no one’s forcing you——hey, just sing

run,
all of us.
everyone outside.
i stand in front of the mirror
i look.
i look.
i look again,some more
hello?
“kids are so adaptable” he says
she makes a joke about lap tops, all they need, she says, or something . i think of the garbage bags, all of the things in the garbage bags, i think of basements, of the days alone the nights alone . i think of the people, all of the brains inside their heads, all of the things in their houses, their paintings and what’s inside of their refrigerators, the smells on their pillows and sheets. i think of three hundred and nine yellow birds, nowhere, or everywhere, to each his own. i beg the keys to click click—to thunder storm, the phones to stop ringing, the sky to open up and sing, i want the hottest day in august & we’ll be heading for the sea, the water high up, past my ankles in the shower, i’m spinning and singing it, twirls and all, this sounds like crying while kissing, both at the same time, tasting your tears, it sounds like water , & i want it & i want it & i want it some more. this is like falling in a hole and hitting different parts of rock and dirt and on the way down each time you do you think of something marvelous, like dolphin skin and how it feels to be honey, how it feels to be stirred in tea.
now don’t lose your place, here, darling, don’t run off course, this is a straight line we’re walking, we have places to go and all of the people to see, all of the people with their eye balls and big jackets in the winter time, all of the red wines and the french onion soups. i look at him from upside down while i’m sitting on the couch, the song on pause, the world on pause, three cups of coffee down and my head is still pounding. i go up the stairs, the wooden sky, i’m out of some movie, the kind you’ve never heard of but god damn, you should, i get in bed, i sigh, i roll around. my eyes fill up with little water lilies, the pond we had on sixth street with the frogs, a pond in a brooklyn brownstone? i should have known , what a day dream. i call you, you don’t answer, picking up the phone would be the first step – the connection, the humans speaking into the machines, i never call anyone, i call you again. the thing in my head stirring and baking, making pies for the end of the world bake sale. i reprimand it for never being on time, for never telling the right story the right way, for not having a book under it’s belt, a thick one with soft pages, i scold it for never doing anything but lying around hearing songs and recycling water bottles.
( i want to be fancy and live in those brownstones with their dark creases and creamy stories and spend all the days in my underwear and a shirt or black tights if it’s cold and drink coffee and write poems and drink beers and make tea and read books and take walks and smoke joints or bowls i’ll have a fancy bowl, a colorful one, and i’ll eat lots of fruits like green apples and play my music really loud all the time, and the different kinds of songs that you’d hear all day would blow your mind and i’ll get dancy or get sad, sometimes, inevitably, and make forts with lights inside and favorite books and we can read each other, we being you and i, you being this faceless dream boat, words on a silky page, we can read each other our favorite parts. pointing to them with chewed up fingernails, you’ll love my bruised up legs. )
see now, this is my way of throwing up, knees bent and steady against the cold wooden floor, arms around the porcelain body, the things coming, out and in, spitting the left over bitter taste, you always cry, while this happens, you are always in tears.
when i have the drugs, i take them, like fuck potential, it’s already getting dark. everyone is mad at me, i dropped the day and lost it. it swims and gathers, swims and gathers. we are the feathers on that pond, it wasn’t even one of my favorites it just so happened, it happened just so.
all of us, applauding, the leaves underneath all of that snow, “congratulations,” the musty coughing browns, “you’ve done it” i say, can you breathe? i’ll tuck you in, i’ll hold my breath, i always have, i still am. somewhere along the line, my teeth grew in, and i forgot about breathing, i forgot how to exhale, we wait and wait, in the doctors offices of our brains, signing papers to kill what’s inside of us. my seventh grade teacher always said “jesus mary and joseph” when alarmed, when surprised, stuck in a corner, her big earrings.
jesus, mary and that joseph guy who fucked her. really? is that what he did? yes! and then they said hey, hey you, your son he’s holy, he’s king, mind you he’ll have to suffer, you know, nothing too bad, a few scrapes and thorns, it’s all, uh, it’s all in the liner notes, yes yes they said, their eyes big like cantaloupes and bright like the inside, okay, yes, where do we sign?
she skipped all of the dirty work, that holy mother, the virgin, she stayed in one whole piece, her blue robes and angels hair, never broken, we are never broken. this is a song, it always is , but that statue in my elementary school where her pinky was cracked off, making wishes on it, “hail mary full of grace, the lord is with thee” eyes closed, i’m breaking off, static cling and eyelashes.
but alas, my holy mother was the blurriest, marla singer came so close, my jesus christ is you, little words, little fiction flowers, christmas light daisy chains in winter and cold fingers, the last sentence never feeling finished, so maybe i should leave it halfway done, maybe i should just take you away and .

