LOOKED LIKE LAUGHING

someone somewhere
dragging my hide
through thirty
shades of shit
will need a toothpick
soon. 

but there’s fifty watt
humming and hot
yellow bulb
sparks even in
crummy house parties. 

wrapped in spiced rum and
speaker wires saw
some brave shaky graffiti
on the wall
some pretty petal things
signed in sharpie
e.e. cummings. 

then i think i

wish cans were like cans used to be, punched,
those always looked better to me, like
the big red one infantry, 
pousser! pousser! 
i like the scrapes and metal and the stale smell
of the next morning, just drinking cheap cans
of beer with my friends, beer, friends, beer,
friends with firm handshakes
honest smiles
honey brown hues
and heart. 

i have a crush on everyone at the party
someone taught them how to smile
wrap around style
like a bottle of coca cola
and swish their hips
and laugh like licorice. 

dust is dust, man, but
i hope you get better and
until then you can float
from my heels and glide
back down in painful pause. 

i’m a drinker, i’m a fighter.
i’m a dancer. i love to dance.
did he tell you he was falling in love
with just about everything? 

the cornstalk gentleman of wilt and worry
bent skyways and wept with the knowledge
he had a magician’s body which was
no body at all.

in college he sidestepped a child and in
youth he sword-swept flailing roots it was
in helmet-heads that said the earth
was a burden.

so we covered our backsides in coats of
ivory cotton and stitched together tenderly
a harness to hold ourselves and forgive
our transgressions. 

TO MY own private Gabo from Guayaquil,
where it burns hotter and briny to the taste,
on a Sunday, early Sunday, you arrived pink
then golden then gray, and had you saved a dollar
since you were three, we’d live tonight a little
more comfortably — but on a similar note, I admit,
I am running out of lead to anchor our feet.

See, and I implore that you see:
twenty-one years of solitude, two
of puerile matrimony, one self-serving poet;
zero pets buried in an Aerosoles shoebox during
my watch; two moments of premature dissent;
and a vein that runs the extent of I-95;
eight months of hospice in a foreclosed home
and pre-cooked orange chicken and Betty Crocker
vermicelli and mashed potatoes for dinner, egg
burritos for breakfast; un primer beso bien salado
on the promontory into the Atlantic;
and Ybor, how could we forget, never happier
to have heaved soup and a stick of Slim Jim,
the supper of lucky drunkards in love, from
leaping for three seconds with you.

Here’s to your 24th, you wonderful idiot,
and to a celebration of our humanity.

call me saint sorry for the way
i acted
and hang my heavy arms around your neck
like a locket
you’re another feather falling slowly
in my sullen wind achingly pulling

when i can’t even keep
the plastic bags from dancing

tonight we light a candle in memoriam
of the phone wires and curls that tangled
around our parents’ ankles and the
metal railings that held up their mattress

to the copper vines wrapped around
our infant wrists in February of 1989
when Limbaugh was your dad’s fave

to the relief that their absence has not
stopped our pacing around and over
the coffee table, not even the coasters
can save where our feet have passed

hey it’s hot on the weekends
still crisp coast the week
and i’m terribly beaten
last night pissed in a sink
but i’ve emerald boogie-blood
and palm-tree-worship your grace
but you fucked up my back, babe
can’t sleep with so much space.

IN THE DARKNESS THERE IS NO OTHER LOVE
EXCEPT YOU — JEREMIAH THE INNOCENT

I cannot write the frost into your skin.
You cannot feel my nose — colder than
a witch’s bosom in a brass bra, as Adam
has drawled for two months — freeze-burn
in a hallow’s eve night in Charlottesville.
I cannot write, It’s cold, so cold, and I am, too.
I cannot write you into your place, here with me
with arms like hemp wraps around you save
your eyes to spare. — And the moon is pregnant
with loneliness and stupid questions were asked
like: Is it full where you are; Is it as beautiful as I
left it; How was the wedding; How was X & Y,
Jimmy and Diane; yes, it’s a shame, I’m sorry
for myself the flight was cancelled. Christ, I’m
in love. This torpedo of a woman has sunk.

left a coal with
little smolder
wrapped forests
quilts of wet leaves
slicked in night
covered concretely
in corn grain caves
 
until the burning
pad of her thumb
balanced the spine
of the blade kissing
moon reflections
in careful swipes,
repairing careful light,
dripping nickly solder;
a lighthouse,
a carver.

