worthwhile

im finding it very difficult

to be happy with the things in my life

i dont know

if this is just my malcontent

or the thing my mother calls

your chronic unhappiness

dysthymia

the half empty heart

my half full glass

of bourbon

kentucky style

like my father

i dont have much

to say about him

i dont have much to say

these days

i lay

i pray i wonder

where i am

if im going or staying

if im losing or winning

if i believe all the things i tell you

if i believe in anything

i tried to look for forest spirits

but the trees are all gone

concrete doesn’t listen

like the earth used to

the stars are a burning ballet

and i know that most of them

have stopped dancing

so long ago

that their bones are black holes

i worry

that my children

will never see the wolves

i worry

that i will never hear them sing

that they have fallen with the other legends

of nature

i plead with something they call god

i ask him to end us

we have taken our share and theirs

we have built and broken

we are the plague, the rats who carry it

i am the good man who watches and does nothing

frozen

but my heart melts

and aches while they scream against our tides

i think you all fell in love with me while i was sleeping

because i dont remember the moment

you decided i was something

worth saving.

Inside

I lather myself with the lavender soap
I imagine the essence of a sunflower
And I hope when he spreads my legs he smells the fields of Provence
Instead of cheap cherry lube
When I was a child I had simple rules
That only a child can follow
Love
Wonder
Gratitude
We are worn husks of organic produce
We lie to ourselves about the emptiness
We use and we hate
I hate and I am used
On starch sheets
In crochless panties
With a reaching hand of hope extending from my loins
Reverse birthing
Shedding the skin of this cumbersome twat
I will be as children are
I will love without question
And I will save myself

fairy tale

they say you forgot how to be soft, you know the shell, hard diamond exterior walls, coating the loveliness inside. is she so different with her manic love of you and the world. so she says good bye to love, to all the plans she made on beer binges, holding half smoked cigarettes that burn her index finger. maybe there was once a reason to get up in the morning, maybe there was a day she felt complete but now she bides her time with imaginary flecks of romance, tossed at her capsized life raft. she sucks the numbing air of the new york winter day and knows that she has crystallized in the falling snow, soon she will grow warm and tired ready to extinguish. weather worn memories line the insides of her moth eaten gloves and she is losing body heat, they eat away at her. someone said tragedy befalls the strong, weighs on the worthy shoulders of broad backed heroes, shes never been a hero. there is a preoccupation with the way she turns the blade, caresses it over the porcelain white, whispering the true use of such sharp realities. her sketch marked arms show that she has troubled the storm raging blue gray inside the beaten breast. she never needed anyone filling her head with fairy tales, she killed them all herself in a mass homicide of ‘too good to be true’, and she’s wearing their skins like fur coats. how did you grow so old my love? what is that face we kiss after midnight, it scowls and wails the banshee hymnal to call on other eviscerated specters. where did sunday go, with its blooming flowers and open arms? her mouth twists and she takes a large bite out of struggling child, “I want to kill it before it knows the truth”

Going Home

God you taste like Jim Beam, you smell like my father, we only have one thing in common, whiskey sours. Space time continuum, listening to The Replacements, getting high on a merry go round. I guess I’m trying to tell you I’ve had it and I’m taking the next plane out of town, just like I always do. Today is the day, when you all realize I’m a coward and a restless soul. I’m taking these sample bottles of life with me on my trip. I use people in small doses anyway, and if I don’t make it, you can bet I’ll be coming back around. Never did last long without that southern country sound. I’ve been waiting too long now, and all my friends are down and out. I’m calling your bluff we won’t make it another six months. So I’m cutting this rip cord, I’ll let you dangle and I’ll start again. In a place that’s not the same but still they remember my name and my search for the last great adventure. Do you remember me? I’ve been running this underground in dreams that won’t stop. I’ll make it somewhere, some way and I wont have to blame  you any more, when things don’t work out for me. I’m taking this serious, I’m looking for my next stop in a world that seems hell bent on breaking this girl down. Well fuck you, I’ll pull myself off this faded tile ground, I’ll break the mold and risk the most, I’ll lose myself just like I used to, in the streets of St. Marks.

Home Game

Game day one, you know I’ll be under the bleachers, smoking those filterless cigarettes and drinking cheap malt liquor. You told me not to stay there, to come out into the sun, to see the first touch down of the season, to live like Margot and the whale who swallowed her whole. I said it’s easier to live in the shadows than to risk the burn of brightness. I always touched you in the wrong place, I wanted something from you under the bleachers, that I couldn’t have otherwise. You flicked a Zippo and ignored my advances. I was just a girl and you were some kind of man, in those levis and your punk rock shirts. Knowing how to handle this wild-fire, that was what you said. Never feed it dry grass, leave it licking wet wood. Then you grabbed me, by the belt loops, you pushed me down and unbuttoned me. You lifted my shirt, that day, you peeled off your all American jeans, you slipped down my panties, and you kissed me really hard, like we were going to die during that game. You explored me with your tongue, inside my mouth, inside something deeper. I knew someone was watching. This was too good to stop. When you had me naked in the dirt, you took your hand between my legs and pushed hard against my virginity. Then you took yourself, I knew I was a woman at that moment, with your strong body aching and arching through my pelvis. You moaned and I moaned I followed suit, I found myself rooting for the home team as you pulled me on top of you and we slip and slide to ecstasy. I felt you fill me, but you didn’t stop, you were never going to stop, you said, you loved me too much, too deep and too dirty. I didn’t see it coming, but I’d always wanted it, torn t-shirt, broken zipper, lost panties, under the bleachers at our home game.

