Partly Rainy With Clouds

The ellipses down her
coat,
a sentence that never
ends.
Just hanging amidst
the clouds that always
seem a bit below her.

Inspired by weather
and
cloud patterns, her
gaze travels through
cliche sunsets hiding
behind last week's
storms. Rivers need
to start somewhere,
and she is the type of
girl to take cats and
dogs seriously.

She taps the puddles
with the tip of her
umbrella,
the little ants
drowning and wiggling
their stick-hands,
"help me, help me"
but she passes by,
just another dot to add
to the growing
non-sentence.

As inspired by this sketch done by the lovely and talented Priscilla.

A Sweet Poem

I looked up at her.
She was incomplete,
sitting in her cup
throne, her hair in a
bowl beside her. Pink
and fancy and
sprinkles the color of
after-violent rain.

And I laid on the
floor. Flat and soft
and clumsy. Crumbs
of me orbited my
fragile, frail body.
Half of my head
missing, the perfect
crescent shape.

We were the same,
I thought. Staring up
into her: flour and
salt and sugar and
heat and children's
smiles and the bliss
of teeth and not
existing anymore.
I thought.

But without a glance
back, the door shut,
the knob turned with
a click, and that was
the last image molded
into the back of my
mind as I was broken
and crunched between
Oberon's thick canines,
slobbering and licking
and swallowing and
flour and salt and
sugar.

We believed in "fake it till you make it" without really knowing what we were making. Or what we were faking. Behind these out-turned palms are dirty, unflossed smiles. And behind that, no one really knows.

I sat next to a woman at the bus stop. She was breastfeeding, the tiny lips of a pink mass of burrito searching, anticipating, suckling, all underneath a baby blue towel. Baby blue. What about that color was ever for babies?

And between the palms and the no-one-really-knows were little untold secrets. At least that's what she thought, and from mother to child, thoughts passed down to the pink burrito.

So I am left faking something I don't know to make something else I don't know.

And I guess I fucking love it.

"Good night"
the Boy
said to
No one
in
particular.

It was my living funeral. Family, friends, and eyes I was not familiar with, all gathered on a single occasion, in a single area, for a single purpose.

For I would be dying soon.

I laid out in a coffin. Everyone laughed and smiled, guffawed their guffaws while spilling cheap wine on their rented suits and tuxedos.

There was a dinner. Cold out of the oven. There were speeches, some tearful, some humorous, all just vindications for my still life, brushstrokes and the scent of melting wax with each breath that made the candlelights dance.

And it would have all been quite poignant.

Except when they shut the coffin lid and buried me.

They still smiled and guffawed and spilled wine. But at least they took their suits off.

They Shaded Their Eyes

They shaded their eyes against the dark blue sun and they licked their lips waiting for alarm clocks and they smiled and groomed their skin with blades made of flattened silver and coughed into fists of curled fingers and they tripped over table cloth covered in footprints and forgot the touch of doorknobs so they tied ribbons around bent fingers and there is a smell of cold smoke and receding lines and they smiled some more.

As inspired by They Kissed Their Homes.

The supposition is that business happens and when there is time for a cup of coffee, the break room is always open.

But I'd hate to be analogous to coffee. Just keep the sugar to a minimum. The sweetbitters of the wind keep things the way they are.

With a full appetite,
pass by the injured crow
staring back
and the crumpled bit of brown
that used to be a rat.
In that order.

It was the smell of the yellow that reached him. Pollen, mushy, like rotten egg yolks.

And stuck to his shoes like so many years of sidewalk candy. Their wings were plucked off in the grooves of his heels, a million faceted eyeballs staring everywhere at once, the envy of all chameleons.

But they all had to die some time. So why not on a cable reality show, amidst the boots of a nuclear family? A million eyes watching the million eyes from miles away. Anything for ratings.

My parents told me they wanted to take me to Sequoya, but I knew.

I knew they were planning on leaving my body there, buried next to some roots.

And I wouldn't mind so much if they would just buy me a tree keychain.

