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.