unplace

slipping, sloppy, remnant,
remains. slackened by a lack of light
or a lack of rain? old house, stuttering bones,
limping back and back and back again
back to young friends with old homes
with lumbering gazes, with peaceful minds.
between places, jacked-up kid
losing face
in the face of this

después

cada amor, cariño, cada dolor
como una cicatriz en la cama
un vistazo atrás.
he sentido este amor con mis huesos
profundamente y completamente
he sacudido en mis sueños por el
gran placer y el miedo impenetrable
pero más por su presencia afuera de la cama
en el mundo, viajando
con mi alma en tu voz, mi corazón
en entre los dedos.

no me abrace, amor. tengo miedo.

9/19

and here, i can say, is
proof of our heights.
the sexual fact of your existence
echoes through my caverns
long after our collapse
pushing shapes into my walls
that are filled better
and incompletely
by men who understand
what it means to value land.

radio silence

how, and when, and where, and why?
deep, damp shadows shield our faces
from our faces, eyeless
lipless, careening senselessly like
moths, like leaves. i want to take root
in your bones
feel your morning stretches
against the curve of my back
synesthetic kyphosis, i'll call it,
and you'll laugh at the syllables
and i'll laugh at your laugh.
when, and where, and why?
it seems we've been hiking these trails
since time immemorial, since
david touched goliath,
the industrial revolution.
i've watched the smoke of coketowns
curl around your fingers,
shroud you, take you away.
i lost you in the fog, though,
in the natural way,
us both staring at the embers
of a small set of beautiful days.
where, and why?
i imagine us happening again
in a silly, barren place
with modern architecture and undying trees.
a stream flows through our house
and you wake me up with a whisper
the whole of your weight pressing through me.
hello, you say, as if it's the first
time. hello. did you sleep well?
nightmares, i whisper,
your weight too much for my lungs.
about what? you ask,
and why?

memorandum

i must have been swallowed
last night, broken down and
reconstituted as nothing but waste
i am cold-pressed juice, the
healthy, expensive kind that
tempts you at Whole Foods
or in crunchy bodegas after
obliterating yoga in a city
so large it can't help but
swallow people whole,
put them together as
romantics, idealists
destined for love
that is sharply
impossibly
finite

the last night in town

once upon a time
there was a
boy
who slept sound
while i kissed his back
whispering silly
passionate things into his ears

and he was the best there ever was

in which we protect ourselves from the outside in

my persian god looks different in the light
of a computer screen, all soft
and shadowy. more familiar now
(in this glow)
as the remnant of an awkwardness we've left behind

these days we are the kinds of people
who cook good food with each other, and
laugh at my sweat as it pours into
his mouth
and build houses together
and don't assume that any of this
means a darn thing

but of course
the fluorescing stain of light strings tension
along his cheekbones, and i am reminded
that utopias are by nature fiction
and persian gods
belong to a country called Iran
and a time called Before

the strange time

you didn't have the head
for blind horses, my teary rebellions
for days like this, except
worse

(i hid my tail and
called myself a human;
a statement mostly true
but only
from the front)

so can i hold anything over your head
if you don't have one
and if i'm a liar, too
?

(i would like to think i've exposed myself
lying spread eagle on a bed
but literalities fail me
more often than not)

we won't talk about the strange time
despite the aching fact that
strangers are the easiest
people to love

my father has a torn meniscus

and all i can think
is, "how much food
is in the fridge?"

serrate

all of the writers are gone
blown to smithereens, or tied up in
bed. they left us notes
told us not to come looking
they would be hidden
in soft caresses and silken blindfolds
the handcuffs with easy-releases
they would be tied to beds
and wake up with soft fingers on their clavicles.

so the last words ever written
amounted to
"don't call me;
i'll call you."
and the poetry under our eyelids
disappeared into aqueous humor.

north country, almost alone

dropping like flies has no meaning here

when the creatures bump and buzz, nestle

into hair, eyes, ears

careless and kamikaze

like me on the bad days

this thing you have will exhaust you before you can tame it.

