Too Drunk To Down Curb (for Zach)

I was turnt, barging into railings toe stubbed and thirsty. We saw this big bird stride and waddle, mallard red cloak, black tights goose down slick, golden buckle on her ostrich hips.

Behind her a brown fox. Pockmarked cheeks and fine black hair shimmering in grease, stumbling around the birds tail feathers in a drunken figure eight.

Crouched over hand cut spuds drizzled in chipotle ola listening to Zach discuss the merits of truffle sauce and white fish batter I said.

"Tell me your name"

"Lark" she replied

I half cocked my smile and pointed at the fox.

She slow spun her eyes and spat introductions. Knots twisted my diaphragm as he reached out grasping; I mirrored his moves. I wanted to pull him in,inhale his clothes and brush his chin with my finger tips.

We high fived instead.

The beautiful creatures forgot us and stalked on toward the doe legged monsters in referee stripes spilling out of our towns most arsenic heavy watering hole.

We sat up stream and watched the refuse pour, filled up on meat, too drunk to down curb.

Always a Beacon (for Amy)

Jogging in place

naked

trying to regain the feeling in my earlobes, my cock, my nipples.

A snowflake pushed on a stainless steel breeze flutters towards my iris.

I plant my feet to watch it flux in and out of focus

ignoring the push mower shutter

winding up in my diaphragm.

The snowflake was a tiring beauty

Terribly similar

Cold.

Always a beacon of cold.

My joints quake like mantle

and spread  like divergent plates,

chemical heat splitting their natural boundaries like magma whipped and frothing

The thin cloud from my breath appears again.

Always a beacon of life

I feel  an icy burn like my body forgot it's senses. I squint, expecting to taste the black sky.

Running  in place tiered, naked,  trying to regain the warmth in my arms, my lungs, my heart.

A flurry, pushed on a gust like an ice hook, rushes towards my panting tongue.

Always cold

Always a beacon of warmth.

Treadmill (for you)

I didn’t think of you when I wrote this, but it’s got your musk, your scent devoted to it. The kind that makes some flash points of synapse your image in my flesh, my mind, that thing we can’t grasp like shaking our own hands.  You’ve got enough colour to finger paint your breaths in counter shades and micron lengths but complement each gasp

And you,

are a cold mountain breeze, you’re the A.C. in early spring on my wet back after bad dreams. You shook me up, running tread-eyes and milling my side eyes for quips. Now my bloated bodies beat, hard, bruised, hemorrhaging. All puse and olfactory felonies . Small vains off-world-blue and arteries rising to the crust, quaking my basalt surface; building gullies where fat stretches

And me,

I want your warmth, I want the radiator burns on my cheeks from your canvas frame shoulders. And I’m not water bound but ask me, I will be your loon. And I ain’t tryna simp but speak and I’ll eat myself through till my dentin grinds on bone and air hums past my wounds. I want your mark. My trace on your cloak, or never do but write it in a poem, in a song, in a joke cause,

We are ideas, bit map stacks on harddrives, and you may never know that this

is from me. And if you never were again this message would outlive me, from my fingers tips to your eyes and somewhere in a server farm until the servers die.

Pacifica part 1 (for Ania Jany)

Vellus hairs lay flat, matted fields are sparse and bowed away.

Foundation caked like tears.

and almost a flood.

The moment that you almost cry, the anti-podal moon spins into the near horizon

and pulls in saline tides.

“You know, the waves are storms off shore, not gravity”’

But yeah, you did, and I recant this daydream-memory where every strand flutters

and I, hold your waist.

“It’s just a phantom, the sun set,

made by curvatures in the air stream.

And your futures not in the ending it’s in the rise; it’s to the east.” I think you said.

We random walked these sands and never met, just gazed,

out west

to sea,

but only caught shore and scuttled waves tugged at your feet

my soles.

I watched the rheum

build up in the corner and glitter back with each half saunter.

