He says he never thinks of death,
only the constant dying.
That's deep, I say.
Pass me that bottle, will you?
He says he doesn't get why I don't use
a 21st century dishwasher.
Washing bottles by hand is for psychos, he says.
Psychos who consider death a one time event,
as opposed to the self-loathing sods who die
over and over again?
Yeah, he says.
That's deep, I say.
What a bother being attractive must be.
Toothy smiles. Hidden motives.
A never-ending game in which
an un-ugly yellow puck
devours vague, nothing clues,
avoiding the ghosts of bad breakups,
just waiting for their turn
to eat something they can shed light on.
Well you don't need to worry about me, pretty lady.
I'll make myself perfectly clear, Dapper Dan.
I want a swig of whatever you're drinking.
I want a hit off whatever you've got.
I want to be a thing
frequented by your mouth
and then I want to turn your soft spots
into poems or songs
or whatever stupid thing.
I want to use you for my noble cause.
Who knows.
We might get famous.
"Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless — like water.
Now you put water in a cup, it becomes the cup;
You put water into a bottle it becomes the bottle;
You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot.
Now water can flow or it can crash."
I watched this man
all one hundred pounds of him
entice thread from his acoustic
abdomen
and line the concrete walls with
feeling
like words that fall out after a successful 3rd date
like the water that holds unimaginable shapes
it was the difference between fucking
and making love, you see
it was skin on skin
sound on sound
sex atop surface
flush and entire
concentric and total
the sum of all whispers
and sitting there, I felt newly
in love
Marriage feels like a soccer match
between two teams I care nothing about.
It feels like a drawing
of nails on a chalkboard, see
actual nails you could walk away from,
but this powdery depiction - this threat without sound
makes me wish I were anyplace else.
It makes me feel squirmy,
and not the good kind of squirmy.
Not the cobblestone road at 60mph
in the backseat of a car with
particularly bad shocks squirmy. No.
If love is a sort of nervous sick,
marriage is the other kind.
We used to be friends. I think. I recall.
We used to be lovers (chug! chug! chug!).
Now,
I can't put Enough space between the
snotty t-shirt and
bathroom door - wide open, gaping,
inviting our son to enter and swim.
Marriage is a giant middle finger to The Man.
The only problem with that is that
WE ARE HIM.
Marriage is like any STD.
The only fun part was getting it.
in you I
feel
whatever
I am bored of beautiful women.
Give me eyes like preachers mid-sermon;
give me lips like a nest missing twigs;
give me hexes for fingers;
give me eggplant for nose;
give me apples for kneecaps
and sausage for toes.
Give me bodies like pencils,
or pickles, or doorstops.
Give me hair thin as after-rain web.
Give me voices that fall like
a gavel shouts
GUILTY;
give me these things
or nothing at all.
"So Brit, what's really going on?"
He is like a muppet
with his simple hands
and cozy voice.
Like an apple wrapped in the soft-side of velcro.
Or the cool underbelly of a worn
couch cushion.
"Nothing, nothing," I say,
"this water has a taste to it,
but I can't pinpoint what".
He tells me of his housing woes.
How his sister-in-law is hiding his brother's nuts
in the all-the-same-color guts of a Pottery Barn.
How he's not really sure where he fits into this system
of pretending and kowtowing
and looking any which way but straight.
How he's got a sizable artillery for the zombie apocalypse,
but mostly, he just wants to see something naked.
"37 seconds, Brit.
What do you think?"
"Lake water!" I say,
"Shit tastes like lake water"
I sort of need them
men
with their jelly bellies
and pudding palms
and crooked smiles like chimney sweeps
sing-songily fa-la-la-la-la-ing through
sooty poofs
of crude suggestions
I need their haunted mansion eyes
and somnambulist defenses
I need their blushed necks and red ears
and fat fingers
and their not-at-all athletic
feet
I need them because
they sort of need me.
And it's nice...
you know...
...to be needed.
I'll say this for the bastards,
those therapists and therapoops
they really seem like they're listening.
They say, "So what do you do to relax?"
And I snap that I haven't got time to relax.
"Do you jog? Yoga? Pilates?"
What are these fucking words.
"Zumba? Maybe just get in the car and drive?"
And I rise from my seat
and push my finger into their thinkspace
and I say, Look,
I haven't got time for your dumb suggestions.
I have work and a family and a dog who can tell time
and I don't have the fucking magical means
for your stupid goddamned zoboomafoo nonsense.
And they don't flinch.
They just nod the way
good listeners do.
Sitting here
eating cubes of cheese,
ignoring the Swiss,
thin slips of a meat I can't pronounce
without my 's' and 'h' sounds whistling
the way older folks do,
crackers without taste or interesting things to say,
nuts and dried fruit,
ignoring the olives.
At the end of the meal
the Swiss and olives will remain.
They'll wonder what they did wrong
and they'll bond over their exclusion,
using it as the foundation for a love
that will surely see the end
of the cockroaches.
This bodes well for me, I think.
Romantic as I am
and so full of holes...
There must surely be someone
soaked and alone in mouthings
who won't mind if I rest
in his pit.
All he ever talks about is Rimbaud.
This oaf.
This quasi-intelligentleman lump.
Rimbaud this and Rimbaud that.
"Other poets are nice, but this one is more fun!"
(to pronounce, he means
rim-BOWd, not rim-BAWd)
What do you like about him, I ask.
"Well everything! His use of words, his tone, his subjects..."
His use of words and tone and subjects...
"Yeah man. I don't know. I just dig it."
And his themes, too, I suppose?
