Waking up on the floor

When we get angry we say things
we don't mean,
or maybe just the things
we never meant to say.

Dark Corners

Changing from copper to green, smiling masks, teeth of a saint, tongue of a liar, let's try to categorize each face into the discrete confines of the alphabet. whatever kisses happen across your mouth should mark you blameless in bright red stamped letters, no? or should the snails emerge from their dark corners of the bar with their white flags and the binoculars saying they've seen the truth and it's sticky and fleeting, although it does come with a large box of buttered popcorn if you'll be so kind as to watch the film exclusively in rewind, i supposed this is what we've come to, the forgiveness we're told to succumb to, the wars between thumbs we hum to, the doors to friends we run through, i hear her and her lazy sighs one quarter of a million miles deep within her pores, these are the love molecules we read about that compose the earth's core, i need to find more universal weakness or else my skull may begin to crack from the cocaine they pour into the martini glasses, i don't think i've even been stitched up correctly after the operation, when i came out they knew it would be something of this nature, but not quite as malleable, so please be careful with me, the other hands that have smudged their prints across your skin bring you into a tornadoed landscape of course i exaggerate but the intensity of betrayal is exactly the boulder they tie around our neck as the generations of stone dangle you over a cliff of billowy yellow salted foam how many ways can one person say they're sorry before they sink to the bottom of the sea, regret is such an ugly thing, but i'd rather have that creature picking away at my flesh then all the silk of deceit adorning my naked shoulders on our way to the opera or some other elegant bullshit, besides i have more to give to those who crave the mirroring, all i can say is that it only takes one knock of the hand to destroy an antique vase, it takes one heart attack to kill a man, it takes a whole lifetime to understand self control, but if i cut mine short, maybe i won't have to explain myself to all those i've scratched out of my memory.

Going Somewhere

Rewinding the oysters to their full shells like so many of the other pearls stolen from their homes, bourgeoisie ladies screaming murder in their satin saturday dressing gowns "We've been looted! We've lost the capacity for revival!" Material and commerce the birds sit on the porches of esteemed vagabonded corporate swindlers and lend their comfort and grace bidding a good tithe as innocuous as the feathers they float upon and fragile homemade houses, nests and nuts, worms, and the other earthly beetles that crunch between the thumb and the index of a young strapping encyclopedia bound neatly makes its way back to the forest of an aging ladybug with her manfriend who died right above the "Horseshoe" definition on the bottom half of the page, the small brown smudge of insect entrails will always entail the second half of an intellectual pursuing the definitions of what makes them so comfortable or maybe popular culture does have something up its sleeveless shirts and all the hyper-caffeinated moral standards we set will bring us closer to a remedy that doesn't stop the pulse, but will make the pain irreducible or at least cosmetically appealing especially for the younger girls, you know how self conscious a female can get when they have their motherhood and their friends and their deepening kit of reflective make up, a clown like sensibility of color and presence a subdued sense of fashion or confidence for that matter and beauty that is bright and sold, complemented and corrected with more rouge on the cheeks and a little less character at least on the edges of the eyes, i can see the young ones now, complaining of the weight their lids have to bear the world is already more than 16 pounds per square inch and now this, its smudging deep into my personality and i can't wink anymore for the boys its for the sake of nature but we have to think about it so i guess that makes it less authentic but nobody seems to give a shit about that today or tomorrow or even yesterday when there was peace and the globe was still glassy fresh with the snow fabricated by commercial santa's right don't stop don't stop i need you here so that i can get better and fall asleep and pretend the dream i had was really just how i was born and this is something that they cook on television right? this is not my life a poor quality show i thought i should have deserved more color than this.

Okay?

I feel it more tightly
than before, the lack
of her deep inside me.
This moment, for some
reason, i miss her
so much i think
i might die.

Noticing

It's 2:23 a.m.
my pants are in
a pile around
ankles and toes,
the nails of them
unclipped.
outside my window
the light from the
stars and probably
the moon, too,
twist with the street-
lights, and make the sidewalk
sleepy, beautiful,
cold-looking.
I can imagine
perfectly
how the snow will
settle on this street,
how the flakes will
land and stay
just from this moment,
maybe in a month
or so, and I can't
wait.

Upper West Ruminations

Writing until I forget how cold my feet
are right now. My Manhattan room has been
'has been' for over half a century. The stone walls,
the crumbling furniture appendages swell with my
tossed laundry. Entering this room feels like
walking into a cavern, the staggering stalagmite
piles of books on every free flat surface.
This space gets smaller everyday,
my pages turn quicker, my words get smaller.

Our phone calls never seem to lighten the dark
maybe only tonight my humor has that old
tangy flavor she misses, or just remembers
missing.
Her heart palpitates regardless of what I say.
Mitral valve...something, she says
Prolapse--welcome to the club, now we
can really know each other. Not just the nine
years we've spent trying to scan each
other like cats, now we can X-ray your
whole body and match our defects.

We are soft machines, I tell her.
I imagine her heart failing. I would gladly
give her mine, but it beats with the same
irregular problem she's trying to rid,
ha, much like our relationship
it beats and beats, pumps and gurgles
and eventually misses a step and burps something
violent. We were meant to destroy
each other with this disease the hospital
calls love.
The most potent strain is almost rare
definitely contagious, definitely deadly.

What philosophy is for

What if we are all right?
or what if we have all just missed the whole fucking point?
the trick to life--the way we should have done things.
maybe the buddhists are right--at least what they say sounds nice
like i want those things to happen to me, even though i don't
know them, or necessarily believe them.
maybe the christians had it right from start--maybe we should stop
whining and follow the rules.
maybe it was the greeks or the egyptians, the ancients--
when i was in san diego on the pier facing the pacific i understood completely
why they used to worship the sun. even when i write this
in my manhattan bathroom, the sun peaks through the window
and goldenizes my paper and i thank it for accompanying me
on the most royal of daily occasions. i continue on my throne.
Maybe the guy sitting behind me at the yankees game had it right.
just drink 'til you pass out and laugh with your friends, scream with strangers.
that sounds easy, even enjoyable.
maybe i've been doing it right, though most times i doubt it.
but i guess it doesn't really matter at the end.
the only thing i hope for is that i get all my moments
on tape, a film of my life, nicely edited, when i sink
behind my eyes and into the earth.
maybe then everything will make much more sense, maybe i'll finally get
relief, maybe it'll just make me miss this place even more.
either way i think it's about realizing the beauty in being
wrong sometimes, too.