“We’re trapped” I said

“In cyclones, and sometimes sail tandem”

“and sometimes sail past, pushed by torrents out at churning water”

and sometimes bays are tidal pools from bowsprit cliffs

I stayed and watched the jet black ocean melt into the sea.

You saved a life

you were an anchor threading back

mending lost and washed up creatures, just like me.

LIfe till Then (for Andrea Washington)

Behind the house where I was raised there’s a concrete bunker sprinkled in an industrial mosaic of tacky 1970’s living room gravel furnishing.

I watched my brothers on the roof jumping spigots and water mains with invisible alien dressage horses until Erick turned on the forcefield causing Kandy to trip and fall. We were up in arms and armed ourselves with lava bombs and light sabers. Erick couldn’t breath, we ran and cried and tears led grown ups galloping down the hill to save him.

A quarter mile west of the street where I was raised there’s an open field (dry grass in may,mud in january) nudged between the ox-bow of an inner city creek and a grove of oily eucalyptus trees.

We did cartwheels through the grass clippings while the children prayed. At lunch our knees were dirty but theres were godly and I stared at the mud stains in there tan uniform khakis and wondered what god saw in the chloroplast smears that stained their legs that he didn’t see in mine.

Two towns east of the place where I was born there’s a corner store across the street from a liquor store though they both sell cigarettes and lotto tickets, and liquor.

My dream car fumed and paced black circles into the AME asphalt. Inward acceleration stressed the hinges (made in Japan, assembled in Fremont) and our dark locks flowed through roils of white smoke. Someone on that block, behind drawn curtains and prison bars, phoned for help but no one came.

Two days south of the state where I was made there’s five brick rooms with sunken pine floors and palmetto skeletons piled under the boards.

Quiches of Kush (for Maggie Grimason)

When I was small my mama took me up  the river bank where the old drunks hooted salty words at peanut farmers coming from the countryside. She gave me a fishing line and told me to wrap it round my shoulder up to my wrist, placed an old rust stained treble hook in my hand and said "tie that hook on boy and if you tug it just right, and you right with god, there's a quiche in there ".

Mama used to tell us about the quiche, about the oil dipped crust golden as an autumn cottonwood, about the egg whites so fluffy you just as much wanna lay on it as eat it. But it was always the spinach that got me “so green it’s black” she said.

Mama said spinach gives you strong teeth and long hair but it gives you back that myrtle too. She said we used to be green. That we was so rich with the life of the forest, the plains, the mountains, the sea that we was green like midnight; but they was color blind and to them the deep forest hue of our skin was black, so that’s what they called us. And she told us how they took all the black folks and squeezed us out to make money, and that's why money looks like ferns and evergreens.

When I was tall I’d battled some rainbow trout, wrestled some blue tailed lobster, and even tangoed with a portuguese man o’ war (and not the jellyfish). Now I’m small but that quiche never bubbled up outta that brine and never blessed me with that warm stringy cheese. And on those thick nights when I lie between the splinters, on these old docks, I can smell ‘em bakin’ in those deep coal ovens. And if god is good, when i lay down, there’s a quiche in it.

Future Earths ( for Lauren Kostelnick)

Oceans empty, in a billion years as the sun swells and boils every drop into the clouds the seas will drain in

My inner ear sways till I’m upside down, tumbling to the ceiling; late at night, when our thoughts congeal and trap us, twisted.

Summits wilt, sheared by air like warm breath flows over ice each grain will dance in splendid chaos, building islands from aborted earth

A million threads kink to their root and swirl from my scalp. They feed from memory, stack themselves in towers, and push out ,spinning.

Life stops, long from here but still too soon, the dying gasp of bloated stars expels our skin and rains in hell from everywhere above

They have edges, these people, they have nails and barbs and splinters and little jagged parts that hide in the face of smooth surface.  I’ve been cut so much, so bruised, beaten, humiliated.

Slow crush, glaciers roll out troughs and creatures swim through desert rocks, recede and leave a tangled swamp.

There is a time when these jagged edges dull. and we’ve all died to see it.