the back of the door

I'm pleading the fifth while she's getting dressed
We're watching the width of the over oppressed
The dishes are breaking on the frozen concrete
But it's nothing quite like that sad, summer heat

You're a right wonder crossword
I'm as dumb as I seem
And I'm moving to Hartford
To live out the dream

It's like they all told me on the radio show
I won't ever like anywhere that I go
But you're running away from me just like before
And you're still hidden on the back of the door

I wish that I could
I wish that I'd try
I wish that you would
I'll try not to cry

The pots on the counter are all from the past
And they're marked up with stories just trying to last


I'll impress myself on the back of the door
And you'll feel as if you have seen me before. 

bon voyage

I could've killed you out of sympathy for every single pair of weak little eyes who are ever going to fall in love with your perfect monstrosity of a smile. 

Instantly instantaneous, like the drunkest of your winks to nobody in particular, I have this feeling growing down below that 

you might still be too broken for any of this to be real.

 Excuse me?? No, no, it's all optional; all of the scars and blood and your tissue on my tissues are unnecessarily beautiful.
I couldn't have stopped if I had wanted to, until you marketed the business man's secretary off to the highest bidder for the sake of the art, and had 

"sic ego nec sine te nec tecum vivere possum" 

written on her arms in an attempt to make her feel like any of your words had ever been true in the slightest.
I was thrashing at concerts, trying so hard to want to fuck anybody else.

Thus I cannot live without you, and I cannot live with you. 

So get your ass over here and let me die in your arms. 

I met a pretty girl who told me a couple pretty words about an ugly situation that you put me in. 

"You can't always take the shit. You have to give some too. That's the nature of equality."
You'll realize that you still care and then you'll figure something out like nonsense and nothing at all.
We should probably go…
And I guess because I've been fighting for your human rights and the kids in the sahara and because it's been deemed bad to smoke and good to work out and bad to eat candy and good to eat carrots and bad to love anyone and good to love anyone and bad to love yourself and bad to hate yourself and good to glue your eyes to the television like the colored lines will solve your depression; goddamn it baby, won't you just turn up the volume, i'm trying to drown out the sound of our daughter committing suicide upstairs.
Uterus or fallopian tubes or mice on the back of the highway underpass, it doesn't matter where you push me.

I'm going to fall.

Because I've been falling every day since you told me you'd rather kill me than love me back. 

I could've killed you out of sympathy,

but I'd rather just tuck you in and slip out while you sleep.

bbq

mark it up on your
bulletin board
terminal departure
credit card statement

that the girl is leaving town
for a little slice
of something else
without a net
below the bridge

she's going to bury
treasure
in your skin
and make you wonder
why she
wanders

on
and
on

mary j.

He was pushing her face
against the wall in a way that made her
insides burn like
dynamite and
die-no-might
bucking heads
like a locked up tattoo artist
who can't find his ink
and the mafia lord who
really needs a mother fucking hug.

 

They watched the colors change, really slowly, as their pills dissolved in the plastic Aquafina bottles on the bedside table.

The youngest of the rebellion couldn't stomach the pain.

They were running out of time.

 

But she was more marvelous than the northern lights when she finally decided to smile

and she was more mysterious than the deepest ocean when she let herself laugh

and she was more beautiful than the darkest night when the television screen flickered on her sleeping breath

and she was more everything than he could've ever dreamt of

in his cowboy sheets and his indian mind.

 

likened to the falling of an era and the end of some thing bigger than all of us, the poppers opened up our eyes and we could see that our pupils were filled with blood and history.

all I wanted was to sleep for another hour or to wake up really awake.

all I wanted was to love you for a second when you weren't thinking of someone else.

all I wanted was to drink up the pills that had dissolved in the water so my liver wouldn't hate me so much and so that my tongue could taste what I was doing to my insides.

but I couldn't stomach it either.

