september ("fisherman")

teeth grit,

bowspray crackling

against leatherbound cheek. 

flint-hued eyes

set like stones

in the sockets of his skull,

casting out small, flat chips

of the same color

over the endless ocean,

vainly,

after the horizon's fleeing back

his red red heart

curled like a fist

around ropes of blood

the hat he gave his son

that his son left in the garage

now worn & frayed,

discolored like an old tooth,

is lifted, jammed back down

& shifts, back & forth -

brim pointing first forward

then back,

like a compass exposed

to a man-sized magnet

above, the old sky

still appearing new,

and the veiled threat of fall

nestled sweetly

between the words

of the wind

the roar of the ocean in the sky echoed in our room

the shush of sheets
over bare, scissoring legs

late night undulation
thrust, parry,
push, pull

the wind from the window
is labor-shallow,
the world outside
is a woman in birth
snarling

i am devouring your pain
through savage, blunted teeth
i am shoving fistfuls of you
into a small wet cave
whose walls are painted
with figures from a dead time,
with the paint from the heads
of dead marigolds,

shatter, spin,
suddenly:
rounded eyes,
as big as two moons
in a blemished sky

i cram your heartbeat
into my ears,
all eleven measures of it

i like you terrified.
i like me poised,
catlike,
on a branch,
entranced by the black glint
of your fledgling bird's eye
somewhere down
on the winter ground

the ceiling thrums
like a skin pulled
taut over a drumhead,
the bed hums
like a skin pulled
tight over the bones
of a skull

outside, a seagull falls
for no reason
from the endlessness
of the sky

in the morning we will find it
crested, regal,
on its back, with its eyes squinched
shut and beak
curving heavenward

you unknit, suddenly,
too suddenly,
in the cold breath of the dawn,

and i spend the rest of my life
chasing down
the fleeting pieces of you
tossed about by the teasing wind

saint oscar (pt. 1)

my tongue is stuck to the roof of my mouth and i can feel the heartbeat of the knife in my pocket.  the whiskey thunders through my veins like a disease and threatens my brain.  the architecture of my brain has become Brutalist.  lately i have been bleeding from strange places and all i listen to is a female singer-songwriter who is prone to write songs about winter.

a week ago i told Lucas that i loved him and he stared at me as though i had become glass and shattered.  i have never seen someone so horrified and it's not that i'm so ugly.  i am ugly like an overripe fruit.  on the same day, the season turned into summer like a depressed, irritable person shifting their weight to one side.  i abruptly vomited and he held me up while gobbets of myself drooled from either side of my mouth.  his look of horror had melted down slightly, like plastic, or wax, subjected to an intense heat.

'are you OK?'  he asked, solicitously.  i watched a long strand of my saliva fall to the back of his hand, like a raindrop in slow motion.

my voice had fallen away from me, had slunk out of my throat like a lover caught cheating.  i shook my head from side to side and vomited again.

'should I take you to the hospital?'

his eyes were so concerned.  there is a sheen of sympathy on his face, like sweat after a long run.  his voice is tired and weary.  he's had enough of me, i can tell.  i've had enough of me. 

i smelled of day-old garbage.  banana peels, orange rinds.  coffee grounds and sour milk.  i started to cry and mucus clogged the back of my throat.  one of my shoelaces came undone and lay on the sidewalk like a dead worm.

the only thing that will make me feel better is to kill him.  i considered a bullet.  i considered poison, the weird white lace of dusty arsenic.  i considered a bomb.  in the end, only a knife would do.  i've kept it in my pocket, folded like the legs of a cricket, for so long.  it's never had a use.  it gets warm in my hands when i grip it.

'HAVE YOU CONSIDERED JESUS?' a poster on the telephone pole is yelling at me. 

'no,' i tell it simply, lying, as i pass by.  one hand is in my pocket.  the other one swings haplessly by my side.  my friend the female singer-songwriter is singing in my ear a song about skinny trees bent over by the weight of the gray sky.  her voice is like a skein of yarn, unspooling, looping itself in thick coils on the floor of my skull.

i quit smoking in November but i want a cigarette right now more than anything.

Lucas lives in a five-story building on the other side of town.  i can see the brick of it in my head.  there is an obnoxious seagull that is following me.  i know it is the same one because it has a cock-sure look to its beady eye.  this started a week ago.  i ran at it to scare it off, yelling like a madman.  it just stared at me, and then took off, flying up into the sky where i couldn't reach it.  i'd like to rip its feathers out, one by one, and then burn them, one by one, with a lighter.  i think it knows what my plan is.  it's eyeing my pocket.  i've named it Lucas.

the other side of town is over a railroad track which acts like a tourniquet, cutting off the bloodflow.  all of the houses are drained white, blanched.  there is no color on this side of town, except for the trees in fall.  Lucas lives in number three-A.  his apartment building is full of beautiful people who never need to wash their hair to look good.  the kind of people you stare at on the street.  clothes were made for them.  i am in love with a number of them, but none so strongly as Lucas.  he wears an impossibly russet-colored shirt almost constantly, with the sleeves rolled up to his forearms.  he always seems to have a hooded sweatshirt on, even in summer.  when he wears a white t-shirt, his skin turns ruddy.  his eyes are brown and his hair is brown and straight and touched with weird brushstrokes of tarnished gold.  he is the kind of guy who wears one pair of sneakers and always has.  they are grass-stained and battered and their color is blue, as though they are out of breath and slightly cyanotic.  he can't seem to keep the laces tied. 

