Feedback Loop

“I’ve lost my faith,” she said.

Not even the curls on his head moved. He was completely still. She wondered if he was dead. Of course, he wasn’t, but her head always went there with loved ones. If her mother didn’t bless the day with some incessant nagging or advice her head went there. When her roommates in college wouldn’t come home for the night. And so forth. But with him, especially, she always wondered if he was dead.

He sighed. The smell of the air told her so. When her parents would wake up in the morning, she would sit with them at the breakfast table and held her breath. The smell of married couples. The same pajamas, week after week; not brushing your teeth before the other woke up, maybe going half the day that way until leaving the house. Stale, overripe. His breath was clean, full of pheromones. She had read that every mouth has its’ own chemistry. You could be completely enamored with someone’s appearance, but kiss them and the attraction would be gone. With the wrong chemistry, of course.

He had refused to kiss her for days. Before they first went to dinner, he would only walk her to the edge of campus after class. Her skin itself would hurt when he’d say, “Later, tiger!” and bike away. One evening, he walked her home and she asked him in for tea. He sat on her heavy red futon and she brought him her books. The mating dance of nerds, really. She sat on the lifted floorboards, looking up at him, telling him strange stories about this author, that poem. She knew these things worked with men like him for two reasons. One, because so many men like him had proposed marriage to her already. Two, because she was convinced he was to be hers. Only some weeks and he was already the line by which she drew the world.

When he decided that it was appropriate to kiss, he did just that. She held his breath in her mouth so long, it felt as if chili peppers were being rubbed into her lungs. Later, he told her that her breath sometimes smelled bad when they had first met.

“On the metro today, I heard a man call the woman he was with ‘my love’. I cried in our closet for an hour.”

He turned his head away from her. He had a cherub’s face, young and clean. He couldn’t grow a beard. Cheeks redder than apples. When she had taken him home for the first time, her mother asked him if he was from the Ozarks. He looked like a child from fresh mountain air, she reasoned. He wasn’t, though. He was from a small town with a funny name in a state she had never been to. She hated his parents.

Her mother said she could always foretell how a man would treat her. She only needed to learn about his relationship with his mother. Before they went to bed, at his house, he and his mother would sometimes talk on the phone. They spoke often and he responded to her inquiries gently. He would end the call by saying, “Love you, too.” That part, she didn’t like. The “I” part was what mattered.

But that’s how she now knew about the hopelessness of it all. She felt like the finches in her parents’ backyard. Her mother had hung up a bird feeder one spring and, beside it, placed a cement bird bath. A diligent woman: she woke up every morning, rolled her shiny black hair in those notorious red curlers, and smoked her secret cigarette of the day in the backyard. The bird bath and feeder, then, were her excuse to be back there in the first place. And they came, the finches. Shrieking feathered thimbles with puffed chests. Her mother placed duck tape over the light switch for the back patio, because one finch had built a nest on top of the light. Every day they came.

Her mother started hating the shells left behind, scattered on the concrete patio and pasted there with finch poop. She stopped feeding them entirely, except for some days when she felt guilt or a particular variety of matronly. It didn’t matter, either way. The finches came every day, from the moment her mother hung up that bird feeder until the last time she had been back to visit. Her mother told her, in a sad voice, that sometimes the finches became so angry they would fly toward the house, breaking their beaks on the clean windows. The birds’ feelings didn’t matter, though. They came back, every day. For the moment when the maybe became a full vessel of nourishment.

“I don’t want what we have.”

He shifted, straightening his back. She reached out her fingers, ready to rub his spine, stopping just short of his skin. When they found out he had scoliosis, she went outside and cried while smoking a cigarette. He denied it, but she knew that sort of display made him uneasy. They had gotten into the shower before bed and she looked at his shoulder blades. One higher than the other. She liked tall men, because of her father’s height, so she knew that tall men held themselves awkwardly. Shoulders rounded forward, chin a bit tucked in. He was holding himself more vertically than she had ever seen and, indeed, there was a curve. Slight, but enough that he felt uncomfortable every day she had known him. He was tilting his head back, wetting his hair, mouth open to catch the stream. She stood at the end of the tub, shivering. Every few minutes she would place her hands on his chest to catch some of the warmth.

His skin seemed a paper towel, covered with grains of salt and flakes of pepper. Rough bumps everywhere, some as white as his own skin, some a furious red. She had whispered once that it was her favorite part of him. He was surprised and asked why. She responded that it made him a more visceral experience. Any lover can guess the real reason why, though.

