Where were you the first time you found out

someone you slept with was dead? My legs are so long

that everyone expects me to be thin

without driving myself crazy. Hours after

the twin tours collapsed like tired dogs

my mother and I walked home

from 96th street. Terrible, pink smoke rose

over the East River. My tragedy hasn’t happened

yet.      My cancer didn’t have the chance

to become cancer. At night, waiting to hear the car pull in

I think up horrible accidents in the road. My dreams

are filled with devastated weathermen, trash cans on fire

and then I wake to the sound of gravel      scattering wildly

                                                                         through the driveway

If no one told you how beautiful of a bean you were today then I am telling you right now that you are a beautiful bean.

Now you are a beautiful bean in a coffee cup of soil.

I water you then place you in the sunlight.

You become a beautiful bean plant.

I transplant you into a pot because you grow into a beautiful bean plant too large for a coffee cup.

You thank me by growing more beautiful beans of you.

I thank you and run an experiment on the beautiful beans you grow.

One of your beautiful beans becomes the control bean.

I whisper thank you to the control bean every hour.

One of your beautiful beans becomes bean A.

I whisper I love you to bean A every hour.

One of your beautiful beans becomes bean B.

I whisper you are beautiful to bean B every hour.

The experiment is a great success and the beautiful beans grow into beautiful bean plants.

I pick beautiful beans from them and repeat the experiment for each plant.

You are every beautiful bean plant.

I wake up in an indoor potted field of you.

You are every beautiful bean and I give you away to my neighbors and other members of the community in handfuls.

Every year she awaits
the arrival of the Perseids,
those familiar friends stream
like curtains, just behind,
the silhouette of hands,

“Hello,” and “Goodbye,”
in the same instant
and meaning the same.

Every year they fall
in familiar voices.
They sing swift

in silver and blue.
She cannot tell
if the song is sad

or joyous, and that is okay.

Their presence breaks through
cloud banks and hot saltwater
where the sky and the ocean
are the same color.

There is no difference there,
either, or here

or anywhere.

sun rises / sun sets / mood makes bad judgments / rise fall

run rise fall run

cap it capulet & keep yr chin up lady

hear them pumas circling la casa
how in hell cd one sleep w/ that?

salacity for our ancestors … find yrselves religion

it wuz part of it before
   & now there’s little more
      &so there is more than before

When I people watch, I’m looking for beauty. Or sex at least. I wish D’angelos would create a signature sandwich and call it, Untitled (How Does It Feel). So I’d have something to eat while sexting you. What if dicks had knuckles? What if my dick was a literal knuckle sandwich? Pick the most sensual of the cheeses. Think of the heartiest bread. What if this was making you hungry? What would that say about you? What would that mean to me? I totally forgot that one of the main aspects of Robocop’s creation myth is the fact that that chick couldn’t not check out that dude’s nude package. If she doesn’t glance, Murphy doesn’t get blown to bits. They actually dramatize the glance too, with a pause. Adam and Eve, I guess. Literally skullfuck Peter Weller’s tiny face bones, please.

it was the spray starch that took me back. i had to think about it for a moment.
what used to be the department store perfume of legal secretaries is now captured in my can of spray starch.
i remember her eyebrows were too thin. they matched her lips. her husband, i think his name John. and a daughter who didn’t live there. a son who was away at camp.
me. my mom. the cat. and suitcases. my childhood hastily catalogued into U-haul boxes.
they were good friends to let us come there and stay. were we grateful? i’m sure we must have been. but i don’t have a sense memory that brings me back to gratitude.
i remember heat. Southern California, San Fernando Valley heat.
our windows were closed at night. we weren’t allowed to run the air conditioning.
my mom sobbed into the pillow of the bed we shared. i turned my back to her and tried to find pockets of air.
Richard Ramirez was out there. people laid awake in their beds at night listening. waiting. he raped and robbed and decapitated and murdered. i hardly noticed. i just wanted the window open.
i remember solitude. teaching myself how to bake bread. teaching myself how to skateboard so i could get to the tennis courts at the bottom of the hill. i taught myself that bloody knees weren’t worth crying over.
a bag of tennis balls and a racket were cheap therapy. every ball had his face on it.
i scavenged quarters for the $2.00 discount theater so i could see the same movie for the 14th time. it was air conditioned and dark. i could catch up on sleep. Richard Ramirez didn’t go to the movies.
i watched a lot of MTV. it was cool to like Depeche Mode. i wasn’t. i didn’t.
the boy came home from camp. i knew him from his room. i would go in there when no one was home. i knew where his dirty magazines were. sometimes i wore his board shorts. they smelled like Zog’s Sex Wax. they smelled like teenage California.
i wanted a friend. maybe if i’d shown him my tits. i didn’t know their influence yet. i didn’t know that i was a burgeoning statistic.