slowly :

the month of december is always like a sneeze, you feel it coming, the tickling up, snow falling in your brain, the buzz of nothing, a heart sighing upward and then it’s out and it’s over, the settle, and goodbye, whispering goodnight you. everyday is a day, everyday there’s a day. i swing on branches, my palms cut up and sore from the cold tree life, our antler hands.
my favorite part of the wizard of oz was always that simple jingled inquiry, “are you a good witch or a bad witch?” her voice like a teachers – the nicer kind – the question sitting in the colorful, scratchy moment, wand raised, well are you? i thought, i kept thinking, there’s no such thing, no such thing, birds under the sea, these witches, because in the movies they have time to think, in the movies there are scripts with your name before the line so you’re sure, there’s directors and x’s marking the spots. and who cares anyway, what the answer is, who knows the truth when it’s falling out and pouring over? how do you peel out the lies? like dead skin after a sunburn, showing us what we’re made of, how easy we are to take apart. the words shake in my head like dice, they land and fall out of my mouth revealing the tiny black dots on the white cube. slow down, slow down, i try to remember, the hands in my heart are holding tiny epiphanies, like bells ringing out and shaking all my bones. you have those glossy eyes, like magazine covers, falling into the moon, coming out the other side, i can smell the whole world from here. i said reading you is like ripping all of your clothes off on a train, a loud naked silence, a foamy sea of mouths and eyes and you. it’s like dropping the f bomb to a teacher or your boss, the word ticking in the air and the slippery smoke of the cymbals in your heart left swinging. with you it’s like there’s this sky i found, there’s a sky i live in.
remember those milky pens and papers, the sky blue, the glitter, the ink that would slow dance out when they touched? remember teenage kicks? “who are you’s” like a cheshire cat, the teeth, just bones really, they are just made of bones. this is all that i have, this is it, these analogies and misplaced adjectives, i hug them to my chest to hear my singing, i hug them there to show them love. because the sky is this never ending dark black and blue and in the end you’re not as cool as duckie, in the end there is none of this, no shiny glaring light reaching to the back of your eyes and pulling at your heart, no skies to live in, never.

snow eyed;

escape artist

will you kill all the bugs?

deer might fly: december

it’s times like this i’ll wonder if my head is even attached to the rest of me, times like now when the sky looks like its crying and the wind is too loud, it plays tag with the things coming out of my brain. while driving home i think maybe the car will just crash, maybe we’ll explode, the both of us, two machines. the smoke , the rubble, the whole shebang, this will be it, the end and the beginning. the lights outside are shaking and my house has a heartbeat that i’m stuck inside. cartoon humans, everybody. i am trying to find a way through to you, through to anyone, through to the veins, through past the feel and movement of your haagen dazs vanilla bean skin and teeth.
like you’ll ask me who you’re talking to kerry or the song and in my mind i think, kerry is the song. i’ll think, this is what they meant by break of dawn, the crashing of light, this is where we had to put our names and date on the looseleaf lined paper in high school, the beauty dispersed but mismatched. no one understanding the electronics of sadness & thoughts that have their very own brains. you text me “are you there?” and i think, so glad you put it that way. when am i ever? all of the “it’s times like this” and the “listens” , ” no one taking the time to whisper. everything is moving, the oceans made of sand and i think, baby is such a good word for lovers. pretty brain, in my wet sunshine-orange head making up pet names at the end of the world.
this, this is something fused, something there all along. it’s no solid or tangible emotion, no webster dictionary definition. it finds itself so intense insisting on the mixing up of all the emotions, too many, like getting past ten when counting on your fingers. which is how it really is, anyway, everything touches you know, everything melting and molding, there’s never just one, you have it all wrong. and who here cares if it’s not the right kind of brave? no one, get up and wash your knees. why can’t it just be pretty ends up the nucleus of questions, the center life force beating in the background, and the first time you ask it, is when it all ends, it’s all downhill from here. but since we’re on our way down, to tell you the truth, in the end, i just want it to sound good, i just want the words to be a song your lover hums from the kitchen, the steam of the tea, the mouths. i just want to make you remember.

in here?
some legs down stairs
who do they belong to
i can’t ever make my mind up,
make up for my mind.
sometimes i feel like when i turn around, you’ll be standing there
i’m not sure how i feel about it.
in the shower i let the water go into my eyes; reverse psychology,
i thought, the best things are done in pieces.