He is the safe guy, not that he really has a combination. He isn't very good with numbers and figures and turning so many dials with so many rotations and lefts and rights and ups and downs. But he is the one girls trust, the one who the boys trust even more.

And it's not so much about the loneliness because he is used to empty rooms and the smell of cold draping in through closed windows that are all too deserving of baseball bats. It is more about convincing her to go back to someone else, someone that isn't him, when all he wants is her to stay, to be something more blunt than elbows to the throat, gasping for air, coughing up bits of maybes and Isupposes onto carpets already stained black and white though never gray.

"I'm happy for you" says the boy named Reluctance.

He is the safe one. The one who won't slip her liquid oblivion in a bottle and leave her crying under the gaze of thousands of wet tiles, squares upon squares that chant "Embellish uniformity". The one she will come back to again.

And again.

And again.

And

A Squirrely Poem

The crack and sigh of the
Discontented nut as eager
Teeth work towards its center
Meat.

The beast of many colors,
Always hiding behind the
Shade of its own tail, gnaws away
At useless cardboard skin to
Get at the heart of the matter,
The core of the single chamber
With air conditioned by earth and
The bottoms of so many paws
And feet.

Beady eyes that stare out
With innocent ferocity
Along streets named "Indifference",
A dare to the whole world that
Always goes unanswered until
The passing of sneakers, a thump
And a beat.

The beast scatters carrion and
Dismembered joints from its meal
Over dirt and cracks in the road
But stores just enough between its
Cheeks, because the last bite
Is the best bite for this beast
To eat.

For Phil

The beetle was limping away. One of its legs was half a knot, tied-up and barely hanging together.

I could only imagine what that beetle was thinking, where it was going in such a hurry. Minutes earlier, it had been mating frantically, or as frantically as beetles could, with another beetle, assumedly the opposite sex. Or maybe the same sex but different. I don't know, biology was never one of my better subjects, and I suppose that explains a lot about why I have so many ex-girlfriends.

I wondered about the beetle. Does it hear the crunch before or after its stomach finds itself somewhere up and out of the head?

The beetle was limping away. I guess five out of six isn't bad, except when it comes to legs.

Please don't expect anything from me, from the self-proclaimed gentleman who pays more attention to smells and cloud patterns through eyes perpetually squinted. It's not that I have bad eyesight, but I like people thinking I do.

I went out with some friends this one night. Some family restaurant that was Italian-themed, the walls covered in photos and memorabilia and other unnecessary ridiculousness, the type of decor that would make the average housewife chuckle to herself and hide her teeth behind fake nails and hands that are a little too fucking clean for even the most intense obsessive-compulsive sufferer.

We were sitting there, talking about one thing or another. Topics tend to jump and change and morph and disappear and reappear moments later, somewhere amidst the audience, the spotlight shining ever so brightly and conveniently as hands are raised into the air and everyone claps their gullible, polite little claps.

We were near the door, sitting in the waiting area on vinyl seats that were scratched to some kind of Hell. And as were talking our unimportant talk, there came a man, apparently alone, in one of those automated wheelchairs with the little joystick, though I could imagine how much of the joy he could be feeling. My eyes drifted down and I saw that his legs were plastic.

Well, they weren't his legs. I mean, he wasn't born with them.

And part of me wondered how. And part of me wondered why. War, disease, one-in-a-million bull riding accident, any number of possibilities shot into my head like a desperate man's bullet in a single instant.

And I realized that he was exiting the premises. Maybe he was done eating. Maybe he needed a smoke break. Maybe he was struck by a moment of existential understanding and needed to tell the world. Or maybe he just hated those fucking pictures on the walls. Elderly citizens holding banjos, grinning toothless grins at the camera.

And I didn't act. I didn't stand up and open the door for him, didn't say "have a nice evening, sir", didn't even move. I sat there, on scratched vinyl, and stared.