i see my mother in pictures and i don’t remember her. she was there with me. holding my hand. signing my school papers. but i have no memory of her before that summer. i feel sad. maybe i would have liked her. maybe i would have wanted to be near her. instead i’m left with this taste of rust and salt.

i remember not wanting to be alone. i remember wanting to be asked so i could answer. i remember heat and sweat and anger. i remember wanting to be scared of Richard Ramirez. it would have been something. it would have been more than this.

I don’t know a lot of food and you should shove
all of that food into my mouth at one time
there is truly a whole planet that I don’t know

the sky looks a way on a different side from me
and there is a you existing far away

there are so many people sitting right now
far away from me and likewise

I never met the insides of my toes
and I have always had my toes

I had a plan to kiss a person in a cornfield
while I wore all black, this is what always is
when the sun is coming up in a cornfield

I am trying to bite the atmosphere
and swallow it with all of its bones

there are parts of time that happen when we sleep
dogs sometimes probably bark
in unison miles away

if we were stuck in the snow
our whimpers might sound like harmony

people die when they’re sleeping
remember that time that there was

a universe that happened without us. Someone has
a come at the same time I do but
that makes my comes feel very little

I made a bust of my dreams
it looks the most like me hugging you
but also like me concealed in forest

what I mean is that there is only me at once
there is something of me that is always a before thing
and always an after thing.

right now this poem is very urgent
it’s not a point
though, just that you are hearing this thing of me
right now.

1.
Among twenty snowed-in mucous membranes,
The only moving snot-nose
Was on the face of your mama.

2.
I was of three minds,
Like a love triangle
In which there are three your-mamas.

3.
Your mama whirled in the autumn wind.

It was a small part of the rigmarole.

4.
A man and a woman

Are one.

A man and a woman and your mama

Are really one.

5.
I do not know which I prefer,

Your booty’s innuendo

Or your booty without inflection,

Your mama whistling at me

Or just after.

6.
I’m sick. Less from long withdrawals
Or booty gamesmanship.
That back shelf of your mama, we
Smacked it, flipped it to and fro.
We rubbed that back shelf
And gave it a Booty Certificate.

7.
O thin men of Middlesex County,
How do you imagine those golden butt-cakes?
Do you not see how your mama’s
Wardrobe envelopes, for rock formations,
And the waddups are about you?

8.
I knew noble my accent

Was lucid, an indescribable trifle;
But I knew, too,
That your mama was involved
In what I know.

9.
When your mama flew out of sight,
It marked an effort
Or an opinion of many clarities.

10.
As a signifier, your mama
Flows into the next neighborhood.
Even Ben-Wah balls

Can cut a butt-cake more sharply.

11.
She rode over Connecticut
With a glorified colitis.
Once her booty hit the ground
She mistook
The shape of her equipage for

Your mama.

12.
Our romance be moving.
Your mama must be flying.

13.
It was example of all agreement.
It was snowing.
And you were getting on the sofa.
And your mama just sat there
In her seat, licking her lips.

i don’t get drunk on yom kippur anymore

when we were all strung up together in white plains, i vomited all over the sequined table spread.

i have not since gone on birthright, nor am I capable of getting a buzz off stolen

manischewitz

from the cabinet

it is
what the archdiocese
would have pumped out by the gallon
out of worcester

everytime I visit my dad on christmas

there is no true faith, just competing, shitty, cut-up, fortified wines

sometimes
it’s all haraam
altogether