She pressed a hand to her stomach. Nausea always battered her intestines at this hour. Breathing shallowly, she reached over to the desk for the pink bottle of bismuth. A chalky swig. She spilled a drop or two on the carpet and rubbed them out with her toe quickly, furtively glancing at him over her shoulder. Some nights she spent on her knees, hugging the stem of the toilet. It was always a shame when that happened, and perhaps not coincidentally when she was the one who made dinner. When they had gotten together, she was hungry all the time. Their dinner dates were often the first time she would eat that day. She did love her body, it wasn’t that; it was just as if her physical needs were a broken leather sole. As long as her shoes got her around.

He started feeding her every time they were together. People didn’t stop her on the street as often, telling her to eat more. She rarely stated a preference, because she had no idea what could be made at home. Anyway he was a bit of a food snob. She was fine with mayonnaise and he made his own aioli, that sort of thing. Only once did he mess up. He bought a cut of goat meat. He later told her that an old woman in the butcher shop asked what he was buying. When he answered “Goat,” she widened her eyes and started cackling. She wished him good luck and walked out, swinging her bags and shaking her head. Stubborn as always, more motivated by this (she could guess), he bought it nonetheless and prepared it that night. They had eaten the first few bites slowly, glancing up at one another shyly. She regally, gently, pronounced it shit. He gallantly threw the gamey morsels away and scooped her some ice cream for dinner.

“You’re ice. Really, you are. If a girl ever stays with you, it’s either because she doesn’t care about you or really doesn’t give a shit about herself.”

It seemed that tonight he couldn’t be bothered. She absently stared past his head, running her bony finger over her face, sometimes her cracked lips, stopping to poke at her chipped front teeth. Shivering, pulling the blanket over her legs, she continued to stare out the window. A crowd of young Spaniards walked by, her age, probably just leaving dinner. She used to stay up late, too, but he had work in the morning. The condition was that they could only sleep in the same bed if they turned in early. He exhaled, snoring a little. She turned off the light and lay down, face in pillow.

Oh water water on my sea,
If I say, yes, if I say
That I am not for you
Then, know no lack of love
Of mine pushed me from your bed.

Your love is steeper than
A whim of a woman can climb into.
You are the line by which
I draw the world.

These downward twirling feathers
Are only savage caricatures
Etched in charcoal, a muffled sketch
White threads hugging a stick
Without your mind to set them on fire!

My blankets wear the calligraphy of
Your ink, my poems written by
Our drying dried juices.
There's no almond to be shelled here,
A white lady soaked free of her brown frock.

Water water on my sea.

satnight

my body boogied with everyone
but you tonight and
my lashes quick picked up
young pretty boys they hardly
knew before they were ensconced
softly secure in my venus fly trap
and while my breasts were busy saluting and
the fleecey street lamps dropped gold dust and hops
became the perfume of the dance floor and the
move that shook the warped wood
solipsism shimmied from my eye shimmered down my cheek
and fell on her fucking face right in
the middle of the place so trembling
clumsy
(and when i look at her from behind
what happens dear is shes all turned around
like a pinwheel in the hot wind that blew all night
shes all turned around
all that ,is,,, you)

apple cheeks

i am small when i fold under
the weight of your regal discipline
i am no classic in my antique imitation
skirts and stockings
garters and corsets there
i go trying to lure you again baby blue
it's just that you are the king
of my genesis dreams i think if i heard
love waft from those peculiar long lips
like stacks of string sweetly lingering
on my hair i am sure i could not discern what you
were saying everything you utter unto me is
so
crisp

boy you are such a Boy
look at you with cheeks bloom bitten and crimson like
Doctor just clapped air into your lungs with that slap on the ass like
a grown-ass-man would know to give in loving you just
cannot be nasty you are not weathered aw look its little
boy lost sitting under the university oak tree reading bland poetry

look, your gaping baby blues might be sweet if the gaping
gap between what you see and what humanity (with its bituminous
steel-toed boots it polishes every moment) struts around economical
as cheap shoelaces free condoms the going rate of american soul just sayin’
your ecclesiastic eagerness helps as well as that dollar you gave that junkie
helped stick vapor up his heart

christ you are such a Boy
look at that tummy bulging with sweets and dinner you
made me call me your girl and that’s supposed to clear
libertinage from a straight up death goddess demimonde you
still think your heart levels the brambles of me like a fire please
your intentions are akin to those tedious callouses

i mean you look this certain stirring way when you
compare your insides to our outsides only to find all of us
lacking but sea level most of all and when this happens your
mouth purses so we will kiss you thickly pouring into your immensity
like one thought can, i mean you know better than to sleep there

your boyhood embarrasses boys
everywhere who would look at my tits when i place them on
a platter like this but you are too busy with bloomsday questions you
consider stark like the absence of absence or how to maintain your
autonomy in the throes of passion jesus just be lascivious for a second
get hard in my hands take shape like you can oh boy

you are the Only man.

