LOOKED LIKE LAUGHING

she asked me
does anyone ever fuck
the portrait artist
at knott’s berry farm?
 
(i met a vampire named Shantelle)
 
she asked me
will you do it like this
with a pillow under my hide
and a fist in my side?
 
(a hidden witch called Shannon)
 
she asked me
what would it be like if
i never fucking met you?
 
you’d probably be happier
but more naive.

(no one fucks the portrait artist at knott’s berry farm)
 
somewhere an oscillating fan
sits still in a stagnant apartment
staring at the empty blues
swirled from carpet to ceiling.
 
(not going outside again)
 
i get claustrophobic in crowds
and ghosts they stand so close.

does vivienne del rio ever
wander bakedly through
downtown los angeles
giggling in silent pockets
of crisp concrete
whispering street names
with a smile
flickering through
bar doorways with their
shadows turned inside out?
.
i want to give some ghouls a call
and see inside her apartment freshly
will she let me give these ghouls my all
entirely i am completely in love with the fall
but summer’s gonna gut you nicely.

A few times I have indulged a fragile curio
with lending my hand in prayer, my shoulder to collect.
Those were necessary falsities.
 
Alone, however, I spark ember-woven prayers
like I till the land madly in a zig-zag.
 
I pray at pages of Virginia Konchan
and feel the utterance tangle upward
to the only heaven I have known-
 
(trees!)
 
I pray on Lexington while surfing
the magnificent concrete who lies down before the sun
and is eternally thankful.
 
I pray into the faces of my brothers and sisters
and they moonbeam back at me with fury in their hearts
wearing fabric made of helium.
 
But usually, when my eyes are shaded,
and my simple lips are trickling,
I am only counting palm trees.

She says psychics speak too soon, of course,
and I’ve been partial to premonition.
It is too early in the morning for a
mother’s day-
I can tell by the burn in my eyes
which I’d rather not subside while
ribbons of smoke tangle toward me.
This apartment is a space that
makes me containable-
I flirt out your window to tussle
the crisping day I say:

You are perfect in your sagging ways!
You are wonderful while you crumble,
while you crumble I can mix!, I can
strip so satisfyingly
rectangles of quartz from your smeared sky
all the while doing the watusi-
existing, twisting right on the volume knob,
eternally staring west.
 
Swinging trees high five and bark madly.
We are ascending hills golden and glad.
You have power windows and once again
it is a parade of hits weekend.

Kansas City 1 & 2

(1)

when the summer is at its quietest
when it bows down in exhaustion like
the rest of us:
it is in still and muggy kitchens
that i love you most
with brittle yellow light bulbs
like shining grinning june bugs
like green little flies of lightning.
the linoleum sweats like
the beads on your neck
and the heat hushes back and forth
the side-swept salt-sweat hairs
hug your forehead and the clink
of one more bottle cap
dances in the museum of moments lost
and humidity.
it is only nine p.m.

(2)

Straight teeth
blonde hair
blue eyes
smooth thighs
long legs
long hair
pouting lips
twinkle toes
tinkered brain
cali forn ia smile
broken ribs
carotid erosion
exhausted tear ducts
valet stubs
unread books
salad fork
in the sink
unclean
sheets
when certain
numbers burn
on her alarm clock
particular arrangements
she gets aroused and sad
simultaneously
and no one
will ever know.

The Job

dear dad
i think it’s safe to say i didn’t get the job,
it’s been five days and my cell is quiet
like our long distance phone calls.
did you get the songs i sent you?
if you can get past the foreign words
i think you’ll really like it,
i want to learn swedish just so i can
sing along
maybe you can too.
i don’t dream about anything these days
like i used to, like the dreams i had next
to the blue bookcase you built for me.
i wonder if you dream still too
and what it must be like to know truly the phrase
‘after the war’.
i feel like you forgot to tell me something
the other day
maybe not
it’s been a while
and my desert body is incomplete and tired.
wish you were here last winter, could have used some help,
you would have known what to say.
did you ever meet karen?
i didn’t know what to say when i couldn’t do what
she wanted but she wanted
me to go so i said
i only keep you around because your pretty
and i’m dumb
and us dumb people can’t help but do dumb things
when they look so pretty.
she passed away yesterday
pretty as ever
and do you remember when mom would talk in her sleep?
always about the beach and there is still
sand in your boots
and i have some too.

numerical repetition, endless dividends:

her name was valentina
and i loved how it sounded
when that last delicate A
would drift from my mouth.

it was march 13th and already sizzling
when i sat cross-legged on her carpet
in her new apartment
off rodney
babbling through our second date
when she asked me to hook up
her vcr.

i am not good at many things
but television and wiring
come naturally.

surprised at the speed
she had barely opened my beer
when the tubes cracked blue
and brilliant

and brilliant! her standing there
in the doorway of her kitchen
a sweating stella artois in her motherly hands
smiling and pleased
smiling in to me.

i just didn’t want to let that part go. 

