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

Reading confidently that you live in branches in my mind that bend so low into styx I can't see you anymore

the name I used to write shakes the earth and I fall over

I've been taking quiet stabs at the ghost of you.

Could you be more yourself now than you ever were with me?

I draw the darkest line under your name.

Permanence, stick to my mind

somewhere. Letters I used to write

this word, your name, is a story

a real ending now, is this true?

some kinda lost

and i've never experienced love at first site

except when i fell into a black hole 

and you reached your hand in like a wise fool

gypsy tinman

looking for a furnace heart

and i'll dream of burrows in the dirt

warm and rough

where I knew you made of clay

and you always were enough

your hidden sew

Last night I fell asleep believing in you, and when fractured light danced through flaps and painted watercolored memories above my bed I woke up quietly. I dreamed you had sewed the most beautiful blanket I had ever seen with all our favorite colors and shapes. And you spread it out across the floor for some dreary expert and his approval, while you took no notice of me. But, when you were looking away from your blanket searching his magnificent criticism, I became entranced snuck my sliding, clutching hand across your threaded scapes, sighing at your stitches, and fell in love with you for the first time again. Warmer than worn corduroy, softer than warm coffee.

drunk and dropped

Tied knots
not us not us
i broke a sink and watched my dreams of you
disappear through cracks
swirling with the tide
a genie sucked back into its bottle

now i know
to feel alive
a body is just a body
 nothing else
and when you
the only one who could
demanded a higher love from me
 and I was a better person
I was.

The bones in my back
just bones in my back
the buds of my lip
to talk to eat
but nothing more
my hair nothing lovely
a mess i ought to cut it all off

There is no beautiful me
loved me there was
when the magic wears off
when the booze burns up
when the lights exhaust out
a floating body
 light
insignificant as a wild daisy
 waiting and knowing
for dogs and hunters.

february roaches

I wanted to know I could feel happiness without you, and when I did, and when I did, and when I did, and when I did, and when I did I felt it, a sadness fell upon me like a streak of sharp
blood blue paint falling into Their morning alka seltzer glass,

because I had not You to share my happiness with.

indecisive in love…..what a true pain in the ass I am; but I’ll always be that, I’ll always be that, I’ll always be that, I’ll always be that I’ll always be yours. 

Because you'll never Believe

It's daffodil Season, and so I
think of winters past

           Remember
     how we used to season
     our sweet
     potatoes with
oregano
you kept in a tiny jar

        My old fashioned
             candy heart
    would get sticky...    as I watch you
    hovering
lovingly    over such
a warm stove      fingers earnest
     and reverent,
       saxophone,
 careful-l-y dropping     fairy      dust
on 'range sleep wedges
          ...
breathing    like
             warm                     crystal     in   the window

We'd smash
potatoes
    into shape-shifting
pools
       dark
       thick  
       tomato     .ketch up.
that glistened in the steamy house.

Caution not, leaning back
smiling at eachother for     making
   for...
living
such a day worthy of that     moment
bellies full
of equal parts
     ketchup       and        sweet potato, timeless
     orange         and        red..

But most of all your oregano, a secret aphrodisiac of your turning Roma ancestors
                          no doubt.

a pleasure filled death

I offer you my lips
parted
by rosebuds
  wearing
the
deadly mask of a child you
reach
  my face
and squeeze
until you see the juicy beads of angry red
rolling
   out