decline of the western civilization (adoration): downfall circa 1945

sheet the sheet darling the sheet
pull the sheet over our arching bodies
and make sure the sheet falls under the comforter
you more comfortable knowing that the sheet
protects the comforter from our juices, the sheet
prevents you from washing the bulkier of the two, i know
you more ready to break open my pearls make them weep
as long as sweaty dust is caught by that sheet

cocaine new year's eve darling it's only an evening
slide the gauze over the distance between our bodies
and cradle this agnostic embryo into an opiate of eggshells
you self righteous knowing that the problem
of addiction encloses my dry night, your life
your cavalier boyhood prevents remembering, i know
you more ready to bend your elbow close that arm's distance
as long as i'm the only one with thirst around here

Teaching a Toddler(A woman-child?) the Manners(Manipulations?) of Love(Jealousy?)

please dont drink with her please dont think with her
something can happen some things i can do better i think
that i think better i think those things can happen
between you and between us things happen different than
the differences between you and that child, that girl
if you please please me first please

excuse me do not forget me excuse me no neglecting me
recuse yourself from all social niceties if you will
that require your nice manners, that refuse your nice & neat neglect of an ex
lover love her? lover it's unexcuseable
excuses are to me the lover's niceties of neglect

i beg your pardon darling please pardon my vanity
the tenacity of my unpardonable envy is begging
for the salve of you pardoning yourself from seeing an old darling
who is going to beg for the pardon, my king, of that wound
(on your chest) i pardoned myself from life to be a salve for
part based on you darling, part based on your pardon of my audacity

oh i thank you oh how i will for all things thank you
the blank hues of days you thank her for filling i will shade in
in shady willow tree caves i will thank you for the hue
of pointsettias poisioning your cheeks oh thank god for you

Apotheosis

Through plump porcelain
fingers ringed with gaelic grandmother's silver
and hardy long nails whose DNA are shot through with
cocaine and the dust of cowboys riding off to chase
injuns on TV screens and girls with bigger dreams
like triple D breasts this girl thing looks at me
and says its the touch, its any touch, its like
she's found the Cerberus to cork her nitrogen bottle of lonely
and it's touch and it will keep those shades in sohelphergod

I think desire or quelling it
works as well as dousing blue vibrating electricity
with water then wading in water so blue
as the lakes in north country and screaming
at the flagellation of poison coursing through
the maze of veins when those snakes that can
swim so sperm like up and through waves for days
and bite her right on her heel its like if we love her
we must fling bouquets to the wind and save our baby girl sohelpusgod

Through pulsating cayenne
hair ringed with grandmother's gaelic curls
and fetus sized wrists whose boniness grinds like
powder under an apothecary's beat and the dust that coats
your patriline because great great granddaddy drank mint juleps
with his feet propped on sooty scorched skin and courage
propped on his mother's womb this girl thing looks at me
and says its the touch, its any touch, its like
she's found the mouth that will blow the rank stench of a tomb away sohelphergod

I think this cartilage idiocy
catches as well as a poacher's trap catches
like the hammer of domesticity catches a most lovely
loving woman in the act of lipstick on the collar on the boxers catches
in the pores of grayish bloated mushrooms dank musty rainwater catches
on the snags in girls' cotton rigidity something like
when daddy brushed our hair he never knew how
but we laugh while our scalp sears and its like because he loves us
we must kiss rapiering stubble which grates us raw as pork sohelpusgod

Although viscous turquoise
eyes like yours stroked with the wrinkles of aged papyrus
and a form erect as Priapus whose vellum danced with
coarse musky hair waving like reeds headiness that
punches pow right in the think of all i have left
and demolishes me boy man god thing looks at me
and i don't need the touch, its not the touch, it's like
a harvest abundance when he pushes thermal oxygen out of his mouth pufff
when we are loving and from that I know weather ohthankyoulover.