Some gentle soul eventually opened the door for the man-with-the-plastic-legs-that-weren't-his. And when he was gone, the whir of his wheelchair just another violin string that wouldn't matter tomorrow, the gentle soul who opened the door muttered something about all these people who had their heads shoved up their asses.

And I should have acted.

I could have acted.

It's all just words and fucking angles spoken through gritted teeth.

So don't expect anything from me. I am just gritted teeth and pictures on the wall and plastic legs.

You can't help but poke at the bubble around you. Thinner than the criminal's conscience but just as sturdy when it comes to feeding families. Children with distended stomachs groping in the dark for orange peels and half apple cores. Everyone else around you is making something of themselves, creating, shaping, their thumbprints so fresh and clear on the already drying clay. And you try to reach through the thin film and press your hand against the grey-brown but you never quite make it. And the clay is already crumbling, turning to dust and powder, swallowed by birds passing by just for the winter, migrating to better places, carrying within themselves the lines and curves that so distinguish mothers from fathers from audience members.

And they vomit. The nutritional value of chunks of clay marked with the tips of fingers makes them thrive.

And they fly, soar, through clouds and blue skies and suns wearing masks of happy faces. You wonder how many people can afford these masks, how the strings tend to snap and disappear over time. They tie behind their heads so they'll never figure it out.

And you realize that you're not stuck in a bubble.

You are a bubble.

Pinky

He has this dream, recurring dream.

He forgets who he is, how to act. In the dream. None of his words match up, some sick crossword puzzle where the letters don't fit into white and black boxes. The lines in the grid split like so many hairs. And the grid grows until it's just the suburbs from satellite peepholes, no need to ring the doorbell.

And the words are impossible. What's the 23 letter word for "elbows" that starts with a 't'? Or is it an 'f'?

And nothing he does is right, feels right. He walks with two left feet but no legs. Enmity and disgust in the eyes of friends, family, and lovers imaginary. And the smell of old gum stuck to people's heels after tromping through wet grass on a September night.

And it's not even about how they hate him. It never was. It's the voices that clamber through scratchy throats, words consumed with an unfamiliar anger, the intent of knees thrown into glass noses making for dried blood disguises that no one can seem to see through.

He awakes in a cold sweat, consumed with finger-smudged mirrors and memories of childish heartaches that never quite see tomorrow's tomorrow.

And he always wonders if his eyes were ever closed in the first place.

Ring

There's nothing circular about it, no concentric circles or pupil-less eyes. It was just me and the ceiling, and frankly the ceiling did more staring than me.

And so I wake up and there are sounds. I enjoy noises plugged directly into my ears because there are sounds I miss when they just bounce off of the walls.

She was gone before I knew she was there. I don't even remember her name or her face or her anything. Just a smell.

A sweet smell. Warm, inviting, the birthday cake of an impoverished child. Fumes that shoot straight up into my nose, through the wrinkles in my brain, and out my head. Light a match and you will see the trail of flames, burn this whole bed and room to the ground. The futility of shaking the thoughts and cobwebs out of my mind, just spreading flames further, engulfing, embracing. I always wondered that the only difference between the two was digestion. Stomach acids, corroding bits and pieces into just more bits and pieces.

I wish I had asked. I wish I had said something. I wish she had talked to me, but she spoke less words than a mime.

And she still managed to lock me in an invisible box. Maybe I will suffocate, my lungs will give out, burst with little pops, and then nothing. Candles snuff out, the wick burns to black, the wax left intact. I'm still in the box, conscious or not.

And I suppose that's commitment.

Middle

This is the turning point. When Hamlet everything. Or nothing. When swords are drawn from scabbards and sheath into the bellies of the unseen but always seeing, watching our every move and touch and feel through walls pinkened.

She can see the attempts at repainting, streaks of white, speckles and drips on unvacuumed carpet.

Sensations that burn through every fiber of skin within their bodies, warmth and cold. The sheer anger and fear and the smell of old bubblegum wrappers shoved purposefully into pages of nothing and the opposite of finding but not losing. The way it all represents just another pop song, another voice from the car stereo as the doors close but never open. Driving on terra firma morphed, changed, the firmness is silence is the bait at the end of the traitors stick. Climb these fish up towards heaven to be married to cold steel and heat.

