"where do your keeps toy?" asked the tenderfoot "my box." said the greenhorn

the world ate me.
i am a monkey,
i am smarter than you.

ask me a question and
swerve into the ditch. cars
are in the median.

inside the world as well.
because i brought them,
because i was hungry

i would like it "townsize fry'd," please

i am an other's luck for... another's luck. her
luck for her luck was all i was or would've been
had it been for good...

but it wasn't. it
just wasn't and nothing stops too...
not to listen and... why should i not
lock in knockles too,
knock, till killed, he haunts us.

two people can't move for two.
it's written in a boo. kept inside
of a haunted house
on a haunted hill
in a haunted village
where the only noise is old, crickety noise from old men in rocking chairs that chew their lips until a fester drips to their shirts, their pants, an old floor above where they buried their grandmother and her mother and her grandaughter and her daughter.

and. i'll never live to see my babies. four-eyed and foolish, banging their swollen heads
on a concrete wall
in a concrete city
where the only noise cold. and an old man cricks across the mississippi looking for a craw-dad.

"craw craw" that's what my dad used to say when, late at night, i could hear him finishing off my mom. i love my baby
brother.

go go go to yours. yours is yours for your hours.

i'd like the cities too
never bees, buzzing our
cat's trophy; it was she
--one--on alone
from a bay, winking
to away the city

the bicycle

the bicycle is broken. I and she
deflate the tires and chip away the paint
with two metallic tools and iron nails.
like butcher’s belts around a lame horse leg,
we squeeze, we knock the handlebars to glue.

yaoza

chomp chomp
the end of the world ate a monkey
toy. the type that says clank clank
clank clank. clank clank. if clank clank
was a miniscule of a moment and a
period LASTED FOREVER.

i hate my menopause.

Racing

Designed to squeeze the arteries,
this problematic stretch of road
around the hills and trees becomes,
with sudden emphasis, a blur
of curbs and pavement stripes.
An airplane flies at lesser speeds,
designed to angle at the road
our truck achieves terminal G's--
avoiding stoplights, the cars
a driver hates to veer around--
the windows flanked with trees, a wind
that pulls the coulds through the foliage;
air is rougher in a country
busheled by acreage and squares.

Box Truck

I turned around and was confused,
more or less, by the disappearance
of a valuable truck, abused
but identified through adherence
to my employer's rules--it rolled
how fast, how slow? While the gas nozzle
that vibrated in my hand tolled
the deep brass baritone rumble,
that now feels misplaced. The trailer
sits innocently sunbathing,
and a giant of a man, bailer
of another life, his arm raising
an alarm for me, with black face,
apologizes. His lips a space apart.

Watering

I built my wall around a house,
a trim garden blooming inside.
And a wife, in a yellow blouse,
that sits beside
the crumpled petals of the peonies.
The ants parade under her feet,
like well trained marching ponies,
their antennas quarrel when they meet.
The summer bends their busy trail,
as water trickles out the hose,
and turbulates some paper seeds that sail
in a puddle, overflowing
with ease beneath a faucet:
and the sparkling nozzle head
she turns at the expense
of dusty beds.

your camera

within your attic, i stumbled upon a trunk. inside, i found, below some
clothes, three polaroid pictures, sitting on the back of a folded poster.
the white edges of the first hid the contents of the second, and
the second, the same to the third, making a rectangle, almost perfect.

it was you, the first, but a you that i did not recognize. the cheeks were
much stronger, the lips, fuller. you always wore a lot of makeup.
i angled the picture, and it caught the fading twilight, spreading upon
an off-center shot of your face, the u of mute blurred across the stereo.
your hair was in curls, reminding me of that halloween years ago,
you, dressed as monroe, and me, dressed as an older JFK.
we rooted through thrift stores that fall, looking for our ideal
black suit, white dress, finding only the perfect pearl earrings.

later, as i was walking home, i saw a young blonde woman
on the street. reminded me of you, i smiled and reached in my pocket.
twilight became smeared rouge and i turned. comparing the picture
to her hair becoming orange in the evening fading to night.
i squinted, staring at the image. it was you, but a you with longer hair
and less wrinkles, pursed lips, and warm features, freckles
with the picture in my hands, i watched for details, your face
off center, the angle, your lips. you wore more makeup then.

i set the other within the folds of my bedding, and i stared. this was
not you. it was a woman, yet not; a memory, perhaps, a place, maybe
something forgotten, or nothing at all. i sat upon my bed and sighed,
rolled onto my side, and stared. the picture wrinkled below me, and
i brought it to my face, feeling for imperfections with my hands,
looking with the glare of the table lamp. to my eye, it was unmarked.
the picture of a picture of the poster above my bed: the famous one of
marilyn with blonde curls, red lips, holding down her white dress.

we would lie here in the heat of the summer, talking about ourselves,
and the previous evening, making attempts to piece together the events,
the stares, and the kisses, the silence. and, the entire time, unknown to you,
reflected in the daylight on the poster above my bed, i watched your naked
body squirming to stay covered within the folds of my bedding.

scores of... something ending in a y

this was when my world began to burn into
my own, to lose itself within what it couldn't say
in the minutes between all of the momentous
mind-follied mind-reactions that we pulled that day
from the little-baby baby-thoughts that went
along with us within ourselves, muling our weight,

the end of my world was angerment
it was the moment when i stood and stayed
and stared and saw the my range of wonderment
returned into itself as a mood, candied
and raw, molten and melted, caged with fonder
memories of the other year's yearly memories.

day by day until no longer were there weeks in
our percepts, but ounces of tomorrows laying
in a blackened field of browning mushkins.
they were mushkins they; they were not they
but one, always one, a smallened hint
of adolescence in what will always be a babied
form-thought, held in what--for us--just wasn't

Wheatgrass. The Band.

Begin opening music. Cloud from stage left. Cloud falters, makes a sound like "tssp..." No. That isn't the cloud. That is the gas pipe, something hissing awkwardly from its single valve; but -- it's not gas that's coming out. No! Tiny leaves fly up, meet in the air, and out from them grow the branches of a tree! Cool! A freaking tree -- but what kind is it? It is a hickory brocade -- the very symbol of Wheatgrass! Who is on tour again. Who is putting on their guitars in the back. Who is preparing their arms with juice to play fourteen hours straight UNDERWATER. That is the new big thing I guess. And look now, on the rainbowy hill of old vans -- there they stand. Seven feet of pure cloud.

oh regretlessness! when must you excuse? but this is not to it, but you if you is when my thoughts reflect

understand this now:
we are these noises.

fallen on the gilded, we've
run among the wilderness
of the
two-treed--booted and torn
with the after-mathematics'
insinuated context of our
everyday's associates.

or so they said.

they--those that've
fled, those that
have golden,
that are those that
lost or left to us,
those that folded.

or so i said.

when i was saying what i
was saying about where i
was--without them--staying.

Feeling inhuman/inhumane.

There's desperation in the air,
beading on the windows and making
the curtains flutter.
Some kind of devlish bullshit
two-faced kismet brought me here
and has not left me,
for better or for worse,
with a thin blanket
and a pillow that makes me sneeze.
I kid myself sometimes,
visions of grandeur, of
utopian mornings and days
where the sun barely sets.
I am suspended in time,
between points in life
worth waking up for.

artificial sunlight

I prefer my light from
lamps, ruining my eyes but
warming my home.
Truly the easiest bulbs to
garner results.
I wonder if I sit here long enough
will I flower.