nighttime illusory malfunction

the kind of love you lose every day

when thinking of watch yourself calmly cut off pieces

half a finger, half an arm, one ear. 

away from olive boughs the world is electric and cruel, cloaked in fleeting inspiration

floating circus tents
dollar stores

don't you understand, I was soul shocked
now i am just wise and quietly dissatisfied

glow in the dark Jesus statues 

balance crumbles me into a ripe fruit
and blur into cozy embers 

its no use

i can't stay mad at you 

i failed this time around

ill meet you wherever we met before

emerging from our last cocoons 

with foggy trees, cool fingers and chests like furnace

promise you'll look for me
even if only out of malicious curiosity 

or this life is in vain

why i love Pablo Neruda

May I imagine Neruda lost Matilda before finding her again, and much before writing how he loved her fiercely enough to cloak his bloody nectar with banal papers?
My friend went to a poetry reading. the scene of heartbreak and lost love dripped doubt all over her love life until I reassured her that all poetry oozes with a similar crap, and it is the crap that keeps a poet going in a world that takes the metaphor out of the artist out of the child. But, poets aren't special.. I'll tell you what is. The notes you leave on the fridge, ink that fades into aggressive inkless carvings, and you're weak suspended hand
walking into an evening kitchen and sighing beside the rosy pool of sweet milk left on the tiles
the miniature collections of paper scraps,wrappers, and lint lying around the places your lover empties their most intimate pockets. This is the crap poets and losers describe to themselves on repeat  under their breathe. This is how she masturbates, the woman who loves words.

never let a minute

i fear rejection beneath my finger nails. 
can you see it? 
For years 
I've been 
digging it out, 
scrubbing haphazardly with little 
bubbles and bristles. 
But like the food residue
that cooks further and 
harder
onto your baking pan
every time you
agitate it 
with the hot water..

try being rejected 
so many 
times that
you become the 
worst kind of
prostitute, the
kind that 
claims she is free to be whoever she wants at anytime
like an evolved anomaly, but really
she is just
a vaporous postmodern spirit
with reflectors all around 
her, she glides shielded by
her mirror magic making
her just meaningless to a rational world
invisible ship in the sky.

Distance is the
smell 
of cherry pits on
the highway concrete dried by
the sun 
and 
gasoline.

Your heart beneath my temple and wayfaring
ear is the love I miss
is the salty clumped soil 
that bears cras hope and fear beneath
my fingernails when 
I work 
in the rock embroidered 
part of the garden that is kissed by 
beats of rainfall, 
like an old woman at your shrine
hunched in watch

4

dreams limbs drop aches and shivers shake me awake
falling on knives knees bent eyes shut scream myself sober
grabbing you fleeting rubbing disappearing moments between fingers
fearing the unknown "peace" becoming time in vain i fear the dying my living makes
the breathe i breath nowhere to go spiteful forms it takes
if i'm an illusion, i must be dispensable to you too

beginnings and endings

it's a pretty big fucking deal for me to feel this way
so why

you make your own now

slide your feet from the bed's one end
wasteland sheets
dreams tonight blind our skin
broken buildings subway heat piles of broken snappy snakes
you don't land because
nobody's there