Heat.

And there are streaks of bright white and then pink walls and speckles.

And they don't have to turn over hours later, when blacks become orange-pink. They will know the name of solitaire. Alonely. They will have no answers to no questions. Just a feeling.

A feeling of meaning and meaninglessness.

Index

She flips through, one at a time. Licking tongue to flesh to page. She could cut out the middleman and going straight for the words, lap them up, a hungry deer in winter fog, staring out into half-branches that so resemble the bear's teeth in soft veins.

In the two-fifth light of the library's moon, operated with the flick of the conscience, she flips through, one at a time. Silence interrupted by turning pages, alphabetical but to her, just the warm soup from the morning in the lines of her palms. Sound that was so barren and alien, the walls shut it all out with fingers shoved into ears, awaiting the blast of dynamite to break the earth she stands on, already crumbling, already the stuff of tired elbows, but it will never come.

She is looking. Skimming, touching paper to flesh, gliding left and right and right to left, up and down and down and up, but this elevator has no music to make drops seem standard.

She is looking but not looking. The spaces between letters mean just as much as the black marks. And the blanks between the spaces. And then the spaces between those. Until it's all just a feeling, a skimming.

Pointing.

And staring, with jaws clenched and glassy eyes shut tight.

Thumb

Cock back the hammer. But no nails, none that construct. Anyway. Just nails to tear down this wood paneling. And sentences better left unsaid, rubbing and scratching, and more tearing of syntax and letters that should make sense but don't quite make it.

The smell of imaginary bullets traveling great distances through metal barrels, the lines hardly painted straight. Spray the floorboards and window shades with the stuff that dreams are made of and the dust from the backs of our eyes. Like cotton candy climbing walls, bright pink and fluffy, finding some place to swing on the ceiling, sticking to angled lips and spinning lights.

And hoping that nights will be filled with nothing but closed eyes now that dreams are cotton candy and the walls are bright pink. And window shades that shine through, bask the room in this pink glow, so the taste is on the back of our minds, where that imaginary hole should be, where it's already healing, filling up.

And then it doesn't matter if the shades work or not because it's easy to go from one side of the bed to the other and back again, complete roundtrip.

Even if the walls and eyes and joints are cotton candy.

There are smiles to be had. Innocent smiles
Aand flirtations, secret coquetry that
We can't help but notice with
Wide-eyed expressions of hope and
Grief and the trees that shake and dance
And weep after storms all too expected.

The silence of this moment, this
Moment that freezes our second hands
Wrapped around wrists while our first
Are reaching for each other, swans seeking
Someplace that feels right, familiar because
Even ducklings have a place to be
Fed by the elderly woman, throwing bread
From aged fingers, ripping crusts from centers
With a half-smile on her face. Not even
The swans will know if that other half will exist,
Devouring crusts, swallowing crumbs through
Toothless bills, and she can only
Hope that fingers will never touch plastic bag.

We point at the signs in the sky, just
More distracting illusions to keep
Ourselves from blinking for too long, from
Keeping the sun down with wills
And hands kept all too busy,
Second hands that must thaw sooner
Or later. But for now, this is it, and
The tress will always shake and dance
And weep when tired heads
Rest on shoulders all too willing.

His hand presses up against lucid windows if only to eyes milked over. Bent at the tips, staring out at the cold and grey, staring out onto roofs and chimneys and more roofs that must be related by blood. And water that pours down and in. Water on fog and glass, and the only thing separating the outsides from the insides is a quarter of an inch of something he can hardly see through. Drops tend to tap dance, but those are the only heels and toes he will welcome against the back of his skin.

And all signs point to red and yellow and green. And then nothing. The outside and the inside feel the same against warm bodies huddled under sibling roofs. And the sense of impending goosebumps, climbing up through the body into the throat so we can run our tongues over imperfections.