the cop car roars by and ordains himself a liar
strands of my black hair fall fast and i call myself
the ugliest
i would claw at my face's windowframe like so many
wheels clutch at potholes but
my fidgeting hands are full with two bruised
persimmons, forlorn from their fall off
the tree
i bought them when i couldnt buy my reasons
for roaring up the interstate, pushing on
the clutch as desperate as my thighs push on your
ruddy ruby red ears
i stopped when i sold out my standing at the university
and bought these persimmons, sandpaper felt wet dreams on
the tongue
and crouched in the shadow of a meadow behind
the fruit stand
in fresno. imagine my surprise when orange silky skin
scuttles away from prying fingernails, opening like
rotting wet floorboards. i like it, this pulpy glove
sliding down my arm
the weathered brown face languishing beneath his straw hat and
the fruit flies didn't seem to mind when i
whisked my hand over the stand for a couple more
he didn't wake up, anyway i would have gotten them any way
i could to fill that wicker basket you picked out because
thank you for
the hows of
no the ways which

no you just remove the pit lodged between the buds of my breast
when you kiss there like so, like feathers, like a quill
puncturing the roaring rot of a seed
you pull me out so delicate

"the trees have their loves through they're different from mine"

a pretending like that would work
like taking the gremlin doubts that lurk
in my mind and snorting them down into my mouth
chewing them up and squishing them out
through the gaps in my teeth like tender
titian yams, all dull pumpkin spice.

a pretending like that would serve
like the way i dished up the curve
of my shrunken breasts in a boned corset
deluded, that, these were the roundest your tongue had met
truly though its a presentation hiding my womanhood
a sagging secret like a bar of soap in a stocking

a pretending like that would pervert
like sloshing around in mud and dirt
uncapping a jar, trying to capture the breath
of crimson tuberroses, light powdery and bereft
of weight. i hate that the thorny can smell this
waltz on the wind too, so i pull out the roots.

a pretending like that would incinerate
the feathered masquerade mask i would bait
a fire with, that big venetian spectacle you wanted
to wear on the town, so daunted
by showing us perfumed ladies your cherub face.
i would take it away to take away what would hide you.

a pretending like that would water down
a piece of your peace of mind, contrast like the sound
of uncapping your maker's mark, wanting to make a mark
on the tension of boyhood and tasting that dark
amber, which is just diluted now, because i like
your hands how they are. sober, crystal, unshaking.

or it could be (please please be) that pretending
she never sewed the frayed woolen lining
of your cold country solitude, that she
never came before me, it could be
as harmless as furtively clipping your nails.
maybe you couldn't play that guitar anymore but

you look so secured for me when you play bach.

Cherubim I'm Sorry but Thank You

If my nose were my child, the most valuable advice I could bequeath upon my aquiline little darling would look something like this:

“Poems and sneezes and bees and murmuring mornings will mislead you to think that roses will always offer you a powder perfume light as gossamer wings. I know, beloved- it seems as if one day, all the cherubs took a break from rolling around field of strawberries and stopped splashing in fountains of wine and visited Earth. Eagerly, wonderingly, these little babies –much like you!- popped into the most glamorous and bustling of metropolises, curious and energized at the spectacle man makes of himself. Yet, upon witnessing only terse acts of loving and the most disheartening acts of brutality, the tourist cherubs could not help but blush! Their round nectarine cheeks turned fiery red, a soft pink, even yellow with comical nausea. In the really extreme cases, blood fled their cheeks altogether and fled back to their enchanted nursery in the sky, leaving their faces a pearly white. There was no need for their cheek-blood to flee so hastily however; the disheartened and awoken little angels fled quickly after, scared of what they could possibly see next. The only evidence they left of their excursion? Their cheeks! Marked so, soiled really, with the shock of the ugliness of the human world, the cherubs never really wanted to wait for the sweet nectarine color to return- and definitely did not want to take this in-your-face reminder back with them, to a dreamy world of innocent hedonism and clouds of pillows and nectar. They left their cheeks behind and we called them roses. Imprinted on them always will be the light dust of the clouds that you will always desire, my dear nose.

But remember! The most injurious expectation you can have is that a rose will always be wearing this fine fragrance coat. You see, you should know better than anyone the importance of having nice breath! With this desire in mind, the blowing wind dusts off and picks up the rose’s perfume, stealing it and swirling it around its mouth and blowing it all over the Earth, in hopes that people will forgive his icy wind chill and irritating impudence (his favorite activity being to lift up women’s skirts and playfully peeking underneath, you know).

