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.