what's wrong is i drink too much coffee and smoke too many cigarettes

some days i wake,
& my heart is a pound, pound, pound

so i say,

it was the coffee last night and just general unwellness of being and

my wet charcoal breath says,
you 

are still drunk, so i say
poetry, didja save me?

Sometimes we hate ourselves. It starts when we're young,

You're a loser, a gawky awkward kid, so the first clear thoughts you get in your head, most of the mornings in your young, insignificant life,  is that you hate yourself.

Wherever you go, there's the same ugly, plain, caveman, simian sorta face.  You stare back at you, from the train windows underground, set against black tunnels.  You're in every shop window you pass, when the sun burns down on your city-sheltered skin.

So you get older, and promise to be better.  You get fitter, buffer, toner.  You get prettied up and shapely if you're a girl.  You mar your body or paint it appropriately.  You don't let a goddamn hand touch your face, not even tender fingers on cheeks, if you were all craters and scars.  You cultivate a style; become an epitome of urban, center-of-the-universe perfection.

You are individual. You possess opinions.  You follow local & global politics.  You have an urge to change the world, but also to find personal happiness.  You make art, or songs, or something that strangers like, get pats on the back and celebratory drinks from your peers.

Without your mother making you, you wash and rinse your hair as frequently as you can without destroying it, and soak it with some sludge, scent evocative of something summer, and pure and clean, or of a sleepy, mildly exotic, distant land.
You kneel in the shower spray until the clock in your head tells you that it's already been five more minutes than the time you've allotted yourself to wallow in your exfoliated, dead skin cells and the draining fluid of the cold womb or grave of the bathtub.

Or maybe you're happy.

Maybe you play love songs, and the way the sun makes everything gleam, and gives a translucent clarity to, makes you secretly want to go weak, fall & lay down, or curl up with loveliness on the warm grass.

Maybe you harbor something that glows, but for now, you're under dark clouds, idling, until that August storm hits. And when it does, the sunset will burn itself into you.

Ink costs more than the cool breeze of a blue day.  

Autumn comes quickly, even in the midsummer.  Maybe you know what I mean; pool of morning anxiety in my belly, or maybe it's all the whiskey, never properly appreciated in the dark, on ice cubes.

finding the lost language

she arrives when i am drifting on the bus.

not anymore, i tell her. and the others, so they wait.

so many discarded selves

and their suckling mouths.

so good on the skin.

they lilt.

why, bodied & suffer
when you are steel and suns
and something else
underneath our wet tongues?

it's only organs.
fleshwebbing & pulse. exoskeleton.
must you craft a 'lume,
to thread others into your hollow?
why boats or roads in the night?

motherless, schizophrenic god;

fragmented stars,

& the spaces in between.

lost children in a dream,
i reply.  alone,
but for the poetry 

of another hand.

the mornings feel like gold.  in love, the breeze by the hudson, the silver pen in my bag, fountain and pointed like a sword.  musicians.  piers and piers. some other land.

something blue

Sometimes, when you fall in love,
you wake up on your unmade bed
& bare mattress,
curled up
& cold
on soft bags of clean laundry.
The pale morning light lingers.

The only scent in the room, is yours
& the beach,
which is where you'll drift to again.
The ocean & the sky are the same today.
Mermaid souls,
ebbing foam,
are clouds today:
sweet, white,
& quick to dissipate.

There's some joy to wading & swimming alone.
Summer is lovely.

There was something you forgot, as a child, about solitude.

The sky,
sleepy, and full,
of the occasional, distant, passing planes,
will always be your lover.
Sheets of paper,
bright and rectangular,
will always be your lover.

The bed,
which you have pushed against your window,
and have piled high
with pillows, will always be
the constant sandbox
for your girl body.

As a child, you did not think much, but you listened,
to the song
of the wind & cerulean,
and the rattling car drifting down your street,
past your house.

Your heart
knew the happiness of counting things that flew.
Your body
fit the square frame of your windows.
Little, round, black chimneys
of the houses across the street, were wonderful
on your tippy toes.

And now, you live elsewhere. 

playing on the guitar made me cry today;
aw, who's got feelings? who's got feelings?

there was a girl i used to love. in the nights, while everyone was asleep, she would crawl into the bathtub, and kneel in the hot spray.
when the water got cold, and the boilers in the basement wheezed, she would dry off, and get dressed.
everything was colder after the heat. she would leave, and sit by the river. it was best in winter, when it was below freezing and nobody came out.

sometimes the sunshine is too much,
the way i need to lock myself in my room, and bring my body low, to the floors,
the way it puts its roaming mouth on my throat, my clavicles, my bared shoulders in the loose, hanging dress, and there is no fight.
they say you can't touch the light, but maybe you can't feel it unless you've got cold fingers, cold skin, or unless you want to be feeling it.

light is apart from all things adjacent.