i am well aware of the risks

of trying to change what is already functional

and of the great taupe rush of a dim sunset

and of the milky way, so rarely seen downstate

i am aware that if i try too hard

the kamikaze haze will

settle in, like spirochetes

like silt

in this big, lovely house

the piles of guitars play themselves

the books are read

the food eaten

i am treading newly on what has always been.

bartleby

the dusty pearl of long-gone things,
the engineered closeness of
sisters and their long-gone brothers
mothers and their deteriorating husbands
the activation of your voice sets me apart
from dirty rags and a twenty-year-old room
finally being made to look clean.
you are in north carolina now
living on a lake.
i ask you what you write these days; non-fiction
more or less
and how you are writing it
and how you are doing

(how are you doing?)

there are many people to miss, and they all
show up on pieces of digital paper
strewn about my room like bulkless
leaves, leaving, left.

swinger

i took a series of photos of myself
called them "drops" after
the water on my hair, in my skin
feel myself breathing with you, fickle friend
unobserving lover, dispossessed, un-obsessed
the one who needs me and then doesn't, doesn't, doesn't.
i do miss your voice, and the palms of your hands.
trying not to say "i" these days
trying and instead becoming unintelligible
nothing incurable with a day or two, i'm sure.

the great lonesome

what it is to be something
when someone is somewhere
the vaguest of understandings

i stumble upon you
after releasing
wondering
"what makes me so alone here
and too full over there?"

generosity

you said that
and i've been that
and i will be it again
whether or not you are there
or care to be so

last

me too. in other ways.

the way i stay naked, and you do not.
the other things that are suggestive
of happy endings, and not in the traditional sense.

we remind ourself continually: this is not about me.
that, too, in the twisted way. the ways that we forge
to resolve cognitive dissonance. to modulate.

you and your aesthetics, me and my words.

when i realized there would be no more comments

well take a look at my back
this scar is from when i was twelve i
had a mole and they took it off and
it left a scar. this scar.
this scar too, age thirteen that means
nineteen ninety-nine when i got it
the last of year of that decade that i holler for
at night.

and this one?
no, i don't know where it came from
or how i got it, or if i got it, or if it got me.
i believe that you have meaning
because you have expression
it is not enough to see that you have bled
part of me wants to see that you can bleed.

the other scars don't mean anything
they're just evidence of
a few years ago, when i fell down and got back up
(the alternative was worse)
remarks on the shiny white life i used to have.
i'm still white that type of thing doesn't change
but my dreams are less serene.

about that other scar
i'm unsure as to whether or not you care what it says
about me, about my capacity to pick at scabs

it's just,
now you know that i know how to bleed.
i didn't mean to show you that
it just sort of happened.

a spin glass model

i want you to say, "yes, let's walk,"
and keep on walking. i want to sleep.
i want my body to ply itself open
push out the inane nectar of this slow decline.
i want to sleep. and sleep. and sleep.

what am i but a foolish merchant
selling emotions i cannot afford to buy?

a joint poem, timbbe and n.

central pattern generators
acoustic optic modulators
our lives
our lives.

bells

so what is with all of this apocalyptic photography?
not in the smiles, but in the gently
heaving winds of a background cataclysm
the falling fingers on a living piano
the deep chords, the subtle ones
the ones that make you shake in your bones.
what is it with the end of days?
beneath my cognitive whirl
i slink into the golden light of a january day
a photo that you took, before the end of it all

late night, basements, no sex

lately the real trouble has been
convincing the self that this place
is not an ossuary but rich topsoil
a rich deposit in which to grow.
my thumbs shake above
the mechanics
the physical representations
of the verbal representations
of the mental representations
of the things that we call "letters"
but that are really unuttered, unvoiced
understandings.

i study the reasons why this degree of abstraction
is beautiful and necessary. pragmatic and kind.
i write poems. i work.
i sit. i sit.

the three of us, with different motives
pouring ourselves into
what we believe is right.
this self believes in the incendiary whispers
of revolutionaries in basements
of the curdling sexual desire that grips the
unfettered human. this self believes in mutability
mutations, generations of change.

this self sits in basements
next to doors labeled "holography"
and is preserved, like ammonia-treated
beef.

they say i have an infinite self-life.