When he pressed himself onto my skin and made me hold the rope between my aching jaws

{"bite down bitch"}

the smell of his discontent mingled with my own

until I felt like I could understand him for a second

 

 

"Free from desire, you see the mystery.

Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations."

Tao Te Ching



one year

dipping my tongue into your teeth

the way your dipping your fingers into my flesh

pressing your bones

against all my 

atoms in january

until you're

apt to

burst

like

the 

[our]

first 

time all

over again. 

february hurt

and the holy grail

that you've been searching for

marching on like springtime until

april sank into everything that your mother

swore you'd never have to feel 

and it was all coming back like

may had never left at all.

marley was defending your mind in the antiquity of 

rebellion underneath bridges in june's stagnant 

intensity, without any chance of coming or

going any time before independence day 

sang on july's tambourines  and i made believe

that when i said it drunk

i didn't say it

at all

all over august 

i wanted you and watched you

like the maddening september sun

on the end of the louisiana leaves of burning grey

as that cold october night was turned away 

and november came crying in like 

insanity in the flesh and 

the mesh she kept 

over her stocking

for that  one

christmas

eve

ripped. 

december 

a little colder 

than before in your 

bad religious applications

that tied me down with your

leather and biblical words unearthing

all the sin you could've ever dreamed of 

on my skin

and

it 

feels

like the

[our]

first time

every 

night

you're

gone. 

an age in art

Though the committee had

closed the case on the 

666th plea of innocence, 

as we stood their with our hands shackled

cracking  

in the 

sugar                        glass                      jury               room                   where                    our                 linkages                make              up                   nothing          at          all

i started to sing.

And there's something about the way I'm pulling out the seeds from my pockets

and using your mind as a flowerbed

where I'm going to harvest the rising of a new millennium from your laughter;

I'll show the rest of the world how 

when the two of us converse

we are the epoch of a culture

like a newly                                                                 lost

found 

generation

throwing a particle of your wisdom 

where the wind hit the cliffs 

to combine it with a fraction of my 

voice

until the cubist illustrations are the most realistic things in the room

and our words

just a harmony of contradictions

make grown men cry

and the angels weep

My mechanized cataclysms are waiting under the arch in an attempt to argue their way into a philosophy-free future and no disjunction between the then and the now. 

it all rings incessantly true

that there has never been a single case wherein 

an age has failed to recognize potentiality

that it had rejected an age before. 

waking up

Understandably, she questioned all of them; the noises that erupted from the back of her throat when she cried, the monsters under the bed and the demons in the closet, the harsh realization that her nothingness could've suited her better or suited someone else worse. When she was caught in rainstorms in September, like the kind that sent the homeless people into store fronts with their left-over highs, that broke umbrellas like they didn't have any substance whatsoever, that made the mothers have to sit up late with the kids who cried at the crashing noises from the sky, ("It's God bowling," they would assure them, "don't you think it sounds like he got a strike?" The dogs darted around the living room, barking as the father puffed lazily on his cigar and wondered when he became a man of a house of mediocrity. He still remembered that night in Cancun.) she would sit outside and let her cigarette go limp instead of smoking it to the end. She would let her clothes get see-through and then she would stare at her reflection in the streaking windows of her building. She would wash her make-up off in the run-off and see if the acid rain could give her any sort of a trip. 
She had been caught in a storm last night, but the lightning was so hypnotic that she forgot to get all cold and wet, but stood on the stoop of the coffee shop that she was waiting in. She had been there for hours, her lipstick fading in potency as she cycled through cup after cup of bitter reality. She smoked all her tobacco, so she settled for a fat joint that she rolled in the open in the middle of the cafe. Nobody stopped her though, because her hair was plastered down, and the tear stains couldn't be distinguished from the destruction that the rain had done to her face. In fact, a man dropped his lighter on the table and touched her shoulder in the veiled attempted to promise that it might be alright someday. She didn't look up at him because his hand was too heavy and she knew she was really only waiting for one touch. 
"Make a wish and then I'll stop crying," she said to the barista who passed her as she was putting the joint between her lips. 
"I wouldn't know what to wish for at all." 
"I hope that you're happy," she wished for him. 
"I hope that my rent check doesn't bounce..." he said. He hadn't heard her.
The sunset was blackening the night. She felt like she might as well walk home. 