"Oh yeah. Radical themes!"
And his structure?
"Yeah!"
And his preference for the English alphabet,
flowing top to bottom, left to right?
"Yeah, man. He's just brilliant"
That he is, man.
That he is.
for his wire hanger shoulders
for his bright manna eyes
for his foppy golden waves of hair
that crest but never seem to crash
for his voice like a prize in a cereal box
for his shaking virgin surgeon hands
for his arms about the length of an evening
and his sex like one poem
exactly
My penmanship has gone
the way of the junebug -
lines heavy and erratic, yet somehow afloat
like the Tuesday lunch crowd at the Stars Lounge
with all those wayward
midgets.
Still.
I hold my little golf half-pencil.
I hold it on my middle finger
and alternate pressure with my pointer and ring.
And I imagine my fingers
are kids on a see-saw.
I get sick about it.
Why must the fat old thumbs ruin everygoddamned thing?
Why, by design, must they loom and wink
at the farside and anywhere else
with a playground?
I take long looks around
and hate each one that walks past.
With their turtleshell bellies
and their lazy grey eyes
and their red freckled noses
and powdered don't-nut thighs.
And their unasked-for insistence
that I'm prettier
than I think.
Watching them now
and typing this later -
We've all gone the way
of the junebug.
I received a call from Scam Likely.
I answered, though we hadn't spoken in ages,
and much to my delight, we picked up right where we'd left off.
My infected computer, oh, you don't know the half of it.
I need to liquidate my assets. Buy stock and gold bars.
I'm very depressed, "Roger". Can I call you Raj?
I'm depressed and entertaining the thought of lonesome.
Credit cards, maiden names...Can't we just talk a minute?
It isn't often that Scam Likely hangs up first.
I can only wonder how long Raj listened for my breath
before reassuring himself
that he could call me tomorrow.
How do I get so fucking cool
as to wear green pants out
with a matching necktie...
And I'm not talking Is-It-Black forest green.
Nah.
I'm talking Pond Frog on a Mossy Log green.
And a blue button-down shirt
with what appear to be
Saved by the Bell title scene graphics
patterned
all
around.
Fuuuuck me...I go through phases, see.
Like, right now,
I feel like nothing.
But it's an artist's nothing, y'understand.
So it is more accurate then
to say that I feel like
everything
and all the time.
I am shapes and colors and tastes and textures
and smells and summers and left/right of bang.
I am screws and towels
and a brush wet with polish.
I am a lost tube of lip balm
and a call from your mother.
I am dog food and bent nails
and fresh paint and thin ice
but I am Not
so goddamned cool as to be
green pants out
with a matching necktie.
I'll tell you.
I'll tell you, and I'll tell you in plain language,
no cutesy (c)odes or lyrical curtsies;
no graphic novels;
no pixel proof.
I'll tell you just like it is.
Pumpkin chocolate chip muffin tops
go great with room temperature Dos Equis.
There.
You've got it.
The entirety of my existence.
Everything I have to offer.
The disappointing similarities between
eater and eaten.
The pulsing red glow of a speaker
forcing itself on a snoozing room
So
Obviously
Dressed.
I don't question my existence.
I don't lack self-control.
I'm a parking meter few are happy to see.
But By God, I'm easy to use
and I fucking work.
And none of you Mooks can ask for much more
than that.
Everything looks unimportant
compared to the lives of stars.
See here…
One shot a thousand years ago
and just today
the neighbor kids put down their rocks
and quieted their shouting
to make a wish.
My husband takes his phone to the bathroom when he showers.
I hear clanging noises,
like he’s throwing out sauce pans,
and sometimes, he takes an entire hour
just to comb his hair.
Compare this to the massive black hole in space
created when one little star,
tired of star things,
blew the fuck up
and took many little whore stars with it.
Blackest brutey,
oh,
dimpled brick,
I have used the moon and crosswalk to deceive you
matching pale for pale for pale, I dazzle
with smooth, amber know-how
and talked shop on my hip
I make pretend that you can hardly see the
icebergs of primer
floating just beneath
You’ve had days to see daylight
yet here you remain,
shall I assume you are top-sopped
in paint?
we wanted what only the mind could give –
creation
like the hanging black nail of God
giving way to new Flesh and new Bone and New Life
can you smell the unlit tip of Knowing?
it grows and glows and begs to be touched
while I backspace and flounder and
oh, do I have to say?
you’re Fire, baby,
inside and out
and I swear you used to want me
watch you play with yourself
Do mispronounced words still make poems?
I started to write the Federal Reserve
about the confessive tender lining the walls,
but they, like you,
might remind me of soap spheres;
not everything in mind
stands up to beholding.
Did I mention I may have also
misplaced a few words?
I can speak cardboard and vibrate
and jumped 8's for sure!
Appreciate the quack and the coal, won't you, darling?
And tell the mind's eye
to stop hitting itself.
One could almost argue
the significance in measures -
hours, inches,
Pounds (Township matters).
Proof belongs in pitchers, not poems or pictures.
Words are best served
slurred or smothered in pixels.
Can you believe fat and slim mean the same thing with chances?
I had a chance once.
Couldn't stand it.
The
familiarity is almost disappointing.
Not disappointing.
I don’t use words well.
My imagination is everything I never asked for,
yet was gifted so that I could not look away.
(You are a horse, sir.
I am in love with your mouth)
Would you suppose I should have stayed a teenage dream?
Time is mangled, at best-
I have crooked teeth.
There is something like curiosity
inside words like ‘canary’.
And in depressed bed springs,
there is something
else.