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

May Is Cold This Year And

May is cold this year and

(I don't really know how to breathe

under the weight of)

every day progresses slowly, darkly 

into the darkness of night, night like a 

blanket like a blackout curtain, bag over

the head, 

trunk of 

the car 

the porch is blue. I sit on it 

smoking. I think

of Uncle Charlie some more.

I don’t know what he did all those crabbed winters

those springs and summers beneath thunder,

I have heard that

he fished the little creek, he read books

and read them again, he had a cat and a dog

our family somewhat blown around,

the fragile aspects of a little tree,

a little creek.

From the strip of oil spill coast we meandered

north, or east, or stayed put like dad-

dad came home covered in petrol 

in 1969 he says. 

He remembers the year it was 

1969 he says. He will remember this year 

too, it is 2015 and Plains All American

Pipeline 

has made a mistake again. 

Things break. Sometimes,

broken things even break things- 

candy shrapnel in the belly of 

a seagull. 

And there are two kinds of silence, perhaps

even more, I am familiar with the one

that arrives all dressed up

in organza and chatter, looking 

like something, sounding alive.

Another kind does not arrive,

it has just always been here,

and we have never noticed it, 

and still we do not notice it,

but soon we will notice it, 

and when we do it will buckle 

the tender of our knees,

we’ll all fall down. 

(I want to touch you the way

one can touch a tree can touch

a creek. I am not looking for anything 

that can be defined by taxonomy, 

unless it is creek. Unless it is light- 

from the family greater phenomena

of the genus things above us things beyond)

And sometimes I act tough, for I’m tough; sometimes

I act tender. I consider my maker, I consider

the fader. I consider consider.

I consider Plains All 

American bathing the round rocks with 

crude culminations. 

I know I’m not doing all I ought to be doing.

I’m working and writing and sleeping and writhing.

I’m searching and finding and discarding my findings.

I give it away like a rich man;

crumple beneath sun like a leech.

It’s hard to stay well when life is so vicious

in its joy and its tumbling doubts. Uncle Charlie 

went in with a rifle when they didn’t 

give him that job he interviewed for.

Though, I’ve heard he sat 

in hot tubs naked, good moments were had-

I walk on the wharf and my father tells me 

about fishing. In pictures they are 

tiny boys and fishing with jaunty caps 

frozen in time, like beautiful little blue fish, 

like beautiful tiny boys. 

I love them.  I’m messy;

do you understand time?

I do not. I live with my hands over my head. 

I live with my hands over my head because 

strange things fall from the sky sometimes.

Spiders in Australia. Frogs somewhere.

Petrol. Rain, 

or just time, fragmented seconds, 

descending, like some sort of 

scalding judgment, descending, 

and it all turns to steam before 

it hits the ground 

Charlie

“I am bombarded yet I stand

I have been standing all my life in the

direct path of a battery of signals

the most accurately transmitted most

untranslatable language in the universe”

-Adrienne Rich

This is not the first time I have said that 

I am going to drive east but only halfway

because halfway is where my destination lies like a 

yellow picnic blanket next to a sort of 

quaint stream where he fished and smoked and 

lectured the dog when the dog would snuffle his 

nose into the pouch of rolling tobacco

as the dog was wont to do and our dog 

was wont to do it too. 

There are some things that are so easy to know about him 

that he could not hide them even with deliberate and

meticulous effort, things like 

the color of those two stones one is a blue stone 

one is green. The color of those shoes is I suppose 

a point of some contention. The color of fifty percent 

of his hair or twenty eight percent of his mustache or, 

to diverge from this tumbling, 

the color of my hair as a child for instance was 

a very dark brown. And the color of my eyes as a child was 

a very sludgy green. And I weighed eighty pounds as a child.

And I weighed forty five pounds as a child. And I wore collared shirts

with buttons and plaid caps backward and I slept beneath Hale-Bopp 

beneath the roof of the car and I slept beneath oak trees beneath the nylon

of my father’s bike trailer and I slept in tents and 

in one little bed, dreaming the simple quilted dreams that a child dreams.

The color of my childhood for instance was the color of 

that quaint stream in Dodgeville, Wisconsin next to a yellow house 

where a dog trots along with his nose low to the dirt and tail aloft.

And an orange cat finds another orange cat, as if fated, to summon up legions 

of orange kittens. 

And my uncle died in a hospital of Pneumonia.

This is many years after he planned his escape route to Canada.

This is many years after he planned his escape route to east,

but only halfway. A handwritten note painstakingly 

cyphered read that he loved me because I said 

read read read. 

Read read read. 

And if for instance I do not read very much anymore 

because my body buzzes with fear and a little ghost won’t 

let my mind settle into that imperative groove,

and if for instance I cannot make humble head 

or tucked tail of my own teeming life, 

well then it is time perhaps to go east but only halfway, 

if only for a little moment and a very tiny paw. 

The roof and the rifle, the thunderous summers 

and steady perch of raw-bone knees