Ghost
She used to pull hair and talk mud. In between hay bales and under strings she hides around corners and flashes her hair. No more substance than a laugh living in glass covered beaches. This town is a treadmill. He mortars his eyes shut. In the darkness she is everything
Scarf Man
He cried, and cried and kissed him on the lips, chest, and thighs. Feeling how even his bones had become thin, hollow, empty, a winter birdhouse. The hospital curtains kept on swaying and moving feeling air being air. They wouldn’t stop dancing insisting upon the grieving man’s attention. The sad mans breathing snagged. His bowed head rising from the dead mans chest as if he was waking from the junkyard waters of a sleep that refused him. Through the tears the man could see that the aseptic blue was slowly turning into a parade of hot coffee, confetti, and nights with a friend, only sweat between them. Summoning the days before the sick that had slipped into the cadaver’s brain was suddenly easy.
Rising from his knees, moving with the curtains. A smile grew onto the man’s face. His wet eyes now beautiful glass. Above the whirs and mechanical drones of pumps moving lungs, pressing blood into constricted spaces, laughter could be heard. First a dust devil, gaining traction, now a tornado moving time along with the politics of memory.
A Good Breakup is Hard to Find
It was unfortunate. The black marks ran all across his hands and smudged the shadows of his face, turning him into a dark caricature of who he should be.
-Where are we going?
The grit burned the bottoms of her feet.
Mineral sands and sharp bites of shell.
Beaches are a terrible place for sex. Towels disappear in the dark and imaginary sharks never stop circling.
The terror of the unknown drifting in the confused waters was somehow so much worse than the insecurities that slowed his breath and turned vitriolic bravery into short, poorly cut sheets of gasps.
-fuck off
-fuck you
-fuck me
-fuck you
-fuck me
Conversation composed of questions.
About as satisfying as Pabst when you want Jack.
Is the unwelcome a whole chapter written in my head?
A thirteen-year-old child.
-I hate you
Yes.
That’s it.
She’s an Ocean
Dating you is like dating the tide no matter how hard I try to hold you back,
you always wash my
always wash my
always wash my
sandcastle away
Earthquake
The walls closed in. claustrophobia’s too sterile to properly convey the whole mess of associations of this structural collapse.
It’s not claustrophobia.
It’s not claustrophobia.
It’s not claustrophobia.
Claustrophobia is when you’re in a crowded bus; when you’re stuck in an elevator with your landlord
This was being buried alive by hot rats.
Claws leaving marks their putrid sweat indistinguishable from my own.
Layers of white wash start crumbling off… and the dust in my eyes.
The bathroom graffiti underneath became plain once again.
No nearby tables, no doorframes.
My mouth opened showing cobblestone teeth, a brief scream of rank air escaped, the diseased ghost of the last meal.
Then, the cheapest grit and rubble fill the vacuum.
No dog wants to dig this deep.
Car Musing
-You’re weak Dan, you can never say no can you?
-No I’m not, I’m just being nice.
-“Nice” is picking him up from the airport.
Calling up your old friends to buy him cocaine and leaving it in his mailbox is creepy and obsessive.
-Shut up. Just shut the fuck up. Why wont you fuck off? I know what I’m doing.
-No you don’t. You know where this is headed.
There is only one person in this car.
He looks like a dumpling.
Question
Do the homeless have funerals?
All that’s left is a human sized spot worn into the grains of a city park bench.
The wood is for remembering because the street corner forgets.
Montana Bar
The bartender had the look of someone tired of being tired
Like real fed up with this shit.
Like she was the kinda gal picking pockets just to see how many she could.
While she wore down the varnish on the counters the loud man told the lump how he tried to be a writer but his Taco Bell characters where all cheap blooded and leaked on both ends.
He explained how his fiction wriggled til it became fact baring its pubes for every schoolgirl to see.
The lump was told words almost landed the loud man in jail on several occasions.
Everyone could tell the loud man felt empty without half a bottle of malt liquor in his belly.
That the loud man told firework stories all flash and bang, no substance.
That he was afraid to piss in public ever since a man with a snaggle tooth smile caught him spittin’ in a urinal and asked if dicks made his mouth water.
He used a dull razor.
He liked how the rust of his blood mixed with the shaving cream and made his neck look like a birthday cake.
The bartender poured herself a shot of the good stuff.
It was the third one this hour and the sun had only died recently.
Relationships
Once the needle goes it never comes out.
Worry
I worry about myself constantly.
The face drowning in muddy pools is that of a child and I need to protect him.
He rides the bus back and forth just waiting for her to get on.
He feels important, reading and rereading the same issue of the New York Times.
So many people have seen him as if he was composed by Beethoven.
Shoulders straight, legs crossed.
The driver sees him as furniture that should have been tossed after the last garage sale.
The heavy lidded sky spelt out words that alternated between longing and envy.
His face is the one that steals its way into my photographs.
Better trapped in plastic time than honey and vinegar.
Better to walk slow.
I avoid tall grass and loose lipped sap.
Ever since I heard about a friend who hit a tree.
The Evergreen bark was hard enough to break his pelvis in three places.
It filled him with the winter.
Turning him into a tree as well.
His mouth full of sap.
Alpha-beta
Tomorrow tearing letters from the alphabet.
I’m missing key vowels. The system simply isn’t enough.
Trapped in 26 ways needing a 27th a 28th and a 29th, for these last yells.
She falls forward and then backwards drifting.
A phantasm of unrelenting turbulence.
The densities of her laugh, turning microscopic coincidences into macroscopic threads of perfectionistic fate.
Abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
Isn’t she pretty?
The letters can’t contain her.
The Last Cigarette
Once you begin its nearly impossible to stop. Pieces found in ashtrays, garbage cans, gutters, glittering store fronts and mail in promotionals. When left in their small boxes and peppermint soft metal packaging, they are innocuous almost beautiful in their new pale uniformity. Always taken out and used, they catch fire transmuting into so much ash. Everyone has his or her own brand; I’m showing you mine.
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