"Beautiful...." the voice was far away, filtering through a nights worth of cinematic distortions, "beautiful, it's okay." She fluttered her eyes open and stared into the semi-darkness. There was a glow around the room and the voice that seemed to come from the covers emerged like a miracle, wrapping itself all around her. Warm, and comfortable, she fit just right in the arms that encircled her torso to tuck her into the shadowy corners of their mutuality. "You were having a nightmare." She kissed the velvet skin. "I'm right here."

The alarm clock was unusually jarring this morning.
Her bed was still empty.
Her eyes were still wet.
She threw herself onto the carpet and settled for examining the underside of her cabinet.
Waking up is much, much harder alone.

pHd
PhD
Doctor of the acids and the basics that we're flying
tuh-ranasaurous trying
teaching us the movements
buying diamonds in college
waiting for the foliage
to change
to say
to name
that summer's gone
and autumn's coming around.

but i won't be satisfied until the gospel's singing spring. 

Italy or something

You're in the middle of the street, marking your territory on the cars that are running too quickly to ever catch full glimpse of, always going north when we're trying as hard as we can, just trying to go south. and i met her at a bar, or standing next to a bar--a railing really. everything was closing, because it was about the time when all the people who haven't had any sleep turn their lights off and try to die instead of live another night awake. and her hair was too blonde, but her roots were too long, and the nightlife was shining off her skin, which was sparkling the way authors try to describe with twenty six misspelled letters. and i was standing close enough to forget where my cell phone was. they were walking far enough away to tell only that the interactions as such could only cut the chord if a minute's worth of tequila had been added to the brownie mix and her nose ring hadn't been so silver and my tongue hadn't been so swollen after all.
they weren't stoned like i was stoned, and i knew you were watching me from a hundred miles away and she was dreaming me from a thousand miles away and i was dreaming of her watching me from next door with a cigarette precariously stacked on her film canisters, giving her the perfect light to shoot another thousand still frame shadows on the mixed up files of the cereal milk jugs and their significant others.
Closer and tinier and smaller and sweeter to the postal service trucks. Options and marxists and trash-bins full of the Wonder Years, making up a street called Menage a Trois just uptown from the avenue Fuck You Two? Fuck you too.
Polaroids are wallpapering my nosebleeds, but your bandages never soak it up
Smoke it up
Smoke up
Smoke
your lungs look too alive

new york minute

Blink 

and then I'm gone. 

a little bicycle

with all your obvious inconsistencies

tap dancing on my break up

sugar cubes, i'd write our romance novel

on the back of a book-store receipt

and tuck it in your closeted reflection. 

infecting both the multiplicity of meanderings and the

musicality of morning, the thoughts told tenuously tinted the glasses and made the whole goddamn world look rosy.

Romantic in the worst sense, I'm Paris and Rosaline

watching Romeo and Juliet 

the ballet

on the handlebars of your little bicycle

because the drugs are real

and your life is all

all

hallucinating me meandering past your window and holding all your secrets like the diary you couldn't ever stop writing thoughts about me in when you were supposed to be forgetting. 

Choking on narcotics 

and praising the ecosystem of the city, 

Verona couldn't even wish 

me farewell

because you're too busy killing yourself over a fucking

peach

fuck you

i'm holding you
in my mouth like a secret
while you're
imagining your
twiddling her little thumbs
humming
strumming
the words you can't remember
because you
haven't been together
in forever
fuck you

fuck you 

and 

your summer fruits

all in cahoots

with your 

body suits

and

piles of useless shit

that's it

because

i'm trying

dying 

to morph and mold

and hold

something you wouldn't give me

but wanted to 

prove

i couldn't see

while i'm trying

to

fuck you

fuck you

because my crystalline walls

all

Niagara 

fuh-fuh-fallin

while you're 

buh-buh-ballin

and making

me want 

you

even

more

than I wanted

when I just

wanted to

fuck you. 

