tuning

little bird sitting on the top of the tree,
the sky is blue.

smash my guitar. 
shattered wood. 

so softly it weeps.
i could tear the cords out, 

find the bones in my fingers
on six, suppliant wires.

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?