i

on the day when so many things
darkened like the evergreens of winter night
spill over into this abysmal brightness
revealing themselves finally, as bugs do
under skins

the self was gone
swept up in mourning
the memory of crocheted puce hats
falling sweetly behind
the subtle green of summer
limping into tear-caressed eyes
reminding of simple times and the lips that they have kissed

words never seemed to suffice
bubbling outwards, the kind of mouthwash
that invades

two men, twice,
hillside and a far,
contenting themselves in the aftermath
of the day when so many things happened.

close

what is there to convince me
that a night spent huddled in the warmth of the earth's core
that the light of the hazy, unfocused stars
can pull
in the same way, or better than,
the warmth of a breathing human
light pulsing off the nearness
of uninterpretable eyes while
the naked body fills the spaces between
blanket, leg, unspoken context?

liberated beneath a velveteen underworld
twisted trees and soft, un-existing galaxies
it would have been different, perhaps, to
have slept in the tent
and not outside of it

i am not convinced
that all time lost can be regained
or that my best and longest lovers
will always accord in their invitations and dreams
certainly i am a man of nature and of sound,
the shadowless non-contrast of a world
clothed in nighttime

also too i believe in heat.

what is clear, beyond my own simple context
is that there is breath either way, inhalations
of the greater kind
having made the choice
between one way and the other
i will choose next to stay close
even against the beckon of a cold spring night.

second try, a little more quiet

i have said, to pick oneself up out of
a small village and to land in this place, manahatta
it does not do. in the next room over
my lovers whisper of their lovers
or of betrayals that i could not have committed.
this is not the worst of things, nor unwelcome.
the passing cars are scarce
(a thing for which i am thankful)
and the birds exist, at least, if not in color
form, song as in the near-off land that
beckoned me in my dreams.

outside, there are no volcanoes.
not one.

i have said too that mine is not a wanting love
but it is love that i want. unable to weave
such subtle threads, now, today,
(unwilling, i should say; stubborn)
it seems deliriously and swimmingly pointless
to listen in on the murmurs of the friends i have
echoing through my hollow face
as i write poem after poem in search of
such an apocalyptic peace
as others before me
have found.

travel diary

unsolicited solitude, slinking, squirming this is not
ometepetl, the nahuatl fire-gods are not
singing in my ear and i am not
home, but rather
in a place.
from here, we grow.
riveting tin to hear the rain at night
pulling out moon and chickenwire from my hair
the uneven sunset, imperfect lives we fix our gaze upon.

who gets our help?
who gets to help us?
who gets to be a part of these clandestine whispers,
the ones of the first world (or last), the ones of love and hate
of a life so unbearable that one must move?
certainly not i, to any of these. not today.

"¿has visto managua, chico?"
"no."
"quizás algun día..."

he shakes his head.

opisthion

this is not the end of things
the backward-time
twilit, too-soon, and i must speak
that i am not the harbinger
or even the figurehead
no prophet am i
just a swelling resurgence
apples, pears, fruits of the valley
green things that never grew
or never knew how, or never were taught
what am i but a small part
of these new roots

one is normalized

all is one, said the scientist
glumly crystallizing quaternary carbons
aglow with sinuous and silent stressors
internally howling, rancor and stench in his claustrophobic,
nearly deceased sense of self

incessantly, unpleasantly self-aware. ambitious.

pure venom, pure reductionism. all wrong. all indistinguishable.
everything plays into
everything else.

sulfates

the way you roll off of my tongue
escalating, waving the way you carry on
stumbling me home with
scents of roses, ears full of cologne
two in the morning, kid, it's way past late
the arid lack of you in my mouth
the way you carry on
walking me home with a nighttime presence
or a daytime stare, it's too early for this
a case of you would knock me
far off my feet.

dendrites

the fire and its flames
slip and curl
unfurl the unnecessary questions
the why am i here and the what
am i doing, the curdling of the sea
the cerulean indigestions
the fire and its flames
weightless and sharp
burning out dreams
seaside towns and their silken skies
hollowing caves for shelter
singeing skin for sensation
ashing me down, crumbling, allowing cessation.