the coffee is awful though and how can we rationalize THAT

There are the people on a Sunday midmorning
not at church
and I feel a sense of belonging here
I put on my glasses
take out a cigarette
and a book
the sense of belonging disappears
but I welcome it; will interpret stares
as grief of those who have not
given their life or spare change to nihilists
in an offering plate
passed round on friday night
with a lopsided grin

Who is even awake on a Sunday midmorning
not our part time rockstars, part time preschool teachers
preschoolers themselves except for cuervo
stares multiplied with oxford collars
of those who pried open the mouth
of a gift horse, and affixed braces
because freedom was not acceptable
if it had the crooked teeth
of a homeless man on west burnside
Who has ripped the sleeves off his
oxford shirt and spilled vodka sunkist
down the front as artistic license
which is my justification to these people
because I will always need to rationalize
my freedom to horses or children
with braces

A cigarette is 2.8 times better on a Sunday midmorning
it is life-affirming
god grant me the will to maintain homeostasis

Father's Day

My fondest memory is when I put
a metal bowl in the microwave
and you called me a dumb fuck
Rearranged, those letters meant
"You scared
the vocabulary out of me"
so I forgave you the second you said it.

onomatopoeias for walking choruses are replaceable

I am dragging your small body
you are like semiconscious
in a place just below the sidewalk
and above what is actually below the sidewalk
the white of our eyes are the only light
and bugs fly into them
I touch your skin and feel your ribs
and we peer through a storm drain
and you scream 'gutter gutter gutter'
at the not-listening feet.

today I noticed that I have never had to struggle against anything aside from myself.
if the man has held me down, I am unaware.
No one seriously abused me as a child
My parents are not addicted to meth
They are alive and kind, even
My country is not war torn
I have so much water available to me.

And yet and yet and yet and yet
I consistently behave in a manner
identical to someone with
post traumatic stress disorder
in social situations.

Seems like I'll have to burn all my notebooks soon

borrowed a cell phone
(similar to the one
I lost in the woods;
girls in the woods
dancing naked are
the devil)
talking to you--
made you cry
the first time ever--
sitting on my
skateboard
telling you about
how you didn't care.
didn't sleep well

morning.
on his shit computer
your twitter update
told me you still don't.

I've got alchemist fingers
flesh turned to lead
I don't think I'll write today.

lord byron mentioned you all

occasionally the bat strikes the smallest kitten head of mine
--they are all so young
In park grass I watch their skin crawl, silent eyes 'look on'
they seem to search for their high definition colors
and have discovered only 3200 grain

I watch pretty faces plummet off table edges
pennies or dominoes or your favorite pencil
into shot glasses, bic lighter soon to come
just like the ones kindly grandparents set up
for them when they were 5

sophomoric suffragettes waving banners
their pale palms stuck to acned foreheads
Gilligan, the Skipper too, the Millionaire and his Wife,
the Movie Star, the Professor and Mary Ann
touch those foreheads to bathroom mirrors
tears in their red eyes.

chapstick and sidewalks

I walk on the borders of pavement
patrolling immigrant thoughts
with my footsteps
if my mind wanders too close
to the edge of reality
I’ll shoot
tar shoulders unravel to paint ribbons
beneath my Converse

I’m seeking God inside
yellow lines
side-street road signs
the speed limit is 25 miles per hour here
I’ll drive my thoughts recklessly
anyhow
then flash my poetic license at
the thought police
when I hear
metaphor sirens behind me

deities seep through damp socks
to my skin
where they sigh sticky currents
to my toes
I wait for heavy clouds to flash
bright enlightenment on my twilight

perhaps God spoke words to shape oceans
on precision’s eardrum shores
He translated waves into sound waves
and sound waves into alphabet surf
an A B sea
language wrote ocean movement
out of God's mouth
precision replied to his deep blue words with brain waves, told God
sometimes words are better off silent

I lick my lips
they’re a little chapped
asphalt tongue brings tender to my surface
like rain brings slick to the cement
I can smell my contemplation
meditations are worms inching out of my lips
before they can be pressed into sidewalk cracks

perhaps God painted thumbs
on our hands
in an answer to perfection
he said
this is escalation
I see your sightballs and raise you
starfish palms with uneven edges
perfection responded to him with collarbones
shot hollow blanks beneath June skin and left them there, told God
empty space is more filling sometimes

I guess I understand
perfection and precision
but I have never seen anything more beautiful
than stars spattered against a velvet sky
zodiac splashed
onto a Jackson Pollock
backdrop

I have never seen anything
more beautiful
than
the scatter of wet on a tin roof
in twilight rain

I have never
seen anything
more beautiful
than
grass dripping through
cracks in the sidewalk

because
perfection
and
precision
have nothing to do
with

beauty.

I feel I always have the same conversation

a collection of mid-nineties sofas
cushions our collective ass
we pretend to pass time
I can hear a timer behind your ear
mussing your hair, I must
control the inevitable roll
of my boring colored eyes
home has a hole in the knee

on this couch, holding a pair of blue scissors
I reach over and feel resistance when I cut
someone's hair
I make the scissors walk on the coffee table
scratched it
I think about cutting off my 'piano' fingers

-Pathic Tendencies.

I think I like plays a little too much.
I like dialogue
I look up to dialogue.
This is how you're supposed to interact
with other people
This is what it's like
when you're not a sociopath
or a psychopath
or on the wrong path
(which is essentially what all those other
-paths mean)
And Tennessee Williams keeps trying to tell me
that maybe I should stay on my -path,
but I ignore him.
All of his characters end up alone
and God knows that all lonely people
are unhappy
even if maybe they don't like other people
and all they want to do
is live in a cabin
by themselves
and read dialogue
and pretend like they remember how to speak.

I lie a lot, I guess.

I don't like to tell the truth

because sometimes lies are more

true

than what actually happened

and I can remember them better

so I tell them

and they become my memories

"You must be the girl I'm going to know in two months"

and I was confused and a little

t

i

p

s

y

from reading so much, so I nodded

and smiled politely

because in a bookstore anything is possible

and I was reading Tennessee Williams

and he nodded

We both were nodding

I nodded off

Watering Plastic Grass.

"Please don't yell"
so I shouted in her face
and then
I slammed the door as a preemptive measure
(before I was asked to leave)

and then
I realized that there is no such thing
as a proportionate response
so then
I lay in the fake grass at Sonic
and
I let my face leak without plugging up the
holes

because then
the grass was poking into my back
and I was aching
and my head was aching
and my face felt like it could use a drain anyway
and the people who worked there were desperately
in need of entertainment

so I lay in the WonderTurf
(or whatever the hell they call plastic pretending
to be grass these days)

and cried.

simon was not your name

you said something I forgot
I had an anxiety attack or something
and I had a fistful of keys
a spider on my left arm
a cerulean blue bull that was soon
to be grandmother to my orange
translucent bottles of anti-depressants
and anxiety online
the panic of not noticing a curve
attempting to control it
now I am in a dusty arroyo
I am upside down with glass
where the spider had been
electronica still playing
'evil has never loved you
evil has never loved you
nobody has ever loved you'
in the hospital
I am yelling at the doctor
trying to give me a cat scan
telling him I don't have a cat
and pulling the IV out of my arm
and walking outside squinting
into a parade.