reasons

last night there was a ghost in my room it was tapping on the walls in time with all my heart beats, i am thinking of it’s body, of your body, what do ghost bodies feel like? i am thinking where are your hands? at night the world contracts and shrinks to fit inside my head and then it grows back up to fill me, the atlantic and pacific oceans lapping and swaying around my skull, the ear feeling of loud silence, of woods. i can’t sleep, my eyes are sinking, there are places we should never go . we are just looking for the quiet, why they call it “peace of mind”, looking for dreamers, for something golden and capable of glowing. i am separated up in pieces and i refuse to listen to a word i say, like the teachers in high school; broken eyes and frown wrinkles, forever angry with me for the things i’d never believe in. this feels like the house from that scene in “eternal sunshine,” you know, the one that crumbles.

winter

it’ll come to you, i tell myself, it’ll just saunter right over, take your hands in its hands and ask you for a slow dance, and then what? no one is here. there is nothing like rain on forests. there’s nothing like the sound or the smell. what i want is to be really little , i want to fit in hands. i want to be swallowed. we have far to go, i thought, you see, i am a foreigner, the apple when it turns brown, an unraveling sentence, you’ll lose your use for me. perpetually sitting on the edge of the diving board, wrinkly fingers and dangling legs, that clean, deep smell of chlorine, that waiting and waiting, a sticky guilt. that wonder.
but here and now i keep my knees close to my chest, kiss them when i can, think about the lines and curves in wood , i’m thinking how much better night was in the city, all the noises and stories outside, the honking, the footsteps — just distractions for my brain, for this thing in my head.
still, though, i remind myself, that liquid tap dancing on leaves, wet evergreen smells, a clear light fog sneaking out of the dirt, the soil exhaling. the emotional presence, the trees whispering about it, there’s water in the sky and it’s falling.
to begin this i turned this novel upside down and backwards, the last pages of it, now some kind of excuse for a diary, an excuse for a reason to move the god damn pen across the paper, let the words plop out of the tip of it like goldfish bubbles single file out of the tiny orange mouth, a glub glub chime.
to say: winter is coming, it is nice to be reminded, to stop and stand still long enough you disappear, you’ll see the way we write our winter songs, the air doing most of the work, reminding your skin it can feel, hey you – look alive, it says, you tugging closer to your jacket, running because your feet on the pavement bring a necessary sound, telling the cement ground your name and where you grew up, oh the growing up – you were there, you dark grey ground, i remember. and this too, this sky – the winter we keep finding ourselves in, that same feeling. so many tiny winters all chiming, the way the word christmas feels, the sharp c-h-r like a piece of candy in your mouth, the crescendo i-s-t like a secret, the lazy m-a-s on the end stringing lights in your eyes, and in the trees.

6am

my bones are cold, it’s morning, i get so afraid of what you see in me, what my eyes are when you look at them, you powder blue, you slow fire. i’m afraid that emotions got confused with sounds somewhere mid-creation, if we’ve got it all mixed up, running away except we’re going backwards. but i step out, myself – suspended, outside me. sometimes, sometimes way inside, in the belly of that monster, just keeping the pieces of my body together is hard work, when i close my eyes the limbs fall off and i drip, i shatter.

god damn, he said, and right there, i knew what the devil looked like naked, why sweat was cold at night and warm the rest of the time. i looked down, all there was to do, i saw my two hands, saw a bird, and in my head i could hear how tiny it’s bones were, how soft the wings would be, but i stop myself : i’ll let the air have the birds, my body too heavy for flight, so i go with the flow, as they say, as if, we were out to sea, as if that was all this was.

nov 6th

i want to know when we were ever given any evidence to the fact that beauty might not feel like pain. the answer is never, we were never given anything. the air has it’s fingers around my heart, it’s nails are painted white, i have faith in nothing, the moon is crying out loud and i don’t know what to say. i have changed often, i still am, slipping skin like a snake, coiled inside itself, the heart eats what the heart wants & the villains are always beautiful in the movies, all of us. things keep happening and overlapping, i need them to slow down, everything is clapping, left marked up and fuzzy like after nap dreams, learning if everyone misses you you will always be loved. winter is coming, the leaves are almost gone, the trick-or-treater’s aren’t like the ones in the city, the new world missing two sky scrapers, missing teeth. there’s skin on the scissors i say no, no i am just stirring my coffee with them. the blood.