Made a Life of Letting

True love

keeps falling out of the bed. Every time I’ve scraped the vertebrae

to kiss it

it is gone

like a nightmare meeting

morning.

How do I allude to a morning that happened quite

specifically in my own left

eyeball:

I used to say years ago

we’d make the love that would

crack

me

like

ice

-but the past is nobody-

-the past is a landless bastard-

the past is not

landed

and is no land at all.

I have made a life of finding my own

darkness unexceptional

I have made a life of letting men

I have made a life of letting men

slump on my breast

You should be ashamed of yourself.

(Shame is like mold, it is the bastard of nature.)

As if I did not possess my own

humble cuneiform,

I am going to hold him in my mind

and cut his arms off arm

by arm:

I will hold him in my mind

until lovingly I push him off

the deck.

At the marina, cover your

lap with microfleece:

Put the seat back. Like a child.

The cypress sways, and the light will lower

from brutal to gold.

Listen to the old song, the one where the girl says,

if you were a shepherd I could love you.

I would like to forget how you fell out of my bed.

(If you were a shepherd I could love you.)

I would like to forget the morning on that indifferent

cliff. (If you were a shepherd I could

I would like to forget

Thinking about Preetom on a Tuesday Night

"I lift my skirt for the economy"

I.

When I am seen only

by the specific needle of light

emanating from Preetom:

I wonder

II.

Preetom is an alcoholic drag

and his body resembles something coughed up

by a muggy wave

when nobody was looking.

(I don’t mean how it looks

how it looks could fill the shelves

of dreams)

but how it moves when it denies

my wincing agency. I tried hard to cough

that tuneless

song of reason from my little cave.

It’s like that time he said

have you ever fucked a flower.

And I imagined a beauty

that could disappear age.

But he imagined a force

that could make him feel

something.

I wonder what Preetom is doing

right now. He is watching anime

I wonder

what kind of animal I am

through his cracked prism:

like, he put my foot in his mouth and

like, he did not listen to my brief

tuneless song of reason and like

I was waking and torqued beneath

and like.

And like I gave a

small coin that currency

and like.

Now Tuesday night does

its thing all over me.

I made my bed to lie

on it and think of Preetom.

Mine in the Dusk

Mine is a bog

near the coast

of a planet

at dusk

another planet

than this one which is verdant and saturated

in past

mine in the dusk is a

feminine body found resting

in a fen

(those spores have been in her mouth

16,000 years

sixteen thousand years)

mine is my

beloved wrapped in strips of polypore

mine was made tender by a spear

mine was made small by time

and those spores have been sleeping

on her teeth

for sixteen thousand years

mine lies beneath stratified

sphagnum moss,

dreaming vapor and mist:

her body is here in the bog but

her eyes are fixed on the tumbling

sea

and heavy

history is heavy on her chest

her skin is perfect beneath

peat,

her bones eviscerated

mine is flanked on both sides

by amanitas

phalloides unfurling

like clouds

know me,

know me,

never know me,

tired madrigals

throwing voices,

speaking in rounds

are all mine

Salt Point Memory

I tried so hard to explain, we were at Salt Point

, we watched the progression of those whales:

vanish and coast

and I tried so hard to explain I can’t remember what

I was trying to explain to Joe.

Tried to explain the law of the cold blue aether.

Maybe I was trying to explain: why I am this way or

how it happened: I don’t know. It doesn’t matter

but his long hair was long,

like honey,

his hood was up

and we hopped across the creek and then

we watched the whales.

And we slept in the crook of the long state’s elbow.

We slept in safety

in the sand

and we were all alone. We slept against a rock.

And we ate our breakfast leftovers with a pocket knife,

Joe feeding me cold biscuits and gravy in the car.

Clambered out to forage for hedgehogs and chanterelles,

we were on our knees and we were on our knees.

I tried so hard to explain

as we wound down the road toward our separate homes,

with cliffs on both sides,

and the sea on one side,

a strange inlet,

and farms on one side, such green pasture;

lovingly I tried to explain and

I think that I did well but I cannot recall

anything at all of what I said,

just the feeling of microfleece

and the ghost story,

and his hand on my thigh which I did not mind

and microfleece and

darkness spreading

like ink through the water of the air.

Untitled

My vanity is dominating me

I can almost see my body

as a person, I almost

cannot see it at all,

and I’m celebrating the

iron independence of my nightmares,

after years of lover gods

and lover fears.

In my dream last night we meandered

through irradiated township

to find a place

for basking

in our steam

in my dream we had a basket

of things to eat and

a chest beneath your shirt,

you featureless you-

Now lovingly I watch the bowing smoke bush,

fantasize that I walk away both

middle-fingers streaming,

like light for pilgrims.

Bless you darling, bless

every sacred fool.

And all the ones tragically

uninformed:

every Bronte drinking water

that ran between tombstones,

the spectres of brain-eating virus

in picturesque creek-

my future waits for me

patiently

it holds a fist of

pretty weeds,

a scar crossing its

pretty face,

and we are meant

for each other