Telemarketer from Sector 4

I fucking hate it, telephone ringing. Fuck you telephone, fuck whoever is on the other line, fuck you all. Hi my name is Emily and I’m a telemarketer from hell. I work in hell, I live in hell, I call from hell, my number pops up on your cell as ‘demonic minion of Satan calling from sector 4, the brimstone pit’. And when you get a call from me you will fucking hate it. I know you will because that’s why I’m calling you, to make you hate your life, to cause you anguish and trouble sleeping. If I’m good at my job you will kill yourself before the week is out. If I’m having a shit week, you might just end up hurting yourself. If I’m having an on week, you will go on a mass killing spree and then kill yourself. The more damage I do, the more points I earn, and the more points means the sooner I can get out of this shit hole. I hate the phone, I hate making the calls, that’s why they put me here, extreme psychological torment via phone calls. Each time I have to pick up the receiver to dial out, because there are no headsets in hell, and all the phones have long twisted, snaking cords, full of knots and that tangled in everything. The pitch shrieks at me making my ears bleed, they’re always crusted over with brownish dried gunk from the constant calling. I have to call, if I ever want to get out of here I have to smile and dial my ass off and see how many souls I can drag down here for the master to snack on.

Settling In

i guess you know something about me
we both have skylines on our arms
and even though buildings in yours
cast a different shadow
sometimes i feel they look like mine
i still wake up hungover drunk
to look at myself naked in the mirror
to stare at the curves of my aging body
so wreckless and wrecked
but beautiful
i wonder if you see me beautiful too
if we arent just an inner space cavern
doomed to the dark days ahead
with our clock in out jobs
logging hours like a prison sentence
we wonder what we ever deserved in this world
crazy kids in a muscle car
never feeling real
stereo on with the bass up and we vibrate to a future
our crystal ball is telling us we dont belong in
the what ifs crashing my party
keeping me awake
i will dream about it
i still get to dream about you
even if we are nothing more than semi colons
on a page that is running ink
even if you are just a figment
of my fucking imagination
even if i settle like i settle and then break apart

Firecracker to the Dome

pulling my bones apart, fingers are supernatural beings

and the breaking is a back stab building bomb

beaching whales with napalm flames

loving in a heat wave

my occasional misadventure

with the wrong man

under graveyard dirt

rolling in the Puget sound

dont you smell like a teen romance

you can freelance me to the end

i wont keep these secrets plain

ill lace them in my mercury saliva

im alive it seems

today is such a themed trip on daisy dukes

in your back seat, dont we keep each other down

drown baby

in the coldest

salty lungs scream silver in the moonlight

crushing with a knife point and your crowbar

sliding up my leg

good thing this M80 love affair

only packs a pinching punch

knock my breath out

blow my hand off

leave me splintering,

not until i wake up

on blood soaked carpets

will i tell you

what it means

No. 7 in A Major

I can listen to it over and over again, and it builds the same, just like impending death. I imagine they’d play it as they were walking me to the guillotine, Delacroix can record me in paint just like the rest of the revolutionary executions. I think they sing without voices and extend black wings at my throat, those violins. I hum and vibrate through my lungs and the heart of me knows torment and terror in the height of descending dark ecstasy. An orgasm of something wholly incomprehensible, shaking the marrow from bones, scouring through my tumultuous soul. Raking clawed fingers over exposed pink flesh, private parts of sexual realization. This is only a symphony, but it has culminated in the fabric of my stomach, causing a pit to develop and grow, like an itching thought you cannot scratch through thick wool mind tricks. I suck like a tick on its fat body and the fullness of me is all boiling blood of another. This ascension into something ethereal is not so surprising as it is hard to relay. How could they know the completion of identity, foreboding, and delight, through one song. One opus. As I know it.

Heroes

he’s bent over the shards, the widow broken, the pane bloody. he’s shaking, isn’t he shaking though? so hard the rest of the glass begins to fall around him a slow motion rainfall of crystal reality. he leans back against the wall, his hyperventilation running smoothly with the shivering tears. his eyes are a sadness unknown, undissolved, refined and vulnerable. the brown stained yellow note, it’s almost shredded in his fixed grasp, the nails biting his palm, the shattered clarity cutting him on impact. the widow, the door, the house, the last day he ever knew what it was like to be in love with this person. he thought he was the hero, he thought he rescued the girl. he didn’t think this was something that happened to heroes, it never happened to them this way: folded note, table top, drop the flowers, punch a hole in sanity, hit your knees, covered in dripping open wounds, winding red down your arms. no that wasn’t him that wasn’t him who needed to be saved there on the new tile, he had never needed a burning savior to wrap him closely in their embrace. he was  . . . he was . . . mortal. she was a little bitch, he picked her up, her fragility exciting, he held her, he rocked her. in the storms he weathered her fear and rage. in the nightmares he pulled her away from the dark place. now it was he in the eye, no one told him there was a place where heroes died, but he should have known it was love, that it was her love, that took the final stab in black ashes. threw him off the coast of Crimea. she had a Ukrainian heart, icy and flirtatious, delicate, and so much like the winters of a soul, totalitarian and demanding, encompassing. his hands rattled, the bones trying to free themselves, her Ottoman Empire owned his being, his righteousness and self-respect. it was a battle he had not known he was fighting. the killing blow, it was in red ink, on a cringing sheet of mercilessness. he knew this feeling, he’d been told about it. he’d been told about the moment you lose your humanity, when you gave yourself away to a reckless divinity, blasphemer, worshipping peach nipples and white blonde hair. loving something more than altruistic Gods, sacrilege. the statue of her on the pedestal of his interior self, toppling his belief in goodness, throttling all faith, leaving a bitter cave of a once brave and magnanimous man, ruined in her wake.