the sun sneaks out of a cloud and lances me right in the eye.  i blanch away from it and Lucas-the-gull caws loudly like he's laughing.  i wish i had a slingshot and a small explosive.  'fucking bird,' i mutter, and spit to one side.  my stomach is lurching around like a drunken giant inside of me.  i have to inhale, a shuddery breath that feels serrated, like a knife sawing deeply into a plank of wood.

i am pink on the inside, like a badly-cooked piece of meat.  i don't ever want to see the inside of myself on the outside ever again.  my tongue has unloosened from the roof of my mouth like the cuff on a shirt and barely feels attached to the floor of my mouth either.  if i open my jaw it will slide right out of me and fall to the ground, wriggling around desperately, like a snail without its shell.

my heart is aching.  actually aching.  it seems to beat like a tired drummer, desultorily hitting the snare, arrhythmically and out of time.

if i don't stop i will follow through.  i can feel my knife warming up through my jeans.  Lucas' building appears slowly, like a scene from a movie, and i push open the front door.  it is not locked.  headlines are cartwheeling through my head.  TWENTY-YEAR OLD BARISTA SLAIN IN APARTMENT.  LUNATIC IMPRISONED.  SENTENCED TO DEATH.  JURY.  JUDGE.  EXECUTED.  "HE WAS SO QUIET."

i turn around in the dark lobby and see Lucas-the-gull performing a small promenade outside, bobbing his head up and down, knowingly.  he looses a garbled cackle.

you're just death sans hood, baby

i watch you take your eyes
out of your skull
and place them on the table
reverently,
then step back and sigh,
crossing your arms
over your chest

cigarette smoke unravels
from your mouth
in long, knotty ganglia,
as though you are
exhaling your spine

i watch you
quietly and decisively
plunge your hand
into your chest
and pull your calcified heart out
and set it on the table

when it hits the wood,
it makes a noise
like a glass of whiskey
re-encountering the bar
from the hand of a drunk
and glitters
nastily
in the same way

your hair
turns suddenly white
with the effort of growing,
and you tell me
between mouthfuls
of your own fingers
how you've always
bitten your nails
to "the quick"

your wan smile threatens
to slide right off of your skull
and then makes good on its threat

you pull off your skin
like a set of rainsoaked clothes
and your skeleton shivers
like a windchime in a
dispirited breeze

i touch each one
of your vertebrae,
rap each one lightly
with a knuckle,
as though quietly
asking for permission to enter
as though quietly
begging you to stay

the electric universe (scraps)

the new world!
a blinking whirl,
a dizzy shimmer,
this lurching carnival &
sudden, dreamlike drift -
           have I been here before?
 (electricity's invisible kiss, a clock's devious hiss)

& the atmosphere is crackling
with unsung words
pickpocketed from the mouths
of drunken poets

(this winterbound city
purses her lips, hesitates,
crumbles, burns, shivers,
reassembles.)

the old street still lives
beneath the new street,
the old hotel rooms hum
inside new apartments,
like a clock within a clock,
one pair of hands
in a desperate chase
after another,
sweeping indulgently past hour
after hour,
gathering up seconds like gemstones
as the face yellows
and clockguts rust

(& the rain falls outside
desultory, indifferent,
gathers strangth,
exhausts itself,
spatters, stops)

we are creating a new history
all salvage & twisted rope &
rusted links of chain,
feebly attempting any connection
between empyreal and concrete,
lashing down whatever
embattled spirits we can
(some nights i roll over
and there is a phantom
between us, eyes shut
and hands fists (as though in prayer)
beneath the eave of her chin)

and time clothes itself in
the discarded garb of our old enemy -
Death -
as we inch nearer
to the edge of
an unnamed cliff
only ever trangressed in dream -

(even it, doubling in the
drunken field of our vision,
reveals itself as hologram)

and time,
that awful invisible tyrant
who lives in the wings
hushing every actor
who has yet to
make their eager entrance

fishing

to Mike Foley

I am trying to slip sidewise
into this unwritten poem,
I am a sliver of a person
lodged in the palm of the bar,
surrounded by fidgeting fingers,
loquacious drunks, befuddled by
the intensity of the guy adjacent -
a man who provokes conversation
so that he can use the word "I"
as much as possible,
as though that ninth letter
at some indiscernible point in the past
became totemic,
and I keep slipping obliquely,
jarred by this man's insistent,
repeating narrative of
a missing tooth -
and they say when (within a dream)
a tooth goes missing
it means you're afraid of abandonment,
as though a part of you
has mysteriously & without reason,
politely & bloodlessly,
seceded overnight -
just like this damned poem,
a silvery flash under dark waters
(and me without a creel or even
a serviceable line, pun intended)
all I have is this wriggling worm,
too fleshy and insistent,
desperate not to be used,
so alien against
the iridescence of my palm -