He slips his hand away from cloudy surfaces, leaving his handprint hanging in the smoky air. Windows crying for help to the coldgrey.

Or maybe just waving goodbye because there are no hellos, not from roofs or chimneys or raindrops performing for sidewalks and parked cars.

These are emotions, feelings. At least, that's what I'd like to believe they are. Or maybe it's at most? I always have trouble quantifying things, and this heart's so outdated I use an abacus. Thousands hundreds tens, and beads that are too fucking heavy to move with just two hands.

I'd like to think that these are feelings, but it's hard to tell loneliness from reality. Desperation. In every single gasp of breath as I swim to land that never gets closer. Salt filling lungs, drying out the backs of throats, not now, not when I've found someone to share words with so easily, so that I can break this abacus over wooden boards and really make something human of myself, of me.

So maybe we won't need to use sign language during late night phone calls. Why use hands when your lips can tell me so much more?

Or maybe loneliness is just another symptom.

It's like when you're in an empty stairwell, climbing slowly, one step at a time, not necessarily going up or down because that's just what the earth's rotation wants you to think. And you can hear scuffed shoes from ceiling to floor to corners and bricks and inside bricks. It's a little creepy because you don't know if you're alone or if imaginary characters are more than just another concept in this story. Or maybe alone is just another room in your mind. But either way, you can't help but mix words with scuffed shoes and drill it into bricks with elbows and voices that tend to crack, but it's okay because we have enough concrete to fill things up.

And maybe no one is looking, or maybe that's just when they decide to turn their cameras on but no one can ever figure out how the plugs fit in or what they're plugging up.

There's something so fulfilling about these lines in my hands and fingers, something that the fortune teller will never understand or see in her crystal ball. Because things might be clear through the glass but it's all as fragile as it seems, uncertainties and calendars that fit so nicely into paper shredders.

And the way the tips of my fingers smell like the lines in a musical street performance. So please put some money in the hat that will never cover these disheveled strands that never seem to be complete, pulled out so easily during sleepless nights and wall-filled days.

And iron and metal, melted and grafted onto tender flesh. It's a way to keep touch away, keeps the temptation of brushing away water rolling down your cheek, soft and smooth and disallowed, forbidden, the complacency of brick walls and lines in the pavement.

Lines that fulfill.

And divining that is never divine.

It is dim. Half the room cast in shadows, the other half in fluorescent white.

And it would have been intimate. But it wasn't, if only because of unimportant company, chests that heave up and down with no real air entering into indifferent lungs.

And there is light, blinking without eyelids, open and close and close and open, below the glow of exits colored crimson, cholera.

Open and close and stay closed. And there never really was a key to the lock, so the pins never fit quite as well as they would fit into amphibious flesh dipped into a formaldehyde sauce, sating the hunger of children's curious minds because the only way to learn about life is to cut into it, apparently, and the only way to learn about a heart is to see it when it is gray and unbeating.

Apparently.

But just because you can touch it doesn't mean you should, doesn't mean it's actually there, doesn't mean skin and bones are always nouns.

Apparently.

Tossing and turning was some kind of game, one without dice, because black dots on white should hardly be the decider of dreams, hazy apparitions of persons long since buried. Hands reaching up into headlight shadows, half-eaten torsos that cannot digest what they have ingested. Hands clap over toothless grins, an applause for empty streets and buildings like hallways that they shall never walk.

All in the comfort of pressed cotton, warm, supportive. The daily hypocrisies of how we close our eyes when it's dark and open our eyes to bright lights and dissonant, jarring lives that are anything but.

But these sewer drains are both object and action, so perhaps there is hope yet that we will allow some stationary slumber, thoughtshapes that pool into something fluid and tangible on pillows well-crushed by nights before nights before nights.

Insomnia implies never opening the door or getting through the barred window. I can get inside the house, put my foot over the threshold, slam elbows into plate glass, I just can't promise the house is stable.

Or my own.