In Defense of Being Alone

The rain was falling out out time with the beating of her idiosyncratic heart. The lights burned too bright indoors for her to see the blank walls with any sort of creative expression, so she dimmed them most of the days in order for her eyes to be able to squint and find in the emptiness a sort of peaceful art. She sat on this sunless morning, with her fingernail polish already chipped though she had painted them less than an hour before, contemplating the nature of the world, while dangling her head off the side of her bed to see if the rush of blood could speed up her thoughts. Like a wind-up toy in desperate need of a good twist, she let her circular marching slow and slow until she could stop and breathe, or stop and hold her breath long enough to see if the little girl with the hazel eyes on the other line had really hung up the phone. She had. She always did.

It seemed to her that young people, though she herself by all terms and by every adult in the entire world could too be counted amongst the youth, didn't appreciate the beauty of loneliness nearly enough. She felt that she alone could find amongst the waltzing of nothing but her thoughts a sense of peace that was eternally absent from the perpetual discussions present outside the walls of her head. It was many a night where she fell softly into her bed, holding nothing close other than her wit and her eclecticism, and being completely satisfied. Without the din of the ceaseless noise - she still could not fathom how they all did not run out of things to say - she could find commonalities with literature, she could schedule her own intergalactic pondering, and she could market her emotions as exactly what they were. Her options were endless when she had no one to answer to but herself.

This morning, while crafting her essay entitled "In Defense of Being Alone," with the rain falling out of time with her idiosyncratic heart, she shut her eyes and fell off into a slumber unlike that of the night before or the night after. She fell into a dream of a truly profound nature wherein, with her hands tied behind her back and the lights of a stage pointed directly at her skin, beading with sweat, she found herself wrapped up completely, thoroughly engrossed that is, in a conversation with a person who was not herself.

Upon waking, she blinked at the light that was now shifting through a nearly cloudless sky. The rain had gone and the grass outside her window was dewey and delicious. It could've thrown green lights against her walls had she looked close enough. Hearing nothing inside of her room, she realized that the silence in this moment was too absolute. Nothing was chattering, not even her thoughts. It perplexed her, as many things tended to do (facts of one's own mind are much more perplexing when your mind is your own best friend) and she stood. The blood rushed quickly from her head and the stars that popped up like nighttime diamonds in front of her eyes made it seem like she was far too empty to be standing. Quickly, and without any sort of warning, a thought sprang through her brain like a bullet through sugar-glass. "I'm lonely."

She thought for a moment, as she tied up her shoes mechanically, on the difference between being alone and being lonely.

Stepping outside, the sun warmed her skin like a hug. She hadn't been hugged in months. And down the block, a child laughed, pedaling along the sidewalk in unobtrusive, wholly youthful joy.  She smiled at him and he smiled back with every fiber of his being. His mother, disheveled and full of gaiety, trotted along after him.
"Good morning!" The mother laughed as she passed.
"Good morning..." she whispered in response. For a lithe heartbeat, she felt like an active player in the game of someone else's life.
Smiling without any notion as to why, she began to walk.

People were milling about in many a listless fashion; but their thoughts could still pass through them as she found her thoughts still passing through her. Not mutually exclusive, she realized, were interaction and self-advancement. In fact, she pondered, I feel rather quite advanced. 

Thinking, as she was, she failed to notice the car skidding quickly toward her as she stepped onto the asphalt, so taken by the child on his bicycle.

Had she survived, she might have made this anecdote the final point to her "Defense of Being Alone."