20120513

At least Y isn't Z.

Dear Baby,

dear baby, come home baby. I miss you only maybe because you aren't home,

baby.

I search trees in hopes of you. I found some in Dante, Gilgamesh,

my night was cedar and jewels, tobacco smoke and a fool who

bought me breakfast food and seems somewhat cruel

with blonde hair and blue eyes too. I know this means nothing to

you, baby. True words were said, maybe, but not as true as

truer drier

poems you read to me, lately. And then I find you've been

home, baby. And I realize I'm just a toy reflecting

some love stories you've been wanting to play-act,

lately. Like when we play house and make-believe,

stately in sand boxes and cardboard boxes,

under mother's date tree. You ask too much of me.

I am little seeds, dry cranberries, tasteless

until you consume three of me. You're hurting this lady,

baby. I think you want a little girl who seems crazy.

I flat-out refuse to be a bird in that tree, baby. I was that way

across the sea, only months ago, back in January. It almost

killed me. I swore up and down I saw Hades. Solomon's sin

crept into you too, baby. Cause we're torn in two, clearly. And

now it's messier than it can be for this lady. Animal tracks lead to

briar, you see. I need sweet lullabies but I call you

baby?

That doesn't seem false or mixed to me. And I hate how bad I wish

you came home and crept into my bed, baby.

20120508

Today I read my best friend poems. They hurt her heart and widened it and made her think there are others like her. White men, black men, women with names of men, yellow men, jazz and dialect and the pastoral, all in tender little moments as she lay at my feet in tender little daisies. Some of which I stuck in my hardened toes. She unhardens my heart. She softens my soft core until it is malleable as poetry, until it can bend to include her and her bigness, ready to receive poetry and daisies and my seedy needs. The woman is pierceable and I will not pierce her like I do to others maybe, maybe she will pierce me maybe,

we don't need radicals, we need shoemakers who love making shoes and make love like Marx. We don't need union organizers, we need pharmacists who love filling pills and would dance to Engels, if he had played a swing jazz piano. Smokers who puff the rich confetti cigars filled by Fourier.

20120503

onan (II)

You, slate gray,

honest ways and motioning hands

slow slow circles--

cupping sailor knots from my back

rubbing them dissolvingly

into an ash, into an ink, into the

coloring of your red blue green sailors' tattoos
with my

knots. Not blue-eyed, not tall,

not one to knot up my little gold chain gut.

onan

We lie entwined.

"I just had deja vu," You say.

"Are you an atheist?" I sit up.

"I think so. I guess that means it was just my brain, right? Which can mean two things. Either I can't trust my mind at all, or it's the only trustworthy thing. It's either misfiring, all sorts of vulnerable little synapses lying in wait, or it's picking up the way time unfolds and refolds, even if only for a moment."

I wake up. You are sitting by the bay window, reading Pynchon. It is raining. You have tried to keep quiet but I am cold. My body is not little like yours, and not compact, I am soft bruiseable women curves, you are hard angular ribcage and can handle sleeping on the floor. I cannot let you into my house and so we sleep on the floor. I cannot sleep alone and so we entwined sleep.

I walk downstairs and outside. You live in the high hills and so I smoke, and watch mist cover the bay like your scratchy wool quilt, the one your mother made you. Because she likes you, you said. I stand in the middle of the street and hope life for two weeks will be somewhat like deja vu, deja vu, deja vu, deja vu, I cannot see enough of you.

You come outside and you look tender at my hair all knotted. You always look at me tender. You look at me tender and agree when I ask you to tattoo me before I move away. Or you offer to pay for it. You do not mind, money is no object, you only ask me of me. I gave this before you asked and you know this and so really, you are asking nothing of me.

"It smells like Berlin," I say.

And it does. Wet wool and wet air wet cunt and your wet skin, all mixed on my sleeve, I always make love to men who smell the same, I am only slightly sorry to say, and I have deja vu of a wet morning, 6 am, on a balcony overlooking Kreuzberg. I stand over cities and do not feel small or too tall, it's just about trusting that all these structures will hold me. Sometimes it leads to a bitterness not tasted by a life measured out in coffee spoons.

You want the posthorn and I want the muted posthorn. This is so fitting, I think. You drive me home. Thank God, I think.

20120501

Dear Allison.

Tonight I did not understand (as


I lay with the careening nightskyness


a roof, house of grass with walls of fear,


possible approach surrounding me)


how maps painted a flat brown

inky Earth. The maps lied and I saw


it in the arabesque globe, globules of god,


I was lying alone in a park you see.


And I thought womanly thoughts, how no one
would appreciate this gesture of eggshell bravery,
this gesture of abandoning for abandon! this gesture
of whipping flagellation across its lashing teeth.


And you, you with your breakable tea bohemians, I


am too a breakable bohemian, cupped you have collected me
blown off dust from china stems steaming with chatter
chatter to everyone else, poetry to you (my poetry,

you--

to you). I trusted this schizophrenic city
tonight not to rush upon me from behind as
I turned cartwheels (I never told you because I never
remembered to, but once when I was a girl I spent the
summer learning, rope burn on the backs of knees. It wasn't sexy
it didn't need to be).

Letters are a curse. My photographic memory

a slimy receptacle, I balance as a ballerina wandering

home and tip my mind onto china bohemian fingers (and

I know you wonder the same, despite your love for poetry, the why,

the why, the why, the why, the why)

the illusion imposed upon me by mediator toward love object, you are the mediator,

the world is my love object, so some French asshole says.

I could sleep here-- you jump in lakes bare backed. I accuse you of being theatrical, you beg me to take it easy and you're trying and I now say stop trying. You are so lovely.