Don’t worry about forgetting anything, 
the crumbling little shits are worthless
that we give and those lazy Sunday fucks, 
to watch you flounder across my sheets, 
evaporate in sunshine your winter-face ever-green
knocking against my more pleasant dreams. 
 
And yes you’re still in all my dreams
or sweat-panicked nightmares if anything,
see my filled-in imagination makes me sickly-green
when I see you filled-in by someone so worthless-
did you eat sunshine while supine on his sheets?
Repeating fractions, dirty remainders, careless fucks.

O! The meaningless are meaningful at least when we fuck
and the meaningless become meaningful briefly in dreams.
I felt so meaningful when you let me see your sheets,
I was a collector collecting your anything,
and these trinkets I hold now are worthless-
you were a silver ring that left my fingers green.
 
The summer approaches- lush, golden and green-
and we both will bleed condensation and fuck.
Fuck ourselves through sweat drenched nights so worthless,
pouring each other into our unfulfilled dreams.
Crippled with cocktails we don’t worry about anything
especially the volumes cranked out between sheets.
 
Finally washed the cries and shed skin from my sheets
but some nights I wander and tint myself electric-envy-green,
and these burning festering boils don’t mean anything,
glittered in glossy promises, those fake fucks.
Why couldn’t you flitter past rust and repair my dreams?
My only want was for my wanting to not be worthless.

And time can mean so much, don’t dare make mine worthless.
No more tangled tussles when I’m dark and three sheets.
This is the recorded stand for a ban on baseless dreams,
for things that grow slowly aren’t always natural and green,
not those sulfur-stenched firecracker-fucks,
no not everything has to mean anything.
 
You were not worthless you were only green
and these evaporated sheets came from not giving a fuck.
These silly shared dreams they could have been anything.

firstly, no, i will not keep calm and carry on
there are too many actualities of presence
in my way and lord knows we are perishable and will.
i beg of you honesty in earnest and i vomit completely
at the steps of your etsy shop when you tell me
in peach pastel paisley on eight by five with lethal lace
that everything will be fine, don’t worry. i worry,
does your set of water colors with brushes dipped in fancy
include the shades of want or regret or rent or
day in day out life long terror? you know shit.
while you were cupping cooly a mustachioed mug of
colombian coffee on graphic designer carpets in
graphic designer jeans next to your never-semen-stained eames,
someone, saccharine and soulless, stupid and smirking,
excreted this phrase at me: treat yo self.
 
So I did: promethazine, codeine, white wine chaser, and
twenty milligrams of melatonin; what a lovely gift
to myself to combat the stretching minutes and or

In a coma I saw her reading Carver on Chinaski’s grave, needlepoint platitudes abound, that robin’s egg blue dress, twisted mountain lines that heave from her chest.

This is living?

when i tell you i’m breaking
i mean tiny little nothings
and baby magnificent sparks
are creeping in at full force
threading something that
means so much i blend into
surrounding particles.
 
in the elevator i
smelled a smell
that nearly made me weep
and today is your birthday
and gone are the days
when i held your ankles
like pistols pointed
to the ceiling
with all kinds of smells
sneaking, swirling
‘round the ceiling.
 
evaporated in obligation
and fed lines and lies
you have to watch out
for those guys
some of them
don’t even know
that they’re dying.
 
the metro is late there must
have been an accident and some
stranger’s wry smile means
when i finished, when i asked
if you needed something to
clean yourself up with, you said
i like to leave it on me
it makes me feel like a woman.

now that we’re dead, what else can you feel?
when they spike and pop i at least know i once was. 

The junk email keeps piling up
there is a lawsuit against nuva-ring
and one says hot russian escorts today.
 
I can’t get through all of this today,
the flimsy fluffy fucks I give up
and why are they suing nuva-ring?
 
If it weren’t for that shining nuva-ring
there’d be one more of us today
and I, more than he, needs growing up.

She’s looking up at me holding her nuva ring knowing it is only today.