i want to fuck a cloud
crack creams into nothing
smash auras not belief systems
strip status to free range and
float around.
 
which version of me
will general sherman
three hundred feet
and fondle the futures
with branch-hands over
the husk-boys beneath?
 
certainly not Lord Worm
with his useless toothpick
wrists and his overgrown
hearts, searing the beauty
in his eyeballs against
the blue blackhole
television glow in a
matchstick motel puking
particle love poems.

may all
the glory
be given
to gapped teeth
on pretty girls
your gummy
vacancies are
the instrument
through which
cold air flows
the absence
of bone the
tiny reserves
that need be
filled with
my mouth

I went to the Tea Bazaar tonight
it’s a smelly burrow built above
the fantastic shithole that is Ike’s Underground
and a man sat and he sang and sang
he played the kazoo and whistled
and he did things I cannot do
I can’t
whistle
I can’t
even swim
can’t tie
my shoelaces
nor can I
keep a tune,
but I’m in love
every night —
I mean, dearest,
my admission here is
my voice is something very few
people get lost in, but there is you —
so Sullivan played
and the walls turned
to honey, and each note
melted in the crowd’s ears
it was a good time
to fill the hollow of your neck
and a good time to knit a red
sweater out of your beard

morning pre-acid-absentia
my bed now an Italian shell!
and Venus in a chem-trail
capped sun-tea-brown
wrapped upperly in forest green,
pinching a waist-down pillar
of milky ivory-
 
this is how i float
and surf oil slicks
called puddle rainbows-
there is a current and it
chandeliers from my feet
every goddamn minute of
every goddamn day-
 
you’ve autumn hammocks
in the treated woodgrain
of your iris catching deer
in the foam of your beer
during Barbarella happy hour
and i stretch.
 
it is columbus day and i love you
it is columbus day and i love you
so fucking much that in all my dreams
i am a tall and sturdy tree waiting
for my Schloss-chest to be pressed
against with your humming hands now 
branchless driving home without you 
watching the leaning night palms
count time beside the freeway.

tuesdays are droopy days
filled with day old bagels
and feeling trapped between
a piss covered park bench and green laundromat. 

[morning wood & a sip of joe]

billie holiday orange days,
wrapped in the arms of your favorite
jean jacket. a bb gun shaped
hole dominates its left sleeve.
someone always said that
character comes with a price.

[two elongated kisses & a chat on the rail]

you look good with it
hugging your shoulders,
tidal waves of yellow
pulse with a slight touch
at the hip.she said she hated seeing
trees naked, exposed with little purpose.

[two flights of stairs & a silver key]

forminated dreams lay dormant
in your sluggish mind as you
kiss a soft vision to sleep.

[seven whole minutes listening to YOURSELF breathe]

you look for words that
cushion and ones which ooze security.
the consonants will remain
crisp as auburn and goldenrod
take shape around your future
mornings consumed with
supreme, holy light and a cavernous chill.

tell me the one where the egyptian
fox eats too many marbles & never wakes up again.

what do you get when you mix tree branches
and a sea of children? i never remember the end to that one.
it’s too complicated and too blue.

don’t you hate when people refuse to cry at
funerals? don’t you hate weddings without an
open bar? mourning tends to be measured
and calculated. where do all the tears go anyway?
how much do heavy sighs weigh?

do you know the one about the boy with the gold
earring? he was                        loved and loved
until he was rendered helpless by
stern surprise. yea, it was never really funny anyway.

he grinned at me and I knew he hadn’t
had a single dream that night.
there was a bass line playing somewhere
in his head but I didn’t realize it until later.
I was tired of making promises and he
was tired of breaking them.
maybe he had hair like rough grass.
I can’t remember.

that night I see a beautiful American couple
laughing in the front seat of a blue cadillac
with City Slickers painted on the back
I think about how I will probably love you
the most in California, but hopefully in
Europe too, or maybe sunday morning
at my parents house
you are my solicitation in central park
my red-light genuflection
my B.A.C. test tip toe
sleepy moan of a car
starting in the cold
I can’t remember what english
sounds like anymore but I know what
the dogs are saying when they whimper

and when all time’s been long dead I think
I might just miss these days when I
couldn’t hardly think to save my life