choo.

the train is cold today. and where are you? i'm sitting in a corner seat, pudgy-nosed window-smudging to get a view of the advertisement-smattered dark. people hurry in and out of doors, looking down, concrete floors, missteps, nothing to see here, move along. i have a backpack. i pretend its your baby and hold it with respect and indifference. the end of the line isn't really the end, and it'll take more than a loudspeaker to make me move, all olive akimbo arms and nothing better to do.

so i look around.

too many people, blank faces on interchangeable stick figures, or solid american frames with pert piggy faces. i like to stare and be stared at. do they know more about me than i do? maybe. i look around. i wonder who loves. i wonder who has a great love, i wonder who had one, i wonder who never has. what is at home? fold-out trays and crinkled napkins and rabbit-eared football, cacophonous? or pretty thing, ironing, unhappy? no, i shouldn't doubt them all. maybe one, maybe two go home to eternity and wrap themselves up in it and sleep through the night zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzs so soft and fingers softer, lillies resting and tracing upper lips, languid blues. i hope so. i know what i've got ain't common, but thank god its mine. i'll keep it.

i squint. its a sunday on the subway, but i'll sit eyeless in neutrality and pass no judgement. being kind is the only thing that matters in the end anyway. i read a book.

talk how i think.

for my new friend, who i think would get along with leonard cohen and certainly gets along with me.

make the world happy inside your head
i promise outside, you've got friends
we have to crack to begin again
taste the light the leaks inside our brains
will you walk with me
in the purity of the breaking?

the bridges buckle under a moon so full
and we can almost taste the bay
it's just a chilled yesterday soup
to drink it might just make us brave
i'll hold your hand
if you just stay

and i'll mold your purpose out of clay.

pas bien.

i am scared when i lay next to you

that when my lids loosen, and i struggle to wakefullness with eyes untrapped

i will see you see me

for me

and you will realize

that fortune cookie was wrong---

i'm not someone special

and

i didn't deserve flowers.

poetry room is upstairs.

for naomi's boy, who loved peter.

bathtubs filled with

bubbles & beat

&indian snippets

are important

as anything else:

the faucet drips jazz

and i am sudsy prose,

letting my mutilated

childtoes play with

white soap beards

forming foaming at the tiled ridges,

liquid santa's

lapping, hidden chins.

candles are lit, yes

romantic shadows smoking on

the water

confettied with

candied ashes of the poems i HATE

or the letters i LOVE

too much to

be

REAL, like this moment is

REAL,

and the smell of wax

on

flesh--filters into my

neurons, digging

dig it?

because let's face it:

the burning

wakes me.

and all the fairy boy-a-sleeping diary entries

make my skin

itch

for

passion that

is that perfectly

animal-crazy.

thank you, allen,

namaste.

black as birds.

so.

blackbirds

sit up on blacker wires binding up communication,

scumbrilliantly twittering english mangled by rapidity

we cannot comprehend,

swooping

dropping roofies in our trailer-trash red cups

i wake up

under hands so flutter-white and lonely

it takes a soft light

a subtle morningcreepiness to cast a shadow and to know

they aren't mine,

books crashed on the floor around me

disrespect lining their spines

and memories in their skins

we're rain damaged

and the birds are nestled dry in their skies and they

gossip and laugh like they're at the market and we're

the village whores

the wall-crashing and mother-catching made me who i was

but its no longer who i am

so shut up, so shut up!

alexander's body is dead across the sea-rocks, salted

and i will attend his funeral, but i will not send flowers

we woke up

elevator-bruised

and brushed with sap

and i tasted more like you and i smelled more like you

than i've ever tasted or smelled like me

and god, i loved you so much

i wished that i could be you.

and the birds sat outside cackling trash-hungry

disagreeing and picking through plastic

and trying to outsound us

but you were dead-set on discovering the new world of my shoulder-blades

so i lay like the indian ocean

and stopped caring about blackbirds///////////////

shut

there's illness rioting within me.
disease spreads its fingers, a violent choke
are my vital signs so vital?

i could've been fooled
and
i was.

the waves of nausea clash with the narcissism
and the drugs don't make it better
the drugs are the sickness, the sickness is the drug

'baby, you're being morbid'
naw, i'm being human
i'm shivering with self-restraint, shivering with the subtle way
you hold your hands
over me
me, an untouchable

WHY THE FUCK WON'T YOU JUST TOUCH ME (?!?!?!)

the deathbed floating hands
they're just favors
they're tie-overs
its a waiting game in the waiting room
and i'm sorry
i'm sorry i'm wasting your time.

i look out the window. i don't see any leaves, come to think of it, i don't remember ever having actually looked for leaves before, but now i am, and there aren't any, and is it winter, is that why? i don't think so. prayer beads block my view. i don't remember leaves, but i especially don't remember praying, what if i had, would there still be a mess on the floor and in my veins and outside my ice-cubed window? shut the book, i'm cold. i'll be even colder to you.

you're just waiting.
tapping.
smoking.
actually, i wish you'd smoke. you just sit there, jittering.
tapping.
waiting.

never crying.
never once crying.

i'm not one of those people your mother would ever want you to cry over
even with my eyes glued shut and no one to love.

shut the book.

dry

mosquito bites line my legs, forming irritating constellations of a summer i do not want. i could wash them off with molasses, catch more flys, my body is a bug zapper? i miss a lot of things. i miss cold war american values, i miss my patriotism, i miss the moments when words made a difference, when sentences pushed through bongos, punct;uation be? fu:c!k(ed). this mango weather reminds me of the last time i treated a boy like a diary, the guts i spilled across his skin and the pens i scratched him with and how the sprinklers and the new semester rinsed it all off him and out of me and i was in a new coma for months that were shaped like millenia, but i crunched through them like carrot sticks and now i barely remember all that malnourishment.

i read once in the newspaper making love is like riding a bike: you never forget
except i never learned?

i used to be a lot of everything. now i sit crossing my bones and shut my nose and pretend i am drowning in an eastern sea, surrounded by flowers, a sacrifice. i pretend i'm religious. i pretend that 2 in the afternoon signifies a march of heroism and not a seat on a pile of underappreciated leather and wire, fingers for clickers and re-runs until the microwave dings.

i pretend i face the same issues as ginsberg and that i'm better at writing about them.

there's a hushing outside and an animal dying and i? i'm concerned with the lack primetime sexual indiscretions. i call the cable company, crawl outside, taste the grass, dizzy, memorializing the time when you were my country and my amendment rights and my buddha and my promise ring and my planet and my god, and the pebbles you kicked in my face and the buzzzzz you didn't answer. cable box puts me on hold. you never answered your god-forsaken phone.

its funny, how i used to like the wasteland. i'm going to plant it full of pansies.