar crawlers,

after betting a blow job and winning.

forgetting she can grow tomatoes

and pull the cart when the oxen fall,
she is solitary, upstanding and finally

faithful after all:
that with her, only love will never come.

at peace & with gratitude

 

true:  the happy ending was each time we met,
and longevity was never a part of things. which I knew
and too,

wanted.  it was not a construct that included promises
though youth was back and hollering

(noise to break the windows, wake the neighbors)

pedestrian, human, obvious,  but it was not ugly,
it was not
unbeautiful. 

The Bed

Yes the bed is empty,

But the eyes are full.

Yes the bed is empty,

And the dream is crazy.

I wish I were the bed,

The dream become reality

I can read in eyes,

Like I read a book.

I can feel feeling,

I have a heart too.

If there is not if,

I will not survive.

If there is not hope,

I will die before my time.

I want to be like a bird,

Who can fly without borders.

I want to be like bees,

Who can test each flower.

If you know what I want,

The mountain will move

I like to dream, I like to hope

Because I want only to live. 

 

(Written by a friend; a gift for me)

a refrain

run with me down field, he said
I'll love you like a doll.
and when it ends, I promise you
I won't even call.

I hate that I can't smell the outdoors of you,
I can't hear you talking in your sleep, or reading
poetry aloud,  or see you shining the flashlight through my house
and I hate not touching you,
your belly,
your face.  and I hate that you intellectualize my grief.  And I hate secrets
and I hate cell phones and hallways and 7-11, I hate the pictures in my mind,
black vans and pupusas and bossa nova and I hate
tenor voices.  I hate that I understand you and all this hate

run with me down field, he said
I'll love you like a doll.
and when it ends, I promise you
I won't even call.

and I hate most of all that you came into my life a hurricane
and ended up rearranging my landscape so that every day I loved living
and you watered my dessicated lawn and then you dissipated,
and only destruction was left behind, and memories of excitement,
violence, and joy, and the something,
unspeakable but something, powerful of us.

run with me down field, he said
I'll love you like a doll.
and when it ends, I promise you
I won't even call.

Longing for Home

For Ali

--------

I don't know what it's like
to be landless because of
war,
to crawl on the ground in starvation,
bypassing the fallen figs
and drawing circles in the dust,
hoping for beetles.

I don't know what it's like
to have my brother turn in to
a little bird, following the buzzards
in their flight to sustenance in the
dead eyes awaiting in other places.

I don't know the ache of walking
in blood mud or the exhaustion of crying
for the old and the never young. I only
know terrible paradise, and the Hell of
not belonging there.

my puerto rican rum, pour

you smooth textured dark.
you nut sweet candy, i
sit back and sip.


this private hold,
pink peppercorns,
you caramel and spice,
start me soft and build


straight up and
rolling in my mouth 
and finish on
this smoky note.

i
drink you.

stilletos and sneakers

hey you in the skin tight skirt

what shoes you wear on your flight

will your blouse open can i reach

hey you with the loose easy smile

what shoes you wear on your flight

will you dance me up and make me

play to the movement of our wings and

come,
play again without regard

you shadow

he combs me with a light touch

soft movement back and forth,

finally pulling with his fist

each hair alives the precise circuit
running electricity

to my
 

make me beautiful

she trims me of that excess
pulls tender, tug away
rapidly clearing pale from pale

each cuticle cut a small jolt through fingers
running hot shock

to my
 

make me beautiful 

she rubs me with salt and oil and i melt and i pay

think of touch, your thumb

jamming in the sole of my foot your mouth 

back where it belongs
 

make me beautiful

Self harm

tiny little pinches
tiny little slice
skinny lines of scarlet and
clinking of the ice.  gin and tonic lull me
sloely sing me off to sleep.
bedtime is so cold now

the darkness is so deep.
blades of razor kiss me
on tender open skin
let me know my heart still beats

without the perfume of you

observation

The grass is knee deep

and it is not grass but

some weed called cow something.  I think I’m supposed to

deal with it.  The ivy beds are overgrowing the stairs,

and the ivy beds are self overgrown with some other vine. 

There are three pots by the front door,

two cracked and containing only dirt,

the third holding beige flakes and a stick

that is a dead Japanese Maple.  Welcome.

From where my left cheek is pressed,

from against the warm wood of the deck,

I have a perfect view with my right eye

of where the private investigators must have sat

all those days and nights, peeking into the windows

with night vision goggles and super-cameras,

assiduously taking notes, or

whatever it is they use and do to spy on lovers. 

Decrepit derelict garden.  You’ve done my curb appeal in,

you know.  This is your fault.  Because now,

on my stomach looking down, I can’t up myself

from the dusty, headed and toed by piles of pinecones

and pine needles and probably spiders,  maybe ticks,

an older, uglier, horizontaler, knowinger, Juliette. 

Between blinks I see

the deer ate the Hostas and who cares.  Now the stalks are stubs. 

Fitting.  And apt too:  slices in the driveway host prickly things,

and I could dig them out, probably.  Or I could dump poison.  

It’s not two months and unwanted still invades.  I am lying here. 

Waiting.   For what. The bee on the back of my knee should just

stop walking around there and sting me.  This impatience with indecisiveness,
impatience with decisions.  Maybe if I’d just close my legs

the pain would change. 

He flew away.