So treasure your moments with cloud dust when you can and remember something more selfish stole it first if you find a naked rose.

Your turn, Kandinsky

you wear cruelty like a color
a thick butter of it just hovers
on the twists and the lines
of your rigid form. It dines
on girls using forks twisted at right angles.

but don't misunderstand me, love
i sorted the science of it above
the restaurant, in the attic, remember?
through pasta with bloody red marinara embers
i told you i was leaving to Argentina.

two things happened right there, right then:
a swig of that shit wine thatd put some men
to shame and indifference coloring your face
at a soldier's march, a condemned rebel's pace
and you requested a leather wallet, "they cure well there."

and that was that until it wasnt
when later you whispered we mustnt
make too much noise as you laid me across
your cool sheets the color of straws
and your baby blues were murky and oily.

oily with greasy apathy that shimmered on top
of you and your skin until it seemed to drop
off your lashes onto your square solid wrists
and THEN then then then i tasted the twist
of how you, you swirl, you feel in colors.

how crimson is every single shade of red but
and titian a mangy magnificent mutt
of it all! all! all! except that sunniness
which it can't take under its wide hoop dress
like the rest of its grandchildren colors.

Marx were you ever in love?

i become the worst pig of a capitalist
when it comes to owning you
i want you i want you through and through
you have lived gold's worth and i have missed
it all until only pearly days ago

but i would pay more for this moment than any other:
the moment red slapped your cheeks in anger
and found your thoughts so warm she chose to linger
on the chamois of your cheeks as a rosy cover
dancing in a blushing waltz so slow

Short-Order Cook to a King

you lowered your mouth to mine, first,
head lowered like a bow, lips straight mine pursed
like a little girl playing bergman
(no, kelly) and i thought that might happen that night and
so i tucked bits of ginger into my teeth
i bought from the stand on Tudor street
because you luxuriate in having that bite in your soup.

i thought that might happen every night until that night
so i tasted like ginger for a while, watching your height
get smaller and farther as you rode away, in late cold dark
and resolved to get some other flavor and make my mark
on the loops and furrows of your boy brain.

but ginger worked until it didnt anymore
and you came around until you didnt for
a while and then it was time for fiery peppermint
fresh sticks of it i stuck in my pockets until it stuck in the lint
of my pink coat. you tried tongue for dinner once, mine,
and winced at its fire, liked it just fine
said it reminded you of cigars and royal crown whispers.

until one raucous evening when i swapped spit
with a towhead yelling skinny thing who couldnt sit
still. That was when we hadnt spoken for a few weeks
and you mentioned books and business and my cheeks
were salty all the time. but i took a brave break from
my sea and went out on the town to the artist's slum
warehouse. he, that blonde, tasted like nicaragua and oranges.

citrus tasted like relief to me and, figuring
you had been missing because you were configuring
messes of minds like ours, i thought you could use some orange, too
a woman's attempt at getting your mood to sienna from gray blue
and then you'd know know know i can bring quiet.

so i bit a golden sun in two and found you two at the bar
a deflated you and your southern whiskey, neat, at the far
end of the room. your murmurs were of disconnect distance
but so intimate i forgot how your absence meant resistance
and showered your sandpaper neck with sugary titian hellos
where were you downcast prince, your humor so marked by the gallows?
you said you liked citrus, then ordered yourself some fried plantains.

fruits go moldy until you rang my bell and pounded on my door. I am unprepared
and you are regal with quiet demands and can hardly muster some care.
now you have shown up here on my door early morning, fog gray
cinereal dove early, and ask so sharply why i taste, taste, taste! that way
your velvet baritone boxes my ears with its lush disgust.

Without pause to pepper my bitterness- in truth?
This taste is the taste of wanting you.
my tongue sweats sadness feral with reeking lust
my gums don a coat of grime tailored from your dust
and my breath? a stale hops catacomb of decay
its longing that keeps me from brushing gossamer cobwebs away.
but you are here now, my love! there's some rosemary i've been saving to chew just for these very moments i get to spend with you.

If I was old you'd make me young

I never felt as
romantic as that fall day
when i rolled around

in damp musky hay
muffled by the sloshing sounds
of moonshine and rain

those black boots i found
victorian leather and
steel eyelets so black

kicked off to the side
sagging to the side Van Gogh
hidden by more hay

the bottom started
talking one day, flapping its
big flat gabbing mouth

and it wasnt til
you came along that i thought
to fix them and wear

them out on the town
as we waltz through puddles and
hide behind wet oaks!