-

i've taken to arguing with the dream people.

dream-lover in my bed confesses love to me in the dark, and i tell him that i am asleep and he doesn't know he's not real, only another figment of my mind, so i am trying to wake up. and then i wake- know it's another dream,
tell more dream figures that they are things of my mind, and they ask, how does a butterfly know he is not dreaming of reality? and i tell them that as real and convincing it all feels, i know, unless i'm bound in a cell, completely out of my mind.

and then i wake.

sunday, i was murdered, three dreams in a row. they are dream strangers, stabbing me to death. one was a blonde beauty. another, a madman. another, i can't remember. i argue with them all, tell them nonplussed, that it is a dream, and that they are figments, as scary as they might be if they were real. they don't believe me, and separately kill me. i wake up unphased- i've been killed before.
i suppose i just didn't like the dreams, otherwise, perhaps i'd humor them, and play along. there is a reality.

what does it mean when you fight the strangers in your dreams, tell them the truth about their reality, and they don't believe you? does it mean they want to be real, or is it because they don't believe me, or is it because i want them to not believe me? i suppose it's good that my dreams never stare back at me, and look at me, deep into who i am. they are never sentient of me, like strangers.

-

sometimes in writing too long, i feel like i'm losing myself.
is that why you shouldn't steal characters from your dreams?
what if you fall in love with them?

the snow falls.

the way the nights go, i think, perhaps it is time for running, shoes and concrete. something about the way the leaves are falling, in my mind, along the hudson. june, june, there is no rain.

shoes and concrete, shoes and concrete. something cut out of me. maybe somebody knows what i mean.

we don't walk this way anymore, they tell me.

the sweetness of night air kills. slow sweet breath. sweet breeze kisses on my cheeks, the way i can't let anything else. sometimes we know the water comes from the heart.

come running with me, i want to say. i can't. my feet are tired. i am tired. dream walking. how many hours until morning?
-not enough. and too many.

somebody must know what i mean, but berryman is dead.

they say, listen to your mother, but i know mothers are often wrong.
what they should say: never give away the heart your mother gives you. you will never get it back, and it will kill you.


-


the time traveler has no idea of anything, except of her own happiness. all photographic ink. blues, and skies, and so much flowing dark hair. but she is not a woman.

may is dying but somewhere, the trudging in february snow. what are you carrying? why are you still cradling the cracked airlessness in your hands?

go to sleep.
i can't.

i can't. shams and shambles. i don't need a new house.
i would never tell my mother. i would never tell anyone. if only it would stop seeping.

when the fence didn't snag my dress

just jumped,
and i'm leanin'
against the fence, breathless
on the other side.

o, how my heart
is a thud thud thud
with the rush
of flight & the deathfear of the leap

but the firm,
dark, ground catches me,
my sidewalking boots
impressing two grateful kisses.

the dusky morning breeze flickers,
cool fire through my chopped hair,
& i throw one last glance

over the young gleaming grass.
the sun's coming up, like sweetness,
like apples, over my summer hills and haunts,
and i turn,
and i run.
the day will never catch me.

Shipwreck

A radiant woodbox of lies:

God knocked twice last night,

wove a gentle net

of gilt thread, to cradle the young

Fool. I am stripping the taste

of stale spirits from my numbing tongue:

Nights of singing

of the blood clock burned from the bone cage.

Charring vapors & smoke dreams,

Downed soot on a decayed stage.

I am aging like a dirtied cloud,

Rain, rain,

Heavy.

Rain on my streaked window pane,

but I am out

-side and empty.

Bright baubles and sylphs,

don't need a'body;

drift in foam and breeze, 

nothing but a splinted thing in light.

It hurts so good;

I could carve it out,

slide a clean serrated blade across its skin

as it grinds against the mottled, wooden board,

steady cut by cut,

its juices, soaking

into the hard perspiring bed.

It grows back

as I cut.

Uglier, and fresher.

I want to flay it,

strip the polyps,

cancer thing. It's all wrong.

how beautiful you are when you're all sorts of fucked up inside,
like the way that damned croissant won't sit right,
but it looked so damn good, all soft and buttery
until it went down, greasy, like a dirty marble stuck in your windpipe,
or
a chunk of old garbaged stormdrain ice, rammed in just right of the heart,
and i go god, it's like a storm, a filthy ocean on my tits and in my lungs
and i never learned how to swim, so i'm puking the bittersweet sea and sol
and sand and i'm going oh

-

but i was a good girl, and god, i tried so hard, i'm always trying so hard,
so damn willful, maybe that's why you slap us, because what
is a woman but a girl with another wet face, and what are tears but salt
when you are only dirt and when men cry all the time when some boot
trods over their dust bodies or when even on days i don't believe in you,
you're still leaving me to die
same girl, face in the splintering floor with the elbows dug into my back
that you forged steel so i could crawl,
and carry my cuts and skin scrapes like a cabochon of your crafting

-

and god, i am lonely, so you made a boy with as many ribs as mine,
and gave him frost's apple trees and a tongue for pears,
and gave me a song of frost & hollow wind in the nights,
and change for a few cups of dark, milkless coffee,
and i threw up