1
Tell yourself she does not need you.

2
Tell her it is all
in her head.
She says ‘yes,
that is the problem.’
Buy her a shot of gin to slow
down her overthinking.

3
Give her blades of steel
for her birthday
show her you think she is
strong enough to resist
pounding in her wrists
that reminds her she is
still here.
When she tugs the strings
tying her down
draw balloons on the ends
of her scars
kiss your way up her arm
whisper into her chest that
she can fly higher
now.

4
Tell her there is not enough of her
for you to lay your nighttime hand over
hold her thigh in your clasp
a skeletal prison.
When you fuck her you are
Shaking the bars to her cell.
Tell her you can break her free.

5
Fill her body with your voice.
Don’t let her expand
into it.
Don’t let her push every inch
of her illness
into her dried-out fingertips
drag them along the sun
to burn it out.
Keep her pared into pieces
hide the map she draws
to put them back together.

6
Tell her she is asking for attention.
Ignore her hands at the golden filigree
hem of your shirt
junkie on the street
needle still in vein
she begs you for change.
Push her greedy hands away.
Don’t pay her
your attention.

7
Tell her she is beautiful.
Tell her she is pretty.
Thin.
Princess.
Don’t mention that her heart
beats into you while she sleeps
has more muscles than a fist.
Don’t be there when it strains
stains her tank top burgundy.
Don’t tell her she is worth it.

8
Strap on your white
armor

9
Tell her you can fix her
your grease-tinged meatball hands
can tuck thread through
her holes, reattach the lose parts of her soul
back to before.
Tell her you love her.
Forget to show her.

10
Tell her that you
are the cure.

---

(Album cover art by Dave Quiggle)

Everytime I hang up the phone
I say “I Love You, bye.” 
as most people do.

“Iloveyoubye”
as if it was a single word
“Iloveyoubye”

and she did the same.
“Love you too!” 
She would say
“loveyoutoo” 
as if it was a single word.

Then,
The United States Government.
Confessed to everyone
that there had always been a finite number of lies
and we just ran out
The last lie ever told,
was that it was all going to be just fine.

Some politicians went to jail
some police officers too
and more than a few world religions collapsed. 
Everything seemed just fine to me though.

I hang up the phone
I say
“Iloveyoubye”
each time still
“Iloveyoubye”
“I… love you…” 
And the silence after clutches my chest
like a windshield clutches a bug. 
And she just whispers
“…Bye”

No.
When she says No
She means it.
Whether she’s dressed like a nun
Or has a low cut blouse.
Whether you think she’s classy
Or simply trashy
Whether you believe she’s easy
Or the most complex puzzle in creation
No means No
Whether she’s a blind date
A one night stand
Or some girl you’ve been with for awhile
Whether you think she’s beautiful or intelligent
Or uninteresting or unattractive.
no will always mean no.
sober or drunk
assertive or mild tempered
strong or innocent
her body is not free-way
her word is valid.
respect her because she is
someone’s daughter
someone’s mother
someone’s sister
aunt, girlfriend or wife.
respect her because she is a woman
ever before she became your conquest.
And when she says no
she means it.

I’m 17 and I call my molester
from the last NYC payphone.
When that last breathy hello echoes,
I slam the receiver against the coin slot
and we laugh and we laugh,
the phone booth and me.
In that untraceable call,
I call you out and I take the sun
back to the sky.
I fall back in love with holidays
and rooms in a family home
ruined by genuflecting and you like this, faggot,
don’t you?
The man I almost killed myself over
said (when I told him about you):
You’re too much, I can’t do this, I can’t do you anymore
and I stopped talking all together.
During the mute cutting years,
I ate the hole away with fast food
and binges and private purges.
Now when a man introduces himself
with your demon name, I recast him
as something primitive:
I call him a beast.
I call him buttercup.
I have slept with four men
who share your Christian moniker
and each time they bled
I pictured you out of my life all together.
I dream a world of no more Bryans.

It feels like God doesn’t love us, 
like there is no gospel in the gusts of wind 
that sometimes wrap around us. 
It feels like all of the prayer & preaching, 
all of the song & celebrating The Word
doesn’t seem to help us, 
doesn’t protect us from the grip of injustice, 
doesn’t defend us from those who have descended upon us
& stripped the life from our bodies. 
It feels like there is a bounty on our backs, 
like we are destined to keep dying unarmed & at fault. 
It feels like the angels have abandoned our skies, 
& Heaven will not have us.

The Romans conquered with fight set to music, rhythms designed for men carrying sixty pounds of oil and flour and weapons on their back. Centuries later, Napoleon’s soldiers, without packs of food to weigh them down, light as feathers for the marching plunder, marched to the beat of a different drummer, one faster and more efficient. Soldiers may have minded, but their feet and their stomachs crawled on.

Contemporaries said these men were hypnotized; heart beat in sync with boot fall and drum. Minds pendulummed. They knew music gave the soldiers courage. In fact, the music was courage. Look, you know the drill- left right left. We chant until we are enchanted.

But music doesn’t kill people; people kill people …. So you must remember: the freedom singers that walked with Reverend King, cross before them – no turning back, faced dogs and death and sneering white faces, broken bones and their own paralyzing fear. Woodie Guthrie’s guitar. Miriam Makeba in South Africa.