My desk is a mess again and the scratched
and beaten cellular telephone hums lifelessly
awake
little do I know the lights and vibrations
mean exploration of trenches between
skin and bone
and winding tunnels of colon and tar,
and I hold back in front of him,
a man who never cries, a man made of bullets and
sand and sunned olive California hide,

which now, in my mind, is shriveled and empty,
sockets so deep,
his cratered face and crooked
nose, thinned and radiated, and me,
cool as ice
haha, yes, that’s who i am,
mr. cool guy, mr. don’t cry,
mr. i am my father’s son,
and how even now before
the voice is tinny and older,
and he hangs up
and you let go,
comfortable for once in your ownness,
immediately scared of not holding enough of him in you,
not nearly half the human,
so, quickly, and with
brittle boy-hands,
pour a clichéd glass of scotch
and choke it back in the filthy kitchen in a filthy glass
with glassy eyes and a filthy mind staring out the window
at the golden graced hills with sockets raw and red 
and gushing wet thinking once this was so beautiful
thinking once this would never disappear
now angry and spitting wondering just
what the fuck it is exactly that you’re always looking at.

1. “LEDOUX-KID FRANCIS”

i may not have any luck
but i’ve got a charm i can’t turn off. 

i told mom i was looking really hard,
i keep looking and bending and crouching
and tip toeing through dark bedrooms
until slivers of secret moons push back
moons of secret moans, moons who have always known

well i met a nice girl from raleigh
i think that might be the only way to go
find a nice southern belle, find a nice escape
find a cool sun baked porch to sleep on like casey
eating apples and there is always ice in your drink
some nights i cry because i miss so much that i haven’t yet met. 

and wasn’t it so nice the moment you realized
that we were all just horrified? 

4. “CATTLE COLD CALL”

we were young and beautiful once and people wonder why we want so many reminders, could you imagine missing this? could you pretend to be faded and folded? each day we see more and more, curl-clad women walk tight-rope curbsides through our fair fractured city, we are always clean and cool with little rose-kisses of sun on our noses, for me the mornings are the hardest, but in the crystal cut afternoons and in the sweat-tussled night club evenings do i see in dark and danger all the things that make the mornings bearable, and when the smutty dogs cut through the forest to find you and sure they’ll find you usually lamenting an entire month of poor decisions, pressed like a leaf in a photo album to the wall of some lounge, barely keeping your head steady eyes focused on the wide-mouth opening you’re dredging up to your lips and the regrets put tiny flags across your brain, your eye lids, your palms for anyone to read, but like a spell like a bolt of lightning they roach-in-light to the corners, yes, yes, something so simple, something so common, like an hourglass body levitating across the dance floor in a black dress, can make the wane worth the war. 

the deaths that form before summer
make steps to climb through all over
with slicked slanted shoulders
crawling and holstered.
 
what a night!
they let exhausted laughter pour
out and under
like blankets of thunder.
 
they knew a lot of things,
like when it was coming
or when it was running,
hugging streams under the agony of the stars.
 
we, smuggled and smoldered, thinned smiles
and stared,
as they kept building then ascending
the stairs
hissing smiles, sacred and scared,
through blurry, love-wet stares:
 
kiss me like a french boy
kiss me like a french boy
kisses his french boy toy.
 
bent by breath, bold by barley,
the open-sunned quarry coughed
that he was sorry, and she broke
just like she kept, foggy and wet,
bashfully exited stage left, and grew he
between swing sets and cool regret
slouching and sloped
returning home:

how have you been, boy?
i’ve been fine.

Parted through a fern and trellis I cut cool morning summer air
with my knives eyes and saw for the fullest minute a stranger
moving muscles to tie her sweaty hair into a sloppy bun in front
of what could have been her mother’s full length mirror like the 
one my mother had with a swivel and I saw her guests arrive downstairs
without her notice And the hair tied up to keep herself together
knowing they’d be here any minute now with the newborn and the
sunscreen and I with sleep in my eyes scratched and craned to
pray that one day those balcony windows would open wide and the hair
would never be pinned to the top and the sun and birds would swoop
along the rugs of your secret and quiet room.

In some artparty scene
she brayed barely nineteen
with stilettos and a give-a-fuck lean
pausing the room to be illuminated and
carelessly dragging an empty bottle of wine.

When the mermaid set free
with shoulder length aqua-marine
her campfire creaking notes felt mean
eye-smiling shark-like through floorboards
of cross-legged men with faces like twine.

In the hallway or slouching mezzanine
a group of strangers eagerly agreed
that though false it was their favorite thing
to pretend to fall in love and sing blue
the chest of porcelain with time.

and i don’t know
why no one knows
why things are pretty
i just want to
brush up against a
soft serve sun.