Music makes us brave enough to praise a god we do not see, to dance when we are weak, and to fuck when we are too tired to love. Music has been the oppressor, the hero, and the high-jacker.

But then there are so many other things that are like music: becoming aroused at porn, or frozen near deep water. We jump at snake-like shadows across the trail. We sneeze, and yawn. We have sweaty palms and a stomachache and even George W. ducked a shoe at the podium before he even thought to catch it.

So that’s why this Autumn when you sit in the living room, around the table with your friends and the “rapey” song comes on the radio, you all have to talk about it for the one hundredth time. You’ve groaned and eye-rolled at every party, wedding and dance night this summer. You think it’s dance music set to misogyny. Someone wonders aloud why people got so mad about the lyrics, after all, there have been plenty of other songs about rape and murder and all the rest. “Have they listened to pop music, like ever?” says your friend. You have to laugh bitterly, thinking of the foreboding of down by the river, the whiny insistence of delilah, the catchy obsolescence of under my thumb. But you do secretly hate the song, the slime and creep of it, the moral outrage you feel – you hate that too.

But there it is: your foot jumping up and down beneath the table. Someone finishes their wine, rises from the table and turns the song up. And without thinking, you all get up and dance. Your bodies move to the beat, unwillingly, but joyously. And you all laugh and smile. You are all enchanted, ravished even. The song isn’t about rape, it is rape.

Just because I’m very high on acid,
doesn’t mean your hands aren’t two mares, foaling in the night.

Place them in my rapture machine
& get in the backseat.

Look, kid— no one knows
how this works, just
how it doesn’t. I never said
it would make sense.

Didn’t your mother tell you: you can’t wish for more wishes. You can’t make a dress out of a beehive. You can’t believe she’s not just going to walk down the stairs & start making you pancakes.

Okay, kid, make a wish. No, not that one.

i’m about to tell you what to do 
i don’t mean to second guess 
expressions only antagonize 
the no longer uninformed 
and always deconstructed 
i define feelings but i don’t mean to 
scare you like you scare me 
now there are two of us 
on this sweat soaked chair 
i keep leaning forward 
heavy handed and too heady 
to stand up on my own 
when you say 
she suffers from A Cute Depression 
i consider Your Intentions 
i never recognized 
my skill sets on my own 
performing under the pressure 
of the Same Old Scenery 
let me submit to you 
let me be the way you want 
let me find a comfortable position 
for this bent neck to rest 
pretending not to hear 
sounds other people make 
little sirens moving oceans 
assuring i’m safe 
if you only knew how hard 
i made it for my self conscious 
insecurities as a meltdown 
under the sun’s orbit tone 
i muted to say you still love her 
i can’t find a way to love my self 
i can only find these words 
i don’t think i’m going to give 
because this is not a love poem 
this is the way we look at each other 
when neither of us know 
how to stop shouting

(first photographed by Pioneer 10 in 1973)

Strung-out among the stars,
we’ve photographed you nude
at last. It wasn’t hard.
We knew where to look.
(Galileo named you
in his little black book.)
Besides, you’ve always been
a nudist, a whore, even
before Jupiter plucked you
from obscurity, made you
famous, made you his lover.
He dragged you in,
you’ve said, by the chin—
His third wife! Third from him!
And now, finally, we’ve got,
in all its tabloid glory,
shots of your naked body.
The scars are all there,
the stretchmarks.
The wear and tear is clear.
Oh, heaven’s bartender!
habit has crushed you
into your very own moon—
sized pillar of salt—
forever looking over
your shoulder, battered
and bald. What do you care
who takes your picture?
Your molten core remembers
how to turn for the camera.
Face is all you have left to give.

---

(This piece was first published in Issue 19 of Assaracus.)

I can’t sleep in someone else’s bed.

I eat onions every day.

I have OCD and I can’t stand when people touch things.

Sometimes I can’t stand when people touch me.

I don’t own an umbrella because I always abandon the things that protect me.

I tell my secrets onstage.

Sometimes I tell other people’s secrets in an effort to feel more like myself.

I have OCD and I can’t stand when people move stuff.

Sometimes I can’t stand when people move me.

I didn’t know my grandfather but I live with his skeletons in my closet.

I’m afraid of growing soft like my mother in the arms of a lying man—her heart is a rotted peach.

I’m afraid of growing spikes from my wounds like my father—his heart is a pinecone.

My parents love too much.

They love so much they had to put 75 miles between them and live in separate houses.

Men say I’m too serious except when I’m drunk in a bar and laughing and wearing a dress he likes.

Sometimes when that happens I feel cold like predator and I wonder would he like serious better if he knew he was prey.

My grandfather was a predator and I inherited his affinity for perfectly folded towels, his disease of exact.

Reasons why I can’t have a boyfriend: My bloodline is poison and the drama is contagious. I’m afraid of contaminating someone healthy.

I’m afraid of meeting someone who has everything I want and realizing he’s the version of myself I’ll never be.

I only date other damaged people with the hope they won’t know any better.

Sometimes I think being with someone would calm my mind but I don’t want to treat a man like Prozac.
It’s taken so long to be able to sit peaceful in a room by myself I don’t want to invite anyone else in.

I’m an armadillo, sheathed in leathery armor,
Alone in the desert doding trucks on their way to somewhere
Better.